The Nightmare Game Read Online Free Page B

and dust and
mildew, but something else, something familiar that I hadn’t smelled in years,
something from my school years. Suddenly the memory came to me. Formaldehyde.
The vision sat before me clearly of poor dead things in my eighth grade biology
class stuffed into gallon glass jars and stuck on a shelf. With a dizzying
revelation, I recognized it was the smell of death, the odors of an ancient
funeral parlor, the smell of flowers mixed with dust and embalming fluid that
was making me sick. Rochere still didn’t seem to notice it at all. Was it just
me? Was I imagining this? Had I really caught a new virus? Did I have food
poisoning from something bad I’d eaten at the airport this morning? Horrible
thoughts hit my mind. Was I going into anaphylactic shock from an allergic
reaction? Was I having a heart attack?
    Without warning, nausea engulfed me, but as I
tried to shift in my chair, I realized that my feet were trapped. I panicked.
Something was tying them down while something else was crawling on me.
Suddenly, the crawling something began to bite like fire ants. I jumped. As I
looked down, I saw that the plush white carpet had completely consumed my feet
while its little Oriental snakes were now slithering up my legs. With long
tongues swishing away, tickling my lower extremities as if they were creeping
insects, they bit me with their sharp little fangs, leaving behind tiny spots
of my blood. I cried out, but when I did, no sound emerged. I bent over and
brushed them off of me and thankfully, they slid away.
    In shock now, my eyes implored Rochere to
acknowledge me, but she did not look up. In panic I looked around and, to my
horror, the wallpaper began to move. The vines slid down out of their patterns
and crept toward me. Now buried above the ankles, my feet were sinking ever
more deeply into the plush carpet, as if it were rising water, and the now
returning snakes were joined by the wallpaper vines in slinking and swirling
and twisting up my legs, higher and higher. I needed to get up, to run away,
but I was trapped. When I tried to swat everything away again, the tiny
hummingbirds flew off the wallpaper toward me, swarming about my head like
mosquitoes. Then something sharp grabbed my hands. It was the carved claws of
the chair, clutching my hands, then my forearms, crawling up as their thin
wooden strips wrapped around my arms the same way the vines wrapped around my
legs, gluing me to and imprisoning me in this chair. Trapped, I could only
thrash about in what was rapidly becoming a seat of torture as the little
snakes began biting my legs again. Berserk from pain and panic, driven almost
to madness, I looked around wildly for help from any source. Instead, the
drawers in the heavy black armoire next began to move, pursing themselves into
lips. A dark, deep, evil voice came out of them saying, “You shouldn’t have
come here. You should have stayed home.” “He’s right, you know,” something else
concurred. My head swung around to see the large garden-sized Greek-style bust
of a youth agreeing with him. “This is what you get,” it said in a low,
breathy, accusatory voice, “for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. For
not staying home.” My brain screamed in terror. This was impossible! How could
it be happening? Just when I thought things could get no worse, I saw, from the
corner of my eye, the ornamental wooden crown of the chair elongate and come
round to my front, wrapping itself around my neck as it began to choke me. I
couldn’t breathe. I thrashed around as wildly as I possibly could, being pinned
down so, but still Rochere took no notice of me. Overwhelming horror possessed
me. I was being murdered, right here, right now by, of all things, a chair,
wallpaper and carpeting.
    Then I heard a little bell ring. The tiny portion
of my brain that could still think as I writhed in place, trapped, fighting for
air, wondered if it was yet another cruel trick or if there really was