Chapter 8: Par for the Course

Chapter 8: Par for the Course

The darkness was a physical thing. It was a thick, suffocating blanket, heavy with the scent of ozone and stale popcorn. It pressed in on Leo, muffling sound, stealing his breath, erasing the world. All the garish lights, the menacing shapes of the course, were gone. There was only the void. He could feel the thrumming of his own pulse in his ears, a frantic drumbeat against the abyss. His broken body, which had been a constant source of searing agony, now felt distant, a numb and broken vessel he was piloting through this final, terrifying sequence.

Then, the voice came. It wasn't from the speakers. It was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a cold, clear thought injected directly into the center of his skull. All the static and distortion were gone, leaving behind a purity that was more horrifying than any rage.

“Here. Now.”

In the blackness, perhaps ten feet in front of him, came a single, sharp sound.

Click.

The sound of a pristine golf ball being placed on the synthetic turf of the starting mat. The entity was ready.

“One hole. One shot,” the voice resonated in his mind, a contract written in ice. “Winner leaves. Loser… stays. Forever.”

Leo’s plan, born of spite and desperation, was a fragile, insane thing. It relied on a single, audacious gamble in a world without sight. He took a breath, a ragged, painful intake of air that seemed deafeningly loud in the silence. Using his rusty putter as a cane, he began to move.

Each step was an exercise in torment and stealth. He didn’t lift his feet, instead shuffling them forward, feeling the rough texture of the concrete path give way to the bristly turf of the teeing ground. The fire in his ribs flared, and he bit down on his lip, tasting the coppery tang of his own blood to keep from crying out. He could feel the entity’s presence nearby, a zone of cold, concentrated hatred in the air. It was waiting, utterly still, confident in its own perfect senses, its own perfect skill. It had no reason to suspect that its boring, broken little toy would do anything other than what it was told.

His putter nudged something solid. He knelt, his good hand fumbling in the dark. His fingers brushed against the cool, smooth sphere of the mascot’s ball. He had found it. His heart hammered against his shattered ribs. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his own ball. It felt different—scuffed, slightly warmer from being against his body.

His fingers trembled violently. This was the moment. The swap. He carefully lifted the entity’s ball, the smooth dimples a perfect, factory-made pattern under his fingertips. He placed his own battered ball in its exact spot, nudging it with his thumb until it felt settled. The sound of the rough sphere scraping against the turf felt like a gunshot in the silence. He froze, listening.

Nothing. The cold, arrogant presence was still there, unmoving.

He clutched the entity's ball in his palm and began his agonizing retreat, shuffling backward, every nerve screaming. He made it back to where he started, his body drenched in a cold sweat that had nothing to do with the humidity. He was in position. He carefully placed the smooth, perfect ball—the entity’s ball—in front of himself. The trap was set.

“I am ready,” the voice announced in his head.

Leo heard a faint whiff of air as the mascot took a practice swing. Then came the sound he had memorized, the sound that had been his key to survival. The sound of a perfect golf swing. There was a clean, sharp CRACK as the putter head met the ball with impossible precision and force. The sound of the ball whizzing through the air, a tiny missile on a perfect trajectory.

Leo held his breath, waiting for the one sound that had punctuated his entire nightmare. The final, damning plink.

But it never came.

Instead, after a second of flight, there was a dull, unsatisfying thud, followed by the soft rustle of what might have been leaves or mulch.

Silence.

A deep, profound, and utterly confused silence from the entity. It had executed a perfect shot. Leo knew it had. But his ball, the one he’d been using all night, was old, scuffed, its surface uneven. It wasn’t properly weighted. It couldn't fly true. A perfect stroke with an imperfect ball resulted in an imperfect outcome. He had introduced a flaw into a flawless system.

“Your turn,” the voice in his head finally said, the two words tight with a confusion that was rapidly curdling into suspicion.

Leo stood over his ball—the entity’s perfect, pristine ball. He didn’t need to see. He didn’t need to aim. The outcome of his shot was irrelevant. The damage was already done.

“You know,” he rasped, his voice a dry, cracking thing in the darkness. “All this time, I thought you were a god. But you just missed a two-foot putt.” He let out a weak, wheezing laugh. “Par for the course.”

He swung his putter. It was a clumsy, weak motion, all done with one arm. He barely made contact. The ball wobbled off the tee, rolling no more than a few inches before stopping. A deliberate, pathetic, insulting failure.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then, he heard a sharp clatter as Putt Head’s putter was dropped onto the concrete.

A new thought pushed into his mind, no longer a voice but a raw, screeching wave of pure disbelief.

“What… did… you… do?”

“I cheated,” Leo whispered. “I played your game. And you lost.”

The realization hit the entity not like a thought, but like a physical cataclysm. The cold, hateful presence in the dark didn't just get angry. It fractured.

“LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAR!”

The mental scream was so powerful that Leo was thrown from his feet. The world erupted. A blinding, searing light emanated from where the mascot stood, a light that wasn't yellow or white but a chaotic, strobing rainbow of impossible colors. The very air tore apart with a sound of grinding metal and shrieking static.

Leo shielded his eyes, peering through his fingers. He could see the mascot’s form, silhouetted against the internal, violent nova. It was coming apart. Its cartoonish yellow-and-green outfit ripped away, not like fabric, but like peeling reality, revealing a howling vortex of pure chaos beneath. Its limbs bent at impossible angles, snapping like twigs.

Its head—the smooth, white, dimpled golf ball—began to crack. Fissures of blinding energy spread across its surface. The two dead, black circles that were its eyes bled light. The humiliation of being beaten, of being made a fool of in its own game by its own rules, was something its pride could not withstand. The core of its being, its narcissistic certainty, had been shattered, and its physical manifestation was collapsing with it.

With a final, deafening roar that was both a sound and a feeling, the golf ball head exploded. It wasn't a physical explosion of shrapnel, but a detonation of pure wrongness. Reality warped, the darkness folding in on the light, the very ground buckling. Leo felt a wave of pressure, like being at the bottom of the deepest ocean, and then…

Silence.

The light was gone. The noise was gone. The presence in his mind was gone.

A single, weak fluorescent bulb, one of the park’s normal security lights, flickered on overhead, casting a sickly, buzzing pallor over the scene.

Leo pushed himself up, his body a single, unified scream of pain. He looked at the starting mat where the entity had stood. There was nothing there but a pile of shredded, garish fabric and a handful of black, glassy dust that smoked faintly on the concrete. The putter it had dropped lay nearby, twisted into a corkscrew of scorched metal.

He was alone. Truly alone. The jingle was silent. The game was over. He had won.