Prankster, page 3
He hoped it was a good-natured prank at least.
“Jeremiah,” the distorted voice repeated, “I have taken your coworkers Parker and Hope hostage. If you call the police, I will kill them immediately.”
“Uh-huh,” Jeremiah said, sounding as unconvinced as he felt. The distorted voice was obviously Parker’s.
“You have a choice to make, Birthday Boy. You can flee the building with the confidence that you will live to see another birthday even though your friends won’t. Or you can try to save your friends. If you take this option, you have thirty minutes. The longer you take, the worse shape they’ll be in when you find them. Now, what is your choice?”
“I choose to save my friends,” Jeremiah said with a sigh. In truth, he considered Parker a bully, not a friend. But he wanted to make a good impression on Hope, and triumphing over one of Parker’s pranks seemed like a good way to do it. Plus, it was just a stupid game anyway, right? Like those escape rooms people chose to get themselves locked into so they could have the fun of finding the clues that would get them out.
It was his birthday after all. He might as well play a game.
“Very well,” the distorted voice said. “Use your time wisely, or your friends may be missing a few pieces. Your time starts … NOW.”
Jeremiah stood up. He had to hand it to Parker. This was certainly darker and more imaginative than his usual pranks. He looked around the workroom, trying to find clues. He looked on top of Parker’s desk and even pulled the drawers open and looked inside. Nothing out of the ordinary. He went to the reception desk where Hope usually kept her stuff. Her purse was stored in the usual drawer, which meant she had definitely come in this morning. He wouldn’t stoop so low as to invade her privacy by digging through her purse.
So Hope was somewhere in the building because her purse was here. And he knew Parker was here because he had heard him on the loudspeaker. To win this game—to beat Parker and impress Hope—he had to turn himself into a combination of an action hero and a sharp-minded detective. What was it Sherlock Holmes used to say in the stories Jeremiah had liked back in his middle school days? The game is afoot.
“Since you’re at a desk, you might as well write something down,” the distorted voice over the loudspeaker boomed. “Your first clue is an anagram. Write it down: STINGER MOOT.”
“Stinger moot?” Jeremiah yelled back at the voice on the loudspeaker. Parker’s voice. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense,” the voice bellowed. “It’s an anagram. You’re wasting precious time, Jeremiah. Write it down. S-T-I-N-G-E-R space M-O-O-T.”
Jeremiah did as he was told, but he wasn’t going to let Parker intimidate or pressure him. Not this time. He wanted Hope to see the kind of person he really was, that he wasn’t just a hapless foil for Parker’s pranks.
Anagrams. It had been a long time since Jeremiah had thought about anagrams. Those were the ones where the letters were scrambled up, weren’t they? He looked at the nonsensical combination of words. If this was truly a clue, then it was probably directing him to a location in the building. He spotted the letters R-O-O-M quickly, so room must be the second word. With those letters eliminated, it didn’t take him long to figure out that the remaining letters could be rearranged to spell testing.
“The testing room,” he said, feeling an undeniable sense of accomplishment. “I need to go to the testing room.”
He walked instead of running. He didn’t want Parker to think he was feeling pressured. It was just a game, after all.
He used his key card to open the door to the testing room, then turned on the light.
In the middle of the floor sat a small gift box, the size that most often contained jewelry. The little box was wrapped in colorful paper with a shiny purple bow on top. So this was a birthday treasure hunt with a horror/suspense theme? Jeremiah could live with that. At least he could say that this birthday wasn’t like every other day.
He walked across the room, crouched down, and picked up the small box. He unwrapped it carefully just in case there might be a clue written on the inside of the wrapping paper. The hinged box was a deep crimson, flocked with velvet, the kind of box that might cradle an engagement ring. He flipped the lid open.
His stomach lurched.
Teeth. The velvet-lined box was filled with teeth. Some large, some perhaps small enough to be baby teeth. One molar was flecked with blood on the bottom where it had been yanked out by the root. Jeremiah wanted to keep his cool but couldn’t help but visibly shudder.
Where had Parker managed to get teeth, of all things? Was he friends with a dentist who had a sick sense of humor?
Jeremiah took a deep breath. A clue, he told himself. The teeth are supposed to be a clue. Stop freaking out and start thinking.
He didn’t want to touch the teeth, but he knew he needed to examine them for possible clues. He took a tissue from his pocket, spread it over the palm of his left hand, and shook the teeth onto the tissue. They contained no distinguishing markings or features. There were seven of them. Could the number be significant? Seven certainly didn’t feel like a lucky number when it referred to a bunch of extracted teeth.
He set the teeth aside and examined the box. He pulled out the velvet liner. In the bottom of the box was a small piece of paper that had been folded into a tiny square. Jeremiah unfolded the paper. On it, a typed message read:
SINK YOUR TEETH INTO THIS CLUE, JEREMIAH!
GIVE ME ONE, AND I’LL MAKE MORE.
EACH ONE LIKE THE ONE BEFORE.
WHAT AM I?
Jeremiah didn’t have to think for long. He had always been good at riddles. “That’s easy. The copying machine.”
“Don’t get too confident, Jeremiah,” the distorted voice boomed out of the loudspeaker, making him jump. “The time is ticking away. Only twenty minutes left. And the slower you are, the more they’ll suffer. I wonder … if you do manage to find your friends, will you even be able to recognize them?”
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you, Parker?” Jeremiah said as he exited the testing room, leaving the teeth behind. “Stop nagging me. I’m on my way to the copy room.”
In no particular hurry, Jeremiah made his way down the dark hallway.
The copy room was the third door on the left. When he walked inside, lights from the machine emanated an eerie glow. At first he went to the machine itself, but found nothing out of the ordinary. He scanned the room. It was small, so there weren’t many hiding places. Other than the machine, there was just a wastebasket, a recycling bin, and a long table where people could collate their copies. He looked on the table and saw only the usual office supplies: a cup holding pens and scissors, a stapler, a small jar of paper clips.
Wait. Those aren’t paper clips.
They were small, translucent ovals, white-tipped on the top and flecked with red on the bottom.
Fingernails. They’re fingernails. And not fingernail clippings but whole fingernails that had been … removed, somehow.
Jeremiah felt the bile rising in his throat. He gagged.
He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. These couldn’t be real fingernails. They were props—extremely realistic props, the kind you’d see in a horror movie with a decent budget, but props nonetheless. He supposed it wasn’t so outrageous that Parker could get his hands on such things. You could buy anything off the internet these days.
But where was the next clue? There was nothing else unusual on the table. With a shaky hand, he picked up the jar of “fingernails.” He upended it, scattering the nails across the table. A small, folded piece of paper fell out of the bottom of the jar. He didn’t like touching it since it had been in the jar with all those fingernails, but he knew it was the next clue, and he wasn’t going to chicken out now. He wouldn’t give Parker the satisfaction. He unfolded the slip of paper and read: YOU NAILED THIS CHALLENGE! Jeremiah could almost hear Parker’s annoying hee-hee-hee. He kept reading: YOUR NEXT CLUE CONTAINS EVEN MORE FRIGHTS/TO GET THERE YOU JUST NEED TO FOLLOW THE LIGHTS.
Jeremiah stepped out into the hall. A string of tiny lights was stretched from the doorway of the copy room down the hall. He followed them, which was certainly easier than deciphering another cryptic clue. Maybe he was getting close to the end of the game. It hadn’t been fun—it was too disturbing for that—but it had been interesting. He would definitely come out of this experience with a story to tell.
“Time’s a-wasting, Jeremiah,” the voice on the loudspeaker announced. “Only ten minutes left. Better get to your friends soon, or they’ll be all to pieces!” The laughter sounded like a distorted version of Parker’s hee-hee-hee.
“You really put some work into this, Parker, I’ll give you that,” Jeremiah said.
The lights stopped at a doorway to a conference room that hadn’t been used since the company’s downsizing. He turned the knob and walked in.
Sitting on the table, lined up as if staring at him, were three eyeballs. Two of them, Jeremiah noticed, had brown irises; the third one was blue. Seeing intact eyeballs separated from their owners made Jeremiah think of how delicate the eye was, soft and squishable, like a peeled grape. He felt a wave of nausea, a sensation that was now becoming familiar.
These eyes had to be real. Even an excellent special effects artist couldn’t make something this convincing. So where was Parker getting this stuff?
A thought popped into Jeremiah’s head that explained everything. On the third floor of their building there was a medical supply company. Jeremiah had never thought that much about what kind of supplies they provided—he had thought scrubs and maybe masks and gloves, that kind of thing. But what if they dealt with medical waste? Body parts left over from surgeries that were going to be sent to medical schools for study and dissection? If so, Parker could have just bought some spare parts from them.
Jeremiah felt better suddenly, confident that no one had been harmed in the creation of this elaborate prank. He spotted a slip of paper sticking out from under the blue eyeball. He didn’t want to touch it, so he nudged it with the blunt end of a ballpoint pen. The eye rolled back, and he grabbed the note and unfolded it: I SEE THAT YOU’RE MOVING CLOSER TO YOUR GOAL. FOLLOW THE LIGHTS TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT!
A new string of lights started at the conference room doorway and led farther down the hall. They stopped at the office, which had belonged to the PR person before she was laid off. He tried the door and walked inside.
A medium-sized gift sat on the desk. It was wrapped in white paper decorated with shiny multicolored letters spelling HAPPY BIRTHDAY and topped with a big silver bow.
Jeremiah was starting to lose the pleasure he had always felt in unwrapping gifts.
Still, he tore through the paper and lifted the lid off the box.
Resting inside a nest of light blue tissue paper was a pile of fingers—maybe as many as twelve or thirteen, but it was hard to say because many of them had been chopped into fragments. Two of them were missing fingernails.
Jeremiah couldn’t help it. Prank or no prank, he vomited into the wastebasket.
Once he was able to normalize his breathing, he looked inside the box again. One of the fingers was small and obviously had belonged to a female. It was wearing a delicate silver ring with a light blue gemstone in it.
Aquamarine. Hope’s birthstone.
He realized with horror that it was Hope’s ring, the one she always wore on her right ring finger. Did this mean that the severed finger belonged to Hope? He bent over to examine it more closely. There was a small, dark freckle just below the finger’s first joint.
Jeremiah had spent so much time looking at Hope that he had memorized her face, her hair, her hands. This was not her freckle, not her finger. He felt a brief moment of relief, but then felt bad for feeling relieved. Even if none of these fingers were Hope’s, they were still human fingers. This had gone beyond a prank. It was a sick game, and it had gone too far. Jeremiah had often said that Parker didn’t know when to stop. He was only realizing now how true that statement was.
And even if it wasn’t Hope’s finger, it was still Hope’s ring. What did that mean? Could Hope be in some kind of danger? Was Parker hurting her?
“Enough is enough, Parker!” Jeremiah yelled. The game had gone on too long. “This needs to stop now!”
“Feeling like things are getting out of hand?” the voice on the loudspeaker said, laughing. “There’s only one way that this game ends. Follow the lights before it’s too late for your friends.”
Jeremiah ran. Before, he didn’t want to let Parker see him sweat, but if Hope was truly in danger, he had to get to her. He had wasted too much time already.
The lights ended at another empty office, the large one occupied by the boss when he actually bothered to show up. Jeremiah couldn’t even remember when the last time had been. On the large oak desk was a cardboard box with two round holes cut into the lid. A note attached to the box said, For the key to where your friends hide, roll up your sleeves and reach inside.
Jeremiah pushed up his shirtsleeves and plunged his hands through the two holes in the box. Instantly, he was up to his wrists in something cold, wet, and squishy.
It would be more accurate to say some things that were cold, wet, and squishy because the more Jeremiah felt around in the depths of the box, the more he became aware that he wasn’t just feeling one slimy mass, but individual items. His hands were tangled up long, snaky tubes. Intestines.
Jeremiah hoped that the innards he was feeling had come from some unfortunate livestock and had been acquired at a butcher’s shop. But in his mind, he knew better.
The medical supply company, he told himself. All this stuff came from the medical supply company. It was from people who had died from natural causes, who donated their bodies to scientific research.
But even as he tried to convince himself, the words were sounding more and more desperate and ridiculous. If these body parts were for study or dissection, wouldn’t they be preserved in some way? All the parts he had encountered during this horrible game seemed disturbingly … fresh.
Jeremiah feared he might be losing his mind. Was this how you lost the game, by losing your sanity?
He fought off wave after wave of nausea to rummage through the offal in search of the key. Finally, his right hand felt something hard and metallic. He grabbed it and withdrew his arms from the holes in the box. When he looked at his hands, they were stained red past the wrists.
He held up the key. “Okay, I’ve got the key! Is the game over? Do I win now? Because I am done! Do you hear me, Parker? I’m done!”
“What quest ends with just finding a key, Jeremiah?” the voice on the loudspeaker boomed. “Don’t you have to find out what it’s a key to? Don’t you want to save your friends … or what’s left of them?”
“You’re not my friend, Parker!” Jeremiah yelled. It felt like something he should have said a long time ago.
But Hope was his friend. And she could be in danger or in pain. If she needed saving, he could do it.
He took the key and closed the office door behind him, staining the doorknob with a bloody handprint.
The trail of lights continued. He followed.
The next room had probably been an office at some point, but now it was crammed full of old office furniture. Sitting on an obviously broken desk chair was another box, wrapped for his birthday, this time with a candy-pink bow. It was a medium-sized, flat box, the kind that he had always opened last at Christmas as a kid because he had known it contained clothing, not toys or games.
He was pretty sure this box did not contain clothing. He didn’t want to open it, didn’t want to see what was inside, but if he was going to play the game all the way through on the chance of saving Hope, he had no choice.
He tore off the brightly colored wrapping paper and lifted off the box’s cardboard lid.
When he saw what was inside, he screamed. He tried to muffle the scream with his fist but tasted the blood that still covered his hands. He looked at the contents of the box, driven by a need to make sense of what he had seen.
Jeremiah was looking at a face that had been stripped from a human skull along with part of the scalp and hair. It took him a moment longer to recognize who the face belonged to. But then he started to put the pieces together—the brown hair with the distinctive forelock, the full lips that had so often been stretched into a self-satisfied smile. He almost expected the lips to part in a hee-hee-hee.
“You still think this is Parker?” the distorted voice on the loudspeaker said.
“No,” Jeremiah said, surprised to hear the sob in his voice. “No. Parker’s right here.” He didn’t want to, but he found himself looking again at Parker’s peeled-away face. Jeremiah wiped tears from his eyes.
If Parker wasn’t running this sick show, then who was? Jeremiah realized that as long has he had thought Parker was in charge, he could entertain the notion that no matter how bad or cruel things seemed, it was all an elaborate prank. But now it became clear that this was no prank.
It was real.
There was only one word that made sense to Jeremiah right now: Run.
He ran, ignoring the trail of lights, ignoring everything except what appeared to be the quickest route out of the building. The halls took on a mazelike quality. To the left, to the right, with no seeming way of escape. He reached the elevator and pushed the button. No light came on. Clearly whatever psychopath he was dealing with had tampered with the elevator. He ran for the stairwell.
He opened the door marked STAIRS. Jeremiah had always found the dimly lit stairwell creepy, even under much calmer circumstances, but there was no time to reflect on his feelings now. There was only time to run.
As he made his way down the first flight of stairs, he noticed a red smear across the white cinder-block wall. Blood. Relatively fresh blood, judging from its brightness. But whose blood was it? He couldn’t slow down to think about it, or the blood that next spattered the walls could be his.
