A Game in Yellow - Softcover

Piper, Hailey

 
9781668077085: A Game in Yellow
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1668077086 ISBN 13: 9781668077085
Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Euphoria meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this latest novel by the Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper, following a couple whose search to spice up their sex life leads them down a path of madness.

A kink-fixated couple, Carmen and Blanca, have been in a rut. That is until Blanca discovers the enigmatic Smoke in an under-street drug den, who holds pages to a strange play, The King in Yellow. Read too much, and you’ll fall into madness. But read just a little and pull back, and it gives you the adrenaline rush of survivor’s euphoria, leading Carmen to fall into a game of lust at a nightmare’s edge.

As the line blurs between the world Carmen knows and the one that she visits after reading from the play, she begins to desire more time in this other world no matter what horrors she brings back with her.

Bram Stoker Award–winning author Hailey Piper masterfully blends horror, erotica, and psychological thriller in this captivating and chilling story.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of A Game in Yellow, Queen of Teeth, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings series, and other books of dark fiction. She is also the author of over 100 short stories appearing in Weird Tales, PseudoPod, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Cast of Wonders, and various other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Writer’s Digest, Library Journal, CrimeReads, and elsewhere. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. Find Hailey at HaileyPiper.com.

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Chapter 1: Breathe 1 Breathe
THE CUT WAS QUIET, ALMOST silent. If Carmen had meant to stab something thin and soft, she would’ve held it up and run it through with steel, leaving nothing but air on the other side to absorb the point.

But she’d only stabbed anything at all because she was spacing out at her desk. The glow of her work monitor must’ve messed her up on some subliminal level, and she’d checked out of her brain hard enough to drive her seldom-used letter opener through her black mousepad. Only the steel clacking against the desk warned her anything had happened.

She nudged the mouse away and lifted the thin square of fabric and rubber, dangling it in front of her eyes. A small round hole let in the blue monitor light, as if the mousepad were a one-eyed mask.

Bad girl, she told herself.

She studied the letter opener—could a dull edge become a murder weapon? Of course. It was part of this dull office, a dozing animal with soulless white walls and piercing fluorescent lights, and that overwhelming dullness had to be a murder weapon, too, killing Carmen with a tedious blade. Or worse, smoothing out her personality and peeling away her features until it could render her a faceless peon.

She touched her cheek, thinking of tender fingers, and then checked the time. Five minutes to go. Almost end of day.

Foot tapping, blood teeming, thinking about what would happen later, a quickness in her heart—how was she supposed to concentrate with this kind of pressure and anticipation?

It’s nerves, she thought. Nothing worse.

When she checked the time again, it was three minutes to six. She couldn’t take the waiting anymore and began packing up her bag, logging out of her data-entry files, bounding out of her chair with a barked goodbye to her manager, Liza, before zipping away from the cubicles, out the door, and into the city.

September heat thickened the air across Queens. She was having enough trouble keeping her breath steady, but the walk to the nearest station to take the 7 was mercifully short. Her hands broke from her bag to hold her phone over the reader, and then she pressed through the turnstile toward the next westward train.

There, easily done. She was just one more person trying to get home.

And yet, a sense of separation haunted her through the ride. No one tried for the empty seats beside her at the few stops before her transfer. Not one person approached to ask for change at the Queensboro Plaza platform where she stood waiting for her connecting train. As if every commuter and wanderer were smelling death on her.

They couldn’t understand. There might be a sense of dying ahead, but on the other side, there was life.

A yellow N train screeched to a halt alongside the platform and poured out fresh commuters. Carmen squeezed aboard and stood by the door, looking out its west-facing windows.

The rail line toward Ditmars ran above the streets, sweeping past graffitied brick and flat rooftops. Beyond those, the windows offered a glimpse across the East River to the Manhattan skyline, its buildings rising in a jagged series of peaks as if the sky were grinning with a concrete underbite. Carmen thought of it scooping up the rest of the city. Bad omens lay everywhere.

She clutched her bag tight to her chest and tried to take slow breaths. There were only a few stops between Queensboro and her own, but each one felt like pumping the brakes on her heart, squeezing out another dose of adrenaline.

Her hands trembled by the time the train reached the 30th Avenue station. She hurried onto the platform, down the steps, and headed east, crossing a handful of streets and north a couple blocks. The storefronts and home windows seemed to lean toward her, even when she reached her apartment building, the brown brick becoming its eyes, watching, waiting. Every inch of Queens was vibrating.

Or maybe that was her. Nervous, excited, worried, scared. It could all go right for a change. It could all be terrible.

Don’t be terrible, she told herself, as if that were in her control. Sometimes it felt like it should be. Shouldn’t she know enough not to fuck up her life?

But control wasn’t a concept she’d ever grasped. If she could take charge in a practical way, she would have done so already.

She yanked open the heavy door and hurried inside, past mailboxes, up the stairwell. The second floor looked darker today, but she barely caught any of it in her shaky rush toward her apartment. In pulling out her keys. Unlocking and opening the door. Letting it shut.

None of these features or sensations were as real as the feeling of a firm cylinder jamming against the back of her head. Her bag dropped to one side. She swallowed hard, mouth gone dry, and raised her hands, could practically imagine the pistol digging into her skull.

“Not smart, coming back here after what you pulled,” a voice rich as caramel said, her tone lethal. “Not smart at all.”

Minutes passed, too slow and yet too fast. Carmen was nude now, her button-up and slacks and everything else lying on the floor several feet away. Sweat made her bare skin stick where it touched this wooden chair. Her heart beat a gallop through her chest, but when she tried raising a hand to feel it through her sternum, her right wrist snagged on a leather cuff binding it to one arm of the chair. Another held her left wrist in place, and similar cuffs bound her ankles to the chair’s legs.

A heat billowed behind her—Blanca, her hand stroking Carmen’s short hair. Blanca, who’d restrained her.

Blanca, ready to end this.

“I can tell you things,” Carmen said, mouth still dry. “Secrets.”

“It’s too late for that,” Blanca said, almost doting. “Much too late.”

Hazel eyes reflected in Carmen’s vision for a blink, drifting dark circles like twin eclipses, before cloudy plastic wrenched against her face. It flattened across her brow, pressed down the tip of her pointy nose, and squeezed her strong chin, smothering all reflections in a whitish fog of exhalation.

Blanca tucked one arm over the rim of the stiff two-gallon freezer bag, sealing it to Carmen’s throat. Her other hand slid up Carmen’s head and laid a gentle hand on top. She kissed the outer plastic, her lower lip’s two studs pressing cold to Carmen’s temple while Carmen sucked in a breath that wouldn’t come.

“I thought we had something special,” Blanca said. “But you’ve fucked me over for the last time.”

Seconds passed. Maybe a breathless minute. Carmen couldn’t say how much time slid by before she began to fight. Couldn’t see a clock. Couldn’t open her mouth with Blanca gripping the bag beneath her jaw.

Blanca leaned close and kissed the plastic again. “And now, you can die for me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Die slowly, my love.”

Carmen thrashed to one side, her naked legs rising slightly, but the restraints held firm. Her thighs thumped up and down against the chair, neck catching with Blanca’s grip, and an inner fist tensed between her thighs.

No escape. Trapped in delicious suffocation and its ecstatic thrill.

Blanca unstuck the bag from Carmen’s neck, only long enough for a breath, and then hugged it to her...

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Verlag
S&S/Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668077086
ISBN 13 
9781668077085
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande