Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel (8 page)

Steve gave me, James, and the other three winners, a smile-free congratulation then he told us that we would have to come back for the Second Round a little later in the evening.

Eight o’clock.

I felt like I was buzzing inside, like I’d somehow contracted a swarm of bees right in the centre of my chest . . . but in a
good
way, obviously . . .

Just as I was heading away, making for the stairs which led up to the spectator seats, James spoke up behind me.

“Hey,” James said, “we were thinking of like meeting up in a little while—I mean, just us, the kids who were with Alive Action Games, what do you think?”

I looked back at him. Shrugged. “Okay.”

We exchanged phone numbers, and agreed to meet up in about an hour at the letter T.

I did wonder, as I felt the burn at the backs of my legs as I climbed up those—seemingly
unending
—stairs to the spectator area that this might perhaps be some clumsy attempt to throw me off my game . . . to maybe have me miss something important in the competition.

But, looking at the time, I saw that it was only five now.

We’d meet at six.

And, after the meeting, we’d probably go straight to the next round which began at eight.

It would be fine.

16

WHEN I GOT UP THERE, to Dad, he was—
surprise, surprise!
—still tapping away on his chess app. I explained to him about how I was planning on meeting up with some other kids in a little while and he did that rapid-blinking thing of his that told me, instinctively, that he was a bit thrown by these sudden developments in my social life.

I guess this was really the first time that I’d come to Gamers Con as something resembling an
individual
human being.

The last four years, when I’d come here, I’d had my mum and dad tagging along the whole entire time.

Apart from the tournament itself, they never left my side.

But this year it was different.

Just me and Dad.

And Dad was spending a whole lot of time on his chess.

We had our own things to do.

Dad said it was fine for me to go and meet with the kids, and he sort of mumbled about doing something . . . though I didn’t really care at all, I was fairly certain that he’d be taking another shower.

There
were
a whole bunch of people at this convention so I guess that he was feeling somewhat dirty.

I let him know where the tournament that night would be taking place, and we agreed, if we didn’t see one another before then, to meet up at that time.

He gave me one of those withered smiles of his as I walked away from him.

And then he turned his attention back to his chess match.

* * *

James was already at the letter T fifteen minutes before we’d agreed to meet.

And, somehow, I got the impression that he’d planned it so that we might have a couple of minutes alone together, to talk in private, before the others got there.

James was leaning up against a railing, the sole of one of his trainers flat against it in that cool way that I’d never—
ever
—be able to pull off.

He smiled at me with a mouthful of teeth as I drew closer, then he said, “That was some nice play, Zak, back there.”

“You didn’t do so badly yourself,” I said, unable to keep myself from smiling back in return.

James nodded off into the crowd, in the direction I’d just come from.

I looked through the people, saw that Kate was there, among the faces.

James gave a shrug. “I asked all of you along but I don’t know if everybody’ll come.” He rolled his neck about like he’d given himself cramp during the First Round, or something, then said, “That Chinese kid—don’t reckon he’ll be able to shake off his mum . . .”

“What about the ginger kid?” I said, unable to hold back.

Again, James shrugged. “Who knows?” Then he broke into a smile. “Anyway, I get the feeling that we might be able to talk a
little more
frankly about just what’s on our minds if he’s not here at all.”

I eyed the crowd, looked to Kate who was only about fifteen paces or so away. “If he does come then I guess we can ask him just what the hell he was doing in
Halls of Hallow
.”

“Hey, guys,” Kate said, flipping her hair out of her eyes, and back over her shoulder.

Though I hadn’t realised earlier, I noticed now that she was wearing a navy-blue polo shirt, and that it had a printed picture of some old lady.

The old lady had grey hair, and she’d discarded her Zimmer frame off behind her, and it lay in a heap on the road, all buckled and bent.

The old lady was brandishing a knife in a pretty scary way.

She had a bright-green explosion around her and the letters beneath read:
Knife Fight
.

I guess it was the sort of joke that I just didn’t get . . . if it was a joke at all.

It was as if me simply mentioning the game that was on all our minds, coupled with Kate arriving here, meant that James had decided to clam up about the whole thing.

“We were just talking about
Halls of Hallow
,” James said, flat out.

. . . I guess maybe I was wrong about that . . .

“Oh,” Kate said, widening her eyes, “that weirdo, crappy game with that lengthy cut scene right at the start?”

“That’s the one,” James replied.

I looked between the two of them as if I was watching the ball at a tennis match.

I wondered who would be the first to crack.

“So,” Kate continued, “you got a copy too, then, huh?”

James jerked his thumb at his chest then pointed at me. “Yeah, both of us.”

Kate glanced me over, pouting, and then said, “And, uh, did you make anything of it?”

I shrugged. “I dunno, well . . .” I kind of let my words trail away since it was James who had called this meeting in the first place, so I guessed that he was the one who got to decide just how much information we spilled.

“You see the red-haired kid too?” Kate asked, eyebrows raising up and disappearing into her fringe.

“Yup,” James said, with a nod, then looked at me. “Him too.”

Kate narrowed her eyes, looked on out over the crowd, then said, out of the corner of her mouth, as if she might be worried someone might overhear, “What do you think it means?”

I shrugged again. “Search me—it was weird, though.”

To be honest I did have
something
of an idea . . . well, that was to say that I knew it was possible for someone to—
theoretically
—step into their Sirocco 3000 simply by brushing their fingertips up against the infrared strip on the back.

But, having said that, I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up if I could help it.

After all, these two had Siroccos of their own, so maybe they’d figured it out for themselves.

What’s that thing that people say about not getting the chance to make another first impression—and that second sort of shadow rule to it that implies you shouldn’t make them think that you’re crazy either?

So I kept my lips sealed.

For now.

James stared out across the crowd, and it seemed like the whole talking-out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth thing was catching because he did just the same as Kate had done. “Almost like that kid got
into
the game somehow.”

17

THE KIND OF STONY SILENCE that followed
that
statement of James’s made me all the more glad that I hadn’t been the one to float the possibility that somebody might be able to actually
get inside
a Sirocco 3000 . . . actually step right into the game.

And a stony silence—a
really
stony silence—is pretty tricky to achieve with only three people, so that was a good measure of the crazy James had just floated out into the air between us.

I only realised that, right then, me and Kate were both staring right at James.

Probably both of us staring out of disbelief, though I guess different shades of it.

It was then that James cracked a smile.

And then, all of a sudden, he was laughing.

A heavy laugh—the kind that seems to come right from the very bottoms of the lungs.

We joined in.

I mostly faked it.

When we got ourselves together again, I looked about then said, “Well, guess that Chung and the ginger kid aren’t coming.”

James looked about, as if he might be able to change the fact
just by looking
. “Guess not,” he said, and then looked back at Kate. “What do you
really
think might be the explanation, then? I mean,” he continued, “don’t you think that it’s a
bit
of a coincidence all this stuff that’s gone on with Alive Action Games, you know, with the tickets, and then all three of us getting those disks through the post a couple of days before Gamers Con?”

Kate chewed on her lower lip. From the dried skin she had there, I could tell it was a habit of hers. She looked at the two of us then said, “Yeah, it does seem weird.”

There was something on my mind, though I wasn’t sure whether or not I should share it. I was still reeling just a little bit from that close shave we’d had with the whole transportation-inside-of-a-video-game thing and didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself.

I’m
not
a good liar after all.

I decided to speak up then, though. “Have either of you seen that guy—Mr
Yorbleson
—drifting about at all?”

Kate squinted at me as if I was giving off a very bright light. “You mean that old guy in the suit at breakfast this morning?”

“Yeah,” I said.

The two of them hunched their shoulders, looked fairly clueless, so I guessed that I was going to have to fill them in.

I told them about the night before, when he’d come to see me following the Ignition Tournament, and how he’d known my name, that he’d mainly come across as
quite creepy
.

When I’d finished up the potted explanation, I looked between the two of them then said, “You think there might be anything to it?”

“Dunno,” James said. “Maybe.”

“Thing is,” Kate said, her gaze drifting away from us, and back over the crowds, “we don’t really know enough about this whole thing—well, all three of us, those other two kids too, we were all working with Alive Action Games, and they were sponsoring our All-Access Passes here. They were the ones who decided to pull the passes too. That’s about all we have.”

“Yeah,” James said, “it seems to me that Mr Yorbleson was just trying to help us out—you know, trying to give us a way back into the tournament, back into the convention, that’s all.”

Though I still had a few reservations about that, I didn’t think to put in anything else.

I guessed that I’d told these two enough.

They
were
my competitors, after all.

And one thing was for certain, that me doing the best I could in the tournament—maybe even
winning
—had to take precedence over solving some dumb mystery about a strange, out-of-place, red-haired kid in some unmarked video game that’d popped through my door.

It seemed that Kate and James were thinking along the same lines, because we broke apart soon after, and I headed back up to the hotel room since I had another hour to kill before going down to take part in the Second Round.

When I got back into the hotel room, I found that there was nobody there at all.

That Dad had gone out.

I checked around for a note—something like that . . . yeah, and then I remembered that we weren’t living in the nineteenth century, and I checked my mobile.

Sure enough, there was a message from Dad waiting for me:

Meet you 15mins before the show, ok?

I fired back a classic reply:

Ok.

And then I decided to put my future at the tournament on the line.

I powered up my Sirocco and slipped the DVDR of
Halls of Hallow
into the disk tray.

18

JUST LIKE I ALWAYS DID—to get myself into the game I had to hook up the console, go around the back and then, taking a very deep breath, run my fingertips along the infrared strip. A few fizzles and crackles later . . . not to mention the darkness . . . I found myself in . . . yup,
more
darkness.

That told me that I was in the right place.

That I was
inside
of
Halls of Hallow
.

The air was thick, almost like if I breathed in hard enough something solid would form on my tongue. And, as it turned out, it certainly wouldn’t have been a very pleasant
something
either.

To put it bluntly, the air seemed absolutely
soaked
in a kind of mank . . . something between damp and mould.

When I reached out, felt for what surrounded me, my fingertips passed along something which felt cool, almost wet even.

The marble.

The
black
marble that I’d seen from before, when I’d been sat on the edge of my bed, game controller in my hand, watching that
never-ending
cut scene.

I blinked a few hundred times or so, somehow thinking that I might be able to strip back the darkness with my eyes.

But . . .
nope
.

Guess that I was going to have to get moving a little.

As I moved forwards, got a tiny slice of light on my situation, I noticed that I was wearing just what I had been back in the hotel room: a pair of low-slung jeans, my boxers artfully drawn up to cover the worst of my builder’s bum, and those same battered old trainers that I’d used for PE last year . . . my mum doesn’t believe in throwing out ‘perfectly good things.’

It was strange.

Mostly, well, when I’d ventured into games before, I would find myself inhabiting the hero of the game’s body.

I wondered if I’d imagined that I might end up in the Cloaked Figure’s body.