The Last Game

It was the summer of ’84 in the dusty town of Pemberton, and I was seventeen, too old for babysitting, but the five dollars an hour was too good to pass up. The house was a Victorian relic on the edge of town, all creaking floors and drafty halls, and the basement was a cavernous, dirt-floored labyrinth that smelled of damp concrete and old iron. I was watching over Emily, a quiet girl of ten, whose parents were away at a medical conference for the weekend. She had a habit of staring at me with an unsettling intensity, as if she were trying to see through my skin to something underneath.

On the second evening, after a dinner of cold pizza and grape soda, Emily asked me to play a game. ‘It’s called The Last Game,’ she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Me and my friends play it. You have to go into the basement, to the room with the old exercise bike, and you have to count to one hundred, and then you call out for the others. But you have to do it alone. That’s the rule.’ I laughed it off, thinking it was just a childish game, but something in her eyes made the hairs on my arm prickle. She insisted, with a force that seemed beyond her years, that it was real, that it worked. ‘My mom says it’s just a silly game, but we know it’s not. We saw things.’

The basement was a maze of shelving and cardboard boxes. I descended the narrow wooden stairs, the bulb above flickering, casting long shadows. I found the room she described—the one with the weight bench and the dusty treadmill—and a smaller chamber beyond it, where a single high window let in a dull, milky light. I told myself it was harmless, just a bit of fun to humor the girl, so I began to count, slowly, my voice bouncing off the concrete walls. At fifty, the silence pressed in. At seventy-five, I heard a faint rustling, like dry leaves skittering across a floor, but when I looked, nothing was there. At one hundred, I called out, ‘Emily? Are you there?’ The only answer was a low hum, like a refrigerator running, but it was coming from the far wall, where an old fuse box hung. I stepped closer, drawn by a compulsion I couldn’t name, and I saw that the fuse box door was ajar, and behind it was not the expected wiring, but a black, starless void, and from that void came a voice, tender and wrong.

It was my grandmother’s voice. She had died three years ago, and I remember the way she said my name, as if she were tasting it. The voice said, ‘You’re it, my dear. We’ve been waiting for the count to end.’ I screamed and scrambled backward, but the basement had changed. The walls were closer, the ceiling lower, and the light from the window had dimmed to a sickly dusk. I tried to retrace my steps, but the hallway that led to the stairs was gone, replaced by a blank wall with a single iron door that hadn’t been there before. I turned to flee, but every doorway opened onto the same room—the exercise room—and each time I entered, the room was slightly different: the treadmill now had a body-shaped stain, the mirror was cracked in a new pattern, the air was thicker with the smell of rot. I heard Emily’s voice, but not from above—it was coming from beneath my feet. ‘You have to count again,’ she said, her voice echoing as if from a great depth. ‘That’s how you win. You have to play until you lose.’

I don’t know how long I played that game, counting over and over, calling out names that no one answered, while the basement rearranged itself around me, each cycle stripping away a layer of the familiar until I was in a place of pure stone and shadow, lit by a flickering flame from an unseen source. I saw things there—faces pressed against the walls, shifting like wax, and hands reaching out of the floor, beckoning. I finally gave up screaming and sat in the corner, listening to the hum, and the hum resolved into a lullaby my mother used to sing. But the words were wrong. It sang, ‘When you play the game, you never come home, you stay in the room where the windows are blind.’ And then the floor opened beneath me, and I fell into a deeper darkness, where the faint, patient whisper of the game promised me that I would be ‘it’ forever.

I woke up in my bed, the morning sun streaming through the window, and Emily was sitting on the floor playing with a doll. She looked up and smiled, but there was a flicker of something in her eyes—a subtle shift, like a mask slipping. She said, ‘You’re back. I knew you would be. Now we can play again.’ I tried to tell my parents, but the words came out as a jumble, and they dismissed it as a vivid dream. But I know it wasn’t a dream. I know because I saw my reflection in the window that night, and for a split second, it wasn’t mine—it was that of an old woman with hollow eyes, and it mouthed, ‘You’re it.’ I left that town, never looked back, but sometimes, when I’m alone and the house is too quiet, I hear a faint counting, and I realize I never truly woke up. The basement is always there, waiting, and the game is never over.