Carousel Book Nine, Chapter 51 (Patreon)

Doctor Meridian ran down his list, reading off names and explaining how each one connected to the paragons. My character didn’t know much of anything useful yet. The contagion started with Ramona at a lake cabin, and the paragons were keeping their lips sealed about the rest.

Ignorance was a powerful shield in a story like this. I was willing to give it up under the right circumstances, but I would play it by ear.

“Sidney, your college boyfriend, Harvey Matthews,” Meridian said. “Unfortunately, he went missing about seven months ago.”

“Harvey? But I don’t remember telling him...” she started to say, then grew quiet. “I didn’t know,” was all she could mutter afterward. “That was almost a decade ago. We had just gotten back from the trip, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Yes,” Meridian said. “However it is that this contagion spreads, it would seem that all of you had your fair share of incidents.”

“All of us?” Ace asked, puffing out his chest. “I don’t think I ever told a single person about what happened that night. How could I? No one would believe me.”

Meridian glanced back at the list.

“It’s our understanding that you told the Vampire Bats men’s softball team approximately two years ago,” Meridian said. “You were on that team, and ten members have either gone missing, wound up dead in unusual circumstances, or survived in a vegetative state like Mr. Kenealy over there.”

He pointed to a man in a coma.

“Is that Red Kenealy?” Ace said, the air rushing out of him like a deflated air mattress. “I forgot about that. We were drunk. It shouldn’t count if you were drunk. It was just a story. How could I... I didn’t know.”

“The story spreads quickly because no one knows they’re not supposed to spread it,” Meridian said. “You all seem adamant that it’s some sort of information hazard. We had speculated on that, but the possibility seemed too far-fetched until recently.”

“Trust me,” Geneva said. “It’s the story. Just a combination of words. I know it sounds crazy.”

“We don’t use that word here,” Meridian said with a warm smile. “A lot of important detail gets washed away by that descriptor.”

They went Off-Screen and kept discussing things while my friends and I watched.

“So do we just come out and ask them about the dream?” I asked. “I already know what it is, and I’m still curious to hear what they have to say.”

“You are going to get us killed,” Kimberly said.

“Better now than later,” Antoine said. “If we have to hear it, we should do it on purpose. We don’t want to look like chumps.”

He stared at the paragons like he was sizing them up to figure out which one would last the longest. We already knew the answer: Sidney. Under Carousel’s plan, they would have all been eaten by rats, but now they had different fates.

Back On-Screen, the main characters got their marching orders.

“There’s only one person who was there that night who, as far as I can tell, hasn’t spread the contagion,” Meridian said. “For a long while, we were under the impression he wasn’t even there. Do you know how to contact Tommy Carter? You said he lived on his parents’ property. I assume you mean the cabin, the very cabin where Ramona spent her last waking hours.”

“That’s the one,” Sidney said. “Their vacation house is right up the road. They used to rent out the cabin. You said he’s the only one who didn’t spread the story?”

“As far as we can tell,” Camden said, finally getting a word in after standing behind Meridian On-Screen for quite some time. “Every single confirmed victim is tied to one of the other attendees.”

“What about Oscar?” Ace asked. “He gave me a call a few months ago, but it was weird. I hadn’t heard from him in years, and it felt like there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t. Heck, I thought he was about to ask for money, but he never did.”

“I’m sorry you have to hear it from me, but Oscar Delgado has gone missing,” Meridian said. “Perhaps as we investigate his part in the spread, we might find out what happened to him.”

-

It looked like we had another field trip in the big psych van. I was glad they even let us tag along. Maybe it was a small reward for keeping them alive a bit longer.

On our way out, a certain patient began yelling at us from his locked room. Isaac was still a captive. We were On-Screen, and he had the good sense to stay in character.

“Please, I’m telling you, I saw a giant worm or something eat my friend,” he said as we walked by. “I know it sounds crazy, but you have to help me. I think something is after me now.”

“Under the current circumstances, it can be difficult to tell who’s delusional and who isn’t,” Camden said.

“Yes,” Meridian agreed. “Let’s just hope it isn’t us.”

“Come on!” Isaac yelled. “There’s a man after me. I would tell you about him, but I’m afraid you’ll think I’m crazy all over again, and I’m not.”

We kept walking.

“His name was Highbrow Hew. I know how stupid that sounds, but that’s what my friend called him.”

There we go. That got Meridian and all the paragons to stop and spend a good five minutes interviewing Isaac.

Unlike the rest of us, Isaac was already infected. He had started the story that way, and the indicator on the red wallpaper made it seem like whatever was going to happen to him would happen pretty soon. It was nearly solid red. He was very low-level, after all.

“What exactly did your friend tell you?” Meridian asked after a litany of other questions.

“I don’t think I should say,” Isaac said. “The moment I heard it, I could feel it digging in my brain, rummaging through things. Please don’t make me say it. I’ll help you. I’ll do whatever you want, but don’t make me talk about it.”

“It sounds like you’re in good company,” Meridian said as he stared back at the paragons. “Come along.”

And just like that, Isaac got his clothes back and joined our little field trip.

-

“Can we make a stop?” Sidney asked once we were loaded in the van and headed off the estate.

“Sure, we’re not in a hurry or anything,” Ace said.

“Where would you like us to go?” Meridian asked.

“It’s time for me to face my past,” Sidney said.

Meridian gave her a deep, meaningful look, and then we went Off-Screen. No one ever said where we were going. They all knew because it was in their script.

“All right, looks like we’re taking a trip into the past,” Camden said as he pulled onto the main road. “But you might want to tell me where that is, because I don’t have a clue.”

“It’s right down there,” Sidney said, pointing down the street. “The mini storage.”

“It’s convenient that the past is so close,” Camden said.

This clearly wasn’t a large scene, but it was important. Carousel only gathered a little footage of Sidney opening her storage unit and rifling through her parents’ old stuff, and her own. Then we went On-Screen when she discovered it: the book that must have started it all.

Phantasmagoria Egregorica. What a strange name.

“You still have that thing?” Geneva asked. “I thought you would get rid of it after... well, you know.”

“What happened happened even if I wanted to deny it,” Sidney said. “There’s nothing we can do to change that, and part of pretending that nothing happened meant not throwing away this book.”

In a weird way, it wasn’t even her book. In the meta sense, it was Cassie’s, a clear product of her It Is Written trope. We would have to get our hands on it, but we might not get the chance until Sidney stopped, well, existing.

-

I recognized where we were going long before we got there. We headed west toward the lake, but unlike all the times we had traveled this road on foot, we passed the entrance to Camp Dyer and kept going, around the south end of the lake, opposite the direction of the Manifest Consortium.

We stopped at a locked gate on an out-of-the-way road in the hills and forests of Dyer’s Lake.

“If Tommy’s still around, he should be here,” Ace said in a short On-Screen snippet once we walked up to the gate.

We couldn’t drive the van onto the property, but we could easily climb over and walk.

I was expecting something closer to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as far as rural decay went, but it was too nice a place, even after some neglect. Even the gate was good-looking, with wrought iron and stonework. Solar-powered lamps lit the path, and at one time the lawn must have been gorgeous and manicured. That was a long time ago. The grass was long and unruly now, and whatever plants couldn’t survive without pampering had died in their planters.

The woods were reclaiming this land.

We were On-Screen as we walked. You knew you were watching a Carousel production when there were way too many characters in a scene because no one wanted to miss out. The paragons, Meridian, and Camden stayed ahead of us. We were the B team after all.

“What is that?” Dina asked, pointing off into the woods.

It was a large oak, knocked over and partly flattened.

“What is that?” Geneva repeated moments later, pointing in the same direction. Carousel was giving her Dina’s line.

“Some sort of large machinery must have done it,” Meridian theorized.

“Maybe it got struck by lightning,” Ace said.

Isaac started to say something, but the moment he opened his mouth, we went Off-Screen. When he realized the cameras weren’t rolling and decided not to speak, we went right back On-Screen. Carousel had made its point.

Even if we got to come along, we weren’t supposed to take up too much screen time. That was probably why we didn’t get to go up on the porch when we finally got to the cabin. Meridian literally told us not to, and by us, I mean all the players except Camden, who was special because his background trope made him part of the super-secret memetic contagion tracking team.

“So we’re just supposed to wait here?” Antoine said. “Why did we even come?”

“To learn,” I said. “Did you notice how the paragons stayed ahead of us on the path? I bet in the finished film, there’s not even footage of us walking with them.”

“I was Off-Screen the entire time,” Dina said.

“Well, yeah, but that’s probably because you stayed even further behind us,” Kimberly said. “Have you figured out what you’re doing in the movie yet? Your dark secret and all that?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” Dina said.

After a few lines of “I can’t believe we came back here after all this time,” or similar, the main characters made it inside the cabin.

We walked around surveying what we could. The cabin sat on a cliff above a steep, forested hill that dropped to a beach on the lake.

“That boat is smashed,” Antoine said, pointing at some trees with broken limbs.

A broken tree was the final resting place of an even more broken boat, as if the boat had been thrown into it. The craft had once been an airboat with a large propeller on the back, the kind of thing you expected to see on the bayou, not on Dyer’s Lake. Its aluminum frame was crumpled like a can.

Like the tree, it was an obvious plant. Something bad was about to happen, and it wasn’t clear if any of the paragons would survive it. The needle on the plot cycle started to dance.

Screaming started inside the cabin. I half expected a monster to burst out, its maw soaked with the blood of our new friends, but that didn’t happen.

“You can’t be here!” a man screamed. “You have to go. Trust me, you have to go!”

“You can come with us,” Geneva said. “We need your help.”

“I can’t help anyone!” the man screamed back. “I can’t even help myself!”

“Ooh, something’s happening,” Kimberly said. “Maybe we should start walking toward the road.”

“Good idea,” I agreed. “If Carousel doesn’t want footage of us coming here, maybe we should make its job easier.”

“Might keep us safe too,” Antoine said. “If we’re not here, we can’t die here.”

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been in the van the whole time,” Isaac said.

We laughed.

We started running before the loud noises began and were well down the road before we figured out what was crushing things out on Dyer’s Lake.

“They’ll never let me leave!” Tommy screamed as the main characters came rushing out of his cabin. “Now you all need to leave before they find out you’re here!”

I had only ever seen him bartending. I never expected the Criminal Paragon to show such vulnerability, but maybe that was the point. He was unkempt, but not real-life unkempt. It was the kind you see in a movie when they want an attractive actor to look like he’s had a tough run of it: shaggy hair, dark circles under his eyes, dirty clothes.

Right about the time the main characters made it off the porch, something rose out of the lake, and if I had been given a million guesses, I wouldn’t have gotten it right.

Two enormous pairs of human arms emerged from the water. Terrifying, no doubt, but something distracted me. One pair had a manicure; they were clearly a woman’s arms. I was so caught off-guard by that, I hardly noticed the arms were attached to giant, unmoving bodies, floating up from the bottom of the lake with barely the energy to look where they were sticking their arms.

Apocalypses liked to incorporate the storylines they absorbed, but this was absurdly terrifying, with an emphasis on absurd. Giants that looked roughly like humans, or what had once been humans, whose bodies didn’t seem to work very well, but whose arms reached up out of the water far enough to bring a fist down on Tommy Carter.

“I thought this was about a circus!” Isaac screamed as we ran Off-Screen.

The weirdest part was that they showed up on the red wallpaper. Their names were Edgar and Maria Carter.

Were those his parents? What was his story, even?

Luckily, we had started running long before the weird things began, and we were back in the dense forest before we had to worry about the giants. After they finished shooting their scenes and a dozen or so more trees were crushed, the main characters made it back to us all in one piece. They even had a few pieces of Tommy stuck on their hair and clothes.

I was willing to bet Camden wasn’t so happy about his honorary main character position now.