Book Five, Chapters 60 and 61

Carousel Family Video, despite purporting to be a family store, was huge, but it never lost its charm.

As I walked inside, I was struck by an invisible wall of nostalgia that didn’t belong to me. For as much as I liked watching vintage horror movies growing up, I missed the age of the video rental store by a few years.

Sure, when I was a kid, my grandpa would pick up some movies for me to watch, often sneaking them into my backpack when my parents weren’t watching. But by the time I was living with my grandparents, most of my movies were bought online in big boxes of assorted VHSs and DVDs and then doled out one at a time every week or so as a reward for doing my homework, completing chores, or maybe just when I looked sad.

But here was a huge store, the size of a grocery market, with two stories—an upstairs and a downstairs—all devoted to movies, specifically VHS. There were no DVDs to be found.

That had to be a stylistic choice.

Customers and employees filled the place, just browsing, occasionally checking out a film. As the Atlas had led me to expect, there were no omens in the store and no trope items, either. Whatever danger was here truly was unknown.

As we filed into the store, Antoine held the crybaby high, like it was some sort of talisman of religious significance, pointing it in different directions, expecting it to start crying, but its little robotic cry never sounded.

We must have looked like goofballs.

We had a plan for how we were going to do things, and that plan involved visiting a local hardware store—one of the old ones from the 1920s, where you told a guy behind a counter what you wanted, and he went and got it for you—to buy a length of rope.

It just so happened that the length of rope the guy brought back to us had a really cool trope called No Bad Noose. This trope made it so that it would tangle around the neck of its target during First Blood, Second Blood, or the Final Battle and form an impromptu, entirely accidental noose. They would fall, their neck would snap (or it would look like it), that sort of thing.

I laughed when the guy handed it to us because I had seen that trope in countless movies, including Tarzan. It was a very dour subject, but at the end of the day, it always tickled me a little when I recognized a trope from movies I had watched, and that happened all the time in Carousel.

We didn’t need the length of rope to strangle any bad guys—or good guys, for that matter because it would work on whoever got tangled in it. We needed it to help us keep the group together.

When we walked into the video store, we each had the rope tied to us somehow. I just looped it through a couple of my belt loops, as did pretty much everyone else with jeans. Other people had to get more creative, but that’s how we decided to solve our problem of people potentially going missing—we literally tied ourselves together.

Fortunately, none of the patrons of the store seemed to care that we were all tied together, though I could have sworn I saw some NPCs stifling a chuckle as they looked at us. Some even stared.

As with bicycle helmets, if you don’t feel ridiculous, then you haven’t taken enough precautions.

After we had all made it into the store, we just looked at each other and laughed because it was such a silly scenario.

We were so afraid of this place that seemed so normal—almost more normal than any other place in Carousel—because it had no omens, and if you didn’t focus on things, it just looked like a normal store.

We looked like a scene out of The Descent.

I had to clear my mind and get my head straight.

We were there to find a movie with the werewolf that a murderous clown had sketched out for us—the one that had killed Logan and Avery. We were not there to browse in general, but I found clearing my mind to be very difficult because this place was so exciting.

I realized that because no one else seemed to be nearly as amazed as I was because of Kimberly.

“Riley, you’re smiling,” she said as soon as she got a good look at me.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “What can I say? This place is awesome.”

“He’s in his natural habitat,” Antoine said. “All right, everybody, check the knots. We need to make sure we’ve got Riley secured.”

Did I really smile so rarely that it was a cause for alarm?

“Listen up,” Antoine continued, reiterating the plan that we high-Savvy players had made. He was the Fred to our Velmas. “We’re going together. We’ll check every row multiple times. We have no reason to be in a hurry. Make sure you get a good look at every movie that looks like it might have a werewolf in it. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous an unknown threat is, so—”

Antoine’s little speech was cut off because someone screamed from deeper into the store. It wasn’t a scared or injured scream—they were screaming a name.

“Kimberly Madison!” they called from across the store, and then a man in his mid-20s, wearing a red hoodie and a lanyard, came running toward us.

“It’s really you!” he said as he approached the group. His name on the red wallpaper was Gus—just Gus, no last name—and he had normal plot armor, like a regular NPC.

His hair was long, but not as long as mine was getting. He looked like a general geek—the overly excited kind, not the sulky kind like me.

We were silent at first because this was the sort of thing that never happened outside of a storyline unless you were getting jumped by an Omen.

“Do I know you?” Kimberly asked.

He chuckled awkwardly. “Well, of course, you don’t know me,” he said. “But I know you. I’ve got your poster hanging on the back wall.” He turned around and looked for a spot on the back, pointing his finger, and sure enough, there was a poster of Kimberly. It was from The Die Cast—just a character poster like one might see on the red wallpaper.

“I just have to say, I am such a big fan. I’ve watched everything you’ve been in,” he said. “Go on, ask me anything about your entire career, and I can tell you.”

Honestly, I was taken aback by this sort of treatment from an NPC outside of a storyline, but Kimberly was a lot faster on her feet, so she did have a question.

“How did I get started as an actress?” she said, not with any particular curiosity, but as if she was just testing the waters to see how meta this guy was going to get.

“Easy,” he said. “You came to Carousel chasing some boy—I forget his name—ended up doing some not-so-well-received horror movies, let’s be honest, but you were the best thing in them half the time. You ended up getting ‘discovered,’ as they say in the biz, by Salvatore Morowitz when he saw you in The Final Straw, and now you’re probably one of the most famous actresses in Carousel.”

That was one way of putting things—a made-up story constructed from elements of truth. She had chosen her Celebrity aspect after The Final Straw, though technically Sal, her fictional talent agent, was already representing her within the made-up continuity of her career earlier than Gus said. But I would let that slide; things were getting a little meta.

I had to assume that was what was going on. Gus recognized Kimberly as a Celebrity Eye Candy.

But by that logic, was it possible that he knew who I was? I also had a meta aspect related to filmmaking, so I was certain he knew who I was. And that wasn’t me being conceited—it was because he was dressed exactly like me, in my exact hoodie, with jeans and even Converse sneakers.

But his attention was on Kimberly.

As amusing as all of this would be when we talked about it later back at the loft, at the moment, we were actually quite afraid because we were looking for something to go wrong. With every breath, I was listening for the crybaby to start wailing, but it never did.

“Well, Gus,” Kimberly said, pointing to his lanyard and the name tag at the end of it, pretending that she didn’t just look at him on the red wallpaper, “can you help us find some werewolf movies? Maybe one that takes place on a mountain?”

That was a good question—one that sounded like the kind of thing he could answer.

Every section in the store was marked as Horror.

How helpful.

To their credit, they also listed subgenres.

Unfortunately, none of those subgenres were werewolves. They were things like romance, thrillers, mysteries, and crime stories. That was where our leads ran dry. We didn’t know what kind of horror story this werewolf movie was supposed to be. Luckily, most werewolf movies were straight-up horror and weren’t particularly gimmicky as far as genre goes.

Still, if Gus could help us, that would be a godsend—though I wouldn’t be able to say which god sent it.

“I love werewolf movies! Are you going to do a werewolf movie?” Gus said, still focused on Kimberly. “Are you here doing research? Do you need my help?”

“Yes,” Kimberly said. “We’re doing research for a werewolf movie, and we need to find one that takes place on a mountain.”

“Well, I don’t know if we can search based on where it takes place,” Gus said. “And unfortunately, we don’t organize the movies by what monster is in them, but I would be glad to help.”

He was really playing up the excited fan angle, and despite the fact that he was a normal NPC on the red wallpaper, I couldn’t help but feel something was going on. Unlike the other NPCs, who were gawking at us for the whole tying-ourselves-together thing, he had yet to acknowledge it.

But what really made me think something was going on was the way he looked at me when he turned and waved for us to follow him. It was a knowing look, with a grin and everything, that only lasted a second—but he met my eyeline perfectly.

Was my I Don’t Like It Here trope giving me anxiety? No, no, it wasn’t. In fact, ever since we walked into this store, it hadn’t been making a peep. And I doubted it was my psychic background throwing me a bone.

What alerted me was my natural distrust of people, and I did not trust this guy—even though I could not find one objective reason.

But still, if we ever hoped to leave Carousel, we couldn’t run away from everything we distrusted. So, when he turned and walked away with his goofy demeanor, we followed cautiously.

And for thirty minutes—thirty whole minutes—Gus didn’t do anything to make me think he was up to no good. He just guided us down various aisles, picked up werewolf tapes, and showed them to us.

And in thirty minutes, we found nothing. Luckily, nothing found us either.

“Wait a minute,” Dina said, and then she managed to point something out to us that we had somehow managed not to notice in all of our searches. With every werewolf movie he presented to us, we did not notice it because we were looking in the wrong place.

“Look at this,” she said. She grabbed a movie off the shelf and held it out to us.

On the cover, there was a beautiful vampire queen—almost exposed and definitely enticing. But that was not what Dina wanted us to look at. She wanted us to look at two of the characters who were on the cover of the movie but not the center of it. They were simply reacting in horror or amazement—I couldn’t quite tell—to the central figure. And darn if I didn’t recognize one of them.

His name was Sam. I didn’t have a whole lot of history with him other than the fact that we were both trapped in the nightmare world together, but I did know him. He was one of the vets at Camp Dyer. He was an Adventurer—an advanced archetype, originally an Athlete, a Health Nut who would actually go out on jogs every morning from the day he got his first scouting trope that made it quasi-safe for him to do.

He was on the cover of this movie.

That was not something we anticipated. And even as we looked at movie after movie that Gus showed us, we had not put it together—the covers of these VHS tapes had characters on them, and not just the original characters from the universe of the movie, but they had the players who had last played them on them.

We hadn’t even thought of it because the Atlas didn’t say anything. And more than that, we had spent so much time looking at movie posters on the red wallpaper—which didn’t change based on the players inside of them—that it never occurred to us that the VHS covers might.

And that simple insight was enough for Dina to ask, “Hey Gus, can we look up movies by who’s in them? Like, who stars in them?”

“Of course,” Gus said. “How else would you follow your favorite actor?”

We all looked at each other and suddenly realized what Dina was up to. It was so simple that we felt like fools for not thinking of it.

“Can we see all movies starring Grace Varga?” she asked.

Those were the clues we had. Madam Celia's cryptic riddle seemed to point us to the Bowlers. We had assumed that meant we would eventually have to check for the storyline around the bowling alley, but what if it meant something more than that?

What if it was a clue that could help us not spend days searching through the massive amount of films in this store?

What if we were directed to the bowlers because they were the last players to play the werewolf storyline that we were looking for?

“Sure,” Gus said. “I’ll have to go get the list from the back if you’ll follow me.”

And here’s where he started acting strange again because it was almost like his plans had been ruined just a little bit. But only just.

But still, we followed him—this time at a longer distance, on my insistence—as he showed us around to the back of the store, a desolate area where even some of the shelves were sparsely populated.

The lights flickered back here.

And that is where I saw something I was not looking for.

At the back of the store, there was a wide doorway leading to a hall. Right across from that doorway was another door that was closed. It had a movie poster on it, which wasn’t so remarkable because most places had a poster on them in this place. But it was notable because the poster featured a grotesque eyeball, with the nerve and everything attached.

The movie was called Archive Esoterica, but that didn’t matter.

To the left was a stairway going up—but not up onto the second story of movies; the stairway for that was in the center of the shop. Besides, the doorway had an "Employees Only" sign.

To the right of the door with the eyeball poster on it was another stairway I could just make out, and it went downward into darkness.

Gus went upstairs.

As he started jogging up the steps, I noticed that he passed yet another poster—another one littering the walls. It was one of many, many of which were torn from people walking up and down the stairs. But I noticed that there was a very particular poster just out of my line of sight.

I started moving forward, trying to crane my neck so I could see further upstairs and get a better look at this movie poster that seemed to call to me in a way that did not register on the red wallpaper or anywhere else.

It called to me because I recognized it just from looking at the corner of it—the bottom right corner. And as I got closer, I knew what it was. It was different than all the others. Untouched, pristine, literally taped on top of some that were already hung in that little hallway moving up the stairs.

That movie poster did not have a title—just a blank space filled with underscores, as if the title had yet to be written.

The photo was taken in front of a carnival ride. It featured three people: two parents and a child: a man, a woman, and a boy.

I knew them well because one of them was me. This picture had hung in our house when I was a child.

My parents. On an unfinished poster for a movie.

Carousel had been teasing me for so long, and now it showed them to me.

Ramona was the first to notice that something was wrong.

"Riley, are you OK?" she asked, or something like that—I wasn’t paying attention.

I just needed to get a closer look because there was a block of text at the bottom of the poster, and I needed to read what was in that text. I walked forward without thinking about it, just trying to get close enough to make out what those letters said.

That was all.

I wasn’t going to follow Gus up the stairs. I just needed to read what it said because it did say something, and I could tell that the first word was "you."

I pulled forward, and I could feel the rope tugging at my belt loop because the others were not nearly as interested in following me. They even started making a commotion about it.

I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying and didn’t notice them, particularly until Antoine grabbed my arm.

“What is wrong with you?” he screamed because the back of the store, with its barren shelves and flickering lights, had scared them.

I didn’t respond to him.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, following my gaze.

I didn’t know if he recognized me as a kid or if he just noticed how central and prominent that poster was, but he managed to put together what was going on.

“Oh, dude,” he said, a bit transfixed himself.

“I just need to get close enough to read it,” I said. “I’m not gonna go in the hallway.”

I wriggled a bit out of his arms because he wasn’t holding that tight once he saw the poster, and as I took another step forward, I could see more of what the poster said:

"You never know where you’ll find…"

I tried to read more, but the text was too small, so I took another step and…

A piercing wail broke through the store, louder than any scream I had heard.

It was a baby crying.

That snapped me out of it. I looked back at Kimberly, who was now the one holding the crybaby because Antoine was still grabbing onto my arm. The crybaby was crying its haunted, staticky cry.

And suddenly, my curiosity was replaced with fear because I realized that had we not had that crybaby and had we not been tied together, whatever danger we were being warned of would have consumed me.

As I looked back at my friends, I saw something rare. I saw Dina crying. And when she noticed I was looking at her, she pointed back toward the hallway with the eyeball poster, the stairway going up, and the stairway going down.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked. “This is what Sean was warning about. Look at it.”

I looked back at it and realized that we had been warned about this place, even though we didn’t know it.

When we ran Permanent Vacancy and then used Samantha’s Damsel trope to make it a supernatural story, Dina’s trope that allowed her to communicate—either literally or metaphorically—with her dead loved ones went into overdrive. Her son, or at least something that looked like him, had come in spectral form and kept her safe from the zombies we had summoned.

As a parting gift, she told me her son had warned about this very place, about a choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it.

Something about that warning had felt so out of place that I dismissed it, and we hadn’t spoken of it since. But here it was.

When you have the choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it, the choice I was supposed to make had been given to us explicitly clear.

“Downstairs first,” I said.

Dina nodded.

Almost on instinct, I took another step toward the hallway, but as soon as I did, the baby started to cry again, this time even louder. We just stood there as Antoine relayed what he had seen on the poster to the others.

"Am I supposed to go down there?" I asked Dina as if she would know the answer.

"Yeah," she said. "That's the whole point of the warning. You have to go downstairs. Don't you want to know where this is going?"

And I did—of course I did—but by then, anytime I even thought about moving toward the stairs, the baby started to cry. There was a danger there, something that we could not know.

I looked around, seeking permission to go anyway. I didn’t know if I would, but I couldn’t shake the desire to just know the truth, whatever the cost.

Yet a feeling, like dread, moved over me, centered in my heart and not in the back of my neck like normal. I knew that I was not going to go. I knew that was not happening.

I walked back toward the group and realized they were debating things, and all of them but one had come out on the side of me not going down the murder staircase. I felt the rope in my fingers and traced it back to my belt loops.

I couldn’t go, even if I wanted to.

That lasted long enough for me to get some of my wits back and realize that it would be a stupid decision. Even with Dina’s little warning from beyond the grave, it would be a dumb decision to see what was down there.

And yet, there was another problem—a deeper horror—as I realized that I was never going to just get over it. Even as I stood there, realizing my breath was fast and that I was sweating, I knew I would toss and turn over this simple question: What was in the basement of Carousel Family Video?

I could hear them arguing, still with me, kind of, but mostly with themselves because I wasn’t participating.

“He should go look. He has to pull that thread. I have to know why my son told him to go downstairs,” Dina said.

No one else was having it, but Dina persisted.

I hated the discussion being about something involving me. I didn’t like being the center of attention, so as Dina argued about how we were supposed to take risks and how this was a huge development, I said, “We’ll have to wait.”

My ears popped, and suddenly, I was back in reality, standing at the back of the store.

“What?” Dina asked. “Wait until when?”

I took a deep breath. “Wait until we’re strong enough that it doesn’t matter what’s down there,” I said.

“Don’t you want to know? We were supposed to go there,” she said.

Of course, she would say that. This was the woman who came to Carousel knowing what was here to save her son, so of course, she was going to be on the side of pulling the thread.

“We’ll wait until we’re so high-level that there’s no risk,” I said. “Besides, I doubt that this is required. It’s a side quest, clearly.”

I didn’t know if I believed that. One thing I did believe was that none of this (none of anything in Carousel) was supposed to be about me, and the thought of that comforted me. I was just an afterthought, invited on a whim. That’s what I told myself. I’m not chasing a picture of my family to my doom.

None of it was supposed to be about me.

Before Dina could respond, a young woman with a long brown ponytail, wearing a polo with the logo of Carousel Family Video on it, appeared behind us. Her name was Vangie on the red wallpaper. She was a standard NPC, just like Gus had been, except more believable.

“I’m not even gonna ask what the rope is about,” she said in a chipper customer service tone.

We all turned to look at her.

“Can I help you find anything?” she asked.

We took a moment to shift gears.

“We're looking for a werewolf movie starring Grace Varga,” I said. I needed to leave that space.

“Sounds like you like mysteries,” she responded. “Follow me, I’ll go look it up in the database.”

She led us to the front of the store, where the checkout area was, logged into a computer with a black screen filled with green text, and started typing really loudly.

“Alrighty,” she said, “I have a list of all of Grace Varga’s films. Do you have any idea what the title is? I don’t see any that have the word werewolf in them, of course. That would be too convenient.”

“Can I see the list?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, rotating the computer monitor around for me to see clearly.

I looked through the list. I found The Strings Attached, as well as every single movie that I remembered from the bowling alley. I continued looking through the list.

“That’s gotta be it,” I said. “#26.”

She turned the screen back around.

“Stray Dawn: The Mark,” she said. “That’s aisle 42, section 6, and it looks like we have it in stock. You can go check it out. If it’s not there, just tell me.”

It seemed to me that the word "stray" worked for a werewolf movie well, as did the word "dawn."

We practically ran, in one big blob of people tied together, to aisle 42, which was upstairs (the staircase in the middle of the store, not in the back), section 6. As soon as we got there, it practically jumped out at us.

The cover featured Grace, our favorite detective, dressed like she was about to have a night out. I could practically smell the hairspray from the way her hair was done. Beside her was Bella, a Bully Bruiser on the bowlers' team, as expected. On the side of the VHS, there was an illustration of the fully transformed werewolf from the movie.

We all celebrated and hugged each other because we had succeeded in finding the film. To the best of our knowledge, it all just fit together so well. Not only did the werewolf match the drawing we had the clown do, but it had the bowlers in it.

“Some secrets were never meant to see the dawn,” Antoine read from the cover of the movie.

It was a late '80s, early '90s-looking movie with lots of punk angst, ironically starring women in their 30s in something that looked like it was designed to appeal to teenagers.

“Do we have to buy it first to read the back?” Kimberly asked. “What did the Atlas say?”

“Reading the back is not spoilers, but they did insist that you paid to rent the movie if you’re going to read it,” I said.

It was a real gamble. In the real world, the back matter of a VHS tape could spoil the entire plot or it could spoil absolutely nothing. There was no way to tell until you read it. But I was confident that the Atlas knew what it was talking about. I also just couldn’t resist.

I turned the VHS over, and Antoine read off the synopsis:

After fleeing their broken pasts, sisters Grace and Bella arrive in the isolated town of Carousel, searching for a fresh start. However, their plans unravel when Bella is drawn into the seductive world of a mysterious group of outsiders led by the charismatic and dangerous Serena. As Bella falls deeper under their spell, Grace is left torn between saving her sister and saving herself from the dark secrets that linger in Carousel. With time running out and trust slipping away, Grace must confront her deepest fears to prevent Bella from straying too far into the night.

It was an angsty, emotional werewolf movie.

Checking out was a breeze, and as we walked out of the store, our moods could not have been higher.

I almost forgot about the call of the poster with my family on it and the question of what lay beneath Carousel Family Video.

Almost.