Lila's story about Mike's ghost beckoning her to the rooftop sent a shiver down my spine colder than a popsicle in a snowstorm. Was Tim right—was Mike's spirit out for revenge? But Ryan's intel on Tim's shady past had me side-eyeing our Taoist buddy, though I kept my poker face tighter than a hipster's skinny jeans. Lila had no reason to lie, so I spilled the beans about her showing up as the game's next substitute soul.
Her face crumpled, and she buried it in the pillow, sobbing like she'd just watched the saddest puppy commercial ever. Ryan and I backed off, not wanting to push her over the edge—literally or figuratively. He motioned for Tim to stay with Lila. "Keep an eye on her, man. No more rooftop adventures," he said, then pulled me aside. "We're hitting the morgue. Time to check Max Wheeler's body for clues."
My stomach did a backflip. "The morgue? Dude, I've seen more corpses this month than a Walking Dead extra. Can't we just, like, read the report?" But Ryan's cop glare shut me up. For Emily's sake, I'd face the creep show.
In the car, I couldn't resist. "Why leave Tim with Lila? You don't trust him, right?"
Ryan kept his eyes on the road. "If she goes zombie-mode again, he's the only one with a playbook for that soul-calling mumbo jumbo. Doesn't mean I'm buying his act."
I nodded, but my gut was doing somersaults. Tim's black-market tech days screamed red flag, but he'd saved my ass from Ethan's ghost. Friend or foe? My brain was a pinata, and I was out of swings.
The morgue was a sterile nightmare, the air heavy with bleach and death's aftertaste. I gagged as the coroner rolled out Max's body, his skin waxy, his mouth a frozen, bloody gash from the game's tongue-pulling punishment. "Still no new evidence," the coroner said, reciting the same report we'd heard before. "Cause of death: exsanguination from oral trauma. No prints, no DNA."
Ryan waved the coroner out, and I stared at Max's face, trying to jog my memory. That night I "killed" him in the game, I'd passed out from shock. Maybe I'd missed something—a glitch, a name, anything. But my mind was blanker than a Monday morning whiteboard.
Then, Max's eyes snapped open, bloodshot and bulging like a horror prop. I yelped, stumbling back as Ryan vanished—poof, gone, like he'd been Thanos-snapped. Max's corpse twitched, sitting up on the slab, his scarred mouth twisting into a grin. "Wanna see the real Hell, Jake?" he rasped, his voice dripping with menace. A cold, sharp pain stabbed my back, my lungs seizing like I'd inhaled a bucket of ice.
"Ghost trick!" I gasped, remembering Tim's warning. But I was no exorcist—my only weapon was panic. Max lurched off the table, his laughter a nails-on-chalkboard cackle. "Stay back!" I screamed, grabbing a scalpel and swinging like a caffeinated samurai. "I didn't sign up for this haunted house crap!"
"Jake! Yo, Jake!" A hand shook me, and I jolted awake, sprawled on a chair next to Max's still corpse. Ryan stared at me, half-amused, half-concerned. "Dude, you fell asleep next to a body? You're either exhausted or auditioning for Napoleon Dynamite: Morgue Edition."
I scrambled up, my heart doing a tap dance. "I… what? I was looking at him, then—boom, nightmare city. Max was alive, talking, saying stuff about Hell!" His words echoed, chillingly familiar. Where had I heard them?
Ryan chuckled, tossing his gloves in a bin. "You're burned out, man. But get this: just got a tip. Max played the game before he died. Spent three hours on it at a dive-bar net café."
My jaw dropped. "No way. The game wasn't public! Emily gave me a private copy on a USB. How'd Max get it?"
Ryan's eyes darkened. "That's the kicker. The café's logs show Max's ID, and his PC was the only one with the game installed. Staff swears they never saw it before. He played, left, and got his tongue yanked out an hour later."
I rubbed my temples, the puzzle pieces jumbling like a bad Tetris game. "So, the game's spreading, picking players like some viral chain letter from Hell. But Ethan, the developer, is dead. Who's pulling the strings?"
Ryan shrugged, his voice grim. "No clue. Every lead circles back to that USB. If Ethan and Emily built it, their motive died with them. And you? You're the only player still breathing. Why?"
I froze. Why was I alive? Emily, Mike, Max—all dead after playing. Was I lucky, or was the game saving me for the grand finale? My mind flashed to Emily's diary, tucked in my bag. Max's dream-words—"Wanna see the real Hell?"—matched a line scrawled in her notes. "Ryan, that diary… it's the key. Emily wrote about Hell, like she was planning this. But there's no proof she coded the game, just that she knew about it."
He nodded, clapping my shoulder. "Then we start over. Re-trace every step, every clue. Emily's diary, Max's café visit, Tim's shady past. Something's gotta give."
We left the morgue, the fresh air a relief after the death-stink. I clutched the diary's memory like a lifeline. Emily's secrets were in there, and I was done being the game's pawn. It was time to flip the board and find the puppet master—human, ghost, or whatever the hell was running this show.
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