ALKMAAR HORROR STORY
Chapter Five: Milos' Cave — The Neverending Game
The building was in a part of the city that had no particular opinion about itself — mid-block, mid-height, the kind of residential building that existed in every Dutch city in the same way traffic signs existed, functionally and without ambition. Third floor. The hallway smelled like someone had microwaved something aggressively on a regular basis and had no regrets about it.
Milos' door had a sign on it.
The sign said: NO ENTRY WITHOUT CLEARING CACHE.
Nobody knew what this meant. Tijjani took a photograph of it for reasons he did not explain.
The door swung open before any of them knocked, because Milos had a camera above the door and had been watching them come down the hallway on his phone and had timed the opening for maximum dramatic effect. He was already gone by the time they registered the open door — already retreated into the darkness beyond it, a pair of socked feet visible briefly before disappearing around a corner.
"Shut the door," his voice floated back. "Or you'll lag me."
They shut the door.
The apartment was dark in the particular way of a place that had decided against natural light as a lifestyle choice. Blackout curtains, total coverage, not a seam of daylight. What there was instead: RGB. A wall of it. A TV that was less a television and more an architectural feature — it occupied an entire wall, or seemed to, the kind of screen that in any other context would belong in a sports bar or a small cinema and here simply belonged to an eighteen-year-old from Alkmaar who had made certain decisions about priorities. Seven gaming chairs arranged in a semicircle, each with a small side table, each with a controller placed on it with the precision of someone who had thought about ergonomics.
The RGB pulsed. Blue to purple to green. The effect was like standing inside a machine that was thinking.
Jesper looked around, then looked at the source of the smell that had hit them at the door — a battleground of empty cans on the kitchen counter, Monster and Celsius and one brand with a name that appeared to be in all capitals and a font suggesting it had been designed by someone who had consumed its own product. He wrinkled his nose. "It smells like Monster energy and sadness."
"It smells like ambition," Milos said, reappearing with his headset around his neck and a bag of chips under one arm. He had the expression of a man who was exactly where he was supposed to be, doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing, which for Milos meant here, in the dark, in front of the screens. He was alive in the way he was only alive here — lit from within by something that had no equivalent in the outside world.
Tijjani had found an air freshener somewhere in the entry hall — a can of something citrus — and was holding it with the expression of a man who intended to use it preemptively and at regular intervals. "I'm spraying this every five minutes."
"You'll ruin the atmosphere."
"I'm counting on it."
Yuki looked around the room with his usual attending quality — taking it in fully, registering it, making no immediate judgment. "Me think," he said, "house very. Unique."
"Thank you," Milos said, with complete sincerity.
Sven was examining the gaming chairs with the mild curiosity of someone who had never owned one and was trying to understand the design philosophy. "Thank you for letting us stay," he said, because Sven said this everywhere, in every house, as a first principle of arriving in someone else's space.
"Sit down, don't touch the settings on the chairs, the inputs are labeled." Milos threw himself into the central chair — largest, most elaborately equipped, positioned at the exact optimal distance from the screen, which told you everything about Milos that you needed to know. "Tonight, we game." He gestured at the controllers on the side tables. "You can leave when you beat the final level."
Sam, in the process of lowering himself into one of the chairs with the expression of a man who had never voluntarily sat in anything that didn't cost four figures, looked over. "What level is that?"
Milos paused. Something moved across his face — briefly, a flicker of something that was not quite the confidence he was performing. "I don't remember," he said.
A beat.
"What?" Sam said.
"I said I don't remember." He put his headset on. "We'll know it when we get there. Start."
They played.
This was the honest accounting of the first hour: they played, and it was fine, and some of it was actually fun, which was the thing none of them had been expecting and which made everything that came after considerably worse. Mario Kart first — Milos had set it up presumably as an onramp, something social and non-threatening, and it worked in the way that Mario Kart always worked, which was to produce within fifteen minutes a room full of people yelling at each other with genuine feeling about things that were happening on a screen. Tijjani played with the controlled aggression of a man for whom competitive instinct was simply the resting state. Jens was unexpectedly good, which surprised everyone including Jens. Sven kept finishing last with the serene equanimity of someone who had decided participation was sufficient. Yuki watched his character drive off the edge of Rainbow Road three times in a row and nodded at each occasion as if it confirmed something he'd suspected.
Jesper won twice. He celebrated the second time by standing up from his chair and doing something physical that nobody could fully categorize but that involved his arms.
"Sit down," Tijjani said.
"Champion behavior," Jesper said, sitting down.
Jens looked at him with an expression that was approximately sixty percent fond and forty percent please stop doing things that make me want to laugh and said nothing.
Then they played something else. Then something else. The screens cycled — Milos controlled the rotation, producing games from what appeared to be an inexhaustible library, each one beginning correctly and familiar and then, as the hours accumulated, beginning to feel less so. The Valorant maps started looking like places they'd been. The survival horror they cycled through at some point showed a house that was not quite Sam's mansion and not quite Tijjani's high-rise but had elements of both. Sven's Tetris blocks fell at angles that didn't follow the rules of Tetris geometry and he kept playing anyway, methodically, adapting to the logic of it rather than questioning the logic, which was the most Sven way to respond to something being wrong.
Time did its thing.
"How long have we been here?" Jesper said.
He said it to the room in general. His eyes were on the screen, still. He had not looked away from the screen in a while — he'd noticed this fact at some peripheral level and had been meaning to look away and had kept not doing it, the way you keep meaning to put your phone down.
"Like, one hour," Milos said, from the center chair, where he'd been since they started and where he showed no signs of having moved, though somehow chips had been consumed and cans had been opened and the small side table next to him was developing its own ecosystem.
Sven checked his phone. He looked at the screen. He looked at it again. He looked at Milos. "It says twenty-nine hours."
Silence. The kind of silence that existed in the room around the sound of the games, which were still going, controllers still in hands, thumbs still moving, because the absence of decision to stop playing was the same as continuing.
"That can't—" Sam started.
"Twenty-nine hours," Sven said. He showed Sam the screen. Sam looked at it. He looked at the time displayed. He looked at the blackout curtains and thought about what he would find behind them in terms of daylight or the absence of it.
He had not thought to look behind the curtains. He realized he had not thought to look, at any point in the last twenty-nine hours, and this realization sat in him like something cold.
"Milos," he said.
"Mm."
"Twenty-nine hours."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
Milos glanced at him from behind the headset with the expression of someone who had been here many times before and had long since normalized the coordinates. "Time moves different when you're gaming," he said. "That's not news."
"For twenty-nine—"
"Are you winning or losing?"
Sam looked at his screen. He was losing. He'd been losing for what he now understood was a very long time, respawning each time with the automatic reflex of someone who had never decided to stop, who had just kept going because the going was continuous and the stopping required a decision that had not presented itself as available.
He put the controller down.
It restarted.
Not the game — the controller. In his hands. Powered back on, inputs reset, the game on his screen refreshing to a new state without memory of the last one. He stared at it.
He put it down again.
It restarted again.
He stared at it for a long moment.
He picked it up.
The montage of the next stretch was not dramatic, which was the thing. It was mundane in the way that only very specific kinds of horror were mundane — the horror of a loop that had no seam, no moment of transition that you could point to and say there, that's when it changed. It was just more of the same thing, incrementally, the light on the screens cycling through its colors, the games cycling through their worlds, seven people in gaming chairs doing the same motion with their thumbs over and over while the clocks on their phones showed numbers that stopped making intuitive sense.
Sam found a menu. He found a menu at some point in some game that he hadn't been playing for long enough to understand the interface of, and in the menu there was an option:
[PAY 9,999,999 CREDITS TO EXIT]
He stared at this for a moment.
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
He went into the in-game economy and found that he had accumulated, across however many hours he'd been playing, approximately twelve thousand credits. He looked at the exit cost again. He checked the in-game store to see if credits could be purchased with real currency.
They could not.
He closed the menu and kept playing, because the alternative was to put the controller down, which would restart it, and putting it down and having it restart was somehow worse than just playing, was somehow the more maddening option, and Sam's relationship to maddening options was to refuse them.
Tijjani had, at some point, stopped trying to play and started trying to solve. This was a distinction: his controller went down and when it restarted he looked at the restart rather than at the game and thought about the mechanism of the restart, the what and why of it, the logic underneath. He stood up. He walked to the wall of equipment — the consoles, the cables, the power strip, the elaborate infrastructure of Milos' setup — and he started pulling. Systematically. Cable by cable, console by console, the careful deconstruction of a man who believed firmly in the principle that all problems had physical causes and therefore physical solutions.
Nothing changed.
The screens stayed on. The games kept running. He held a power cable in one hand with nothing connected to either end of it and watched the TV continue to play.
He turned around and looked at Milos.
Milos looked back at him with the expression of someone watching a known outcome arrive.
"I lied," Milos said. "About being able to leave."
The room had a moment.
"You what," Tijjani said.
"I said you could leave when you beat the final level." He put a chip in his mouth. "I don't remember what the final level is. So."
"So."
"So technically I can't have lied because I didn't know—"
"Milos."
"We're fine."
"We have been here for — Sven, how long—"
"The phone says thirty-one hours now," Sven said, from his chair, where he was still playing Tetris. His voice was very calm. The blocks on his screen were falling at angles that were geometrically impossible and he was adapting to each one without complaint.
Jesper slammed his controller down. It restarted. He slammed it again. "I'm not playing anymore," he said, loud, the voice he used when he'd made a decision and was informing the room.
"Then you can't leave," Milos said.
"You just said we could leave when—"
"I lied about that too."
Jesper looked at Jens. Jens looked at the room. The room had the quality it had been developing for a while now — the walls slightly closer than they'd been, or possibly the same distance but feeling closer, the darkness outside the RGB pulse slightly more total, the air slightly more the specific air of a place that had been sealed for a long time.
"We're unplugging everything," Jens said. Flat. Decided.
"Go for it," Milos said.
Jens went for it.
He pulled every cable he could find. He went methodically through the setup with Tijjani, the two of them working in coordinated silence, and every cable they pulled was succeeded by a screen that stayed on and a game that kept running and an infrastructure that apparently had no relationship to the physical objects responsible for it.
Jens stood in the middle of the room with a handful of HDMI cables and looked at the still-running screens.
He dropped the cables.
"Okay," he said.
He went back to Jesper. He sat next to him. He put his arm around him. Jesper leaned into him and neither of them picked up a controller and neither of them, when the controllers restarted themselves, reached for them, and they just sat there in the RGB dark together and let it run.
Yuki had not touched a controller.
He sat in his chair in the lotus position with his hands on his knees and his eyes mostly closed, the way he sat everywhere, and the games ran on the screen in front of him anyway. He had not chosen to play and the game was playing regardless, running without input, the character on his screen moving through its world on its own, purposefully, as if it had somewhere to be.
The colors pulsed across his face. Blue. Purple. Green.
He watched the game play itself with the expression of someone watching a thing that does not surprise them but that they find instructive.
Even when I do nothing, he thought. It comes for me.
He had not resisted. He had also not engaged. He had done what he always did, which was to sit at the center of the thing and watch it fully, and what he was watching was this: the game knew him. The game that was running without his input was running through places that looked like places he'd been, was making choices he would have made, was navigating the world in the way he would navigate the world, and nobody had told it anything about him.
He sat and breathed and let the colors pulse across his face.
The hunger of this house, he thought, is the most honest one. The others wanted memory, reflection, quiet, peace. This one wants time. Just time. Just all of it, all the time, forever.
He thought about Milos. He thought about what it meant to love something the way Milos loved this — genuinely, completely, with the part of yourself that needed to love something unconditionally. He thought about what it cost to have the thing you loved unconditionally also be the thing that was eating your hours in the dark with no windows.
He thought: me understand.
He thought: me think that does not make it okay.
He sat in his chair and breathed.
Sven lost track of time first.
He knew this retrospectively, which was the only way you could know it — you couldn't track the moment of losing track, you could only notice, at some later point, that the track had been lost for a while before you noticed its absence. He looked up from his screen at some point and felt the disjoint of someone who has been somewhere else and has returned to find the room rearranged, and the rearrangement was not physical — the room was the same room, same chairs, same screens, same RGB — but temporal. He had been inside the Tetris long enough that outside it felt like a surface he wasn't sure he could breathe on.
He thought: I didn't mean to stay.
He thought about his white house, his quiet rooms, the six cups of water. He thought about the silence and how it had felt, initially, like relief, and how relief and surrender were easy to confuse in the moment. He thought about Milos' cave and how it was the same principle in different colors — not silence but noise, not stillness but constant motion, two different routes to the same disappearance.
He set his controller down.
It restarted.
He picked it up. He looked at the screen. He set it back down with the precise movement of someone who is performing the action of setting something down as a choice rather than a reflex, a deliberate and considered release.
It restarted.
He set it down again.
It restarted.
He set it down again. And kept his hands in his lap. And looked at his hands rather than the screen. And sat with the discomfort of the restart happening without his participation, with the game running without him, with the loop continuing regardless.
He sat with it.
He did not pick it up.
The restart happened again. And again. And he kept his hands in his lap and breathed.
The final level arrived without announcement.
The screens, which had been running six different games in six different worlds, went briefly to black — all of them, simultaneously — and then came back showing the same thing. All six of them showing the same room.
The room was this room. The gaming cave. Seven chairs, the big screen, the RGB, the consoles. And in the chairs: them. Their own faces, rendered with the specific fidelity of something that had been watching them long enough to learn the details, staring at screens, controllers in hand. Playing.
The image on the screen was this room. They were looking at themselves looking at a screen showing themselves looking at a screen. The recursion of it completed several cycles before anyone spoke.
"This is us," Jesper said. His voice was very quiet.
"I know," Jens said.
"That's us. On the screen. That's—"
"I know."
Sam looked at his screen-self with the expression of a man encountering a piece of information he intends to dispute and cannot find the grounds for. The screen-Sam was reaching for the menu. Was finding the exit prompt. Was seeing the credit cost. Was making the same sound — he could see it on the screen-Sam's face, the same expression he'd made, the not-quite-laugh.
It was looping. He was watching himself loop.
"Milos," he said.
Milos was the only one who wasn't looking at the screen. He was looking at all of them — sitting sideways in his chair with his headset down around his neck, watching, his face doing something complicated and private that was not the performing-chaos expression he usually showed the world. He looked, in this moment, very young. He looked, in this moment, like someone who had built the most elaborate possible house out of the materials of his one great love and was only now, watching his friends in it, beginning to understand what the house had cost him to live in.
"Milos," Sam said again. "How do we win."
Milos' mouth curved into the grin — the one, the unhinged one, the one that meant he was about to say something that was either very funny or very terrible or both. "Who said you can?"
Tijjani stood up. He walked to Milos' chair. He stood over him with the particular energy of a man who has been patient across a long night and several iterations of the same problem and has arrived at the end of patience. "How long," he said.
"How long what."
"How long have we been here."
Milos glanced at his phone. He looked at the number. Something passed across his face that was not quite the bravado, not quite the chaos — something underneath those, something that might have been the first honest thing he'd shown any of them since they'd walked through the door. "Forty-seven hours," he said.
The number sat in the room.
"What the fuck," Jesper said.
"I know," Milos said.
"Forty-seven—"
"I know."
"Did you know?" Tijjani said. Not accusing — actually asking. Needing the answer. "When we came in. Did you know what this would do."
Milos was quiet for a moment. The screens showed their looping selves, playing and replaying the same stretch of hours. The RGB pulsed. Blue. Purple. Green.
"I knew time moved different," he said. "I didn't know it would — " He gestured at the screens, at the room, at all of it. "I didn't know it would get like this. I just thought — " He stopped.
"You just thought what," Sven said. Gentle. From his chair, where he'd been watching Milos since the screens went unified, with that attending quality, all the way in.
Milos looked at the screens. At his own face on every screen, grinning — ready for another round? — the pixelated version of him, glitching slightly at the edges, wearing the expression he always wore in here. Happy. Completely and uncomplicatedly happy, in the way he could not always locate when he was outside.
"I thought it was the safest place," he said. "Like. I thought if I could just — keep everyone here, in here, where everything makes sense and the rules are the rules and you can always respawn — " He stopped again. He looked at his hands. "I'm eighteen," he said. "I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. But in here I know exactly what I'm doing."
The room was quiet. Not Sven's silence — a different quiet. The quiet of people who have been frightened and tired and are now being offered, unexpectedly, something real, and don't know immediately how to hold it.
Jens looked at him for a long moment. "You were keeping us here," he said. Not a question.
"Not — I mean. Yes. But not like. Not on purpose—"
"Milos."
"I wanted — " Milos ran a hand through his hair. It was dirty. They'd all been here forty-seven hours and none of them had slept properly and they all looked like what they were, which was people at the end of something. "I wanted everyone to stay," he said. "Just. Somewhere no one could get hurt. Somewhere the worst thing that can happen is you lose a round."
"You can respawn," Sven said.
"You can always respawn," Milos said. "That's the whole—that's the whole thing. Out there you can't respawn. Out there you just—" He made a gesture that encompassed something too large for the room. "You just lose."
A silence.
Sam looked at the ceiling. He looked like a man doing internal work he would not describe aloud. Then he looked at Milos, and his expression had moved past all its usual configurations — past the sassy, past the bossy, past the carefully maintained architecture of someone who had been nepo-babied through a world that never pushed back — to something simpler and less defended.
"Kid," he said.
"Don't call me kid—"
"Milos." Sam leaned forward. "You can't keep people safe by keeping them in a loop."
"You're one to talk," Tijjani said, to Sam.
"I know," Sam said. "That's why I'm saying it."
The screens went dark.
All at once — not the blackout of before, not the transitional black of the final level appearing, just off. Done. The RGB took a moment longer and then that too, just the faintest pulse, then nothing. The room in the dark, actual dark, without the screens to define the space.
Then, in the dark, the words appeared on the main screen:
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING.
The light of it — white text, clean, no frills — was very small in the big screen and very large in the room.
Milos stood up. He stretched. His spine cracked in several places. He picked up his controller and set it on the side table and looked at it for a moment, and then he walked to the blackout curtains and grabbed them and pulled them back.
Light came in like something that had been waiting.
Actual morning light — pale and direct and completely indifferent to what had happened in this room over the last forty-seven hours, the city outside running its ordinary morning in the ordinary way, people below going somewhere, a tram, pigeons on a window ledge, the sky doing its flat northern thing of being overcast and silver and providing illumination without spectacle.
They all looked at the light.
Nobody moved for a moment.
"Okay," Milos said. "You're free."
They moved to the door in the way of people who had been in one position for too long — careful, slightly disconnected from the mechanics of their own limbs, eyes still adjusting. Shoes found, coats found, Milos' apartment restoring itself to the background of the story on their way out.
At the door Tijjani stopped. He turned around. He looked at Milos, who was standing in the middle of his den with the morning light now coming properly into it, making the cans on the counter and the cables on the floor and the seven empty gaming chairs visible in full clarity. It looked smaller in real light. It looked like what it was, which was a room that an eighteen-year-old from Alkmaar lived in by himself and had arranged around the thing he loved most because the thing he loved most had never let him down.
Tijjani looked at all of this.
"How long," he said, "have you been doing this."
Milos shrugged. One shoulder. "Gaming?"
"Living here. Like this. Alone."
A pause.
"Two years," Milos said.
Tijjani held his gaze for a moment. He said nothing. He turned and walked out.
The street received them without comment. Morning, grey, cool, the city already running at its regular pace. They stood on the pavement outside the building and did the thing they'd been doing outside each house, which was to stand in the daylight and recalibrate — reestablishing that the outside existed, that time was moving in one direction again, that they were out.
Jesper's eyes were raw. He pressed the heels of his hands to them and leaned back against the building and said: "What the fuck."
"Yes," Sven said.
"Forty-seven hours."
"I know."
"I stopped wanting to leave," Jesper said. He said it the way he said things he didn't want to be true about himself — directly, because that was how Jesper operated, because Jesper believed that the quickest way past an uncomfortable truth was through it. "At some point in there I just — stopped. I forgot why I was trying to get out. I liked the colors." He paused. "That's terrifying."
"Yes," Sven said again.
Jens had his hand on the back of Jesper's neck. The touch of someone who had spent forty-seven hours trying to hold onto a person who kept drifting toward a screen and was not going to stop touching him now that they were out. "You came back," Jens said.
"Did I choose to or did the game just end?"
Jens didn't answer. He didn't have one.
Sam was looking at his phone. He had forty-seven hours of notifications — things that had happened in the world while he'd been in a gaming chair, messages, news, the ordinary content of an active life continuing without him. He scrolled through them. He felt, looking at them, the particular dislocation of someone who has returned from somewhere and found that the world did not notice the absence.
"We were never playing a game," Sven said. His voice was hoarse. He was looking at the building, at the third-floor window where the blackout curtain had been pulled back and the morning light was visible inside.
Sam looked up from his phone. He looked at the building. He thought about the exit prompt — the nine million credits, the cost that existed to show you what the cost was rather than to actually be paid. He thought about putting the controller down and it restarting. The loop of the thing.
"We were the game," Sam said.
Nobody disagreed.
Yuki stood at the edge of the group with his hands in his pockets and looked at the building with that expression of his — the one that was reading something below the surface of things, that was already three steps into the understanding of what the thing meant. He thought about the game playing itself on his screen without his input. The colors finding his face regardless.
He thought about Milos saying I thought it was the safest place with the specific conviction of someone who had been coming to that same conclusion his entire life and had never had anyone tell him otherwise.
He thought: me understand. Me think everyone understand.
He thought: me think that is the problem.
Upstairs, behind the window where the curtain was pulled back, Milos was sitting in his chair again. They could see him from the street — small, three floors up, the morning light on him now, controller in hand, screen on. Playing.
He would stop, probably. Eventually. He would go to sleep and wake up and eat something that was not an energy drink and talk to people and exist in the world in the way that was required of him. He knew how. He just also knew, with the specific certainty of someone who had discovered the one place where everything made sense and nothing could reach him and you could always respawn, that he would come back.
He always came back.
The screen pulsed. Blue to purple to green, visible even in the morning, even from the street.
Just one more round, it said. The way it always said.
Just one more.
Escapism always costs time you'll never get back. The comfort of never having to face your real life — until you realize you can't ever go back. Just one more round.