Scary and Horrible story on Mt silver

Little Brother..?

I walked in and found my brother sitting on the edge of his bed. His GBA was in pieces on the floor at his feet, smashed to bits. Next to him on the bed were a hammer and our mother’s gardening scissors. His face was paler than I’d ever seen it, even whiter than the time we’d gone corning and the old guy up the street, legally blind and a raving nutcase, had come and chased us into the trees with a shotgun. It was now I also noticed the GameShark on the ground, and a silver cartridge corner poking from under his bed. Somehow they had been spared the wrath of the hammer.

“Are you okay?” I asked. I remember the chills that ran through me. He was my little brother. Seeing him like this was horrifying.

“It was awful,” I remember him rasping, and the way his voice rattled made my knees weak. “Oh god. White everywhere, and then BLACK…”

I remember running over and hugging him. And I remember, his limp arm fell and brushed the Gameboy in my pocket, and his sudden scream, right in my ear, making me jump and bite my tongue by accident. He ripped the handheld from my pocket and hurled it at the far wall. I cried out at the dent the plastic system made there, running over to collect it. The screen had gone dark, and though I feared the worst when I flicked the switch it powered up normally. I waited there in the corner, trying to pretend the GBA mattered enough not to go and run for our mom.

The volume was on.

The Pokémon theme started up, and he screamed again, picking up the hammer. This time I screamed, too, and ran from the room with my GBA clutched to my chest like a shield.

He ended up in the psyche ward of the hospital for two days. When we went to visit him, I left my GBA at home. No one could figure out what had set off his strange, manic behavior. There was some talk that I didn’t understand at the time about some kind of disorder he may or may not have had, but even though mom and I had collected and brought in all the cut-up cartridges to be looked at (moms'idea, not mine), no one had even thought to tie it back to the game… maybe that was my fault. I hadn’t said a word about what had happened when he had accidentally touched my Gameboy, or the blind, white terror he had been thrown into when the music had started. On my last visit to the hospital before school on the second day, I was left alone in the room with him while mom had some private talk with the doctor about precautions to take should this happen again. I sat in a chair next to the bed where he was staring at the ceiling. But then suddenly he sat up, making me flinch.

“Hey,” he told me, “Angie. Go in my room when you get home.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, and then I remembered the things we hadn’t packed up and brought in… the game and the hacking tool under his bed.

“Get rid of them. I don’t ever want to play with them ever again.”

His voice was so weary and desperate… he sounded like an old man on his deathbed. My poor, damaged little brother… how could I refuse?

“Promise you’ll get rid of them.”

“Okay. I promise.”

I was carted off to school late, and through the whole day I only had my promise to him in my head. I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last time that I could ever play the big-sister role and help him out. I just had to get home and get rid of that game… but as the day went on a sick curiosity started to go through my own head. What could possibly have happened to that game that scared him so badly? I was scared, myself, but I just had to know. I had to.

I got home and went right into his room, bent on uncovering whatever horror was waiting for me. Mom had since vacuumed the room, and the cartridge and GameShark were no longer visible. I got down and crawled half under the bed, feeling timid but holding onto the promise I made as my badge of courage. Under the bed there was enough dust to make me cough, enough old Legos and various other toys that I couldn’t set my elbow down without it landing on something. But I finally saw both objects. They’d been shoved to the corner, on top of a notebook that looked too new to have been down here long. Unthinking, I grabbed the corner of the paper and dragged everything out with me, still wheezing from the dust. (Allergies and all.)

They looked so innocent, simple toys and a simple, spiral-bound bunch of papers. When I set Silver version and the GameShark on the floor, I took a closer look at the notebook. On it were scrawled at least twenty different cheat codes, but one had been scratched out with sharpie over where it had initially been drawn in with pen. This was confusing. He had REALLY tried to erase it out- the marker had been pressed to the paper so hard that ink soaked through most of the pages behind it, almost 2/3rds of the way to the card-stock back cover. But pen has a way of sticking around. I picked up the notebook and tilted it backward in the light, and the reflective surface of the sharpie revealed the indents that had been left where he’d written. The code was an unintelligible mess of letters and numbers, but the words next to it confused me.

“Easter Egg – Snow on Mt. Silver”

I remembered what he had said when I’d found him… he had been raving about white, white and then black… could he mean snow? Even though it was only August and the temperature was still climbing to 90 degrees every day, a chill ran down my spine. Did I dare…?

I picked everything up and brought it to my room, and laid it out on the carpet in front of me with my own GBA next to it. For a long time I just stared down at it, and the longer I looked, the more maniacal Lugia’s face became on the sticker… like some kind of twisted grin, like it was daring me to find out what had happened to my brother. I was a 14 year old kid. Did I really want to tempt fate and risk ending up like him? I glared down at Lugia for awhile longer.

I had to see.

I slid Gold out of my GBA and stuck Silver in in its place. It took me almost 15 minutes to compose myself and turn it on.

It started up normally. I left the sound on low, too afraid of what I might hear to keep it up the full way, and too curious to turn it the whole way off. The title screen was normal, too. Lugia again, but somehow menacing despite my common sense telling me it was exactly the same picture as every other time I had started up the game. How bad could this be? I asked myself. His notes said Easter egg. Didn’t that mean that that was coding already in the game? The menu came up… still absolutely normal.