‘The guard greets you with a grunt, carefully unhooking a heavy bunch of keys from his belt,’ he carried on. ‘The clink of metal on metal resounds in the still night air, and you hope that it will not alert other guards to your presence. He fits a key into the iron lock, and you hear the grinding of the mechanism within as he slowly turns it. The door swings open with a creak, and beyond you see only darkness.’
‘We should kill the guard,’ Dun said, with a coldness that I couldn’t imagine being there if he was still cheerful, smiley Archie. ‘Now that he’s let us in. It’s too risky. He knows that we’re here; he could tell anyone and we’d be screwed.’
‘It’s a good point,’ said Hesketh. ‘Secrecy is the only defence we have once we’re in there.’
‘I cannot countenance the murder of an innocent man,’ said Lorien.
‘But he’s one of Brandrel’s men,’ I pointed out. ‘That’s not exactly innocent, is it? He’ll have been pillaging all over the place most of his life.’
Adam watched in silence as we argued the toss. Once we’d made a decision, a couple of rolls of the dice would determine what happened next – whether we succeeded in doing away with the guard; whether, if we decided not to try, he alerted his colleagues to our presence; whether they found us in the darkness underneath the castle.
‘I could cast a spell of silence on him,’ Annella said. Under her blunt dark fringe, Nat’s eyes were bright. ‘It would render him speechless for twenty-four hours, by which time we’d be safely inside. If it works.’
‘I say we do that,’ I said.
‘Agreed,’ said Annella.
‘I still think it would be safer…’ Dun began, but he was outvoted.
‘Very well.’ Adam rolled the dice. ‘An eight. Annella’s spell is successful.’
‘We’d better get our skates on, then,’ Freddie said, then segued back into being Hesketh. ‘I mean, we should make haste, and explore as much of this dungeon as we can whilst we have the cover of darkness and secrecy.’
‘We could split up,’ suggested Lorien. ‘Half of us go to the heart of the castle to find and rescue Zarah and the rest explore a bit and look for treasure.’
‘What? Have you never seen a horror movie, ever? Split up? That’s crazy talk.’
‘It does make sense though. When the guard gets his speech back he’ll sing like a canary, and if we’re in two parties at least that reduces their chances of finding all of us.’
‘We might not have the same fighting power in smaller groups but we could move more quickly and more silently.’
‘And if we split our skills appropriately we’d all be safe enough.’
‘So long as we agree that if we find treasure, we’ll share it equally.’
‘Equal won’t mean a row of beans if we’re all dead.’
We argued a bit, drinking our wine and eating the sausages, buns and potato wedges that Robbie had sent us from the kitchen. I knew that if I was me, I’d want our party to stick together. Cautious, risk-averse Zoë would look for safety in numbers. But I wasn’t me. I was Galena, who barely knew what fear meant.
As we ate and drank and talked, I watched Adam’s face, looking for a hint of what he thought was the right or wrong course of action. But he was impassive, glancing down occasionally at his maps and notes, then looking back at us, half-smiling. His smile was strangely sweet and gentle, at odds with the sharp angles of his face, exaggerated by the candlelight. If Adam was a Dungeons & Dragons character, I thought, he’d be a wizard – wise and kind and a bit mysterious, able to weave magic through the words he spoke.
As Adam described the scene inside the imaginary castle, I could hear – almost like it was in my imagination and the game was real – the background noise of the pub, the clink of glasses and the hum of conversation and laughter. I could smell the food on our table, and taste the red wine in my glass. It was like I was in two places at once, and the bridge between them – the portal, as I guessed Adam might say – was the click of the dice on the wooden table as it decided the outcome of the battle that followed.
‘Without Annella, you are unable to use magic against the undead warriors,’ Adam said softly. ‘Your swords are mere earthly metal, while theirs are forged from materials harder than steel. It is only your skill and courage that allows you to prevail, but at grievous cost. Dun and Hesketh are both wounded, Dun seriously. Lorien must try to tend to their wounds, while performing rites over the fallen ghoul soldiers that will allow them to return at last to the realm of the dead.
‘Next week, we’ll see whether the two of you survive, and how Galena and the others get on in their search for Zarah.’
He stopped and smiled, the spell of his voice broken. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for a long time, and I think the others did too – all at once, we started laughing and chatting, the tension Adam had created dissipating as we returned to reality.
I hurried to the bar and asked Alice to make him a cocktail, and brought it back to him, hoping that he would stay and chat. He took his time sliding his notes and maps together behind the screen, carefully slotting the multifaceted dice into their places in the box and tidying his coloured felt-tip pens away into their case, seemingly oblivious of Alice tidying up around him, the lights in the bar having been turned up, and the last of the punters finishing their drinks and heading out into the night.
I left him to it, giving Alice a hand with the last tasks of the night, feeling the excitement of having been in that other world for three hours gradually seep away and be replaced by tiredness. I was leaning up against the bar, yawning hugely, glancing at my phone, when Adam came up to me, all his stuff now stashed away in his laptop bag.
‘Zoë?’
‘Mmmhmm.’
‘Mind if I ask you something?’
‘Sure.’
‘Does the Ginger Cat do private hire? Like, for parties and stuff?’
‘Yeah. I mean, like, in theory we do. But the last one was a while back, when Maurice and Wesley got married.’
I couldn’t help smiling remembering that day: the pub newly reopened, rainbow bunting strung across the ceiling, Maurice and Wesley glowing with happiness with carnations in their buttonholes. And then I remembered, too, how my own heart had ached when I saw Alice and Joe together, how it had seemed like everyone in the world could be happy, could have someone for their own, except for me.
But now I had Jude. I didn’t have to be lonely, ever again. So why did it feel as if I was?
Adam’s voice jerked me out of my thoughts. ‘My friend’s been travelling with her other half. She’s been in Australia for almost a year and now they’re back, and I wanted to organise something. Like a welcome-home thing. Josh and me organised a surprise birthday party for her a while back, and she loved it. So I thought it would be kind of traditional, you know?’
It had never occurred to me that Adam might have friends. I mean, obviously he had a life outside of the world of the game, and a job and everything, but he’d never struck me as a person who’d book out an entire pub for a party. I didn’t have that many friends myself, I thought.