Spectral Tower

A story about a game behind a bulletproof screen.

The game has five levels. If you beat all of them they’ve promised they’ll let you die. In the first level there’s brown water and a corpse with a protruding ribcage. You see the worms crawling inside. You walk through identical sewer chambers and the brown water pours from a grate in the wall. The only way to tell one chamber from another is by the distribution of the exits. At every screen transition the game stops and the image shakes and old newspapers fall from the ceiling. You pick one up and try to examine it, hoping for directions. A dialogue box opens but all it prints out is “It’s too filthy to read.”

There’s no sound. You watch the screen from behind a sheet of unbreakable plastic. The cord for the controller snakes through a hole too small to fit a finger through. The food appears while you sleep. While you sleep you hear footsteps in shallow water.

You find a chamber that’s different from the others. There are exits on all four walls and a card table in the center. On top of the card table is a leaking burlap sack. You press on it and it shakes. A mask appears and slowly rotates in place. You find a hammer in the brown water. You pick it up. The screen turns off and you walk in circles. When the picture comes back, you’re where you started. You check your inventory and find a deck of playing cards. All the face cards have been removed.