When the Dice Roll Your Way,
When the Eyes of Death Blink

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

Margret was at the bar in the lobby of the Bonaventure-Westin Hotel, waiting for a cosmo and the much-needed relief it might bring, when a voice behind her insisted, “Madeleine. Madeleine, right? Madeleine!”

She turned, reluctantly, to find a portly, bright-eyed, goateed man. She had met him that morning at the trade show. She took no offense at his misremembering her name because she didn’t remember his at all — but before he could say “Madeleine” again, in fact before her face could express that she recognized him, a shudder coursed through her whole body, and she stopped, overtaken utterly by the emergence of a lost memory. She did not have the whole picture at first, only felt the drudgery of the convention recede, and in its place an old warmth and purpose that filled her. Then she perceived it was the portly man’s jacket that had prompted this, a Members Only, in burgundy. He had worn it that morning too, but it had recalled nothing in her then — and now, appending some mental effort, she unkinked the source of the pleasant feeling, a moment, nearly forty years ago, yet more vivid than anything from today in the convention hall; sitting with friends around a card table, in a chilly backyard shed that stank of sawdust. She was the only girl at the table, and there tumbled the sound of the die rolling from her hand across the padded tabletop, and the surprise on the Dungeon Master’s face as they both looked up from her 20. He said, “By desperate luck, your strike is true! Your sword plunges through the evil wizard’s heart!” Bedlam erupted in the shed. Her friends’ characters had all been killed in that final battle. In her thief alone lived their hope of stopping the villain they had spent all summer tracking down — and she had done it. What was his name, the wizard? It was a chilly autumn day in must have been 1983 and the DM was wearing his new burgundy Members Only jacket.

“Margret Wells,” she managed to say, sorry to step out of a memory so immersive. “Remind me—”

“Dave,” he said. “Chaikin. Listen, I want to bend your ear about AddUp. We’re looking for a new accounting app — Global Ready, that’s my company, we’re San Diego based. . .”

Thus ensued one of the ordinary conversations she was used to having now that she’d passed her fiftieth birthday. Now that she’d seen thirty cities in ten years of repping AddUp at conventions. It was a living; so went the saying. She had money, a condo. What else could she do? Ten more years in the field, then HQ would stop sending her out because who in tech wants to deal with a woman past sixty. She’d get to putter around the office in Austin for five more years, and then get a retirement happy hour. Not bad. She could ride it out.

V’larkt’sut! That was the name of the evil wizard.

Dave was okay. He walked her over to someone he’d met earlier, a thin gay black man with gray hair and an earring. George from Miami. Then a woman jumped in — “I couldn’t help but overhear” — Emiko from Chicago. She looked like she spent her spare time in yoga and steam rooms, a lean face with a polished glow. She made Margret feel stout. But they were all about the same age, and after a few minutes they’d all relaxed enough for Margret to mention the jacket.

“I had a friend with these exact threads. Back when!” she said. “And I’m sorry, but I lost my mind for a second — the sight threw me right back to a particular day in 1983.”

“Actually,” Emiko said, “um, I crowbarred myself into your conversation for a similar reason. Margret, your brooch. I wanted a better look, but didn’t want to be sneak-staring like a goon. It’s identical to one that we used as kids, as a treasure in a game.”

“What game?” Dave asked. 

Emiko blushed. “Actually, um, I was not an especially cool teen. It was this game where we played paladins and elves, and rolled dice. All made up—” 

Margret grabbed Emiko’s elbow. It was not the alcohol that made her so heedless, but the lingering, virtually supernatural effect of her unexpected memory.

“Dungeons & Dragons,” Margret said. “I played too, 1983.”

“Same here,” Dave said.

George raised an eyebrow. “And me.”

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

They took a table beside the fountain and became a foursome, leaning close over their drinks, astonished by the coincidences they were unearthing.

“Avala-Hechzout,” Emiko said. “That was our big bad’s name. An evil wizard.”

“Oh, the names are always ridiculous,” Margret said. “Our DM woke in the middle of the night and wrote V’larkt’sut on a scrap of paper. The next morning he was off to the races, whipping up a whole series of adventures for us to go on, to stop V’larkt’sut from taking over the world.” She recalled a petrified forest, an opulent oasis city. “The main kingdom was Zannendrom, which had four deserts, each with a different color sand. I remember hating V’larkt’sut. Being afraid of him — and honestly admiring his schemes. They were so devious.”

Dave laughed. “Similar story. Our DM said his evil wizard’s name popped into his head on the school bus one morning. By the time first bell rang, he’d scrawled pages of notes, conjuring up a whole fantasy empire and this guy’s complicated plot to take it over.”

“Fantasy empire?”

“Yes. The once-mighty Litlands of the Golden Moon! Currently on the verge of collapse, ripe for a takeover. Valahk-Lezoct was our villain.”

“Ah, his name had a V and a Z,” Margret said. “That for sure sounds evil.” 

George laughed. “Sounds like you were fifteen too. Alaklekt was our guy. He sought dominion over the Pentraxi Sunjewels. A tropical archipelago of untold riches.”

Each of them had spent months piecing together clues, defending villages from the wizard’s plagues and firestorms and bands of animated corpses, fighting through his hierarchy of underbosses, at last confronting the evil one himself, in a cataclysmic final battle underground.

“Out of a party of four, I was the only one still standing,” Dave said, “and I killed him on a lucky roll.” He bobbed in his chair as if thrilled to recall it. “I had three hit points left. A broken weapon. I managed to… what?”

The other three were staring at him. 

“Same here,” George said. “My friends were dead. I had one last chance, and I rolled max damage. It was the exact number needed to kill him. One point less — and he would have gone on to conquer the world.”

“Wow,” Emiko said. “Likewise, here.”

Margret did not want to cramp the vibe — they were all reminiscing freely now — but she needed to know how far the coincidences laddered. 

“Did anything happen,” she asked, “to your DMs?” 

In fact, in every case, something had. Leukemia had taken hers before graduation. Dave’s was lost to an accidental shooting. Emiko’s in Iraq. George’s to a heart attack at thirty-five. They became contemplative, then, missing old friends they had not thought of in a while — until Emiko brightened. 

“Look at us,” she said. “Four travelers. Meeting at an inn. This is how an adventure begins.”

Margret laughed. “So what happens next?”

What happened next was that a woman came stumbling rapidly across the concourse. Bedraggled, face dark with dirt and sunburn. Homeless, Margret thought; Security will stop her, she thought. But the woman locked eyes with Margret, and picked up speed. 

Their table was beside the concrete wall of the pool of water that separated the bar area from the concourse — so essentially they sat behind a moat — and here came security. A man to the woman’s left, another to her right. Whichever direction she turned, she’d be nabbed.

Except she came straight. Dove into the fountain, ran sloshing toward their table, plowing through waist-high water. Reaching into her tattered coat.

She shouted. “You! You!” 

The four of them leapt up, unsure what to do. The woman fell against the pool wall. Water crashed over it onto the table, their shoes. 

The guards, freaked out, came running the long way around the pool. 

Through the chaos, Margret could see the intelligence in the woman’s eyes. Trapped in there.

The woman shouted again, voice tortured, as if unable to speak more than one word — as if some curse prevented more — hand out of pocket, throwing something. “Beware!”

Then the guards had her. Yanked her out of the water. Dragged her away, heels on the ground, facing backward, blathering incoherently. 

They looked down at what the woman had thrown onto the table.

A map.  

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

The next day Margret generated no business for AddUp and was too amped up to care. She shut her booth down as soon as convention rules permitted and met the others in George’s room.

The map was hand-drawn, stained, torn, smudged, but unmistakably showed a skeleton key in a cemetery. A keyhole had been drawn two miles northwest of that. Beside the keyhole, gothic lettering: HE IS HERE. There were other items, which after much discussion they interpreted as landmarks of the city they were in. Griffith Park, Capitol Records. Dave was the most useful at deciphering the map because he had lived in Los Angeles for a year in his twenties, 1995. The cemetery, he determined, was Hollywood Forever. 

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

Margret was starting to know the other three. George stayed serene in disagreement; she felt he would in any crisis. Emiko stuck to her opinions; she would make up her mind and they could either come around or proceed without her. Dave got jumpy, but that also made him a planner; he hated surprises. 

Dave was the crucial element, if you were going to break into a cemetery. On the third and final day of the convention he ventured out during a lunch break. Returned with bolt cutters, flashlights for everyone, ski masks.

“The cemetery will be closed,” he said.

The map said THESE THINGS BE REAL ONLY BY DARK. They had decided this meant the game was on only at night.

It was a thrill to be playing such a mystery. Like an escape room, road rally, treasure hunt — if you didn’t know who was behind it, or if it was entirely safe. But they had discussed who might be behind it, and not one of them had an enemy — no vengeful ex, no mother of a child killed in a drunk-driving incident, not even a coworker passed over for promotion. So they had concluded it must be some friend. Margret was excited to find out who.

“It feels,” she said on the drive to the boneyard, “like having a secret admirer.”

Margret, actually, was the crucial element — overall. She had come to realize, since Dave’s jacket worked its magic, that she had been bored for a decade. Was coasting to her grave. Now once again she felt young, uncertain, weird. So she subtly but insistently had applied her salesperson pressure techniques to the group, to keep them excited, incautious, to get them to go to the cemetery by dark.

In the rental car they recalled trials they had endured. Emiko had been surrounded by fog-wolves with glowing purple eyes.

“They’d come howling out of the White Depths, a snowbound plain of which little was known—”

Margret lost herself in a recollection of her own long day in the Trang-Mebek Valley, when his corpse army, riding giant spiders, swept over the hastily assembled defenses—

She had buried this part of herself. Evidently they all had, and all relished the chance to dig it up.

“This is it, we’re here,” Dave said.

The cemetery occupied a huge city block, behind a high gray wall. It was not hard to locate a narrow side gate. It was not hard, instigating each other, to set aside worry about breaking the law, and behave like kids.

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

Two hours later they were in a quiet Denny’s.

“We should go to a hospital,” Emiko said. 

“It’s only a scratch,” Dave said. 

He looked scared though. Sweating profusely. It was a trio of scratches, down his right forearm, bleeding, where fingernails had raked.

“It definitely got out of control,” Margret said. “That guy shouldn’t have scratched you.”

“His fingernails looked filthy,” Emiko said.

George had ordered an omelet. Between bites he said, “This is easy to solve. We’ll stop at a Rite-Aid for Bactine. Bandages. If it’s inflamed in the morning, one of us goes with you to an urgent care.” 

They had wandered the cemetery for an hour, unsure what they were looking for. Having fun. Margret saw the graves of stars. Mel Blanc. Fay Wray. Then in the distance a figure staggered among the headstones. Classic undead stagger.

After the scratch they shoved the actor, and ran away with the key. 

The key now in the middle of the Denny’s table. Elaborate skeleton key. 

“Too bad we can’t cast Detect Magic on it,” Emiko said.

David was sweating so much that Margret wanted to slap him, say Get a hold of yourself. She worried he was killing their momentum. 

“We better go find the keyhole,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

Dave wiped at his sweat. “Sure. Sure. It’s — not far.”

Emiko grinned. “Then we’ll find out who’s behind this. If it’s my Avala-Hechzout, or one of your big bads.”

Dave and George laughed. 

Margret did not. 

A fright had drilled down her spine. 

“Your — who has a pen? Wait. I do.” She shielded a napkin with her left hand and wrote on it, then flipped it upside down and passed the pen to Emiko. 

“Write the name of your evil wizard. Don’t show it.”

The pen went around.

Dave said, “It was in an alphabet my DM said just came to him on the school bus. . .”

“Same here,” George said, writing. “Letters he dreamed. We guessed at the pronunciation. . .”

When they pushed their napkins to the center of the table and flipped them right-side up, they went silent. All four napkins bore the same spelling:

Ʌlaƙɮȣt

One name. Dreamed in four different parts of the country, nearly forty years ago. Alaklekt. Avala-Hechzout. Valahk-Lezoct. V’larkt’sut. One entity.

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

This had to be the keyhole site, a few blocks behind Mann’s Chinese Theater. A condemned apartment building. First floor boarded up, second floor full of broken windows. Third-floor windows intact, as if rock-throwers couldn’t get that high. The structure looked flimsy, a midcentury dump that even in its heyday must have been anonymous. A chainlink fence surrounded it, and sections of plywood fence that warned KEEP OUT in spray paint, but both fences sagged, leaned, as if thrown in place a decade ago and never double-checked.

“Are we really going in?” Dave asked.

“You can wait in the car,” Emiko said. “I have to know.”

No one else said anything. Dave popped the trunk and took out a billy club. A hardwood stick, the kind cops twirled in old movies. It could break a rib.

“There might be, I don’t know, druggies,” he said. 

He looked yellow, waxy. His forearm was tightly bandaged though. 

It was easy to get through the fences.

On the other side they found a swimming pool, drained down to a foot of rust-colored water. In fact they found a lot of excuses to explore the courtyard, turning over empty boxes, kicking through weeds for a long time. Mustering courage to enter the building. 

They strategized. Best to go in through the underground parking garage. Its entry was a black rectangle. They discussed meticulously what order to walk in. Spread out, a diagonal line, keep back from any corner so nothing could lunge. They discussed it in circles, eying the black rectangle. Okay what if this. Okay what if that. They each had a cheap flashlight thanks to Dave. Dave barely participated in the talk. He was shaky. But no fever, his forehead cool to the touch.

“It’s psychosomatic,” George said quietly to Margret.

“Has to be.” They eyed Dave from afar. He sat on a crate, glistening. “Nobody ever got sick two hours later from a scratch.”

Emiko climbed into the pool to examine the water. Margret found a pool skimmer, squarish net on the end of an aluminum pole. She claimed it as a staff. 

Eventually there were no more ways to avoid going in.

⬢ ⬢ ⬢

There were rats in the garage. A lot of rats.

Margret felt waves of relief when they found the staircase up. Littered with beer cans and plastic gin bottles and cigarette stubs. Chaotic with graffiti — tags, sigils, dicks. But the stairs went up. Margret felt relief simply to get above ground. 

The building smelled of wet carpet but was dry. On one lobby wall, a grid of mailboxes. George looked them over to see if any fit the key.

They moved down a hall, between rows of apartment doors. Not speaking. Turning knobs. Almost all were locked. 

George—

—his death—

It happened so fast. Margret did not think it happened. 

He reached for a door. The door opened before he touched it. They all jumped. In the swinging panicked crossing yellow flashlight beams, she thought what ran out of the apartment was one of those hairless cats. Except it ran upright, on hind legs. Snarling.

It ran past George with a curved sword. 

The sword cut a line above George’s belt. He folded. Creased like paper.

When the cat-thing spun, and sliced George’s head, it was Dave who reacted. Swung the billy. Connected with the little skull. Loud whock! He’d held nothing back in the swing. That amazed Margret. Shocked her more than the rest of it. She would not have swung so hard. Worried that it was a child. A plastic scimitar. A misunderstanding. It’s only a game. We’re only playing. She would have nudged, not swung to kill—

George was dead. 

He was dead. Even in the poor yellow circles playing from their flashlights, he was obviously dead.

Eventually, she put her circle of light on his killer. 

The thing was not a child. Or a cat. It twitched, and breathed in a labored gurgle. Blood expanded across the carpet under its head.

Emiko, joining Margret to look, said with a calm that helped Margret accept the fact: “That’s a kobold.”

“Jesus.”

Emiko kicked its tiny sword away. How could a kobold — a low-level monster from the Dungeons & Dragons bestiary — be real?

“Dave, come finish it off,” Emiko said.

Dave collapsed.

They leapt to his side. He was out cold. Face swollen. He had gathered his last strength to hit the kobold—

They unwound the bandage to see how his scratches looked. 

Veins in his forearm had blackened. As stark through his skin as if flowing with India ink. 

Now the death of George was starting to feel irreversible. Now Margret’s stomach cinched.

“We need an ambulance,” Margret said. She heard her voice crack.

“Actually, um — if, if kobolds are real,” Emiko said, “maybe I can lay on hands. I was a paladin. In the game. I could lay on hands, to cure a wound.”

The wild conviction in her face made Margret believe it might work. 

Emiko knelt, pressed her palms to Dave’s poisoned forearm. She closed her eyes, concentrated. Margret stood up straight with the pool skimmer. For a moment she felt alert, tough, eye out for more kobolds, not trapped. Not someone whose life was now ruined. She considered putting an end to the dying kobold’s jagged breath by stepping on its skull. 

Emiko’s hands did not glow with holy power. The scratches did not close. The veins stayed black. When she gave up and let go, her palms were covered with black tar.

She tried to wipe it on Dave’s jeans. It seemed to itch. Then Margret jumped, and pointed her beam—

“Look!”

Oily drops now spilled from Dave’s scratches onto the carpet, and each drop swelled, rapidly, into a bulbous ebony gelatin. And the gelatinous lumps moved, and sought each other.

When they began to join together, to form a larger mass, Emiko shrieked.

“Help me get him away from that goo!” Margret shouted. 

Right. The goo could not be coming from him. It had come from the polluted carpet. She grabbed Dave’s injured arm to drag him.

His arm, rotted through, came off at the shoulder.  

She screamed as the viscous dark substance poured from the arm she held. Poured from the loose shirt sleeve of the body on the floor. Poured out and grew.

Emiko screamed as the tar she had not been able to wipe from her palm swelled to the size of a ping-pong ball, began to roll up her arm, the size of a tennis ball. It flattened, rippled, wrapped around her upper arm. She turned to run, but already an oil-dark pond undulated between her and Margret, wall to wall.

Margret backpedaled. 

“Jump over it!” she yelled.

She was still yelling “Jump, jump!” when she ran backward into the wall at the end of the corridor. It knocked out her breath. She could see the tar-coated shape of Emiko flailing. Emiko’s screams choked off as the goo stuffed itself into her mouth and nose.

Globules of black river flowing toward Margret too—

She tried a door. Another door. Locked, jammed.

A third door opened, onto a staircase. Up or down—

Up! The upper windows were not boarded over. She could dive out a window if she had to.

Up. Up.

She tumbled into the upstairs hallway. Identical to the hall below — except quiet. 

Apartment doors lined either side. One had to be unlocked. Or she would batter one the hell down—

Down the hall, a door did open. Creaked. She looked up from the knob she was trying and saw a figure emerge, down there. Unnervingly tall. Seven feet tall. Edged in moonlight from what must have been windows in that room. 

A way out, she thought. 

The figure approached without urgency. Stately. Margret froze.

When it stood fifteen feet from her, it stopped, and made a hand gesture. In response, a sheet of fire leapt up at the base of every door in the hall. By the firelight, she saw who she faced. 

He was not tall — he was elongated. That was the word her DM had used, the previous time she met this person. Elongated, as if stretched thin in his effort to stand above all others. Clad in the metallic gold imperial robes he had devised for himself, and wearing the Crown of Six Ruby Spires.

“It’s so good to be back, isn’t it?” Ʌlaƙɮȣt rasped. That hint of a chuckle in his voice, that bottomless cruelty. “I see you remember me. I, of course, remember you — Rhiannon Copperfox, Princess of Bladespinners.”

She had forgotten that title. Her hair crinkled in the heat. The magic fire could not combust the building, but would kill her if she tried to dive through it. 

And it would wink out if she could hit the wizard who had cast it.

“I killed you once before,” she said.

“Not quite,” he said.

Her hands tightened on the pool skimmer. She considered her life. 

She said, “I have the key. The key that can kill you.”

A bluff. George had it.

“The key does nothing,” Ʌlaƙɮȣt said, “except lure you here. Where you will not be so lucky this time.”

She decided she had better charge. Momentum might make the pool skimmer into weapon enough — somehow.

“I’m still lucky,” she said. “I was born lucky.” 

She started her charge.

She had, she understood, only a one in twenty chance of living longer than six more seconds. She, Margret Wells from Austin, Texas, was going to try to do what Rhiannon Copperfox, Princess of Bladespinners, would do. What else was there to do with six seconds of life?

The end

Having fun? Why not go Behind the Scenes. . .