Something was growing like fruit from the unnatural branches. It bulged a sickly white blob that formed gradually into a flattened cylinder. Then upon one flat face of the cylinder, the pointed black hand of a clock. Just one hand. And just one number, at the top, where the twelve should have been. That number was zero.
While Emma, Liam, and I all stared at this odd fruit, something else was growing from the other side of the bower. It took the shape of hanging vines, six of them, as long as bullwhips.
“The game is a puzzle of twelve and one,” the Game Master said. “Twelve pieces that must be assembled in one minute.”
“Can’t be too hard,” Liam said with bravado that I prayed was not misplaced. “Where’s this twelve-part puzzle?”
The cracked-tooth mouth smiled a skull’s smile. “This is your puzzle.”
At that the bullwhip tendrils erupted into life, whirling around Emma. It was no more than three seconds of mad flailing, with a noise like old-style Venetian blinds being thrashed.
The vines withdrew.
Emma’s flesh and clothing alike were marked with red lines. She reminded me of charts I had seen in butcher’s shops of cows divided by roast and steak and rib.
She blinked. “Oh,” she gasped.
Her arm, severed at the elbow, fell to the ground. No blood flowed. The severed end was a perfect, smooth, bloodless cross-section showing deep red muscle, white ligaments, honeycombed pearl bone, a thin wrapping of tan flesh.
Her scream rose in her throat and Liam bellowed in fear, and a second whip flew and a second piece dropped.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” I cried, fists pressed to my mouth so hard I drew blood.
The whips flew and a hand, a leg, she toppled over and in midair was sliced in half at the waist, revealing organs cut through, intestines sluicing digested food that stopped as if by magic at the place where they were cut.
The pieces lay scattered. Eleven of them. An arm, a leg, a thigh . . . and Emma’s head, mouth open in a soundless scream.
The pieces lay inert, all but that terrible, wordlessly, soundlessly screaming head.
A final slash of the vine, and Emma’s head fell into two pieces like a split coconut, the halves rolling apart, both eyes on one piece, the mouth on another, the nose bisected.
I felt my knees collapse, and this time Messenger let me fall. I did not lose consciousness—I came to rest sitting on the cold ground, staring, mewling, my mind reeling back from the horror.
The vines descended, slowly now, like patient, stalking pythons, each looking for and finding a piece of Emma. Then, one by one, almost playfully, they threw the pieces into the bower, where they stuck like hellish apples hanging from a tree.
“Time starts . . . now,” the Game Master said.
The clock hand began to move. It had passed the place where the “two” would have been, and Liam still stood, frozen, panicked.
“Liam! Move!” I shouted.
The Game Master hissed at me, like a cat, and his worm-filled eye sockets glowed with an eerie green light. But Liam sprang into action. He first took the two halves of Emma’s head and, weeping and sobbing and with shaking hands, pressed the two pieces together.
Then pieces of torso, heavy as sandbags, slipping from his hands. He shoved and rolled the largest piece into the approximate space where it should be.
Already his time was half-done.
“Hurry!” I urged, and in my anger at this horrible trickery, I looked the Game Master in the eye, defying him, cursing him even as I wept for Liam and Emma.
A thigh. A leg. A piece that was at first hard to place until it was rolled over and showed itself to be a hip.
Ten seconds left.
Leg to thigh. Arm to shoulder. It was like the children’s song. The knee bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone’s connected to the . . .
Five seconds!
Liam struggled with the two meaty chunks that would together form his love’s upper torso.
Two!
Liam grabbed Emma’s head and pushed it down against the severed neck.
A gong sounded.
No one breathed. I was sure even Messenger did not.
The Game Master said, “The player has won.” He was, without any doubt, disappointed. But he maintained his monstrous dignity as the bower, that tangle of imprisoning branches, withdrew into his maze of a body.
Emma sucked suddenly at the air. She coughed. Liam bent over her on hands and knees and raised her up until she was sitting. He put his arms around her, and the two of them sobbed into the other’s shoulder.
“Am I needed further?” the Game Master asked.
“No,” Messenger said. “Not at this time.”
“Have I performed my office?”
“Yes. You may withdraw.”
The Game Master nodded. It was an almost amiable gesture. He stepped back and the mist wrapped around him, and he was soon gone from view. The sound of his captive creatures skittering and crying lasted for another few seconds and then faded beyond hearing, though not beyond memory.
“Stand,” Messenger said to Liam and Emma.
I was amazed that they could manage it, and indeed it took some time. They seemed as stiff and weak as if they were very old people. But finally, helping each other, they stood erect, still holding hands, their faces masks of apprehension.
“You did wrong,” Messenger said. “But you played the game and prevailed. You are free to go on with your lives.”
“Are you kidding me?” Emma demanded. Her voice was shaky with the aftereffects of terror but powered by outrage. “You do that to us? You do that? And then—”