CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was Chul-Moo, whom I honestly wasn’t expecting at this point. And he was in the corner, by the baby-changing station. He wasn’t moving, and his eyes weren’t open, but he also wasn’t obviously dead.

However, he might be dead, and so I put down my laptop so that my stream was facing the bathroom wall.

“It’s Chul-Moo,” I said, both because I knew that Twitch chat was typing, WHAT’S IN THERE?!? over and over again in all caps, and because, if by any chance I was killed, it would be good for people to know what I was seeing.

Chul-Moo looked fine—I mean, he wasn’t disemboweled or legless or anything—but when I went to touch him, I found that he was cold.

“Okay,” I said, for the benefit of the stream. “I think he’s dead.” For reasons that I cannot possibly fathom, I did not decide to immediately flee from the Family Bathroom of Horror, but instead felt I should figure out what killed him, which I accomplished by touching the back of his head, which had blood on it.

“Oh crap,” I said. “I’ve got blood on my hands.”

GET OUT OF THERE GET OUT OF THERE! typed Twitch chat. I leaned over a sink and washed my hands, because if I have learned anything from mysteries, it’s that when you innocently get a murdered man’s blood on your hands, that’s obviously when the police show up and you have to say, as blood drips from your fingers, “It’s not what it looks like!”

Plus, also, hepatitis C. You can’t be too careful, she typed ironically, because then someone smashed my head into the sink.

Before we go on with the narrative, I just want to take a very brief detour to discuss Twitch chat. I make fun of Twitch chat, because they are idiots, but they are also idiots who may have saved my life, so I am grateful to them. And I always sort of liked them before that, to be honest. (But to be clear: idiots.)

However, I want to point out that after I got online next—much later in the narrative … I’m skipping around here, but hear me out—four people had unsubscribed from my channel. Four people! That means that four gents (or gals) saw this scene—heard my head get smashed into the sink, watched my stream go black—and thought:

“Well, I guess Dahlia’s dead now. I might as well unsubscribe.”

Fuck you, four members of Twitch chat! I mean, honestly. Fuck you.

I should also mention—because I was told this later—that following my head smashing and fade to black, Twitch immediately decided to play a commercial for a Disney hotel. Advertising synergy at work. Who knows, maybe after watching me get murdered, a viewer might think: “You know, I should get moving on that bucket list. A trip to Epcot would really hit the spot.”

I was not dead, although wouldn’t that be a turn? It’s ghost Dahlia—whoooo! We urban fantasy now, as Twitch chat would say.

But alas, no, because if I had been dead, my head would have presumably hurt much less.

I woke up in a room that was pitch-black. Pitch-fucking-black. Surely the afterlife had more lighting than this. I also heard a very alarming grinding noise that was hard for me to immediately process, and it felt like the back of my head had been split open. I can’t stress head pain enough. This was not hangover territory—a split-open head that I was accustomed to—this was trauma.

My first thought was: Okay, I’m in hell. It made sense. But then I realized that I smelled like blood and vomit and, even for Satan, who I’m sure loves bodily viscera, that felt like an odd combination.

I didn’t immediately piece together what had happened—I just lay there in the dark—trying to reconstruct what had led me to this moment. I was in the bathroom, and I had found Chul-Moo, who was dead. Not passed out, not innocently dying while in the bathroom like people do, but actually murdered. And someone had—what?—sneaked up behind me? I felt the back of my head to see if it was bleeding and found that it wasn’t, but there was surely a giant knot there.

How had this happened? There was a stall in there, which I hadn’t checked. Had my assailant been in the bathroom all along? Or had he or she followed me down to where Chul-Moo was? I suppose these questions weren’t important, or weren’t immediately important, but my mind was all over the place at that point. That’ll happen when you get concussed.

So, a darkened room with a dead body. This had moved into Buffalo Bill territory, after all. Twitch chat was fucking right. Pretty soon I was going to have puppies thrown at me by a transphobically conceived character. That was probably what the girl in the well was thinking. You all thought she was crying from fear or lack of water, but she was really thinking about how she was going to have to explain that movie to her grandkids someday. I digress.

I was not going to die in this room. That’s not to say I was going to live, but by God, I was going to at least survive long enough to change rooms. I refuse to expire in a room without carpeting.

Speaking of text games—it was inventory time. What did I have on me?

Well, nothing in my pockets—no iPhone, no ID, no purse, no nothing. I certainly had things before I had been knocked out, such as a cactus and an ancient paper clip, and so this meant that whoever hit me had taken my stuff. Also my laptop, but that one I had expected. I took a moment to panic about this—two or three moments, actually—but then I bucked up and moved on. I wasn’t the only person here, after all.

I searched Chul-Moo’s body as well, getting nicely covered in what was hopefully hepatitis-free blood. There was something long and rectangular in his pocket—and I was earnestly hoping it was some oddly shaped cell phone. It didn’t have to be an iPhone. A Samsung Galaxy would have been great. Hell, I would have even welcomed a Jitterbug.

It wasn’t any of these things, but it felt familiar in my hands, and I instinctively opened the rectangle in half. It was a Nintendo DS—God bless handheld gaming.

I had wanted a cell phone, which would have been worlds more useful, but this could have been worse. For one, it meant vision. The DS had power, so once I turned it on, a small amount of white light entered the room. See? This was progress. I was like one of those characters in Alden’s text games.

>> SEARCH BODY. OPEN DS. GO WEST.

So there was no reason to panic at all. Of course, those games were hard as fuck, and I was killed as often as not, but no matter. This was not a magical grotto where I was likely to be devoured by topiary animals. I had this. I could do this.

Inventory. That’s what you do in these games. I had a tool now, which was good.

What was bad: I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know who had attacked me, when or if they were coming back, and I didn’t know how long I had been out. Which is pretty scary if you think about it all. Terrifying, actually.

Focus on the tool, Dahlia.

The first thing I thought about was using the DS to contact someone else. Unfortunately, Nintendo’s “Friend Code” system meant that I could only contact people whom Chul-Moo had been friends with. One of which was Swan, undoubtedly, and he was at least an even bet for the person who had knocked me out in the first place. Even if I felt comfortable contacting Swan, and I wasn’t sure that I did, all I could do was send him a message that he might get hours later.

Whoever did this might be back in minutes. What else, Dahlia?

I thought briefly of changing my StreetPass outgoing message. There was this minigame that Nintendo had about trying to “tag” as many people as possible with your DS. Your Mii and their Mii would electronically connect and exchange greetings. So like: “I’m Dahlia!” and “I like cats!” In this scenario, some unsuspecting person aboard the Major Redding would randomly tag me, and we’d have a conversation like: “SSsup? ;-)” and “HELP ME I’M TRAPPED IN THE BASEMENT.”

Not a great plan either. No immediate results, and I didn’t actually know I was in the basement. I had no freaking clue where I was. I scotched the idea of using the DS to call for help just yet, and turned it around so that I could use the DS’s light to give me a better idea of where the hell I was.

There was still that grinding noise, and a pulsating moving and enormous metal—I don’t know what you would call it—I don’t know, penis? Let’s say penis, that just sort of kept thrusting back and forth. Honestly, that’s what it looked like. Okay, maybe, “cylinder” is a better word—give me a break, I just had a concussion. There was a cylinder pushing back and forth, and the resulting motion shot strange shadows on the wall.

I was in the engine room. (Actually my first thought was clock tower—which would have been way more Gothic, if not immediately logical.) It was cramped and smelled sort of tinny and electric, and there were plain white guard rails everywhere. Also, lots of signs that warned: DANGER, which at this point felt like God just making fun of me.

But I was losing the thread. Focus on the puzzle, Dahlia. What else was there to learn?

The DS had a clock on it. So after a little muddling around, I figured out that it was 7:46, which meant that I’d only been out for twenty minutes or so. Assuming that Chul-Moo hadn’t changed time zones recently. But regardless, people were probably still upstairs. All I needed to do was get back upstairs, alive, and then from there it’d be a cakewalk.

I was still on the floor for all of this because—and I don’t want to underplay this point—my head hurt like hell. I was trying to accomplish as much as I could from the ground because it was going to be hard going once I got up. I shone light on the two ends of the room, and found that there was only one exit.

Well, it was clear enough.

I tried getting up, and then someone, possibly God again, picked up and threw the Major Redding at me. Vertigo, vertigoing, vertigone. There was an entire Poseidon Adventure I went on. If you’re going to have a concussion—don’t do it on a steamboat. I can’t think of a worse place for one. A Ferris wheel would be a better choice.

I was glad, actually, that I wasn’t being streamed, because the staggering, drunken, jagged motions I made toward the door must have looked awfully ridiculous. Buffalo Bill would have been like: “Girl—just to be clear, I’m still gonna kill you and wear your skin later—but before all that, are you sure you don’t want me to get you some Dramamine? Because you’re looking rough.” Probably.

I made my way to the door, but doing so gave me pause. Who’s to say that whoever had failed to kill me wasn’t out there keeping guard? I tried to move quietly in the dark—so easy when you’re vomitously dizzy—and then carefully, cautiously tried to turn the door. It was almost a relief that it was locked, but I did not want to wobble through the basement of this steamboat looking for a way up.

Another locked door, and me with no bobby pins in my hair. I swore to God that if I lived through this, I would just start wearing a full-on lock-picking kit in my hair. My whole hairstyle would be engineered so that I would have the right tools for the situation. A beehive, maybe? Maybe a wig?

Problems for later.

New plan? Weaponize. This was the engine room, so that meant that there was a fire extinguisher in here somewhere, right? Also, if there was a fire, I’d be prepared. I was searching the room, trying to figure out where it would be when I made a discovery. That door wasn’t, strictly speaking, the only exit. There was a porthole in the room—just a little out of reach.

This was an interesting possibility. In its favor: the possibility of not getting killed. Against it: I wasn’t 100 percent sure I could squeeze through it, and I would probably need a rope or something to avoid getting thrown into the Mississippi. Probably the extinguisher was a better plan. (Also, I could attack with a zingy action-movie line like: “Get Extinguished!” or “Flame Off!”—the latter line working best if I were being attacked by Chris Evans.)

Still, leave no stone unturned. I found a brown plastic wastebasket, which I tipped over and stood on top of. I felt guilty about this, actually, because the wastebasket had a bunch of Kleenex that, as far as I could tell, had shit on it, and I’m sure the engineers of the Major Redding were going to be horrified whenever they came back in here. A corpse and now fecal matter on the floor.

I stood on the wastebasket and peeked out through the porthole. I could, just barely, squeeze out of it, and ahead I could see the lights of East St. Louis. I’m just going to go ahead and say this: no one has ever been more excited to see East St. Louis than I was in that moment. Screw the crime and the poverty and the East St. Louisness of it—it was beautiful and looked like a mirage against the water. I wanted to live there, forever, and take Nathan, and maybe also Shuler, and start a wonderful little family in the inner city. It looked alive, and I wanted to be alive.

It was at that point that I heard a noise at the door—a metal creaking that I was sure wasn’t the normal creaking of the ship, and I thought: Well, this is not good. This is probably very bad.

I looked above me and saw that there was no rope, no ladder, no anything, really. To get to the upper deck from here, I would either need to be Spider-Man or one of those cheap plastic wall-crawling toys you’d get from the bottom of cereal boxes. And those don’t even really work very well. I looked below and saw nothing but the inky black water of the Mississippi, which I wasn’t sure was safe to swim in, even if I wasn’t experiencing Count Vertigo levels of dizziness, which I was.

And then someone had my legs.

I’m going to say that it was Chul-Moo who had my legs, because it’s more interesting, and also it’s kind of what I had thought, on some level. I was now being attacked by zombies. It had come to this. (Note: I was not being attacked by zombies.)

Have you ever been halfway out the porthole of a steamboat, trying to wrest your lower body out of the grips of a murderer? I’m just going to assume this is a universal experience. (“Girl, we’ve all done that,” I can hear you saying.) Was your porthole hard on your stomach? I still have a mark.

Anyway, I’m not good at a lot of things, but I can kick, and it is my forceful kicking that I credit with getting me out of that situation alive. Also in this skill set of mine: screaming. Jesus God, did I scream. Sam Spade never screamed as I did—but it wasn’t all just fear. It wasn’t fear at all, honestly—I was just hoping I could get someone else’s attention.

I was also trying to fake being completely panicked and irrational, which wasn’t that hard because it certainly wasn’t very far from the surface.

“HELP! HELP!” I screamed while trying to worm my way out from whoever had held me. “I CAN’T SWIM! I CAN’T SWIM!”

I slipped out of my attacker’s grasp and plummeted toward the dark water below and thought: Dahlia Moss, you have died as you lived. Bullshitting.