v-s.net v0.6

Sunday, 6:42 pm in Corner

Some background to this; Dee and Wayne are characters that, if I could be arsed writing this sequentially, you should have already met. They’re both girls (yes; Wayne’s real first name is Wayne), and are Sigmund’s friends at school. They co-produce his game with him – Dee writes it, Wayne makes the graphics.

Wayne is in the upper reaches of 6 foot and has bright pink hair in pigtails. She is curvey and big-breasted with a kind of beauty-queen blank stare. Her parents have very specific ideas about keeping their attractive daughter safe, and thus she’s taken almost every form of martial arts and combat training known to man. Dee is in the upper fives and spends a lot of time in the library, reading. She has short black hair with white bangs, wears glasses and a lot of mallgoth black. Before you ask; yes Dee is a kind of self-inclusion character, but to the point that I got my name from her and not vice-versa. She’s not me per sei, and in fact if the truth be told Wayne also started out as a me-ish persona (a very, very long time ago). At any rate, almost every story/universe I write has a Dee and/or Wayne character in it, and Corneris no exception.

Neither Dee nor Wayne like Lain very much, though they both agree he’s pretty cute. They don’t know there’s anything specifically supernatural about him, but they are suspicious. They aren’t sure what he wants with Sigmund, but they are sure they probably don’t want him to have it. Much to his chagrin, Loki recognises Dee and Wayne instantly as Hlökk (‘noise’) and Hrist (‘shaker’) respectivley; two Valkyries and friends of Sigyn.

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They were at Wayne’s house when things started to go sideways, and at first had passed it off as god-time jitters. The sort of thing everybody got when, after having spent several hours being kept company by the latest in cutting-edge Japanese horror, the lights started flickering. Wayne swore – they were trying to get through the game without saving to reach the special ending, and a blackout would render the last few hours utterly wasted – and Dee peeked through the blinds to the outside.

“Hm, not windy… maybe we’ve just got too many things plugged into the one socket.” She indicated the single power-point in Wayne’s room, which was currently accomodating two computers (and monitors), a TV, at least three consoles, a stereo, two lights and a small fan heater.

The lights dimmed threateningly again.

“You should probably save it…”

“No! Damnit, I’ll build a generator and power it with an exercise bike if I have to but this PlayStation is not getting switched off!”

“Alright.” Dee settled herself back down on the bed. “You missed a box of shotgun shells.”

“Shit!”

Time passed. They swapped players. The cute Korean clock on the bedside table thunked the arrival of 3am. Dee almost killed the game by walking too close to the edge of a caved in street and there was a moment of heart-stopping panic as they watched the little bundle of polygons that made the game’s main character – and ordinary teenager, Just Like You – spun its arms wildly, trying to regain balance.

“Push sqaure! Sqaure dammnit!”

“I am! Argh, God!”

Eventually the character righted itself, and Wayne snatched the controller. “Last time I let you–”

The burst of static ripped a scream from both their throats, then a scramble for the mute button on the TV’s remote.

“Holy fuck!” said Dee, flopping back onto the bed, handover her eyes and shaking with nervous laughter. “Give me a fucking heart attack! Is it okay?”

Wayne was down on her hands and knees, inspecting the console. “PlayStation’s still running, hopefully it’s alright… who knows what the fuck happened. Maybe it’s, like, a secret level.”

“What, the game designers decide to go in for the cheap thrill by making your TV spazz out if you teeter on the edge of Emerson Road while not saving?”

“Maybe.” Wayne was peering intently at the small screen of the TV, nose barely aninche away.

“Hey, careful there. You know what happens to people who sit too close to the telly.” Dee did a reasonable job of miming an arm emerging from a screen and strangling someone.

“Ha ha, I’m not the one who nearly shat herself when she saw the back of the DVD. Pass me the remote for a sec.”

“It was scary, okay. And just ‘cause no-one’s ever made a movie about a killer DVD box, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.” Dee managed to pass the remote in a way she hoped came off convincingly as ‘sulky’.

The room was filled once more with a slow creshendo of static, the little green bar at the bottom of the screen gradually filling with notches as Wayne jacked the volume.

Dee fidgeted a little. “What are you doing?”

“… it kinda looks like there are, like, faces in here.”

“Oh you have got to be shitting me.” She hid her head in her hands.

“No, it’s like that Aphex Twin song, where if you play it in the right media player spooky faces appear in the equalizer.” She was silent for a moment, then, “There, did you hear that?”

“I don’t think I want to hear that…”

“Something on the soundtrack, like… whispering.”

“All I hear is static. All I want to hear is static. La la la none of the reviews I read mentioned anything about this.”

“Maybe we’re the first people to notice. You have to admit it’s pretty clever; and spooky.”

The lights dimmed again. They both visibly jumped, Wayne back from the TV as if it had burnt her. They shared a Look.

“I… don’t think they’re that clever, do you?”

“… coincidence.”

“Try changing the channel.”

Wayne pointed the remote, and clicked.

Everything went black. Black and still.

A few seconds, and then, “Wayne?”

“… yeah.”

“I’m… starting to get a bit weirded out.”

“Yeah…”

A rustling noise then a snick, and the room was illuminated in the dim blue glow of Dee’s flip-top colourscreen mobile. The two girls just looked at each other.

Wayne was just about to speak when everything came back again. Lights lit up, the computers made the grinding beeps that singnalled their reboot, the PlayStation trilled it’s opening before spinning the disc and booting up a loading screen.

They both watched as the game’s trailer began to play; scenes of monsters and gore and an awful lot of rusted cyclone fence. They looked at each other, and Wayne reached out and carefully hit the console’s power button. The screen hissed to blackness.

“So… got any new anime?”

The thump from outside the door startled them both, but only Dee jumped. Wayne’s eyes went to the various practice – and some not so – weapons lying around the room. She rose, walked silently and carefully across the room with a composure she definatley did not feel, and fastened her fingers around the hilt of the imitation katana her parents had bought her last Christmas. The blade wasn’t sharp, but all that meant was the bruise it left would be long and thin. It would still hurt like a bitch.

“Maybe your parents got home early?” Dee suggested in a low voice.

“Wrong end of the house.”

“Burglar?” Almost no sound passed her lips, now. Just movement.

“Maybe. Maybe it’s just nothing.”

Dee wanted to say, It’s never ‘just nothing’, but kept her mouth shut. After all, that was wrong; ususally it was just nothing. It was only never just nothing in the movies, or videogames, not in real life. She swallowed hard. As usual, the affirmations did nothing to make her feel better.

A kind of shuffling scratch at the door, accompanied by a sort of weird click-click; like stiletto heels. Wayne’s house was mostly floorboards and exotic imported rugs made by small hunchedback children far far away. Something was out there. Dee tried to tell herself it was something mundane; a stray cat, maybe, that had somehow gotten inside. Or perhaps a possum. In high heeled shoes. Maybe it was getting ready to go out.

Wayne had one hand on the doorknob, one hand brandishing the sword. She was mouthing a countdown; … four… three… two…

“Holy fuck!”

There was something there, and Dee realised her assessment of it being some kind of animals in high heels was right. Except it looked like the kind of animal in high heels someone in Hell might have designed if all they had to work with for a starting base was black rubber, steel, and the body of a half-rotting, anorexic beauty queen.

“What the fuck is that!” Dee wasn’t sure whether it was her voice or Wayne’s, maybe both. The thing kind of jumped a bit at the loud noise, padding at the floor with it’s slender gloved hands and high-arched stilettoes. On the plus side, some part of Dee told her, it didn’t seem to be attacking them, which years of horror movies had taught her was an unusual bonus in this sort of circumstance. It just sort of looked… lost.

Wayne lowered her sword a little.

“What the hell are you doing! Kill it!” Dee’s voice was a near shriek.

“But, it’s just… standing there. I can’t just kill some… one. Um, excuse me? Can you hear me?”

It did sort of look like it had started out human, but Dee thought this was definatley no reason to talk to it. The various hooks and metal struts that seemed to keep it crunched up certainly looked painful – the thing couldn’t really walk very well, just kind of sculttle around, and even Dee thought she could outrun it if she had to – but that wasn’t a reason to be nice to it.

“What if it’s, like, escaped from some, like, evil S&M club and needs our help or something?” Wayne looked doubtful with this theory, and so did Dee. It’s back legs were digigrade, like a dog’s. People weren’t born with legs like that.

Dee then did the only logical thing she could in the circumstances.

“I’m ringing the police.”

She dialed, and waited. Never having run the emergency services before she wasn’t quite sure of what to expect, bar what she’d seen on the TV. The backwards chanting static scream that came through was, she thought, probably not usual. She hung up, very carefully, and put the phone away, very carefully.

“Well?” Wayne asked, half an eye still on the shuffling bondage dog.

“Phone lines are dead.” It wasn’t entierly a lie, and Wayne just took it as such.

“So… what do you want to do now?”

Dee was about to suggest, they kick the weirdness out, lock the door and get some sleep, when sadi weirdness gave a skittish jump and began emitting an almost ludicrous yapping. It sounded not unlike someone physically yelling Arf! Arf! in a high-pitched imitation dog-voice. Anywhere else it may have been more amusing than it was. It started scuttling off a small distance, then running back, over and over, yapping all the while.

“Um, do you think it wants us to follow it?”

“Oh come on, Wayne! Are you mental?”

“I’m serious, look at it. Maybe it’s warning us, maybe something else worse is coming.”

“And maybe it just wants to lure us out of the light so it can eat us!” The hallway was, indeed, quite dark.

It was the noise that decided for them; a kind of scraping-tapping on the windowpane. When faced with a choice between a known monster and an unknown one, Dee decided it was best to play it safe. She grabbed a thick quarterstaff and her mobile phone on the way out, and prepared to follow the madness all the way down.

• Tags » corner, creative writing, fiction