Chapter 5: The First Loser

Chapter 5: The First Loser

The world had shrunk to the white-hot, screaming agony in my right hand. It was a universe of pain, so vast and all-consuming that it left no room for anything else. I was vaguely aware of the cold concrete floor against my cheek, the coppery tang of blood in my mouth, the sound of my own ragged breathing mixing with Tod’s wretched sobs. He was a crumpled shape across the room, cradling his own broken hand, his body shaking with the aftershocks of the violence he’d been forced to commit against me. We were two halves of the same atrocity, irrevocably bound by it.

Rupert, ever the survivor, had backed away into the farthest corner, his eyes darting between me, Tod, and the game board. He was a rat in a trap, stripped of his charm and expensive suit, reduced to a primal state of fear and calculation. The basement was no longer our sanctuary; it was an abattoir, and we were the livestock, waiting our turn.

Then the hum started again.

It was a low, predatory thrum that vibrated through the floor, through my teeth, a signal that the game was not sated. The light on the board shifted, leaving Tod’s square and illuminating the one where Nadia’s token still sat. Her token, a simple, unassuming peg of wood, began to pulse with that nauseating green glow.

It was her turn.

She was still huddled on the worn floral-print sofa, a ghost in the shell of our friend. Her hacked-off hair stood in jagged, dark spikes around her head, a crown of trauma. Her eyes, wide and unfocused, stared at a spot on the far wall, seeing nothing of the horrors in the room. She was gone, retreated to some deep, unreachable place within herself.

“Nadia,” Tod croaked, his voice thick with pain and tears. “Nadia, you have to play. Please.”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t even blink.

“She can’t,” I grunted, pushing myself into a sitting position with my good arm. A wave of dizziness and nausea washed over me. The mangled ruin of my hand was a grotesque, bloody weight at the end of my wrist. “Look at her. She’s not there.”

“She has to be!” Rupert hissed, his voice sharp with terror. “Remember what it did to me when I refused? It will hurt all of us!”

He was right. The game punished disobedience with indiscriminate cruelty. We couldn't afford her catatonia. I crawled over to the sofa, dragging my useless hand, leaving a smear of blood on the dusty concrete.

“Nadia,” I said, my voice softer than I expected. “It’s Ethan. You just have to roll the die. That’s all. Just one roll, and it will be over.”

Her gaze slowly, glacially, shifted from the wall to my face. For a second, I saw a flicker of the old Nadia, the kind, empathetic soul who hosted these nights. Then her eyes drifted down to the bloody pulp of my hand, the hand I had offered up to spare her. A tiny, wounded sound escaped her lips.

As if moved by some unseen force, her hand reached out, clumsy and robotic, and picked up the die from the table. Her fingers were stiff, her movements jerky. She let the die tumble from her palm. A two.

Her token was on a square illustrated with a pointing finger. There was a collective, held breath in the room. What new horror would a pointing finger demand? With that same robotic slowness, she reached for the deck and drew a card.

She held it in front of her face, her eyes struggling to focus on the text. For a moment, her expression didn’t change. Then, a subtle shift. A flicker of something that wasn’t pure terror. It looked almost like confusion, perhaps even a glimmer of hope.

“What does it say?” Rupert demanded, his voice tight as a wire.

Nadia looked up, her gaze drifting between the three of us. Her voice was a dry, rustling whisper, the sound of dead leaves skittering across pavement. “‘Point at somebody to advance two.’”

We stared at her, then at the card. It was so… simple. So benign compared to the litany of horrors that had preceded it. No secrets, no mutilation, no blood. Just… point. Advance two spaces.

Advance.

The word hung in the air, charged with a sudden, desperate hope. The board had a track, a start and a finish. Could it be that simple? Could this all end if one of us just… won? The idea was a lifeline in an ocean of pain. If someone could reach the end, maybe the walls would un-materialize. Maybe the door would reappear. Maybe we could escape.

“It’s a chance,” Rupert breathed, a manic grin spreading across his split lip. “A chance to get ahead. To win.” He looked at Nadia, his voice shifting, becoming slick and persuasive even through his fear. “Point at Tod, Nadia. He’s the one who brought this… this thing here. He’s the reason we’re trapped.”

Tod flinched but said nothing, too consumed by his own guilt to defend himself.

But Nadia wasn't looking at Tod. Her gaze, slow and deliberate, settled on Rupert. In her nearly empty eyes, one emotion seemed to have survived the purge: the raw, visceral sting of his betrayal. He was the one who had cheated with her best friend. He was the one who had shouted that she should be the one to be hurt, that she wouldn't feel it. Even in her fugue state, that cruelty had found a home.

To her, the choice was not strategic. It was primal. Point at the source of the pain.

Slowly, her thin, trembling arm rose. Her hand, smeared with her own dried tears, was unsteady. She extended her index finger, the nail bitten down to the quick. It wavered in the air for a moment, a pale, accusing sliver in the dim basement light.

And she pointed it directly at Rupert.

“Me?” he choked out, a flicker of indignation warring with his fear. “You’re pointing at me? After everything—”

He never finished the sentence.

There was no flash of light, no warning hum. There was only a sound. A soft, wet, implosive thump, like a heavy melon dropped from a great height onto concrete.

In the space where Rupert’s head had been, there was suddenly a fine, expanding crimson mist. His body, still impeccably dressed in its blood-spattered suit, stood for a horrifying, impossible second before it collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut. It hit the floor with a heavy, boneless thud.

A shower of hot, viscous liquid rained down on us. I felt the warm spatter across my face, my clothes. I looked down and saw flecks of red and gray matter clinging to my shirt. Tod, closer to Rupert, had taken the brunt of it. He was covered, his face a mask of gore. He stared, unblinking, at the headless corpse on the floor.

The wall behind where Rupert had been standing was now a grotesque mural, a Jackson Pollock of blood, bone, and brain tissue.

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the soft, steady dripping from the ceiling where some of the gore had splattered.

Then, a small, scraping sound from the coffee table.

We all looked. Nadia’s wooden token, of its own accord, slid two spaces forward on the board, closer to the finish line.

The truth crashed down on us with the force of a physical blow, a realization so monstrous it dwarfed everything we had already endured.

Advance two.

It wasn’t about winning. It was about eliminating the competition. This wasn’t a race to the finish line. It was a countdown. A deathmatch. The game of Messy Hands wasn’t about who could win first; it was about who could survive last.

We were no longer just prisoners being forced to torture each other. We were gladiators in a supernatural arena, and the game had just demonstrated, with brutal, undeniable finality, the price of losing.