Okay so I don’t know how many “in the public eye” people you get posting here (not a celebrity per se, not in the sense that your g-ma spits out her butterscotch to hear my name, but if you’re the type who hangs around the retro arcade game scene in Portland, dollars to darknuts you’ve seen my initials on the hi-score screen of that one game with the ape [no, not that game with the ape, the other one, with the isometric view that’s kind of like Donkey Kong meets Frogger meets Q*Bert meets probably a hot take on Kotaku about colonialism] and you’ve definitely heard the total Bald Bull, pardon my Turkish, about how I “manufactured” my high scores or whatever [by “manufacture” do you mean putting in years of crushing alienation at the NorthTown Mall while everyone else sucked face in the Food Court to some skin-crawling mall jazz?], but hey that’s being female in the retro arcade game scene, where sexism is basically on free play), but anyway long story short my little sis and I had been in the process of renovating this old arcade space from the 90s and we… found something.
“Well that’s odd.”
This from Cali, the aforementioned little sis, a perfectly plucked eyebrow raised as she glared down at an archived blueprint from Spokane’s own Building & Planning. (This off of a tablet screen, obvs., don’t go thinking little miss priss sis went digging through musty cardboard boxes in some government backroom or anything.)
Myself, I was busy push-brooming today’s refuse into a pixel-perfect L-block. “Let me guess: beneath our feet lies an ancient burial ground, and the spirits detest a sound investment?”
“Well, Sam, I wouldn’t say sinking your savings into an arcade in 2023 is a sound investment, but no, I’m referring to this,” and she passed the tablet to me. Immediately my eyes began to cross at the sight of a geometric gibberish in denim blue. Hard to believe that my “baby” was somewhere in all that chicken scratch, the arcade of my dreams, my own personal all-your-eggs-in-one-basket.
“What am I even looking at?” My head was beginning to hurt.
Cali worked the tablet without it ever leaving my hands. “Okay, so over here is the original plan view of the arcade ─ I mean original original, like, Reagan’s-first-term original…”
“You-weren’t-even-born-yet original, got it.”
“The arcade front being these lines here, and the left wall those there. Notice anything?” She tapped the set of perfectly straight white lines that represented the left wall, the one that separated the arcade from the factory next door. And no, I didn’t notice anything ─ only fifty scaled-down feet from front to back with a five-by-five recess at the middle.
Except, IRL, there was no recess at the middle.
There went my own (less perfectly plucked) eyebrow. I looked up at the wall, dumbstruck, then back down to the screen, then up to the wall again as if waiting for one of them to give up the ghost. As if I were in the middle of a game of chicken where two realities were hurtling toward one another, and knowing one would have to swerve. But the longer neither did, the more my sense returned to me, and the tell-tale signs began to reveal themselves ─ the oh-so-slight shift in the play of light along the wall’s mid section. A faint seam in the floor moulding matched by another just five feet away.
I reached out to the wall. “It would be right here,” I said.
Cali did that thing where she crossed herself with one arm and then positioned the other atop it, which let her rest her chin on her knuckles. Classic Cali-thinking pose. “Hrrm,” she said with a long, drawn-out end. Classic Cali-thinking sound.
“I bet it’s just electrical storage or something,” I put out there.
Another “hrrm” from Cali, but short this time, curt. One that said, “I’d take that bet, Samantha (you idiot).” She left the wall and went to her messenger bag. From inside, she produced a sleeve of old photographs ─ Polaroid’s mostly, dates written in a sloppy permanent marker at the bottom of each ─ all taken within these very walls thirty years ago. The place went by a variety of names back then, depending on the year: Eddie’s Outrageous Arcade (1982-1985), Castle Gamelot (1986-88), or for very briefly in the early 90s the elegantly edgy Game Pit.
She thumbed from photo to photo, a veritable flipbook of screen-dazed faces and jeans so high-waisted. As her first action in this co-venture of ours, back when my pride didn’t gulp down so easily (it’s basically marshmallow these days), Cali had assembled the trove of images from various sources in the hope that they would help me capture, as she liked to put it, “that blacklit teenage dream of yours.” Well they did a pretty good job of that ─ because as she browsed the photos, I was hit with a memory of us in similar arcades in our youth. Cali with her eyes as wide as coin returns to see those flashing screens projectile-vomiting sheer awesomeness. Myself, I had the tag-along blues of a 12-year-old on kid sister duty. (Where was Mom? Great question!) You would’ve thought sis was one of those ghosts in Pac-Man the way I’d lose her in the maze of arcade machines. But just like the ghostly Machibuse (sorry, “Pinky” for the uncultured among you), no matter how far back into the ‘cade I went, it would be no time before I readied another quarter and found Cali once more at my elbow.
(The great irony being thirty years later when I found myself adrift in some martini-dry corporate function on invite, scanning a sea of blonde heads for hers, meanwhile I hastily introduced myself in awkward spurts: “That I just left the Wainwright Institute? No, Bob, my guess is she said ‘Institution…’”)
“Gotcha!” said Cali, finally finding the image, “I knew it!” She shoved a photo in my face.
Well it wasn’t exactly a great angle… and you had to look past the baby’s first rebellion of some dork flicking you the bird finger across the void of time… but otherwise, yeah, there it was: the alcove-that-wasn’t (but-was) (but-wasn’t), recessed between a Primal Rage cab and a screen-punched Total Carnage. And inside that alcove was a cabinet that even I did not recognize. Or rather than did or did not recognize, could or could not recognize, due to an exposure issue right around the area of the alcove that caused the colors to bleed and the details become blurry.
Honestly, I was still stuck on the part about the missing alcove. “What kind of psycho hides square footage─?”
I was cut off by the sudden whirrm-whirrm! of Cali’s power drill. She stuck the wall with it, a look of morbid curiosity on her face, the kind a child has on her face when she pokes a dead frog with a stick to see what happens. And in this case what happened was: the wall murmured with the sound of the drill inside, groaned, growled. Until all at once the bit plunged past the drywall and sunk into the empty space behind it to spin free in a high-pitched whine.
She paused as if wondering what to do next. I said, “You switch to reverse on the─”
“I know how to do it,” she spat, as if we were kids again and she was refusing to be talked down to. Except this time she actually did know how. Pulling back with measured tension, Cali backed the drill bit out of the wall, until finally ─ in a murky, gurgling sound, like pulling your shoe up out of the muck ─ the bit whirred free.
And from the hole in the wall, streaming in a slow tendril, came a dark red liquid.
(Looks like Mom was going to get her wish after all ─ no, not that we’d find a wall dripping with fucking blood. But that, even if for only a single solitary second, two siblings gone their separate ways in life could be brought back together. And not like, “dragged into financial debt by one of their desperate arcade dreams” kind of back together, but a “common ground” back together, a “linked by shared experience” back together. Because beyond the emotional rollercoaster of the last year, which saw a funeral, a mental breakdown, and a small-ish personal loan, the closest Cali and I had come yet to a shared experience was the look across the two of our faces now, which could only be described as “mutual sustained WTF?”)
(Congratulations, Mom ─ even from beyond the grave, you’re still finding new ways to traumatize us.)
FYI, it wasn’t actual blood coming from the walls (figured I’d nip that one in the bud right now), though the reality wasn’t much less weird than that. Me with my crowbar and Cali with a claw hammer, we began to rip apart the drywall, searching for the source of the leak. Yet instead of quivering horrible flesh behind that panel, we found… 5-gallon jugs, the kind you’d find on an office water cooler. Stacks and stacks of them. Two across, three across, four high, five high… The more we mangled the wall, the more jugs we found. Except instead of water, each one was filled to the neck with paint. Thick, heavy paint. A paint that had been lining the wall of this hidden room, for whatever hidden purpose, for give or take thirty years.
“Broken one’s stopped running,” Cali said, drawing my attention back to the first jug.
“By broken you of course mean you broke it…”
“Yeah, well” ─ and she rolled away the mop bucket she’d pushed up against the wall to catch the paint ─ “I don’t see how I was supposed to know that.”
“Maybe if we had talked it over.”
“What’s that?”
“If we had talked over our next step, before you decided to drill the─”
“No, that music. You don’t hear that?”
Now that she mentioned it, yeah, I kind of did. No, not kind of did ─ the more I began to accept the reality of what I had been unconsciously aware of, the more I allowed myself to actively apprehend it. Yes, there was music ─ arcade music ─ the source of which was no doubt the walled-in alcove (which now lacked the full extent of its jugs-and-paint insulation). The sound could float free, and as we began to dismantle the wall and the insulating jugs behind it, the more clearly that composition sounded out.
I use “composition” deliberately. This was not your average chiptune, not by a long shot. You hear the words “90s arcade music” and you probably think of the jangling, high-energy grooves of, say, Outrunners, or the unrelenting aural spiral of Vindicators, or the driven, dreamy drone of Gun Buster. But that was not what leaked from the wall now. This music here was Phillip Glass meets broken glass. Moonlight Sonata meets Esbjörn Svensson Trio meets your moodiest Bohren & Der Club of Gore played backwards on Cthulhu’s voicemailbox. Sure, videogame music could be a bit repetitive, but what Cali and I heard coming from inside that room was straight-up hypnotic. Like if you gave some pagan hofgothi at his altar to the Old Ones a PC-98 synthesizer and said “go to town, buddy.”
In short: it was the strangest goddamn music you ever heard emanate from an arcade speaker. And the closer we got, the stranger it became.
“Jesus, it’s so loud!” Cali said, cupping her ears from the cacophony of the concealed alcove, which had finally become accessible via a 12-inch gap we’d cleared out between the jugs.
“Give me that… that… flashlight there.” I was barely able to keep my thoughts straight. The sound had wormed its way in through the sutures of my skull, spread across the synapses like mold spreading through a peach. I put the flashlight between my teeth and went in.
Inside, it was like a portal into an earlier era ─ a defaced D.A.R.E. poster on the wall, a Stonehenge of cigarette butts in an old ashtray, a bright cartoon cosmos in carpet at my feet.
And then there was “the something.” The thing you’re here for.
At that moment, it was in the form of a black column situated at the back of the room, about three feet around and stretching floor to ceiling. Not black itself, but wrapped that way in a plastic tarp around and around and hastily sealed with duct tape. I felt around the tarp ─ sensed the vibration of the sound inside ─ discovered that the top of this “column” was empty. You could push it right in, leaving whatever the object was in front of me three-by-three around and six feet tall.
“Do you see anything?” I barely noticed Cali’s voice over the din.
“A knife,” I said.
“What?”
“Give me a box cutter. A knife. Anything.”
I assumed she heard me. What else but assume could I have done, standing there in the crashing dark, alone and mesmerized? Indeed, it took the sudden shock of a hand grazing my neck ─ Cali’s hand, she up to her shoulder in the jug-wall gap ─ to bring me back to Earth. She’d searched our work area elsewhere in the arcade and only found the scraper we’d been using to strip the bathroom door. I clicked it open in my hand, admired the razor’s edge inside. That would work.
I began cutting at the tarp, an X-pattern straight ahead of me. Each slash taking me deeper and deeper into the layers of tarp. As I sliced with one hand, I attempted to tear back the tatters with the other, slashing and pulling and slashing and… All the while the chiptune calamity grew louder and louder, until it felt like it was something in my bone marrow. Like it was simply something that had always been with me. Until finally came a sliver of light, shining bright through a slash in the tarp. The more I hacked, the brighter it grew. At last revealing just what had been locked away and left chanting to itself in this room all these years ─ an arcade cabinet. Name as of yet unknown. Origin as of yet unknown.
For a moment, it was like I flashed back to those arcades all those decades go ─ this to realize that Cali was standing at my elbow again, only now eye to eye. My equal. Together, she and I pulled back the tarp fragments, uncovering the image projected from the cabinet’s CRT screen, an image beamed out of an electron gun at three hundred and twenty pixels by two hundred and forty. Onscreen, in marble hues, shone a pixelated bas relief of wanderers being led through a mysterious archway. And overlaid atop that image, in the eye-catching style of 90s arcade title screens, were two words: PSYCHOPOMP PAM.
“Pam,” Cali said. As in Pamela, our mother.
Congratulations, Mom ─ a bit more trauma from beyond the grave.
Now to find out where the hell this cabinet came from.
[Updates to follow]