RED63TENNIS
RED63TENNIS
A short psycholocical horror from Dayfall
Copyright © 2023 Liam Armitage – All rights reserved
Cover Design: Leto Armitage
Content Warnings
࿐ ࿔*˖𓇼 DEDICATION 𓇼˖*࿔࿐
This story is dedicated to everyone like me.
Everyone who picked up some old magazine, comic book, or beat-up paperback, fell into the world of imagination and decided never to leave.
࿐ ࿔*˖𓇼 DESCRIPTION 𓇼˖*࿔࿐
When an online game becomes a deadly obsession
Terrence Floyd discovered Red63Tennis by accident—a small Reddit community where players competed to find real-world combinations of the color red, tennis, and the number 63. What started as a quirky internet puzzle game quickly became an addiction, turning his daily life into a treasure hunt for the most creative connections.
The community was tight-knit and friendly. They even met up at conventions. It was the kind of harmless fun the internet was made for.
Then the deaths began.
It started with a jogger in a red shirt having a heart attack on State Road 63 near Tennis Road. Odd, but explainable. Then a 63-year-old tennis player died in a freak accident on a red clay court. Still within the realm of coincidence.
But as Terrence’s online friends begin disappearing one by one—each death grotesquely incorporating all three elements of their game—he’s forced to confront an impossible reality. Is this elaborate pattern the result of statistical noise, or has their innocent obsession attracted the attention of something that doesn’t want to be found?
BrokenMirrorSelfie, DarthCookieMonster, PMMeYourToes—each player who tried to document the phenomenon vanished, only to surface in increasingly bizarre obituaries. One theorist suggested they’d stumbled onto a debugging flag in the universe’s source code, marking them for deletion by some cosmic programmer.
Terrence knows it sounds insane. He tells himself it’s just trauma, just anxiety, just grief over lost friends. But he can’t fill his gas tank without terror that the pump will stop at 63 cents. He drives twenty minutes out of his way to avoid tennis courts. He won’t wear red.
Because deep down, he knows the truth: some patterns are more than coincidence, some games have rules you never agreed to play by, and sometimes the only way to win is to never have started playing at all.
But when you’re already in the game, quitting might not be an option.
A psychological horror story about the patterns we see, the connections we make, and the terrible possibility that sometimes, the universe is watching back.
࿐ ࿔*˖𓇼 EXCERPT 𓇼˖*࿔࿐
The office had cream walls and watercolors of nature scenes, selected from catalogs to be neutral and calming. The comfortable furniture was made of wood and cloth in a mid-century, rustic style. The middle-aged doctor, a woman, wore black pants and a pink, silk top. She looked through her circular glasses at the disheveled man, in jeans and a t-shirt, who was wiping his sweaty palms on his thighs. The receptionist had shown him in and she gave him enough time to settle down before they started. “Mr. Floyd, may I call you Terrence?”
“Sure. Dr. Halloway?”
“Debrah, please.” She smiled as she wrote on a legal pad with efficient strokes.
“Debrah, okay.” He clasped his hands together and tried not to let his leg vibrate.
“You seem a bit nervous, can I get you something to drink?”
“Uh, tea? Something with chamomile?”
“Absolutely. Sugar? Milk?”
“A little sugar, please.” He forced himself to smile.
The doctor walked over to an electric kettle, opened a wooden box, took out a teabag, and fixed his tea in a white cup. Her flat shoes made no sounds thanks to the thick, brown rugs. She gave him the cup before resettling behind her desk with a fresh cup of coffee for herself.
“Now, Terrence, have you seen a psychiatrist before?”
He shook his head jerkily. “No, never.”
“It’s fine to be nervous. A lot of people think it means something is wrong, but I’m just here to make a preliminary evaluation and see what we can do to help you.“
“I hope you can. I’m crazy after all,” he said, barking a short laugh.
She smiled pleasantly. “You’re looking for help, which means a lot. You said on the phone you knew you were being irrational. The word crazy has a lot of negative biases that I don’t subscribe to, but even if I did, what you’re doing, the help you’re getting, aren’t signs of being crazy.”
“You haven’t heard this shit in my head yet, though.” He snorted.
“Well, try me. But let’s start with how you’re feeling. What is your mental state right now?”
“Um, I’m anxious, on the edge. I feel like I’m about to run screaming out of my skin.”
“Do you often feel like this?”
“A bit. I’ve always been a little twitchy, and worried a lot, but not with a fixation like this.”
She stopped writing. “Fixation?”
“Yeah, it’s stupid,” he said, and made a dismissive motion.
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, there is this combination of things. Three things, and… It’s a story, and it’ll sound crazy. I know it’s just a bunch of coincidences. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Tell me about it,” she said again.
“I used to be on Reddit a lot. Ever heard of it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a place where anyone can make their own forums with their own rules. Some are big and actually serious, like World News. Others are just joke ones, like one where people take pictures of bread on trees. One day, I stumbled across the one called Red63Tennis. It was small, but kind of cool, because it was like playing a game where you had to find things in the world. Everyone posted things they found that combined the same three things in some way: the colour red, tennis and the number 63.”
࿐ ࿔*˖𓇼 BUY OR READ IT NOW 𓇼˖*࿔࿐
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࿐ ࿔*˖𓇼 REVIEWS 𓇼˖*࿔࿐
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