The Nightmare Game Read online

  What an odd question, I thought. “No, I’m just here on vacation. Why do you ask?”

  “That piece of paper you gave me with the address, it says it’s for a realtor. Just thought maybe you was movin’ here.”

  “No, as much as I’d love to, my friends are all back home. I’ve always loved New Orleans, but to tell you the truth I couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods I really like.”

  He laughed. “Hey, I hear you.”

  “I’m just renting an apartment during my stay and I’ve got to stop off at this office first to sign in and get the keys.”

  “You want me to wait at the office and drive you to the apartment?”

  “No, that’s alright, just drop me off. I don’t know how long it’ll take. Besides, I was told it wasn’t far and I need a walk after that plane ride. Thanks anyway, though.”

  “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  There was silence for a few minutes, a silence I utilized as I peered out the window, trying to get a bearing on my new surroundings as they passed by and attempting to drive some of the sluggishness out of my brain. It was a grogginess with which I was now all too familiar, the apparently inevitable aftermath of being awakened from the recurring dream too soon, before it had a chance to play itself to its end. Well, at least the dream was a little different this time, I thought, and I’d have lots of time to sort it out because, after all, I was on vacation now, wasn’t I? I tried to be upbeat, but the truth was that now I was actually in New Orleans, the sense of uncertainty about the apartment which I’d had since finding out that Carolyne would be a no-show was now starting to mix with a real sense of dread. I tried to shake it, but it wouldn’t go away and I began to feel queasy and suddenly vulnerable. It was so contrary to the feeling that I got when I first received the ads for this rental, but then I didn’t realize I’d be traveling alone. I’d been uncharacteristically naive. Questions I should have asked when I first got the e-mail and fax, now, when it was too late, came to mind. What kind of fly-by-night deal would this turn out to be? It was true, apartment rentals in the city were common, but for some reason, I suddenly had a bad feeling about this one. New visions of a broken-down place with bad ventilation, shot air conditioning, rusty pipes and old, stained bedding sporting bed bugs swam through my head uninvited. Was I just being paranoid?

  “Say,” I said to the driver, “This realty company, have you ever heard of before? Is it legit?”

  “Rochere Realty, yeah, I heard of it. Can’t tell you if it’s legit or not, but I can tell you that it’s old. It’s a little place, been around for a long time.”

  It got quiet again as I returned to peering out the window on our ride toward the French Quarter. Everything looked unfamiliar to me since the drive from the airport took a different route into the city than my family’s old bus rides did. Despite the distractions of the sights around me, my mind refused to let go of worries about the apartment. Feelings of dread continued to deepen as the disturbing unreality of my mood grew greater.

  By the time we finally got into the Quarter itself, my state of mind had become increasingly troubled. I tried to cheer up as we reached my destination, but since I felt as if I had never really quite awakened fully from my nap, it was difficult to rouse myself out of my nightmarish mood. As the cab pulled over, double-parking another car at the curb, the driver jumped out, got my bags out of the trunk and helped me out of the taxi.

  “This is it, right here,” he pointed. “Rochere Realty.”

  I handed him his fare and a generous tip. He’d been a good cab driver.

  “Keep the change,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” he replied. “Have a great time in our beautiful city!” He tipped his hat and flashed a dazzling smile before rushing off to get his next fare.

  I stood on the sidewalk for a minute, getting my bearings as I looked around and shook the cobwebs from my brain. It felt good to be back in New Orleans again, back in the French Quarter. I was glad it was still around, spared the devastation of some other areas of the city. I felt at home here and for some reason, I always had. Even though almost two decades had passed since I’d been back to visit, it felt almost as if I had never left. I looked at the building that housed Rochere Realty.

  The realty company was in one of the plainer buildings of the Quarter, well kept up but without the elaborate ironwork of many of its surrounding neighbors. A smallish sign reading “Rochere Realty” was prominently, yet tastefully, displayed in the front picture window of the bottom floor. Taking my bags, I walked up to the door and entered. The sound of the tiny bell on the door announced my arrival. There was no one at the front desk.

  “Hello,” I said tentatively. I looked around the office trying to spot an employee, but no one appeared. The office’s plain exterior belied what lay inside. Thick carpeting, expensive looking furniture and elegant knick-knacks gave it an air of the kind of wealth that comes only with old money.

  “Hello,” I repeated, more loudly now. “Is anybody here?”

  When no one answered, I shouted now, “Hello? Hello?”

  “Come in here,” a disembodied voice shouted from a back office, somewhat rudely, I thought. Hoping the professionalism of the firm would improve, I walked back to meet the voice’s owner.

  An older woman seemed to be busy at a desk.

  “Yes,” was all she said.

  “I’m looking for a Miss Rochere,” I said, checking the slip of paper in my hand for the umpteenth time.

  “I am she.”

  “I’m here to pick up the key to an apartment I rented,” I told her.

  “Which apartment?”

  Glancing back at the paper I’d already memorized just to make sure, I said, “It’s at a house on Toulouse Street.”

  “Very well.” She motioned to the chair opposite her desk. “Come on in and have a seat.” She was working on what appeared to be a ledger. Before I even set foot in the office, she returned her gaze to her work.

  “Is the receptionist at lunch?” I asked, wondering about the lack of professionalism apparent in this office.

  “I don’t have a receptionist,” she answered curtly. “I see no reason to pay for the privilege of hiring employees. I use temporary workers to help around here if and when I need them. Now, you will excuse me for a moment while I finish this up.” Her rude tone implied I was her personal servant awaiting a reprimand rather than a client. She couldn’t even be bothered to look at me when she spoke. “I will be with you in a moment.”

  “Sure,” I responded, putting down my bags and sitting in the visitor’s chair on the other side of her desk. Don’t let me stop you, I thought, bristling under her tone. After all, I’m just a customer, not important at all.

  What I thought was going to be a few seconds turned into a few minutes. I used the time to look around her office, suppressing the urge to whistle while I waited. Normally I wouldn’t have minded as much, but her telling me to wait rather than asking me to wait really irked me. I tried to shoot her a look that would get her to acknowledge me, but she was so absorbed in her paperwork that she continued to ignore me completely. I kept staring at her, but she didn’t budge. This was going on for too long.

  “Excuse me,” I said, getting impatient.

  “I said I’ll be with you in a moment,” she replied coldly and irritably, again not bothering to look up.

  Bitch, I thought, glaring at her, regretting suddenly that I was never able to master the art of making laser beams shoot from my eyes. It was very rare that I disliked someone as immediately and intensely as I did her. Even her tone of voice and rudeness couldn’t fully explain my intense distaste, even hatred, of her at this very moment.

  I studied her closely, my eyes boring into her. Despite my dislike of her, I realized that if it hadn’t been for her rude and discourteous attitude, she probably would have been quite a handsome woman. About sixty or a well-kept sixty-five, she had a very smooth complexion for a woman her age and a head o
f thick, sleek white hair that was pulled back into a tight bun. She wore a dusty-rose colored suit with a white cut rose bud in her lapel and a necklace of pearls atop a white blouse trimmed with lace and clasped at the neck with a golden broach. Gold wire frame half-moon reading glasses were perched upon her aquiline nose in a way that, combined with her sternness, completed the picture of a very strict, probably somewhat sadistic, boarding school principal. She must have been a real beauty in her day, I had to admit, making me wonder whether her personality had been more attractive when she was young or if she had just used her looks to torment and humiliate whatever poor fellows who were unfortunate enough to fall for her. From where I sat at the moment, the latter seemed far more likely.

  When I had first looked around the room, it had struck me as being warm and cozy, a sharp contrast with the personality that occupied it, leading me to think now that the ambiance was more for her own creature comforts rather than to make her clients relaxed. Either that, or just being a vacation renter, I wasn’t a big enough customer for her to bother with manners. If she treated all the people that vacationed at her properties the same way she did me, I doubted she got a lot of repeat business. Looking around again, for I had nothing else to do, I studied the room a little more. The carpet was oriental, an expensive one at that, and seemed to be large enough to fit wall-to-wall. Thick, lush and densely woven, it was interestingly decorated with multicolored snakes flicking long, red tongues. They wrapped themselves around each other and the other decorative elements in the rug, interlocking into an intricate, detailed design that looked almost Oriental, but in a sort of pattern I had never seen before, not even in my old college art history classes. When my eyes traveled up from the rug, I saw that the wallpaper’s background, a very pale dusty pink, was color-coordinated with Rochere’s suit du jour. I had images of her closet holding nothing but identical dusty pink suits hanging all in a row next to identical lace-trimmed white blouses. I snickered softly under my breath at that thought, which brought me a harsh, disciplinarian throat-clearing from Madame Rochere. Well, I thought, at least she knows I’m still here. Looking over at the wallpaper again, I noticed it was also overlaid with a pattern that seemed to be based on a not-quite oriental design. Intricate white flowers, all tightly interlacing with their trailing green stems and leaves, danced in vertical patterns with tiny white hummingbirds. A few old paintings that seemed to be of Indian origin dotted the walls in heavy frames, helping to make up for a lack of windows in the room. It amazed me that, with all these things put together, the decor didn’t look overly fussy, but the designs, paintings and frames were so beautiful and tasteful that somehow they just worked together. Of course it helped, I guessed, that the furniture’s feel was just the opposite and served to balance the room. Heavy and dark, almost black, it had a massive, authoritative feel to it that spoke against the flourishes of the carpet and walls. Antiques, obviously, and good ones at that, the furniture had a very masculine feeling; but it was the masculinity of another century, the nineteenth perhaps, weighty but not above a few curves and little adornment. It had that flawless satiny finish that spoke of being always freshly polished and very well cared for. There were few knick-knacks around this room, unlike the entrance, which had many; but they were large and important-looking pieces. Despite their expensive look, however, their scale implied they’d been designed for a garden rather than an interior room. Rochere’s desk was of the same design as the rest of the furniture except that its front was oddly embellished with a relief carving of two ornamental snakes wrapping around each other, a very fitting design for her, I thought. It was topped with writing implements and books that, while modern, were reminiscent of an earlier age because, like everything else here, they were conspicuously expensive. This woman was obviously very rich with not a hint of new money and her office made sure that everyone who came in knew it. While I noticed a computer in the front office, there was none in here, the normally allotted space on her desk was occupied by an overly large vase filled with a huge bouquet of fresh cut flowers. The overstuffed visitors’ chair in which I was sitting had an intricately carved wooden “crown” at its head and soft, fat upholstered arms that ended in hands of ornate animal claws arising from the carved wood arms of the chair’s decorative frame that began near the floor. It was, I had to admit, very comfortable. But I knew its beauty and comfort was there only for the use of her far wealthier, more important clientele, who, unlike me, did not clash with her decor.

  Now that I had, for all intents and purposes, memorized her office out of sheer boredom, I decided it was now time for me to stand up and demand she hand over the apartment key. Enough was enough and she was selfishly cutting into my vacation. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could, I was distracted by a change in the scent of the room. When I first walked in, it was impossible not to notice the fragrance of the many flowers in the vase on her desk. There were so many, the perfume was almost a little too strong. But now the scent had changed and become a musty odor. The smell of the flowers was still there, but it was rapidly intermixed with an undercurrent of something dank, damp and dusty, something reminiscent of an old attic piled high with moldy, nearly forgotten furnishings and memorabilia, the attic of someone who had died years ago but whose effects no one ever bothered to clear out. The atmosphere suddenly seemed overpowering and stifling. I tried not to breathe in too deeply, but even so the dense smell engulfed me until I felt suddenly shifted outside of time. Speaking seemed to take too much effort and I was too lightheaded to get up. I was getting dizzy, so I tried even harder to focus my concentration upon the physical aspects of the room in an attempt to calm myself. But the more I tried to rely on my senses, the more woozy I became. I attempted to center myself by fixing my gaze on the carved serpents adorning the front of Rochere’s heavy desk, only to find that no sooner had I done this than the relief-carved snakes began to “swim” and to twist upon each other as if they were alive.

  I must be overtired. Get a grip, Ashley, I rationalized to myself. A horrible new thought entered my mind. Was I really just overtired or had someone aboard my flight had an exotic new disease that the nightly news had yet to warn us all about? Maybe this was serious. I was getting scared. I blinked my eyes and shook my head. When I looked back at the desk, instead of stopping, this movement of the serpents, which was surely an optical illusion, became even more animated, more violent as the snakes turned upon themselves and began to consume each other, starting with the tails. I looked up again at the woman behind the desk, feeling sick, having a little difficulty swallowing, wondering just how long would she keep me waiting, feeling that maybe if she acknowledged me I might be able to get my orientation back and feel better enough to make these hallucinations stop. I needed to get that damned key, make it to the apartment and lie down on a bed. I opened my mouth to demand that she hand it over, but I only weakly got the word “key” out of my mouth and was unable to finish the rest of the sentence. She appeared not to hear me and I didn’t know if she was still ignoring me or if I had just spoken too softly. Key or no key, I would have left right there and then but I didn’t have the strength to get up out of my chair. The surviving snake on the front of her desk had turned into one enormous snake and hissing, struck out at me, somewhat leaving the confines of its desk. Startled, I jumped backward toward the rear of my chair as far as my waning strength would let me. That wasn’t standard behavior for office furniture. I was either getting sick or going crazy. The smell then got even stronger. Rochere didn’t seem to notice it. It was so overpowering, how could she not notice?

  I tried to pull myself together by analyzing the situation. What was it about the smell that I found so offensive? What was it about the odor that was making me feel so ill? Generally I found the aroma of flowers pleasant and that of musty, dusty old attics, while not desirable, at least interesting. But this was something different. Flowers, yes, and dust and mildew, but something else, something familiar that I hadn’t smelled in years, so
mething 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.