I was still standing in front of Silas when the voice came from down the road.
"Hello," a woman called out. "Are you all looking for Carousel?"
Everyone turned. Three people stood on the road ahead of us, arranged in a loose triangle like they'd been waiting for a while. They had the practiced, slightly-too-casual posture of theme park employees at the end of a long shift, the kind who smiled at you while silently counting heads and calculating how much energy they'd need to spend on this batch.
The woman who had spoken was slender, with black hair and an easy, warm demeanor. Late twenties, maybe. She carried herself with the calm authority of someone who was used to leading people through unfamiliar territory. There was something behind the smile. Not dishonesty, exactly. More like a brace. The expression of someone who knew something unpleasant was coming and was preparing to be the person who had to explain it.
Behind her and to the left stood a tall, thin man with an ever-present grin that made him look like he was laughing at a joke nobody else had heard yet. Same age range. Lanky in a way that suggested he'd been stretched on a rack and hadn't minded the experience. He had the energy of a class clown who had graduated to making observations, and who found most situations amusing even when they really shouldn't have been.
The third was older. Mid-forties, maybe. Gruff beard, ballcap, cigar. He didn't smile. He didn't speak. He looked at us the way a mechanic looks at a car with a noise in the engine. Professional disinterest hiding professional exhaustion.
A jolt of electricity ran through my chest because I knew who they were.
I knew their names, their archetypes, their approximate stats kinda, and the broad strokes of how they'd ended up here. I knew things about them that they probably hadn't told anyone in years including the whereabouts of the Rulekeeper. But I wasn't about to say any of that, because I wasn't stupid, and because one of the first rules of horror movies is that the person who reveals they know too much about the situation is usually the person who dies next.
I know how calm that sounds. How calculated and utterly sociopathic I must sound. Let me back up and explain something about myself, because it's relevant to why I was standing in the parking lot of a supernatural horror dimension with a heart rate of maybe eighty beats per minute, feeling something closer to excitement than fear.
I was seven years old when a man broke into our house in the middle of the night and killed my family.
My parents. My older brothers. My older sister. One by one, room by room, while I lay in my bed and listened to sounds that no seven-year-old should have a vocabulary for. When he got to my room, I survived because while his stab wound was rather shallow, my sister had hidden how little I was bleeding with her own blood as she bleed all over me. I must have looked dead already, or close enough that he didn't bother checking. He had left with little to no fanfare, and to this day I was never able to understand how the police had only been called after all that.
I survived because a serial killer thought I wasn't worth the effort.
After that, the foster system. An aunt who didn't want me. A family who did, until they didn't. By sixteen, I'd burned through enough households that when the last set of foster parents and I had our falling out, nobody fought too hard to keep me in the system. I've been on my own since then. Two years of shelters and couches and backseats and the kind of rootless drifting that sounds romantic in movies and is mostly just cold.
I got my GED because I'm not stupid. I just couldn't sit still in a classroom without mapping every exit, that dreadful feeling on the back of my neck at every opportunity, they say that the feeling of fight or flight was deeply ingrained due to what had happened with my family.
The horror movies started right after. Not because someone showed them to me. Because I went looking. I needed something that acknowledged the world I had actually lived in, and horror was the only genre that didn't pretend the dark wasn't real. I consumed it. All of it. Every subgenre, every era, every language. I mapped filming locations across the country. I visited haunted houses and abandoned buildings and murder sites, looking for something that could make me feel the way I felt when I was seven. The rush. The immediacy. The full-body awareness of being in the presence of something real.
Nothing worked. The haunted attractions were the worst. Actors in rubber masks jumping out from behind plywood walls, and I couldn't flinch because my body had used up its entire flinch budget at age seven.
So I became an actor, hoping to show them how fear should work, but alas, casting directors were a bitch.
Four horror movies. Small ones. The cheap kind that would be put on Youtube. My biggest horror movie was a thousand dollars that premiered at festivals nobody outside the community has heard of. Dead Body #2 in Threshold. A cult member in The Lamb's Teeth, which won an award at a festival in Austin. A gas station attendant in Cabin Static who warns the protagonists not to go up the mountain. Two lines. Classic horror archetype.
I was good at it. Not because I was talented. Because I understood the genre at a cellular level. I knew how a victim was supposed to move, breathe, look when they heard a sound in the dark. Directors loved me because I never overacted although I never understood that comment, I was barely in the movie to overact in the first place. I was considered authentic in a way they couldn't explain and I didn't care enough to explain.
So when I stood there on the road, looking at three people I recognized from a novel, holding tickets I recognized from the same novel, in a town that shouldn't exist but did...
I felt alive.
Not happy. Certainly not safe. But Alive. The way a storm chaser feels when the funnel cloud touches down. The specific, electric, full-body awareness that comes from being in the presence of something genuinely dangerous for the first time in years. Everything else in my life had been a rehearsal. This was the performance.
And rule number one of performing: don't show the audience what you're actually feeling. Show them what the scene needs.
The scene needed a confused, slightly nervous eighteen-year-old who didn't know what was happening.
I could play that part in my sleep.
"My name is Valerie," the woman said. "These are Todd and Arthur. We're here to guide newcomers to town and help you get all set up. Things are a little diff..."
Todd cut her off. "Is your brother Christian Stone?" he asked Antoine, that grin widening.
Valerie and Arthur both gave Todd a look. Quick, loaded, the kind of nonverbal rebuke that comes from years of working together. Todd had jumped ahead. Shown too much too early. Not a literal script he'd broken. A rhythm. An order of operations for handling newcomers that he'd disrupted by being too eager.
The introductions played out. Antoine confirmed Chris was his brother. The guides exchanged a glance heavy with meaning. Valerie smoothly said they knew Chris. Todd joked about the lake house. Bobby introduced himself and Janet as convention-goers.
Then Valerie's eyes found me.
She paused. A half-beat of confusion as she scanned the group and found a face she couldn't place. I'd expected this. The guides intercepted new arrivals based on experience and observation. They had a sense of when Carousel was bringing people in. They knew about Antoine because of Chris. They'd probably guessed Bobby's name from whatever information had trickled through Carousel's grapevine. But I was an unknown quantity. Solo. No connection to any existing player.
"And you are?" she asked.
"Nolan Cade," I said. I kept my expression appropriately confused. Slight frown. Cautious body language. The look of an eighteen-year-old who didn't quite understand why three strangers were waiting for him on a mountain road. "I got invited to a meet-and-greet. An author event? I was texted that it was happening in town. Is it not?" I put my hand at the back of my neck to rub it, hoping it conveyed my confusion.
Todd glanced at Valerie. Arthur's cigar-smoking slowed.
"Of course," Valerie said, recovering smoothly. "We'll get you sorted."
She didn't know who I was. She hadn't been expecting me. That was useful information. It meant my lure had come through a different channel than the ones the guides were used to intercepting. It meant I was outside their model.
Good. Outside the model was where you wanted to be. Inside the model, they'd be managing me. Outside, I could watch and learn without being handled.
"If we can get the convention guests to come to the front, please?" Valerie said.
Bobby and Janet shuffled forward. The woman in the brown
stayed in the back. We started walking.
I fell in near the middle. Close enough to hear the guides. Far enough back to think.
Bobby found me within two minutes, because Bobby was a man who could not physically tolerate silence when there was a willing ear in proximity.
"So what's this author event?" he asked, matching my pace. "Who's the writer?"
"Rob Lastrel," I said. "He writes a series called The Game at Carousel. It's a LitRPG."
"A what?"
"LitRPG. Literary role-playing game. It's a genre of fiction where the world operates on game mechanics. Stats, levels, experience points. Think of it like a novel set inside a video game, except the characters are real people trapped in the system."
Bobby's eyebrows went up. "That's a thing?"
"It's one of the biggest genres in web fiction. This particular series is about a group of people who get trapped in a town that forces them to participate in horror movie storylines. There's a stat system. Five stats: Mettle for strength, Moxie for performance, Hustle for speed, Savvy for perception and planning, Grit for toughness. Your total stat points equal your Plot Armor, which determines how hard you are to kill."
Bobby's face shifted from casual interest to the very specific expression of a horror enthusiast encountering a concept he hadn't heard before and immediately recognizing its potential.
"Plot Armor," he repeated. "Like the trope?"
"Exactly. Except in the book, it's a literal stat. A number. And monsters target the player with the lowest one unless the characters use a trope to make them unable to kill said lowest plot armor holding person, like say, a scream that makes you technically unkillable since you can't kill someone mid scream, but it lowers their plot armor by one."
"That's brilliant," Bobby said. Then, quieter: "And you said this book is set in a town called Carousel?"
"Same name. The characters arrive thinking they're visiting for normal reasons, and then they find out the whole town is controlled by a supernatural entity. They can't leave."
Bobby was quiet for a moment. He looked at the road, at the trees, at the Centennial banners. I could see him doing the math. The same math that everyone in this group would eventually do.
"That's one hell of a coincidence," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "The author must have based it on this place. Or named this place after his book. Something like that."
I said it casually, the way you'd explain away a strange pattern that wasn't quite strange enough to panic over. I was feeding Bobby the comfortable version. The version that let him keep walking.
The uncomfortable version, the one where the book wasn't based on this place but was instead a detailed account of things that actually happened here, I was keeping that one in my pocket.
"What's a LitRPG again?" a voice asked from behind us.
Riley had drifted back from his friends and was walking a few steps behind, close enough to have been listening. Camden was with him. Anna trailing a step behind Camden.
"Literary RPG," I said. "Novels with game mechanics built into the world."
"Like the stats on these tickets?" Riley asked, holding up his silver card.
"Exactly like that."
"Huh." Riley looked at his ticket. "And in this book, the characters get tickets like these? From a fortune-telling machine?"
I had a choice here. I could confirm the detail and watch the alarm spread, or I could keep it vague and maintain the comfortable version for a little longer.
I chose the middle ground. "The book has a similar setup, yeah. The characters arrive, get assigned archetypes and stats. It's the inciting event."
Camden jumped in. "What archetype did you get?"
"Film Buff. Same as Riley."
Camden looked at his own ticket. "I got Scholar. Savvy 5. The rest is mostly ones and twos."
"The book mentions that Scholars, and other Major Archetypes are supposedly very common to find, they're supposed to be the simpler roles to play in comparison to minor archetypes, since Carousel can translate those roles better than the others." I mention offhandedly.
"Is there a wiki for this series?" Camden asked. Because of course Camden would ask about the wiki.
"Kinda?" I said. "The wiki that exists is unfortunately pretty bare bones," I probably could've done something about it if I knew how to edit it. Sue me, I wasn't a coding genius and my time was better well spent learning more stuff. "Although I've read it enough times that I could probably fix write it down from memory alone." I continued.
"You've read it multiple times?" Riley asked.
"Four times for the published novels. The online chapters I've only read once each, but I have a good memory for this stuff."
"Just for this stuff?" Riley asked.
"Yeah. Ask me about anything outside of horror and you'll get either the wrong answer or a blank stare."
Riley almost smiled at that. "I'm kind of the same way. My friends dragged me along on this trip because Antoine needed a trivia ringer."
"Movie trivia?"
"Horror movie trivia. There's a contest at a bar in town."
"I'd win, probably," I said. Then, without meaning to: "Unless they ask about anything made before 1960. Pre-Psycho horror is a different conversation entirely."
Riley turned to look at me properly. "You think the slasher canon starts with Psycho?"
"The modern one? Yeah. Peeping Tom came out the same year, but Psycho codified the vocabulary. The POV kill shot. The twist identity. The sympathetic monster. Everything after is in conversation with it."
"What about Black Christmas?" Riley asked. "That's the proto-slasher."
"Proto-slasher is a useful category but a misleading one. Black Christmas established the final girl framework and the killer-in-the-house structure, but it owes as much to giallo as it does to Psycho. Bava's Blood and Black Lace is the missing link nobody talks about."
Riley was staring at me now with the expression of a man who had just found water in the desert. Not because my opinions were brilliant, but because he had probably never met anyone his age who would voluntarily say the words "proto-slasher" and "giallo" in the same sentence.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"Eighteen."
"And you've seen Blood and Black Lace? Most people don't even know what I'm talking about when I mention these movies." He said, and to be honest, I'm surprised by the fact that we watched the same movies, given we're from completely different worlds.
"I've seen everything Bava directed. And most of what Argento directed, though I stopped keeping track after Giallo because that felt like the universe being too on-the-nose."
Riley actually laughed. A real laugh, the kind that surprised the person doing it.
"It's nice meeting another horror movie nerd," he said.
"Same here, it's been a while since I felt like this."
There was a pause where Riley waited for me to elaborate, and I didn't, and he let it go.
"So," he said, shifting back to the earlier topic, "this book. The LitRPG. What's it actually about? Beyond the setup."
I thought about what to say. The question was simple. The answer was a minefield.
"It's about survival," I said. "The characters learn the system, build their stats, run storylines, and try to find a way out. Each storyline is basically a horror film they have to act out. There are roles. The system assigns you a character type and you have to play it. Some people are main characters. Some are supporting cast. Some are..."
I stopped.
"Some are what?" Riley asked.
"Some are more expendable than others," I said. "The minor archetypes are less 'important'. They have less opportunity to be considered a 'main' character of a movie outside of very rare situations. You, me, the couple and the
wearing lady? We're more likely to a supporting character in the movie than any of the Major Archetypes." I say as he looks confused.
"Wait, how do you know ja
Riley looked at his ticket. Film Buff. Minor archetype.
"And Film Buff is a minor archetype," he said.
"Yeah."
"Great."
"It's not all bad," I said, and this was genuine. "Film Buffs are the insight class. They see things other archetypes don't. They can read the enemy's abilities, predict plot events, find information. They're fragile, but they're not supposed to be the action hero type."
"The brains of the operation."
"More like the guy in the horror movie who does exposition before dying, not that different from the Scholar, I guess, but they work on different niches."
Riley looked at me. "Does he survive?"
"In the book? Yeah." I paused. "Usually, but death doesn't matter much after the first few deaths, everyone gets used to it, weird as that sounds."
The best way to trick them is give them enough information about the books without revealing any names. Much better that way than otherwise, the pros wouldn't be forcing Riley into the veterans group to level him up and whatnot.
I was being careful. I was sharing the mechanical information freely, the stats, the archetypes, the general concept of how storylines worked, because that stuff was safe. It was structural. It would help these people understand what was happening to them without causing the kind of existential crisis that made people do stupid things.
What I was not sharing:
That I knew their names from a book. That I knew which of them would die and which would survive the first storyline. That I knew about a thing called the Rulekeeper, a man with an axe who killed players who quit or cheated or broke the rules too deliberately. That I knew about rescue tropes that had been taken away. That I knew about the mountain and the lights and the entity behind it all. That I knew about a woman named Dina, walking silently at the back of the group, who carried letters from someone or something that might hold the key to escaping this place.
I knew all of it. And I was going to dole it out in controlled doses, at the right times, in the right amounts, because I understood pacing. I understood narrative structure. I understood that information is a weapon, and weapons wielded carelessly hurt the person holding them as much as anyone else.
I was a Film Buff. Savvy 5. I was built to see things and to know when to share what I'd seen.
I was also someone who'd had four speaking roles in horror films. Moxie 3. I could perform the version of myself that each moment required.
Right now, the moment required "helpful but incomplete."
I could do helpful but incomplete.
The conversation spread through the group in fragments as we walked. Bobby relayed the LitRPG concept to anyone who would listen, with the enthusiasm of a man who had found a new topic to be fascinated by.
"It's a whole genre," Bobby told Antoine, who had drifted back to check on his friends. "Books where the world runs on game mechanics. Stats and levels. The kid here has read one that's set in a town called Carousel."
"What, like this place?" Antoine asked, looking at me.
"Same name," I said. "Similar setup."
"Does the book say anything useful? Like how to get to the lake house?"
"The book is fiction," I said. "Or at least I thought it was. The similarities are weird, but it could just be a coincidence."
I was giving him the comfortable version. The one that let him keep thinking about his brother and the lake house. He'd learn the truth soon enough. Valerie and Arthur would handle that part. It wasn't my revelation to deliver.
Antoine accepted this and moved back to the front, where Kimberly was waiting for him.
Kimberly overheard enough to ask, "What's a LitRPG?"
"Literary RPG," Bobby said. "Novels about people in game worlds."
"Like video games?"
"Like if you were trapped inside a video game and it was trying to kill you," Camden said, who had been thinking about the concept for the past fifteen minutes and had arrived at the most concise possible description.
"That sounds awful," Kimberly said.
"Yeah," Camden agreed quietly.
I caught the edge of Todd's attention as the book conversation rippled through the group. He was walking near the front with Valerie but kept glancing back. He'd heard enough of what I'd been saying to be interested, and not enough to be satisfied.
He dropped back.
"Nolan," Todd said, falling into step beside me. His grin was still there but it had shifted to something more probing. "Couldn't help overhearing. You mentioned a book. Set in a place called Carousel."
"Yeah. Horror LitRPG."
"And it has stat systems? Archetypes? All of that?"
"Yeah. Five stats, same ones on our tickets. Plot Armor equals the total. Characters get assigned archetypes that determine their role in the storylines."
Todd was quiet for a few steps. "What kind of archetypes?"
"Major and minor. Some are frontline types, good in a fight. Others are support. The Film Buff is a minor archetype focused on perception and insight. There's also a Scholar, which is more research-oriented. An Athlete for physical stuff. A Final Girl, which is..." I hesitated. "The survivor type. The one the story centers on."
Todd's grin had faded by degrees as I talked. Not to a frown, not to alarm. To a kind of focused neutrality that I recognized from good actors. The expression you wore when you needed to hear more before deciding how to react.
"You said the author invited you here," Todd said. "To this town specifically."
"He messaged me online. Said he was doing a small fan event."
"And before that message, had you ever heard of this place? The real town, not the book?"
"No. I didn't even know it existed."
"But the book describes it in detail."
"In a lot of detail, yeah."
Todd looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned and walked quickly toward the front. He leaned close to Valerie. They spoke in low tones. I saw Valerie glance back at me once. Arthur, walking ahead in his characteristic silence, tilted his head slightly when Todd said something to him. The cigar paused.
They didn't pull me aside. They didn't make a scene. But I could feel the shift in their attention. I had moved from "unknown newcomer" to "unknown newcomer who knows things he shouldn't."
That was fine. That was expected. I'd told them enough to establish credibility without telling them enough to cause problems. The book existed. It described a place like Carousel. It had game mechanics that matched our tickets. That was interesting. That was worth discussing later.
What I hadn't told them was that the book described them. By name. With their stats and tropes and histories. I hadn't told them that I knew about rescue tropes and how they'd been taken away. I hadn't told them about the Rulekeeper or Secret Lore or the mountain or any of the things that would transform me from "interesting anomaly" to "potential security threat."
Later. All of that was later.
Right now I was an eighteen-year-old kid who'd read a weird book and was processing the coincidence. That was my character. That was the role I was playing.
Moxie 3. Not the highest stat, but it was passable enough.
The road stretched on. The forest gave way to open patches revealing rolling hills and distant structures. Everything had the slightly-too-perfect quality of a movie set. Not fake, but arranged. Curated. Like someone had designed this landscape to look natural and had done a very good job but not a perfect one.
I felt it then. The warmth.
A loosening in my chest. A softening at the edges of my thoughts. The excitement that had been running through me like electric current was still there, but it was being... dampened. Smoothed. Like someone had put a blanket over a speaker that was turned up too loud.
I knew what this was. The woman, Valerie, had a trope. A calming influence that worked through proximity and presence. In the book it was called the Good Shepherd. It made people feel safe when she was leading them, regardless of whether they actually were safe.
Knowing what it was didn't make it stop working. That was going to be a recurring theme in this place. Carousel's tropes operated below the level of conscious resistance. You could understand the mechanism and still be caught by it.
But the warmth couldn't smother the deeper thing. The buzz in my bones. The thrill.
I looked around at the others. The trope was working on everyone. Antoine's jaw had unclenched. Kimberly had stopped pulling at his arm. Camden's analytical squint had softened. Even Janet, who had been a coiled spring of anxiety since the parking lot, looked marginally less likely to bolt.
Everyone except two people.
The woman in the brown
, Dina, walked with the same guarded intensity she'd maintained since the beginning. Either the calming influence wasn't reaching her, or she was the kind of person who didn't feel safe no matter what. I knew it was the latter. I knew why, and I wasn't going to be the one to tell anyone.
And me. I was feeling the calming effect, but it was layered over excitement rather than fear, which produced a strange combination. Like being high and caffeinated at the same time.
Riley fell into step beside me again.
"You don't seem scared," he observed.
"I'm not."
"Everyone else is, at least a little. Even the people who are pretending not to be."
"I know."
He waited. He was good at waiting. Film Buffs, it turned out, were patient people.
"I've spent the last two years visiting haunted places," I said. "Abandoned hospitals. Murder sites. Locations where bad things happened. I've been to dozens of them. I was looking for something."
"What?"
"A reason to be scared."
Riley looked at me with an expression I'd seen before, on the faces of directors and casting agents. The expression of someone trying to decide whether I was damaged or interesting or both.
"Did you find it?" he asked.
"Not until today."
I wasn't grinning. I was aware that grinning would make me look unhinged, and I had enough acting experience to know that "unhinged" was not the impression you wanted to make on people you might need to trust you later. But inside, behind the controlled exterior, something was singing.
Riley didn't push. He just nodded.
"The book," he said after a while. "How much of it is about the mechanics? The stats and archetypes and stuff."
"A lot. The whole system is explained over the course of the first few books. How stats work, how storylines are structured, what each archetype does, how you level up."
"And you could explain all of that? From memory?"
"Most of it. I've read the series four times. I have a notebook with some of it written out. It's in my bag."
Riley glanced at the backpack on my shoulders. "You brought notes about a fictional game system to a book signing."
"I'm thorough."
"You're something," Riley said, but not unkindly.
We walked in silence for a beat. Then:
"If it turns out this isn't just a coincidence," Riley said carefully, "and the book describes something real... would you share what you know? With the group?"
"Yes," I said. "But not all of it at once."
He looked at me. "Why not?"
"Because some of it would scare people in ways that aren't helpful. And because I don't know how much of the book is accurate. It's one person's account. It could be wrong about things. Incomplete. Biased. I need to see how much matches before I start treating it like gospel."
Riley considered this. "That's... surprisingly reasonable for someone our age."
"I'm not most people our age."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
The guides stopped.
On the left side of the road was a wrought-iron fence. Tall, ornate, lined with decorative spikes. Behind it, overgrown grass and dense brush. A gate further down had a broken sign. All that remained: "The Jewel of Carousel."
I knew what was coming. My heartbeat picked up. Not fear. Anticipation. The same feeling I got in a movie theater right before the first kill scene, that tight, focused awareness where every sense sharpens and the world narrows to a single point.
I had been to haunted houses. I had been to crime scenes. I had stood in rooms where people had actually died and felt nothing except a faint, analytical curiosity.
This was different. This was going to be real in a way that none of those places had been.
Bobby squeezed Janet's arm beside me. "I can't wait," he said. "I knew this was supposed to be a fancy convention, but I have a feeling this is going to be great. I have a good feeling about this, honey."
Janet did not have a good feeling. Janet's instincts were the best in the group, and they were screaming at her, and the only thing keeping her here was the Good Shepherd's calming influence and the physical weight of Bobby's arm around her shoulders.
The guides checked their watches. Then stopped.
"You need to listen to us with what is about to happen," Valerie said. Calm. Precise. Each word selected carefully. "It is vitally important to do what we say."
She scanned the brush beyond the fence.
Todd watched our faces.
Arthur smoked.
I heard it first. Because I was listening for it. Because my body was tuned to the frequency of this specific moment in a way nobody else's could be.
Footsteps. Running. Branches snapping. Desperate, ragged breathing.
A woman burst through the thicket on the other side of the fence and slammed into the iron bars at full speed.
The impact split her forehead. Blood sheeted down her face. She was young, dark-skinned, with long curly hair tangled with leaves. Her clothes were torn. Her hands were raw and bleeding.
And her eyes. I had seen eyes like that once before. In a mirror, when I was seven, two days after the worst night of my life. The eyes of someone who knows that the thing hunting them is going to win.
Kimberly screamed. Janet screamed.
"Help!" the woman cried. She grabbed the bars and shook them. "Please! Please!"
The excitement in my chest shifted. It didn't disappear. It transformed. It became something more complex. Adrenaline and recognition and a deep, aching empathy that coexisted with the thrill without canceling it out, because I had been that person. I had been the one bleeding and terrified with nowhere to run.
The difference was that nobody had been on the other side of the fence for me.
"Don't do anything," Valerie said. "Don't even speak to her."
I didn't move. Not because of the trope. Because I knew the rules. This was a medium-level storyline called Permanent Vacancy, and if we interacted with the woman, we'd be pulled in. At Plot Armor eleven, that was a death sentence.
I knew this from the book. I didn't share this knowledge.
"Help me," the woman screamed. She locked eyes with Riley. Then with me. "Please. They're coming."
Riley started to raise his hand. Valerie grabbed his arm.
"Do not speak to her," Valerie said. "Look at her. Focus on her. Do you see something strange?"
I was already looking. The red wallpaper bloomed in my mind's eye. Translucent. Ghostly. Red background with the outlines of movie posters and text I couldn't fully resolve yet. Two letters, clearer than the rest.
NPC.
The red wallpaper. The heads-up display. I had theorized about it for months. Written notes. Discussed it in Discord threads. And now it was inside my head, exactly as described, and absolutely nothing like I had imagined, because descriptions are just words and this was happening behind my eyes.
The woman's name was Samantha. The red wallpaper told me. The book had told me first, months ago, on a screen, in a paragraph I had highlighted on my Kindle.
Behind Samantha, yelling, barks as well. Men with dogs. Close enough that if we interacted with her, we wouldn't be in the Omen anymore, and this would be our Choice.
"Please," she said. "They have another guy in the basement. Please help us."
Nobody moved.
She tried to squeeze through the bars. The spikes caught her. She pushed anyway. Blood ran down iron.
I watched. I watched the way I'd watched a thousand horror movies, with total attention and full engagement, cataloging and analyzing while the part of my brain that was supposed to feel revulsion sat quiet. Almost as if calibrated by real violence at an age when most kids were worried about losing their first tooth.
Except it wasn't quiet this time. Not entirely. Something was reaching through the professional distance, the analytical detachment, the carefully maintained buffer between me and the world. Something about Samantha's eyes. About the sounds she was making. About the way the blood ran down the iron bars in patterns that looked too much like the patterns I'd seen on a hallway floor twenty years ago in a house that I still visited in my dreams.
The excitement didn't go away. I felt more flustered at seeing her in her state than anything if I was being honest. But it made room for something else, and the something else had teeth.
"All right, let's go," Arthur said. "You don't want to see the next part."
We left.
The last thing I heard was a scream that cut off the way a scream cuts off in a movie when the editor decides the audience has heard enough, except there was no editor here, and the silence that followed was the silence of something actually ending.
Her name was Samantha and by God she was beautiful.
Unlike what they think, NPCs are very real, perhaps not every single one of them as I've come to understand, but they were people, who became "NPCs", Janet would be the same due to Bobby's Throughline.
I didn't know if that made it better or worse. And I certainly didn't share this thought with anyone though.
We walked through farmland that was wrong for the season. Fall crops in what should have been summer. Nobody mentioned it except Camden, who whispered to Riley and Anna. I heard him. He was right.
The silence after Samantha was heavy. Even Bobby had stopped talking.
Valerie stopped us in a stretch of cornfields. Flat ground, no structures, no witnesses. A contained space for a conversation nobody wanted to have.
"We're sorry you had to see that," she said. "But we hoped that by showing you that, it might make the next part easier."
Arthur nodded. She continued.
"Carousel is not what you think. There is no horror convention."
Bobby's face gave way to confusion as his eyes shifted to every single one of the 'veterans'.
I watched it happen the way you watch a practical effect in a movie. His smile didn't die. It disassembled. Piece by piece, like a set being struck after the last show. What remained wasn't sadness or anger. It was bewilderment.
"Your brother Chris did not invite you," Valerie told Antoine. "It was all a trick."
Antoine fought. Denied. Demanded. Arthur walked him through it, patient and methodical. The disappearance years ago. The sudden reconnection. The questions about friends and personalities. The curated guest list.
He was guessing. Or I guess extrapolating from a decade of watching Carousel repeat its tactics with minor variations would be a better . He described the pattern and let Antoine fill in the blanks.
"He wanted you to bring specific people," Arthur said. "Probably your smartest friend. Your most sociable friend, your funniest friend. Maybe someone who knew horror movies. Am I close?"
Antoine's silence was confirmation.
"You weren't talking to Chris," Arthur said. "You were talking to Carousel. And now that it's got you here, it'll never let you leave."
Silence.
Then Janet ran.
She turned and sprinted back toward the parking lot with the explosive energy of someone who had been holding herself in place by force of will and had finally run out. Bobby went after her.
"Wow," Todd said. "Normally it takes a bit longer to convince people we're telling the truth, I thought you were using your trope on them?"
"She must have gotten a high roll," Valerie said to Arthur.
We waited. I knew what would happen. The exit was gone. The road had closed behind us. Carousel had sealed the door.
I used the time.
I looked at the group and thought about what I knew and what I was choosing not to share.
I was not going to tell them that I knew their names from a book. Not yet. Maybe not ever. That knowledge would make me either invaluable or terrifying, and I needed to be the former before anyone suspected the latter.
I was not going to tell them about the Rulekeeper. The man with the axe who killed --I think? I'm not completely sure, given NPC Janet after all-- players who quit the game or broke the rules too deliberately. I didn't really have a reason besides 'no one asked' if I'm being honest.
I was not going to tell them about specific deaths. About who survived specific storylines and who didn't. About the futures that the book had mapped out for each of them. That was the most dangerous knowledge I carried, and I would bury it so deep that not even Savvy 5 could dig it up.
There isn't much I needed to share, if I'm being honest, the Veterans had it all figured out, at least as far as newbies as Riley and the others would require, I guess. All I'd do is perhaps tell them about the Throughlines, since I think they'd like to know about that.
The mechanics. How stats worked. How the Plot Cycle functioned. The phases of a storyline, Omen through The End. How to earn star ratings. How leveling worked. The general principles of survival.
Information that helped that wouldn't put a massive fucking target on my back or show that my book isn't just a weird complex bait would already be relayed to the main cast after all.
Ten minutes later, Bobby and Janet came back.
Janet's face was blank. The panic was gone, replaced by the shutdown. The place your brain goes when the inputs exceed its processing capacity.
Bobby was gray. "The exit is gone," he said. "The road we came on... was just gone."
He looked at me. Specifically at me.
"The book you mentioned," he said. "The one about the town called Carousel. Does it describe anything like this?"
"Yeah," I said. "Kinda."
"What else does it describe?"
I looked at Bobby Gill. The Wallflower. The man who ran a horror forum because he loved the genre, the way I loved the genre, with the deep and somewhat lonely devotion of someone whose passion was too specific for most people to share.
"A lot," I said. "It describes a lot. But I don't think right now is the time for the full rundown."
"Why not?"
"Because some of it is complicated. And some of it is the kind of thing that's better to learn in small pieces. Trust me."
Bobby studied my face. He was searching for something. Looking for the lie, maybe, or trying to gauge whether I was holding back out of wisdom or out of something else.
"How much do you know?" he asked.
"I don't know,," I said. "For all I know, the book could be wrong or give me false hopes on some stuff."
Bobby was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Is it at least a good book?"
I blinked. Of all the questions he could have asked.
"Yeah," I said. "It's a really good book."
Bobby nodded slowly. "Well. At least we're in a well-written nightmare."
Ahead of us, Arthur was explaining the basics of Carousel. Storylines. Omens. Rules. I listened. I already knew everything he was saying, but I listened anyway, because hearing it from Arthur made it real in a way that reading it on a Kindle never had.
I could see Patcher's Family Farm in the distance. The sign. The hay bales. The booth for a corn maze.
I knew what was in that maze. I knew its name, its difficulty, its monster, and the specific tropes that monster used to hunt. I knew which of these people would survive it and which would die temporarily and which would be spared.
I kept all of it behind my teeth.
Riley walked beside me for the last stretch. He didn't ask questions. He just walked, and glanced at me occasionally, and I could feel him arriving at a conclusion that he wasn't ready to say out loud.
"Whatever happens next," he said, "stay close."
"That goes against all the horror movie rules." It was supposed to be a joke, but to be honest...
It was the most honest thing I'd said all day.
The corn parted ahead of us, and Patcher's Family Farm opened up like a stage set waiting for its actors.
I had been a supporting actor before. I knew the drill. Hit your marks. Deliver your lines. Don't upstage the lead. Take direction.
But this wasn't a set. And the director wasn't human. And the script was a book that I'd read four times, and I was about to walk into its third chapter, and the monster in the corn was real, and my Plot Armor was eleven, and I was going to be halved to five the moment Trope Master activated.
Five.
In a horror movie, the character with Plot Armor of five doesn't make it to the credits.
And while I didn't necessarily care about dying, I also don't feel like there's an actual need for me to have Trope Master equipped, given that I've already read the book, and if for some God forsake reason, something was different, Riley would still have it. I kind of like the idea of being in the sequel after all.
And in Carousel, surviving the first storyline was how you earned the right to try.