The Longest Game is an Occult Pulp Noir serial. It begins right here. When you’ve finished reading, navigate your way with the Table of Contents.
If you’re new here, please know that the footnotes are necessary for a complete reading experience. If reading in Substack, clicking the footnote number will conveniently open the note in box.
Thank you for reading, and welcome to The Longest Game.
Minerva killed time inside the penny arcade, unable to grow used to the dark nor her accursed company. It sat there in the corner. The room was so dark her eyes played parlor tricks of movement and shadow. Minerva knew tombs had that tendency.
She checked her pocket. The sharp corner of the gamepiece’s little bow assured her thumb it was still there. She was awake, this was real, and she was still in control. And it sat there, in the corner.
The Byzantine hunched over its table, face obscured in raggedy muslin beneath a faded turban. The fabric reminded Minerva of a funeral parlor; lilac-colored coffin linings and dusty artificial flowers. A once proud robe had tattered into a grandmother’s shawl, exposing the Byzantine’s guts, composed of gears and baroque trinketry spilling under the table. An articulated brass hand-- needlessly realistic wrought fingers slotted into a skeletal tin wrist-- poised over the table’s grid, ready to make a move on an empty board. A five-fingered shadow cast upon a grid, the occasional red square breaking up a black-and-white monotony without apparent pattern. Across the Byzantine, an empty stool.
“Don’t sit in the seat,” Minerva had been warned. “It’s not for you. That’s for the ghosts-not-ghosts. That’s for colder months. Kinder months.” The Midwayman spoke in riddles, desperate as he labored for clarity. But his last warning rang simple: “And don’t play the Archer on the board.” She thumbed it again, making sure it hadn’t leapt from her pocket.
The antique roadshow private eye she was waiting for was an hour late. She paced. It sat there, in the corner, perched ready to play. How did one smalltalk with a ghost who was not quite a ghost? Minerva leaned over the empty chair across the Byzantine. “Come here often?” she asked in her finest speakeasy cocktail voice. She could always flirt with it.
“Now and again.”
Minerva jumped away from the table, backing into a foosball-type game with jousting knights.1 Realizing her contact was waiting by the door of the arcade, she laughed at herself and leaned against the defunct game. “Quothe, darling, you know you won’t get very far going around startling ladies like that.”
He just stood in the doorway, the early morning behind him a deep blue that held no light. The silhouette of rumpled jacket. Odd, Minerva thought as she willed her heart to calm. Quothe had seemed the tetatet-type the night before. “You’re mad. I’m sorry, dear, but it was the only way to guarantee you’d come.”
Minerva pulled from her pocket the gamepiece. The Archer, the Midwayman had called it, though it reminded her of a crescent moon. She held it aloft. “See? Safe and sound. I’ll give it back, and you be a real gentleman and hear a lady out--”
“Enough.”
The silhouette did not move immediately, but Minerva understood now this was not Calumn Quothe. She pocketed the Archer with her right hand, her left gripped the small pistol in her bag.
The stranger moved unhurriedly, making his way to the Byzantine’s table rather than Minerva herself. “I trust you haven’t interrupted my game?” He sat down at the stool, slouching over the pieces she hadn’t noticed were on the board. That she was sure hadn’t been there before. In the dim she could now see dozens of intricately carved things, all just too far away to recognize, tied together with complex patterns of string.
A dim red light from a first-person shooter game reflected slick hair sticking to a worry-creased forehead, be it by rain or sweat. His eyes held bags, and they looked sadly at the pieces below.
Minerva tried to ascertain what sort of theoretical danger she was in. “I’m sorry, mister. I wasn’t under the impression anyone was-- coming by.”
“Hm?” He barely acknowledging her now. The man sat poised, as still as the Byzantine, save only for his eyes scanning the pieces on the board. The stranger snapped his fingers and moved again in the dark, lifting and placing a wooden piece back down with a clack! “Clever, clever. Mm.”
The stranger turned to Minerva, with a smile. “My opponent here thought it would add pieces to the board in my absence. Tricky, this one.” He pointed to the Byzantine, unmoving. “Playful, even.”
Hot date, Minerva wanted to crack. But she found herself unable to move. Her feet heavy upon the floor, her jaw clenching painfully against the choked words.
“No use, madam. I’ve got you. You see--” The haggard man tapped a cat-shaped pawn. “I captured your piece. The prize--” he pointed now to a shining token, just by the carved cat, “is mine.”
Minerva’s limbs held rigid, but her heart had never danced faster. Immediately, she understood this was magic. She willed her hand to do something with the gun clasped uselessly in her obscured left hand, the Archer pierced painfully in her right.
“You can stop that,” the man chided. His voice was coarse and baritone, always a scold. “It’s no use, the rules are quite clear. Now come here. Empty out your pockets. Let’s see--”
And she walked, back to the Byzantine. Sauntered, really, as she had the choice of her own free will. Minerva’s eyes were riveted to the board as she stepped beside the man, who reeked of hairspray and sweaty wool. The table was covered in a labyrinth of string, connecting a few dozen pieces of various sizes and shapes. Minerva pulled the gun from her bag and dropped it over the squares on the board. The man huffed a derisive laugh. “Crude thing,” he said. “I really wish you hadn’t.”
From her other pocket she pulled out the Archer. That caught the man by surprise. By some deep-seated instinct of spite, she did not drop the pawn like she had her pistol. Minerva had learned long ago that, when your back is to a wall, it is often best to do the worst possible thing. She placed the Archer on the board, next to the cat piece.
Compliant, and yet.
The piece gave a satisfying clak against the board.
…and life was a dream. It ran like a dream. It was a good move, in the sense that the warlock was flummoxed. He was pale with panic, red from anger, as blotched as the checkered board below. He shouted at her with words made of jowls and spittle, and his eyes bore like a rat, a hungry rat in a maze, a labyrinth of string and sweaty wool and wooden game pieces, red-and-white checkers on a pizza box. It was an excellent play, a cat trapping a rat.
It was also a poor move, in the sense that the warlock pushed her against a plexiglass machine2 and strangled her, fingers squeezing into Minerva’s soft tubes of voice and nourishment and blood until they pulped together, as he grabbed the gun on the table and punched the muzzle to the gut and emptied the lead through the lungs, as he drew a knife and stabbed her between the ribs the eyes the ribs again again again. Endless violent choices were but permitted moves in the meta-game, and it was now his turn.
A mechanical arm raised slightly, the high mewl of metal pulling the stranger from his fury and back into his chair.
It was the Byzantine’s turn now.
The mechanical man chittered to life, a chord of a few untuned sweet notes from within its carcass. With the beleaguered scream of ungreased gears, the Byzantine sat a little straighter and unfurled its brass fingers. One corner of the board had a cluster of pawns; the cat, tied up amid strings. Three black pillars and a rodent surrounding her. A yellow-gold coin whose cameo figure wore a crown over a time-faded face. Each of these pieces were connected by strings to other skirmishes elsewhere on the board, but here -- reaching over the gun-- the Byzantine’s fingers gingerly touched the Archer. Its polished chocolate wood and delicate crescent were all out of place on this crude board. The Byzantine’s clockwork hand gingerly moved it out of range, a few squares away.
Minerva’s heart sunk. The cat had just been sacrificed.
The is the first entry to an ongoing serial. You may continue reading to Chapter 1: We Breathe Shanties, or navigate the Table of Contents.
“Tourney Tops!” by Saltpeter Bros. Novelty Co. was a tabletop sport game designed in 1947, and was to be the first of a planned penny-arcade serialization following the story of Prince Theodore. Beside the arcade game were to be issues of a comic book staged for retail, with future games and installments to interconnect. The principal designer, Jeremiah Saltpeter, wanted high scores to unlock a “serial code” to be mailed to Saltpeter Bros. Novelty Co. headquarters for special bonus issues. Jeremiah’s brother, Hadrian Saltpeter, deemed the project “Three parts folly and one part lark.” Jeremiah parted ways with his brother both in outrage over the failed project, and for his wife divorcing him that year and immediately remarrying Hadrian. Jeremiah Saltpeter’s next doomed project would be the cult classic arcade game, “Fazmondo!”.
“Carir Mode” by Westward Game Co. is an arm-wrestling game released in 1963. It features a strength meter box (“Much The Muscle?”) from which emerges a brawny “strong man” in a navy uniform. Two components on the box move-- the first is a large mechanical forearm and hand, cupped for an opponent to grab, or to reach out to a doomed woman and offer solace. The second moving component is the face of the figure, which features four sides representing the four opponents in the arm-wrestling player’s “carir” [sic]: a baby named Bawlin’ Gus Jr. (easy); a clown named Bingo Bango Bongo (moderate); Brawlin’ Gus Sr. (challenging); and Death Mister (expert). Beating each stage would rotate the sailor’s face, and the resistance on the arm would increase. One of the notable gimmicks in Carir Mode was the Death Mister challenge, during which compressed air would startle players, causing them to let go of the resistance arm and lose. Original sketches of the Westward Game Co. design features Bawlin’ Gus Jr. crying “tears” of water, popping balloons for the clown, and a “steam” effect from Brawlin’ Gus Sr.’s ears.