The Texas heat was a heavy, wet wool blanket, and the cicadas were screaming so loud I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. I was eight years old, wearing my favorite striped t-shirt, when my mother decided we were going to play a new game.
“It’s called ‘Survivors,’ Mason,” she whispered, her voice sugary sweet but vibrating with a frantic, nervous energy. “We have to be invisible. Go to the storm cellar. Don’t come out until I knock three times. It’s our secret code”.
I saw “Mr. Tate,” the insurance agent, pacing in our kitchen. He looked pale, even in the air conditioning. My mom pushed me toward the yard, her hands feeling clammy against my back. Being an obedient child, desperate for any scrap of her affection, I ran to the cellar and scrambled down into the cool darkness.
Then, I heard the sound that still haunts my nightmares thirty years later.
Clank. The heavy iron latch slid into place. Then came a grinding noise—something heavy, like a cinder block, was being dragged on top of the doors, sealing me in.
“Mom?” I called out. Silence.
Ten minutes later, I heard the high-pitched whine of Mr. Tate’s sedan spinning gravel as it sped away. Then, a new sound drifted down through the ventilation pipe: a whoosh, followed by a roar that sounded like bacon frying in a pan, only a thousand times louder.
I put my eye to the crack in the cellar door. The sky wasn’t blue anymore. It was pitch black, filled with rolling clouds of smoke and orange embers drifting down like snow from hell. My house—my entire world—was an inferno.
The terrifying clarity of a child hit me: This wasn’t a game. She hadn’t locked me in to win. She had locked me in so I couldn’t escape the fire. As the heat turned the cellar into an oven and smoke began to fill my lungs, I realized the “Survivor” game had a price: $50,000 in life insurance… and I was the only loose end.
I waited for the knock. I waited for the “secret code.” But as the roof collapsed with a ground-shaking thud, I realized my mother wasn’t coming back. She was already miles away, driving toward a new life she had bought with my breath…
[The betrayal didn’t end in the ashes. Twenty years later, the “ghost” returned to find her. See how the game finally ends.]