Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

7

That night Grace watched from the stove as Charlie climbed slowly up onto the kitchen chair, carefully placing his massive paws to avoid tipping it over. It had taken him a long time and many toenail-scrabbling falls to the linoleum to teach himself the trick, and Grace thought that in doggy terms, Charlie was probably a genius.

Once he had all four paws centered on the slippery wood seat, he turned by inches until his stub of a tail brushed the chair back, then sat down with an audible sigh.

‘You are a brilliant animal.’ Grace smiled at him. Charlie smiled back, letting his tongue fall out.

She had no idea why the dog insisted on sitting in chairs, but she understood panic when she saw it, and the first night she’d brought him home from the alley where she’d found him, Charlie had panicked when she’d tried to keep him off the furniture. He hadn’t lain on the floor with his head in his paws, whining pathetically; he’d danced on his hind feet, howling in terror, as if the floor were writhing with monsters, and height was his only salvation.

Full-grown then, but obviously weak from near starvation, she’d had to help him up into a chair, acting first and thinking only later that the strange dog could easily have turned on her with flashing teeth.

But Charlie hadn’t done that. Once she had him safely above whatever nightmares lived on her floor, he’d only whined softly and licked her face, over and over, making Grace laugh, and then strangely, making her cry.

‘Which was more than all those silly psychiatrists were able to do,’ she told Charlie, as if he’d been privy to her mental reminiscing. He cocked his head at her, then nudged the heavy ceramic bowl on the table in front of him, politely reminding her that supper was late.

It was lamb stew tonight. Grace took hers without kibble.

After supper Charlie headed for the couch and Grace headed for the long, narrow room sandwiched between the kitchen and dining room. A pantry, originally, the realtor had told her, back in the early part of the century when the house was young.

It was the first room Grace had remodeled, stripping the floors and refinishing the wood, replacing the one existing window with stained glass in deep, impenetrable colors. You couldn’t see the bars on the outside of the window anymore, and no one could see in, either.

There was a desk-high counter on one wall where computers hummed twenty-four hours a day, and barely enough floor space for a rolling chair that Grace rode up and down the length of the counter.

‘You can’t possibly work in here.’ Mitch had been horrified when he’d seen it. ‘This isn’t an office; it’s a coffin.’ But it was the one place in the world where Grace felt almost safe.

She walked to the big IBM that was networked to all the office computers. ‘Come on, come on.’ She spun the ball on the mouse to bring the computer out of suspend mode, and waited impatiently, fingers poised over the keyboard.

She’d been struggling with a stubborn command line for the last murder all day at the office and had finally visualized the solution during dinner. She could hardly wait to test it.

She heard the familiar muffled sounds of the hard drive examining itself, then finally, the soft crackle of the monitor coming to life. She’d imposed a digital photo of Charlie on her desktop, long tongue lolling, eyes half closed as if he were smiling around a secret. It always made her smile.

She reached for the function key that would call up the programming file for Serial Killer Detective, but never had a chance to push it. She frowned when the screen suddenly went black, then froze as the scrawled red message appeared on her screen.

WANT TO PLAY A GAME?

She straightened slowly, her eyes glued to the words on the monitor that simply shouldn’t be there; not unless she’d called up the game file, and even then, not until she’d moved to the second screen.

Glitch, she thought. It has to be a glitch. But even knowing that, for a moment she still felt that old fear tiptoeing up her spine, prickling at the back of her neck, paralyzing her.

The past ten years vanished in an instant, leaving the younger Grace that still lived in her mind huddled in a dark closet, trembling uncontrollably, being very, very quiet.