Tag: fantasy

The game limped on for only a few more sessions after the death of Noble Barfolomew. Harris, Jack, and Sonny simply lost interest, and Reed’s attempts to keep them exploring the Ziggurat of Utmost Evil would degenerate into gossiping about girls or staring into their phones scrolling through social media. 

Reed, on the other hand, only grew more preoccupied. At first he remembered his own perfidy with the dice, his abdication of the responsibilities he’d imagined for himself as a just and impartial deity, and Opie’s anguished cries. But soon he pushed those thoughts out of his mind, and began thinking incessantly about those rolls. He saw the face of the dice that he rolled behind the screen over and over, the two and the five inscribed in garish gold and electric blue, swimming in his field of vision. And then he’d envision Opie’s rolls: twenty after twenty, defying probability. 

Barfolomew—torch in one hand, his great birch staff in the other—pushed his way through a narrow corridor filled with dusty cobwebs, then emerged into a large room, walls covered with bas-relief frescoes portraying white-clad virgins being torn apart by winged, insectile demons. 

Wild Woodrow’s keen senses caught the stench seconds before the others. The unmistakable miasma of decomposing flesh wafted out of the corridor in advance of five undead soldiers that shambled into the antechamber. The group looked on in horror at the putrescent scraps of meat still clinging to their yellowed bones, the glistening viscera falling from their abdomens and trailing behind them, their wickedly curved scimitars flashing in the torchlight.

After the game, Reed appealed to his mother. “Please mom, don’t make us play with Opie again. He’s such a dork.” 

His mother sniffed. “First of all, look who’s talking.” She smirked for a moment at her own joke, then continued. “Second of all, if you’re going to play that nonsense, you’ll at least include Opie. His mother says he’s having trouble fitting in at Eisenhour,” the cross-town middle school. 

Reed walked away, chastened but undeterred, and the next day he pleaded his case to his father. He figured that his father, who had often voiced his disappointment in Reed’s own awkwardness, would take his side. 

Part 1

He’d met Harris, Sonny, and Jack at the beginning of Seventh Grade, in the Darwinian nightmare of the middle school boys’ locker room.  A hormonal freak of a seventh-grader named Danny Driscoll—who according to legend had been held back two years—along with two of his hulking henchmen, had taken to waylaying Reed on his way from the showers to his locker, when he was clad only in a towel and at his most defenseless. Danny’s two goons would pin Reed’s arms behind his back as Danny stripped Reed naked and mocked his lack of pubic hair and his small, shriveled penis. 

By the second week of school, Danny had taken to grabbing Reed’s nipples and twisting them cruelly while speculating about Reed’s mother’s sexual proclivities. Reed, between screams of agony, tearfully resigned himself to his fate: to be tortured and sexually humiliated throughout his remaining one year, eleven months, and two weeks of middle school.