Chapter 4: The Roach King

Chapter 4: The Roach King

Jonah left the coffee shop in a daze, Claudia’s parting words echoing in his head. You’re the next player. The cheerful street scene around him—the delivery trucks, the pedestrians checking their phones—seemed like a flimsy stage set about to collapse and reveal the crawling horror underneath.

He wanted to believe she was insane. It was the only rational explanation. A deeply disturbed woman had latched onto his forum post, projecting her own elaborate psychosis onto him. That had to be it. His own experiences—the whispers, the phantom cockroaches—were just the product of stress, exhaustion, and the suggestive power of a creepy old building. His mind was creating a narrative to match the local ghost stories he’d read. It was a classic feedback loop. He clung to this explanation like a drowning man to a splinter of wood.

He spent the rest of the day in a frenzy of denial, trying to build a wall of normalcy around himself. He didn’t go back to Wolfgang’s. Instead, he went to a culinary supply store, losing himself in the familiar weight of chef’s knives and the cool gleam of stainless-steel pans. He talked to a contractor about the kitchen renovations, his voice steady and professional, discussing ventilation hoods and non-slip flooring as if the fate of a woman named Claudia didn’t rest on his ability to play a video game.

He was acting. He was playing the part of a man with a future, a man whose biggest problem was securing a good price on a used convection oven. But underneath the performance, the terror gnawed at him. Every dark corner held a flicker of movement. The rumble of a truck outside sounded, for a split second, like a million skittering legs.

That night, in his small apartment, the performance fell apart. He sat at his kitchen table, trying to sketch out a menu, but the words on the page swam before his eyes. Pan-Seared Scallops with Saffron Risotto. The letters seemed to rearrange themselves. Play for her life. Don’t lose.

He threw the pen down. It was no use. The building’s poison had followed him home. Claudia had said it would.

He decided he would call Brenda first thing in the morning and back out of the lease. He’d lose his deposit, maybe even face a lawsuit from the landlord, but it was better than this. Better to be ruined and sane than to be dragged into a shared madness that ended in death. His desire to prove himself was powerful, but his desire to survive, to not become a monster, was stronger. Having made the decision, a sliver of peace settled over him. He would cut the infection out before it could fester.

He went to bed, the exhaustion of the last few days hitting him like a physical blow. He fell into a shallow, fitful sleep, his dreams a chaotic slideshow of Claudia’s terrified face, the brass PASSWORD plate, and the cold, empty stare of a red-headed boy from three decades ago.

He awoke not to a sound, but to a feeling. A faint, tickling sensation on his forehead.

He brushed at it sleepily, his fingers closing around something small, hard, and wriggling. His eyes snapped open.

On the ceiling directly above him was a single, large cockroach, its antennae twitching as it regarded him.

Jonah’s breath hitched. He stared, frozen, as a second one emerged from a hairline crack in the plaster next to the first. Then a third crawled out of the air vent near the ceiling.

This was his obstacle. Not a psychological trick, not a flicker in his periphery, but a full-blown assault.

A trickle of them began to pour from the vent, a stream of glossy, brown bodies dropping onto his duvet with soft, sickening plops. They emerged from the gap beneath his bedroom door, a silent, orderly column marching into the room. They crawled from behind the electrical socket, their legs scratching against the drywall.

He scrambled backwards, kicking the sheets away, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. He’d had the apartment fumigated when he moved in. It was clean. Spotless.

But the tide was rising.

The trickle became a river, a torrent of writhing, clicking insects that flooded his floor. The sound was the worst part. A dry, rustling, chittering cacophony that grew louder and louder, the sound of his complete and utter failure amplified a thousand times. The air grew thick with a greasy, musty odor, the smell of decay and filth.

He was off the bed now, pressed into the corner of the room, his bare feet planted on the one small patch of carpet not yet consumed by the swarm. The hallucinatory wave climbed the walls, covering his daughter’s smiling sun drawing, extinguishing the cheap art prints he’d hung to make the place feel like a home.

He wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped in his throat, choked off by a sob of pure terror. The swarm on the floor began to churn, to roil, to build upon itself. Bodies crawling over bodies, creating a mound in the center of the room. The mound grew, solidified, taking on a crude, monstrous shape. It was a throne. A throne made of living, writhing cockroaches.

And on the throne, a small figure began to coalesce from the swarm, a shimmering, indistinct form of a boy.

The sight broke him. This was it. The absolute, inescapable reality of the nightmare. He squeezed his eyes shut, a guttural cry finally tearing from his lips. “Stop! Please, just make it stop!”

And it did.

Instantly. Like a switch had been flipped.

The chittering vanished. The smell was gone. The crushing weight of a million insect bodies disappeared. There was only silence.

Jonah stayed huddled in the corner for a full minute, his eyes screwed shut, trembling violently. He was too afraid to look. Too afraid that the silence was a trick. Slowly, tentatively, he opened his eyes.

The room was normal.

The floor was clear. The walls were bare, save for the drawing and the prints. The air was still. It was just his small, quiet bedroom, illuminated by the faint orange glow of the streetlight outside his window. There was no sign of the infestation. The only evidence of the horror was the cold sweat soaking his t-shirt and the frantic, shallow rhythm of his own breathing.

The relief was so profound it was dizzying. He sagged against the wall, his legs weak. It was over. The vision, the hallucination, whatever it was—it was over.

That’s when he heard it.

Not the dry, mocking whisper of the building. This voice was different. It was thin, reedy, and unmistakably that of a child. And it was right beside his ear.

“You were never very good at games, were you, Jonah?”

A jolt of ice-cold adrenaline shot through him. He knew that voice. He knew it from a lifetime ago, from the dim, noisy interior of Wham! Arcade. He whipped his head around, but there was nothing there. Just empty space.

The memory, suppressed for thirty years, came rushing back with perfect, horrifying clarity. The boy’s pale, freckled skin. The unnaturally wide, unfocused eyes that seemed to look right through him. The shock of curly red hair. The quiet, unbeatable player who had systematically dismantled his childhood pride. The boy the forums said had died in that very building.

David. His name was David.

The childish voice spoke again, no longer a whisper but a clear, calm command that filled the silent room, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. A command from the ghost in the machine.

“It’s my turn to play now. Go back to the basement. It’s time to play the game.”