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It wasn’t our fault, that’s what you have to remember. It was the book. This old book: tattered, dirty, the leather brittle and cracked. I don’t know where Annie found it, some stinking secondhand place down near the docks, she said, or wherever. The point is — it wasn’t supposed to be real, you understand? It was just for fun, for god’s — no fucking pun intended — sake. We were too young for it to be real.
Yeah, fine, we followed the instructions, if you could even call them that, all the crap it asked for, all those stupid-looking paintings on the ground. Even the blood, my uncle didn’t notice me filling a couple of sandwich baggies while he was cutting up turkeys and sides of beef. I thought about switching it for ketchup or raspberry syrup, maybe it was one of those weird feelings, but in the end I didn’t, because it wasn’t real, no one finds real stuff in a stinking secondhand bookstore and if it was real, I mean, come on, why the fuck did someone ever write it down?! Who does that?
It didn’t even sound real, you know. Well, not at first. All this stuff about time and this place and levels, it sounded made-up, like one of those games that wanna be grand but end up just wanking. We were laughing. Drunk as skunks and laughing, trying to pronounce that shit. Alice threw up halfway. Maybe that wasn’t just because of the tequila on top of wine. Maybe something else had a hand in that. There was this beat…this…rhythm. It took over, I think. It did something to the light, I remember that. Made it less, somehow. I couldn’t hear real good after that either. Like someone put cottonwool in my ears without me noticing.
Then Marty screamed.
But it wasn’t our fault and we shouldn’t even be here. I mean, all we did was get this book
