I Can Scare You

I'm a big fan of old browser games.

I used to play a lot of them when I was a kid, and while most of them were buggy or repetitive, they were still a great way to kill some time while you were at school or stuck at home. I have many fond memories of sitting at the computer with my friends and laughing and showing each other the games we found on random websites.

When I heard that Java was being phased out, I got to thinking about all the old games that I used to enjoy and decided to track some of them down. I went to Reddit to see if anyone knew any sites that still hosted the games of my youth since many of the sites I'd found them on are now lost to time. A few of them suggested New Grounds, a place I was very familiar with, but a dozen other sites also came up. These were smaller places which made up for their lack of showmanship with a vast selection of retro flash games. I started clicking on them, basking in the nostalgia for a while and losing myself in the simple pleasures of these often simple games.

I mean, I was stuck at home due to quarantine, so what else did I have to do?

That's how I found I Can Scare You.EXE.

I read the description twice, liking what I saw, and wondered how I'd never seen this game before? I used to love the small selection of adventure games you'd sometimes find on java games, little maze runners or exploration adventure games, and this one had a creepy twist to it. I had expected it to be a lot of poorly animated jump scares, probably some loud screams accompanied by the picture of the girl from Poltergeist, but I figured I'd try it out anyway. What did I have to lose, right?

I loaded it up and was greeted by something similar to the screen saver from Windows 95. For those unaware of the concept, screen savers were used back in the day to stop our monitors from screwing up and freezing in place. Windows had many iconic screen savers, but one of the most recognizable was the maze you often saw sprawling out before you as your point of view shifted to follow the runner through it as they search for the exit.

This game had dropped me into a maze with brick walls and a sand floor, an 8-bit soundtrack trying for a creep aesthetic but mostly just sounding spooky. It was a little different than I remembered, though. The walls were black brick, like a negative copy of the maze, and covered in a bright green moss bordering on neon. The sand was also dark, and as I moved, it made that classic game crunch that meant you were moving over dirt. I could hear something like the wind in the background, and as I moved, I could see that the normal pictures on the walls had been replaced with grainy photos of people. The images were pixilated, but clearly actual photos. The strange thing was that they weren't of anything like corpses or monsters or anything. They were just ordinary people, some of them smiling, some of them looking off blankly, but all of them looking like candid shots of people from websites or the DMV or something.

As I moved through the maze, I became aware of a voice that seemed to follow me.

It was just a whisper at first, but the deeper I went into the maze, the louder it became. I would turn around to find that the pictures were still on the wall but that whatever was making the noise was nowhere in sight. The images seemed to repeat themselves, the same ten or twelve photos again and again, and I figured they must be the staff that had worked on the game or something. It was a little creepy having them watch me as I went through the maze, but no creepier than anything else I'd ever seen in a game.

The voice, however, was definitely getting a little nerve-wracking.

I could hear it now, and it was saying the same thing over and over again in a vaguely feminine computerized voice.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

I turned the head of my character, but there was nothing behind me. The voice had sounded close, and I assumed it was the enemy of the game. It kept moving away and getting closer, always just out of sight. So I just kept moving, kept looking for the exit, kept making my way. There was always an exit in the screen saver that made the maze fall apart, and a new maze would begin.

When I found what I was looking for, it turned out to be the last thing I'd expected.

I came around a corner and heard the voice getting louder.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

I turned left and found a dead end.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

I dashed back out and took a right instead.

Then I found another dead end.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

I sighed and turned to face my fate.

That's when I saw what beast lurked in this maze.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

It was a grainy picture just like the other, but this one moved and was far from the bland recreations the others had been. The image's eyes appeared to leak blood, the mouth crunching as it blared its ceaseless words. It barrelled towards me lamely, filling the whole hallway, its face twisted in pixilated agony as it crashed closer and closer.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

Despite its alarming form, it was clearly a picture of my dad's face.

I back peddled in fear, running and taking turns at random, until I finally came to a dead-end that contained a single, floating picture.

If this was the exit grid, I didn't want to know what sort of new maze it would take me to.

It was a crumpled body, a car accident or a hit and run, lying in the street in a squishy mass of broken flesh. It was grainy and pixilated like the others, but this one made me stop and gasp a little as I tried to make sense of it. The body's face was pointing to the sky, its mouth open and its eyes staring. As I looked at it, the blood seemed to pool around it, glistening wetly despite its origin.

"I can scare you. I can kind of scare you."

I jumped as I heard the phrase uttered right behind me, loud enough to make my speakers crackle.

Suddenly, my POV fell over, and my screen was covered in red as the screaming monster with my father's face crunched its jaws over me.

I turned the screen off and pushed away from my computer, suddenly not wanting to see anymore.

The last image had been the most familiar of all.

It wasn't every day you got to look at your own face as you lay dying.

The other pictures had been strangers, weird stock images, but the images of my father and I had been as unique as they were jarring. The face of my father had been twisted in agony, and the eyes had been turned up in anger as the neon red blood oozed from them. My own face and body had been confused, devoid of hope, as it lay bleeding to death in a pool of its own pixilated blood. Even if the game somehow pulled pictures from your computer, they couldn't have gotten either of those from any of the images I had.

No picture of my father existed that looked like that, and certainly, no picture of me existed anywhere like that one.

I closed the game and realized that at some point, it had gotten dark. Looking at my watch, I realized I had been playing that game for three hours, and it was pushing midnight. Shutting down and climbing in bed, I tossed and turned as I tried to push the image of that final horror out of my mind. As grainy and unreal as it had been, it was still a picture of me as I lay dying. How did they have it? Where had it come from?

Those images followed me into sleep, and they haunted my dreams all night. I found that I was running from that hellish thing in my nightmare as it screeched and chomped right behind me. It didn't beat around the bush this time, and it dogged my heels for hours as I ran through that 8-bit maze. Right at the end, I came to a dead-end and saw my own body lying on the floor, surrounded by blood. I rolled my head lamely to look at myself, moaning out a mouthful of blood as the huge dad head fell on me and turned my world red.

When my cellphone woke me up at seven-fifteen, it was almost a blessing.

I reached for it groggily, seeing my mom's number and answering it shakily.

"'llo?"

"Hunny? Baby, I need you to listen for a minute. There's been an accident. Your," she sobbed a little before continuing, "Your father's dead, sweetheart."

I sat up quickly, still thinking I was dreaming.

"What?"

"Turn on the news, Hunny. It... it's been all over the news since it happened. I need you to come to the house right away. I need...I need someone here with me."

I told her I would, and she hung up as I walked into the living room and switched on the TV, wondering what I would find on the screen.

It had been a bus accident that had happened about an hour and a half ago. Dad, the other passengers, and the driver had been killed when another bus had t-boned them at an intersection. The bus dad was on had been crushed against a storefront, and the engine had ignited. The ensuing fire had made rescue very difficult. After extinguishing it, emergency services had really only been rescuing bodies.

Then they started flashing the pictures of the deceased across the screen, and I felt the remote slip from my hands and clatter to the hardwood.

I recognized all of them.

They were the faces in the maze.

I flopped bonelessly onto the couch, my legs refusing to hold me up.

I'm curled up on the couch now, filled with a deep sense of dread over the knowledge I seem to possess.

Everyone I'd seen in the maze last night was now dead, all except for one.

I had seen my own contorted face as I lay broken on the floor of that 8-bit maze. If everyone I had seen there was supposed to die today, why had I seen my picture? I hadn't died. I was still clearly alive.

For now.

People keep calling me, but all I can do is hunker on my couch and wait.

Waiting for my own fate to come and sweep me off the board as well.

So if you stumble across this game in your internet travels, do yourself a favor and don't play it.

I wish I never had.