Carousel Book Six, Chapter 24

Oh gosh, Jerrica, one of the only named characters, had some role to play. Who could have guessed? She's the daughter of the guy who famously had no kids? No way!

It wasn’t exactly a mic drop moment, but Camden and Anna were just beginning.

The family started whispering, but they were so loud I could hear what they were saying. They were a mix of emotions. Disbelief, anger, and concern were all present.

“What does this have to do with the deal?” Gus asked, hoping they actually had a way for him to get out.

“Demons are bound by Common Man’s Law,” Camden said, holding up the book he had been reading throughout the whole storyline. “That’s their whole thing. If you know Common Man’s Law, you can break apart any deal they make. Jerrica was Dante Bonaventura’s daughter, and by Common Man’s Law, that means that when he died, the restaurant passed to her, not Gustavo Senior.”

Whispers moved over the crowd.

“Is this true?” someone in the family asked, looking at Gus as if he would know.

“I... I don’t know,” he answered.

“I do,” Camden said. “I’ve collected evidence going back almost forty years, and I can prove that Jerrica was Dante’s daughter.”

He was waving his stack of papers high, like a lawyer in court about to get his client acquitted.

“First, we went to City Hall and found everything we could connecting Dante Bonaventura and Jerrica’s moth—"

“Make way for the champ!” a voice sounded from the rubble behind us.

It was the Pizza Boxer, the animatronic with boxing gloves and the important job of holding pizza boxes.

The building had collapsed in many places, and lots of things had gotten rearranged as the fire department had gone in and ensured nothing was burning.

The Pizza Boxer was leaning up against one of the walls. I couldn’t even tell if he was plugged in.

His voice box was damaged from the fire, yet he didn’t sound creepy. He sounded like he was persevering.

“I’ll give him the old one-two,” he said, moving his arms up and down, causing himself to fall over into the wall, which broke under his weight.

“What is that?” Isaac asked. He had been standing in the crowd and had abandoned his ferret suit.

The wall had broken open and revealed something dark and square,

Something that looked like a safe.

A very familiar safe.

“An old drop box. It must’ve been walled in during the renovations years ago,” Gus said.

“There’s only one way to win,” the Pizza Boxer said. “You gotta put it to ’em!”

Gus started to crawl into the remains of the building and began trying to pull back some of the wall to reveal the rest of the safe.

“Here, use this,” Isaac said, handing him the pizza paddle that I had used the Insert Shot on to buff its narrative importance.

Gus took it and gave the wall a good smack with the butt end of the peel.

The wall broke loose, and the safe tumbled free, coming to a stop on its feet at the bottom of a pile of rubble.

The door popped open.

Camden looked at me, confused.

We might have stolen his thunder.

Gus bent down and looked into the safe, withdrawing the letter we had found.

He opened the envelope, which had been labeled with his name, though it was actually his father’s name.

“It’s time to make the old man proud,” the Pizza Boxer said, seemingly losing power at the end.

Gus began to read the letter aloud.

I’d already read it. I wasn’t sure how it ended up in a safe in the wall, but I supposed that made more sense than us trying to claim we found it Off-Screen in hell. The two subplots weren’t that well tied together.

We only unlocked it because Anna and Camden had figured it all out first.

I was paying attention to Miss Pryce, who had resigned herself to her fate. She knew she had lost.

Jerrica,

I used to tell myself I had no regrets. I hated regretting things. I’d do anything to avoid it. I never got married, never had kids. People would ask why, and I’d say it was better that way. Better to regret not having children than to regret having them. So I kept my head down and worked. I gave everything I had to the restaurant.

Pecatto’s was my old man’s place. He built it brick by brick. I would know. I was handing him the bricks. He always wanted me to be a hard worker, and he got what he wanted. If only he’d wanted me to be rich instead. I wish you could have met him.

When he was gone, the place became mine. My joy and my curse. My dream. I ran it with the help of the family. It gave us a good life. Gave us a foundation. I lived in that kitchen. Wore out my back hauling sacks of flour and my knees kneeling to scrub grease off the tile. Spent more time with the ovens than with people. That place became my whole life.

A few months ago, your mother showed up. Told me something I never expected to hear. Said I had a daughter.

Said I had you.

I didn’t believe it. Not at first. But then she showed me a picture of you. And I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew it was true. Not in my head. In my gut, my heart, maybe. Like something deep down had been waiting all this time, and suddenly it just woke up.

So here it is. I’m your father. I hope you aren’t disappointed.

We agreed not to say anything to you right away. Let you come to it in your own time, if ever. She said you just found out your stepdad wasn’t your real dad during the divorce, and she was afraid you would hate me for not being around or hate her for not telling you. But I needed you to know, somehow. Because talking to you these last few months, even with you not knowing who I really was, it’s meant more to me than anything I’ve done in all my life. I don’t know how that idiot man could give you up.

I’ve got some things going wrong inside. Too many cigarettes, too much of Mama’s cookin’, too many years of not slowing down. I don’t know when it’ll catch up with me, but the doctors have a theory.

After everything, I finally understand something.

People always said the love of my life was the restaurant. And for a long time, I thought they were right. I spend so much time here. You know, I can see you love it too. The sauce is in your veins, and you get it from me, kid. One day, I hope you get to run this place with me and Gustavo, and the rest of the family. That’d be nice, right?

‘Cause ever since I got to know you, I’ve realized that the love of my life isn’t the restaurant.

It’s you.

I just hope there’s more time.

-Dante Bonaventura.

Gus broke out in tears as he read the letter. Many people did.

Whatever doubts the family had before the letter was read, they evaporated. They surrounded Jerrica and hugged her.

“Well, anyway,” Camden said, looking at Gus, “I’ve got all this other proof too, if you’re interested. The point is, she made you a deal to fix your restaurant. But you don’t have a restaurant, not by Common Man’s Law. Your cousin Jerrica does. That was the trick, the same trick she pulled on your father.”

Camden handed Gus the papers and walked away, frustrated to see his work reduced to a gag.

“What? Dad did it too?” Anita asked. The rest of the family grew suddenly very concerned and looked to Gus for answers.

And that was the final battle. We had reached the end, and Carousel was gathering this final footage.

I had to brace myself because Miss Pryce screamed and disappeared in a fiery rage as the sun broke through the clouds above.

But she wasn’t actually gone. In fact, all she had done was teleport next to me.

“I suppose you don’t think much of the scenario I’ve been tasked with moderating,” she said.

Now she wanted to be meta.

Maybe she had been that way all along.

“I’m guessing you can’t do much with the underlying goal of undoing the deal, can you?” I asked. “You put so much effort into making it look like the goal was to fight our way out of hell, I figured you were distracting us from your weakness.”

She still had the glowing eyes, and I suddenly felt like my knees were made of jelly.

“If you come back at a higher level, I have much more agency,” she said. It would seem the players weren’t the only players in this game. “Tell me, how did you know to undermine the pizza asking for aid I sent in the first scene?”

I thought for a moment.

“Innocence is a shield. Ignorance is the easiest way to get it,” I said. “Just a bad matchup for you, I suppose. I wasn’t likely to fall for that. Speaking of our little matchup, where in your tropes does it say you can do all that dream nonsense? Seems against the spirit of the trope I saw.”

Her Night Terror trope was supposed to delay and punish Insight tropes used to learn about the nature of the demons. The weird memory-erasing and killing me every night was a departure from that.

“I obeyed the letter of the trope,” she said. “Carousel does not disarm our imaginations.”

Tropes were flexible. A crazed hypnotist and a zombie might have the exact same trope to turn people into, well, zombies, but how it was presented in the story would be wildly different. Still, she seemed to imply that her tropes limited her power, and she had to bend around them to stand a fighting chance.

I wasn’t going to argue with her. She terrified me, but I put that fear in my little black box and talked to her as a peer. My brave face was worn in well.

“I never did get to see all of your tropes,” I said. “A bit unfair, don’t you think?”

She laughed.

“That wasn’t my choice. Night Terror only allowed you to gain insight into us while On-Screen in the dream. By the end, you were too good at staying away from the cameras. I can’t be blamed for that.”

I mirrored her laugh.

Yikes, it felt weird.

She was looking more and more demonic as The End played onward.

“For some reason, I couldn’t remember what had happened, so I couldn’t really learn my lesson,” I said.

I also wasn’t sure how I had gotten into hell in the first place for all of those nightmares. Did I just appear there? Did they drag me there? Did I go in and poke my head around willingly? I might have followed Avery down to take a peek.

I could have asked, but that wasn’t what was really on my mind.

“So... how did you get into the pizza business?” I asked. “Did Carousel give you that duty?”

It might have matched her On-Screen persona, but not the creature she was rapidly shifting into.

Her eyes lost a bit of their fire, but the face suit around them continued to roast.

“They’re mine,” she said, looking to the Bonaventura family. They were still hugging and having tearful emotional exchanges. “You should have seen me, back home. It was a beautiful plan. I still try to recreate it, but Carousel has given me a challenge. Perfection takes time.”

“What plan was that?” I asked. “The devil’s deal?”

She smiled widely, and the skin from her lower jaw sloughed off her face and hung down from her neck like a gruesome tie.

“The entire family was mine, in time,” she said. “Starting with Gustavo Senior, so broken over his dead brother that he devoted his life to making Dante’s dreams come true. He was an easy mark. Gustavo Junior was no harder. And Trip fell eventually, with a struggle. I had to maim him to break his spirit. It isn’t difficult when people willingly enter these mechanical behemoths and drive at high speeds,” she said, looking at the cars on the street. “A crippling later, and he was mine too.”

She was speaking fondly of an old memory.

“I got the whole line or the best of them, anyway. One at a time. Generation by generation.”

Her voice became rough and crackled with fire as she spoke.

“Would you like to know my secret?” she asked.

I didn’t want to know.

The woman’s skin was roasting off as she spoke to me, revealing a form I had never seen before, a proper demon form.

“Sure,” I lied.

“Love,” she said. “I did it with love.”

She gestured to the family.

“One by one, every head of the family made the deal, not to mention a few of the lesser members. They did it because they loved each other. No greed. No pride. They gave up their souls to damnation because they wanted to save each other from the pitfalls I set for them.”

She started to laugh.

“That is art. That is my magnum opus. That was what attracted Carousel to me.”

I watched the family as they took turns either chastising or forgiving Gus.

Whichever it was, they did it with love.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do demons care about the souls of mortals?”

Her hair lit up, but instead of burning away, it became ashy spines, released from their bun—a thousand little smoking spines, like Satan’s thorn bush.

“Elidel threw us into the fire,” she said. “You know the story. Your Scholar told you, I’m sure. Do you know why he did it? Why he threw his own creation into the flame? His own children?”

This was shooting right past religious and becoming a family matter.

I looked at her expectantly, even though the fires in her eyes and the bright cracks in her demonic form made me squint.

“Because you were afraid of us. You humans evolved from the mud, and since the first of you prayed to the heavens, you were all he cared about. You feared our shadows and fire. So Elidel, the Great Forger, threw us into the fires of creation. He hasn’t looked at us since. Maybe we are desperate, but if he loves you so much, maybe he will look upon us when we surround ourselves with innocent souls.”

I nodded.

It was a bit cliché, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Thus the desire to trick people into it,” I said.

“Like you said,” she responded. “Innocence is so very powerful.”

We were running out of time, and all I wanted to do was leave.

The heat and flame were one thing.

The aura of endless dread was worse.

“A whole family of innocents, then, was the zenith of my craft.

“Yes, when I dragged them into hell, I wonder if Elidel shed a tear. I like to think he did.”

The End.

It was all about to be over.

“That is a pretty artful plan you had there,” I said, though it felt like acid in my throat. I looked at the family. Loud. A bit spoiled. Apparently, each drew a full salary. No wonder they had money problems. Good people nonetheless. “Sending them to hell must have gotten you lots of clout. Yes, quite the plan… But then, they aren’t in hell, are they?”

The family gathered in their cars.

They bickered about who would ride with whom, and some of them had not forgotten Gus’ little indiscretion, but they rejoiced too, in a happy ending.

An ending together.

What was left of Miss Pryce’s humanity stared at me, as if she really considered what I said.

Then, like a shadow disappearing at the dawn—

She was gone.