The Mark of Kain

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:

Whom resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.” – 1 Peter 5:8-9, The Bible (KJV)

There were carved pumpkins and ‘spooky’ paraphernalia draped and dangling all over the house, and Josh was once again reminded how much he had despised the ‘cutesification’ of Halloween throughout his teens. His mother had joined the mass delusion perpetuated by profit-driven conglomerates and according to which seasonally themed crap was being sold as necessities to the mindless collective masses – only to be removed and replaced with either Thanksgiving and/or Christmas decorations. Though some devout Christians, as Josh’s mother surely was, disdained the celebration of witches, spirits, and ghouls, most (including Josh’s family) took great pleasure in the October festival of the otherworld.

Despite his long-held disdain for modern pumpkin-spice-latté aesthetics, at the moment and in his current state of mind, Josh was actually grateful for the frivolous representation of All Hallows’ Eve as opposed to its more threatening, mist-filled oeuvre of implied unearthly shenanigans. The saccharine stuff somehow provided a sense of security in nullifying the truly horrifying discoveries of the past few days, discoveries which still loomed – a path, a decision awaiting action while he still struggled to wrap his head around the magnitude (not to mention impossibility) of the final solution to his amateur sleuthing… into the suicide of his former best friend. Innocent Ry, with his unshakeable faith and childlike belief in good triumphing over evil.

Running up the stairs, Josh rushed to his room at the end of the passage, opened the door and slammed it behind him, turning the key in its lock as though the very hounds of hell were on his heels. The curtained gloom and muted feeling of a well-insulated space were strangely welcoming instead of oppressive, with the pale, Fall sun outlining the walls around his blackout-curtained windows and casting muted, grey illumination over the landscape of his den.

He was far from fastidious in his personal space, with weeks’ worth of clothes strewn around and used plates, glasses, and cups littering the various surfaces of his bedroom. Thank goodness, his mom hadn’t been in, judging from the mess still present. He eyed his gaming area, or “work desk”, as he liked to phrase it within his parents’ earshot. A darkly looming, weirdly shaped manifestation hung there – the two large screens, keyboard, and consoles having been covered by a large blanket. He’d thrown the nearest thing over them in a panic and he hadn’t uncovered them since. Like his Southern grandmother with the mirrors when his great-aunt had passed. Josh had been ten and asked why. She’d said it was so the spirits couldn’t look into the world of the living while the veil was thinned by death. He’d laughed at her – then. Now, though… Even once it had been removed, he didn’t trust his own tech anymore. Better safe than sorry.

Flinging his backpack away, Josh scrambled to his closet door. Still locked! His relief at this meant a slight loosening of the tension thrumming through him. He’d been in this state for the past three days, and with no idea how to proceed, he suspected the stress would continue for the foreseeable future. Pulling the small key from inside his sneaker where he’d taken to hiding it, he unlocked the closet door and proceeded to dig beneath the pile of heavy books and other bric-a-brac he’d stacked on top of it.

He had to know if it was still safely locked away in the metal strongbox his dad had given him on their fishing trip for his eleventh birthday. When his hand connected with the cold, hard corner of the lockbox, he experienced even further, knee-numbing relief. Only to immediately snatch his hand away from it. He didn’t actually want to be that close to it… To them. A real conundrum that, with his feelings constantly in flux: dread at potentially finding it gone, yet even more dread at finding it still in his possession. Still his responsibility. To keep, and to withhold from others.

“Riley wanted you to have it, Josh. You were his best friend… at least, before the last few months…” Riley’s mom had been adamant, pushing the box of Riley’s games and discs into Josh’s unwilling hands. “And really, no-one blames you for stepping back. He… he wasn’t the same…” Then she’d cried and eventually stumbled away. All her faith – and Riley’s family were really religious, hence their constant monitoring of his gaming – hadn’t spared her the fear and uncertainty of where her child’s soul had ended up. He remembered the eerie feeling at Ry’s funeral, with the pale grey skies, the moist, earthy scent of the dug grave, and the encroaching mists. Like some kind of Sleepy Hollow scene. Except it was all too real – with him left standing there, clutching his inheritance of vintage games next at his ex-best friend’s graveside.

Josh’d never been into the 90s and early 2000s stuff like Riley had, but his sorrow meant he’d taken it. And his guilt. He hadn’t been Riley’s friend for the last six months before his quirky, odd-ball former-partner-in-crime had been found lifeless in his room. Overdose, they’d said. So, it had also been the guilt that had motivated Josh to “look into” the whole thing. To go through the box of games as penance for his own complicity in having left Riley so alone that, to deal with his personal demons, he’d chosen to take the final, solo journey that everyone eventually had to. But more importantly, Josh did it to put his own doubts to rest. Because, even though they’d stopped talking and Riley had been acting batshit weird those last months, Josh had known his friend since they’d been seven years old and he somehow knew Riley hadn’t shuffled off this mortal coil without some help. Or even a shove.

Thus, once he’d sneaked a shot of his dad’s bourbon for some Dutch courage, Josh had opened the box of games Riley had apparently left for him. Without hesitation, his hand had selected one of only two discs that weren’t dusty: Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2. The graphics weren’t his thing, but the world was interesting, and bizarrely, he felt closer to Riley despite never having played these games with him. They weren’t multiplayer enabled, but he wore his headphones and whispered quietly – into the ether – as though he were chatting to Riley. Trying to erase the last ever real words he had said to the boy.

“I hear them, you know…” Josh had rolled his eyes at the feverish, jerky movements that accompanied Riley’s equally crazy babbling. “The voices. They say–”

“No-one’s listening to your crazy-talk anymore, Ry. You’re obviously pressed and no fun these days… You don’t even want to game for real anymore. You only play that Kain crap… It’s not ‘vintage’, it’s just sad, bro.” But it didn’t seem to even register with the skinny boy, who had been staring into the distance, the fingers on his right-hand twitching sporadically.

“You don’t understand, Josh; I have to listen… It’s more important than anything else. It’s the only way I can save them. The voices say so!” Josh had had enough of this shit. He wasn’t going to hang around with someone who was the equivalent of a babbling idiot and a social leper to boot; Ry had always been eccentric, but now he was just a full-on weirdo.

Josh had known something was up, what with Ry talking about “the voices” every chance he got; luckily, Riley’s family had said that he was getting help for his recent erratic behavior, with words like ‘paranoid delusions’ and ‘schizophrenia’ being bandied about.

“He keeps having… hallucinations. Auditory ones. Keeps saying he needs to reach out to them – that he’s going to help them,” Josh had overheard Ry’s mom whispering in their kitchen when she’d come over for some tea and sympathy a few weeks before. His mom had tutted kind-heartedly, murmuring about time and professional help. “Last night, it was really bad, Helen… He mentioned that he was reaching through the veil and speaking to the dead. That’s an allusion to… to witchcraft and seances, Helen! Like to King Saul in the Bible!”

Josh had made himself scarce after that. He didn’t believe in any of the more esoteric things – and definitely not Old Testament judgments. Ry was clearly just going through some stuff, but Josh couldn’t be bothered with getting too involved – Riley had his own family that could help him. Josh wasn’t his keeper. Afterward, his mom had shared at the dinner table that ‘poor Riley’ was seeing a psychiatrist and that his mother was praying the medication would fix him. Ironic, really, that it was the pills to fix him that ended up fixing him permanently.

But Josh’s last interaction with Riley had stayed with him long after the funeral, and the twitching hand in particular became even more significant because of the shakily written note – ensconced between the discs in Josh’s inherited box. Riley had definitely written it in those last days, when he hadn’t even bothered with a final note to his family before the final act. And here, with this missive, Josh had found a message. Or perhaps a possible clue? But no. Just one word, scribbled sloppily. A senseless jumble of letters: Sluagh.

Upon further investigation, a Google search – and the ever-maligned but never-to-be-sneered-at Wikipedia – provided some meat to the bone he’d been tossed:

“The Sluagh or Sluagh na marbh (‘host of the dead’), were the hosts of the unforgiven dead in Irish and Scottish folklore…” And suddenly, it rang a bell. Weren’t there sluaghs in that Kain game he’d been playing every night since the funeral? Those weird, animal things that ate souls, but the Raziel guy could render invisible and then consume? Once he’d thought about it, the disappointment he’d felt was almost overwhelming. No great mystery. Just some kind of hack or cheat code for the game, perhaps. But, being the intrepid investigator he’d decided he’d be, Josh had headed over to the ‘Spectral Realm’, where the sluagh could be found in the game, and moved here and there, aimlessly. Hoping for another clue, it seemed.

“Okay, Ry… You sent me here. What’s up, man? What did you want to tell me?”

And then Ry had answered, his voice hoarse and wispy through the headset that had, up until that moment, been merely for nostalgic decoration.

“Josh…”

Josh had frozen, unsure if he’d imagined it. Imagined the tremulous tenor of Ry’s voice through the staticky headphones. And then, whispered sibilantly:

“Josh! Please…Help me!”

Without even realizing it, Josh had torn the headset off and flung it across the room where it hit the wall with a startlingly loud crash. When he glanced back at the screen, it was still only the character, Raziel, in his passive stance – paused.

KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK! Josh nearly shrieked at the pounding from his door.

“Joshua! What are you doing in there? It’s half-past one and I have work in the morning!” his dad had snapped.

“Sorry, sorry!” Josh had stumbled to the door and opened it to his father’s unamused face and sleep-mussed hair. “Sorry, Dad. I just dropped my… keyboard. I’ll go to bed now.” His dad had eyed him sombrely, clearly considering how severely to take action under the circumstances (those being: Josh’s childhood best friend had recently committed suicide, and his mom was insisting they give him leeway to grieve in his own way). Apparently, consensus with his wife won out, because he just grunted something about being more careful, then lumbered off, back to bed.

Upon turning back to his computer, two ominously blank screens stared back at him. He knew he hadn’t switched them off, so maybe they had gone into sleep mode? Then, spontaneously, they flickered back to life – completely across the room from where he stood with his back to the door. Just the Spectral Realm landscape, without any figures in sight. No Kain. Only barren, dark landscape. And then the perspective began to spin, as though the person from whose viewpoint the game was being seen was being rotated endlessly. Josh hadn’t stopped to think – he'd grabbed his blanket and thrown it over the crazily spinning scene, then yanked the plug out of the wall. Impenetrable darkness. He’d grappled with the lamp switch in his haste for some light, then spent the rest of the night hunched on his bed, in the furthest corner from the pc.

It had taken him until morning, when he’d opened the curtains to let the thinly pallid sunshine in, to finally scrape together his courage, cross to the desk, and remove the disc from the machine to lock it and its sequel away in the lockbox at the bottom of his closet.

Over the next days, a few more pieces were added to the puzzle through Josh’s obsessive dedication. He did some more research – on the school computers, and far away from his pc – and found a very disturbing, if old-fashioned, mythology surrounding the Sluagh. If the stories were to be believed, it was some kind of fairy host that was made up of the souls of the dead, which it then also collected to add to itself. As far as Josh was concerned, the word “fairy” might sound twee, but when used in conjunction with this monstrosity, he had begun to fear the concept in equal measure to ‘spirit’ or ‘demon’. Added to that, he’d found a list of names on one of the discs that Ry had apparently put together – way to go for doing it old-school, Ry. There were over six hundred names on the list, from all over the world, and after searching up fifty of the names at random, it seemed they’d all died sudden, violent deaths.

“I hear them, you know… The voices”. It seemed Ry had listened and put some things together. Why hadn’t Josh listened?

“They say–”

But Josh hadn’t been interested in hearing what they said, and now, he was convinced (if somewhat unwilling to even admit it to himself) that he had some kind of evil, soul-collecting entity in the form of a game, hidden at the bottom of his closet. One that was potentially quite dangerous, to have collected over six hundred souls over the past twenty-odd years. There had to be a way to get rid of it! Or perhaps render it useless? Render it harmless… Was that what Ry had been trying to do? And if so, how could Josh finish what he’d started? Why hadn’t he paid attention when Riley had wanted to tell him about the voices! How was he going to figure this out without being able to ask Ry?

The solution came eventually, and Josh braced himself. He needed to sort this out as soon as possible – without delay. And so, he waited until the house was empty – his sister having gone trick-or-treating and his parents to a Halloween-themed work party at his mom’s office – to remove the blanket, insert the disc, and plug in the computer. He placed his second, less fancy, headset on his head with shaking hands. The Spectral Realm immediately flickered into being in front of him. He was alone in the dark eerie landscape.

And then he wasn’t.

Voices whispered from afar, seeming to come nearer and nearer as the volume increased spontaneously. Many voices. Hundreds. Men and women. He picked up some words he recognised, English words, and also words in other languages. Many different tongues. It was the oddest susurration, making him feel light-headed and shaky. Evil. This thing was evil. It roared hungrily, but he needed answers and the only way to get it was by finding Ry amongst the chaos.

“Ry?” he called; the hissing voices – like a hundred snakes – quietened slightly. He tried again.

“Ry! Can you hear me?”

The volume of the voices dropped markedly, and then:

“Josh…” He’d know that tone anywhere.

“Ry?”

“Please… Help me! It’s dark. I’m scared!” Josh’s throat constricted and an incongruous need to be closer to Ry arose. To show him the support he hadn’t when he could have saved him. Maybe he could still save him now? The other voices had completely ceased, and Josh’s words echoed dreamily. The visual of the Spectral Realm on the screens didn’t seem so barren and ominous anymore. It felt quite… welcoming, actually. Pleasant and unpretentious. A place where you could be free. Free from fear.

“Are we alone now?” Staticky silence, then:

“No. We’re never alone.” Josh felt the hair all over his body stand on end. Ry hadn’t sounded scared when he’d said that. He’d sounded almost… soothing? Proud? And then a pleasant feeling of warmth stole over Josh, the momentary physical reaction of fight or flight soothed. He was fine – he was talking to Ry.

“Will you help me, Josh… Please?” The frightened note had returned. “You’re the only one who can help.”

“I’ll try…” he breathed deeply. He could do this. For Ry. He could sacrifice for someone else.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me down! You were the right person to ask for help.” The warmth of Ry’s voice, so full of hope and trust, made Josh feel powerful. He hadn’t felt this close to Ry since they were young, and it was quite addictive to feel so needed. So important to someone else’s survival.

“What can I do? How can I fix this?” Josh would do anything his friend needed. They were best friends, after all.

“You just have to listen to us.”

That was easy.

“And keep listening…”

Josh could do that.

He hadn’t listened before.

But he would now.