The trek across town took about two hours.
Two hours of walking through a town that looked, from a distance, like any other small mountain community. Ordinary buildings. Residential streets. A downtown area with shops and restaurants that we gave a wide berth. A college campus that we avoided entirely. If you'd seen it from a helicopter, you would have thought it was a perfectly normal place to live.
You would have been wrong, but I'm sure you could have guessed that yourself at this point.
Arthur marched us forward like we were moving through a minefield, which, in a very real sense, we were. Every few minutes Arthur would make us change direction. Sometimes he'd have us run. Once he had us hide in a drainage ditch beside the road while something I couldn't see passed on the street above.
"Stay low," he said. "Don't look."
I looked. Obviously I looked. I couldn't see what had triggered the Omen though, which probably meant it was subtle. A car driving by. A pedestrian with a specific expression. A mailbox with the wrong flag up. In Carousel, anything could be an Omen. The book described them as tripwires strung across the landscape, invisible until you stepped on one. In my experience so far, that was pretty accurate except for the part where the tripwire could also be a woman walking a dog or a nice mirror in a trashcan.
I didn't have a scouting trope. Neither did Riley, he only got his after Janet got axe'd. We just had to trust Arthur, who had been navigating this town for much longer, and the other two guides, who probably had at least one scouting trope.
The group was quiet during the walk. The corn maze had burned through whatever conversational energy people had left. Antoine walked near the front, tense and silent. Kimberly walked beside him, their hands brushing occasionally. Camden and Anna stuck together, whispering about the architecture and the vegetation and the thousand small ways this town didn't match what a normal California mountain community should look like. Camden had this look on his face, the one where you can practically hear the gears turning behind the eyes. Scholar archetype doing Scholar things. Was that racist? Or uh, Archetypist?
Bobby walked with Janet. She hadn't spoken since the maze. Not one word. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, her arms crossed, her pace mechanical. She was still functioning, still putting one foot in front of the other, but there was nobody home behind her eyes. Bobby held her hand and didn't try to fill the silence, which was the first time I'd seen him not try to fill a silence.
At one point, Bobby looked over at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. His face was the face of a man who had been decapitated by a scarecrow and then woken up fine, and who was now trying to reconcile those two facts with a worldview that had been built entirely on horror being a genre you could turn off. Maybe I was just bad at describing faces because that's just what happened.
Earlier, when he'd asked me about the book describing Benny, I'd told him the characters in the book actually played something different first, a storyline with spirits and a bell and an Ouija board equivalent. That was a deliberate lie. The book described this exact corn maze with this exact scarecrow, and I'd told Bobby otherwise because the alternative was him knowing that I'd watched the whole thing play out exactly as written and hadn't warned anyone.
I didn't feel great about lying to Bobby. But I felt worse about the alternative, which was Bobby telling everyone that I had a complete script of their lives and chose to let people die, which would have been both inaccurate and incredibly damaging to my ability to function in this group. Sometimes the smart play is to manage the narrative. This isn't a concept unique to Carousel.
I gave him a small nod. Not reassurance. Just acknowledgment. I see you. I know what happened. We'll figure it out.
Bobby nodded back and turned forward. Janet's hand in his. One foot in front of the other.
Dina walked alone at the back, as always. She moved with the same deliberate, watchful intensity she'd had since the parking lot, except now there was something different underneath it. Satisfaction, maybe. Or resolve. She had smashed a pumpkin and gotten killed by a scarecrow and come back from the dead, and instead of being traumatized, she looked like someone who had just gotten confirmation of a hypothesis she'd been testing for a long time.
I recognized that look because I'd worn it myself about five hours ago.
I walked alone in the middle, which was where I usually ended up. Not in the front where the leaders went. Not in the back where the damaged went. In the middle, where you could observe both directions without committing to either.
The middle was the Film Buff's natural habitat, I assume. Close enough to see everything. Far enough to not get involved until the right moment. Also, it's where the background characters tend to be, and I was very much a background character right now.
We crossed what might have been a residential neighborhood if you squinted. The houses were set back from the road behind deep yards and mature trees. Some had lights on. Some didn't. All of them had an empty quality that had nothing to do with whether anyone was inside. They were set pieces. Backdrop. Locations waiting for their storylines to activate. Like movie sets the day before shooting starts, everything dressed and ready but not yet alive.
Arthur stopped us at an intersection. He looked both ways, waited, and waved us across quickly. Nobody asked what he'd seen. Nobody wanted to know. I assumed it might have something about the devil in the crossroad? Or maybe one of those "Wrong Turn" type of movies.
Three blocks later, he stopped us again. This time he made us hide behind a row of hedges while a woman walked past on the sidewalk across the street, walking a dog that looked like a small pony. The dog was straining at its leash, lunging toward us.
"He never does this, I swear," the woman said to no one in particular.
We stayed behind the hedges until she was gone.
"What was that?" Antoine whispered.
"An Omen," Arthur said. "Talk to her and you start a storyline. A bad one."
"How bad?" Camden asked.
"Bad enough that I'm not telling you. Move."
Right, that one was in the books, if I recall, not that they ever did this storyline in particular, as
The dodging continued for the next hour. Arthur read the landscape the way a sailor reads the sea, watching for currents nobody else could perceive. Every few minutes, something would catch his attention, a car, a pedestrian, a specific building, a particular arrangement of objects on a porch, and he'd change our route.
At one point, we passed a street that had a thick fog bank sitting at the far end, motionless and low and wrong in a way I couldn't articulate except to say that fog was not supposed to have texture. It sat there like a wall, opaque and faintly luminous, and Arthur didn't even look at it. He just picked up the pace and said, "Eyes forward."
I looked at the street sign. Calumet Ave. In the book, the Carousel Atlas specifically warned players to avoid the fog on Calumet Ave. I didn't know what storyline it triggered. The book hadn't described it. But Arthur's refusal to even glance at it told me everything I needed to know about the difficulty level.
The seasons changed as we walked. Because of course they did. Because this is Carousel and nothing is allowed to make sense in a way that feels normal.
The air warmed. The trees shifted from the reds and oranges of autumn to the deep greens of summer. The light changed quality, becoming brighter, more direct. On Patcher's Family Farm, it had been fall. Here, approaching the western side of town, it was summer.
Camden noticed. "The seasons are different here," he said to Anna.
"I noticed," she said.
"Different parts of town are set in different seasons," I said. They both looked at me. "Think about it. Each area is the backdrop for different storylines. Different horror subgenres take place in different seasons. Summer camp horror needs summer. Harvest horror needs fall. The town is zoned by genre."
Camden stared at me. "That's insane."
"It's consistent," I said. "Which in this place amounts to the same thing."
"How do you know that?" Anna asked. "The book?"
"Partly the book, partly just connecting the dots. If the town runs on horror movie logic, then the settings have to match. You can't have a summer camp slasher in November. The ambiance would be all wrong."
Anna gave me that look. The one I was getting used to. The "I can't decide if you're a genius or a lunatic" look that I'd been receiving from people my entire life.
Fair enough. I couldn't always tell either.
Riley fell into step beside me after the seasons conversation. He'd been walking with Camden and Anna, but something about the genre-zoning observation had pulled him back to my orbit.
"You doing okay?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Most people aren't okay after their first storyline."
"I'm not most people." I'd been saying that a lot today. It kept being true.
He studied me. I kept my expression in the general neighborhood of "processing but handling it." Which was accurate. I was processing. I was also buzzing with residual adrenaline and cataloging every detail of the route for my notebook and thinking about stat point allocation and wondering whether the My Father Was a Pastor background trope would let me equip Know Thy Enemy before or after I hit Plot Armor 21.
Multitasking. Film Buff brain.
"The scarecrow gave you seeds," Riley said.
"Yeah."
"It gave Kimberly seeds too. Nobody else."
"He judges people," I said. "It's one of his rules. He only kills people he considers unworthy. If he thinks you're good, you walk away."
"And the seeds are what? A receipt?"
"Something like that. Agricultural stamp of approval."
Riley almost smiled. "What does a scarecrow consider 'good'?"
"Don't break his stuff. Don't cut through his corn. Don't be cruel. His values are based on preservation. Growth is good. Destruction is bad. It's the same logic as every nature-spirit horror film."
"That's from the book?"
"That's from genre literacy. Scarecrows protect crops. Their moral framework centers on cultivation. Same pattern as every movie where the monster punishes people for violating the natural order. The Wicker Man. Midsommar. Children of the Corn."
"Children of the Corn," Riley repeated, looking at the road behind us where the corn maze was now miles away. "That's on the nose."
"Everything in Carousel is on the nose. That's like, the whole point."
Riley walked with me for a while in comfortable silence. Comfortable silence with another person was rare for me. Usually silence was just the space between being alone and being bothered. With Riley, it felt like two people thinking the same kinds of thoughts and not needing to say them out loud. Film Buff solidarity or whatever.
"You mentioned earlier that the book has a Film Buff character," Riley said eventually. "Same archetype as both of us."
"Yeah."
"What's he like?"
That was a loaded question and Riley didn't even know it.
"He's... observant," I said, choosing my words carefully. "Quiet at first. Watches more than he acts. Good at seeing the patterns in how the storylines work. Not great in a fight. Not fast. He focuses on Insight tropes since the others ."
Riley nodded slowly. "That sounds about right."
"From my understanding, minor archetypes aren't supposed to be the main players," I said. "We're supposed to play support, me, you, Tod, Janet, Dina, Bobby, we for example, thanks to Trope Master, are supposed to detect the tropes the monsters, and even the NPCs, have in the first place and relay to the others."
"And if nobody listens?"
"Then your teammates are kind of dumb for not listening to you in the first place, which begs the question of why they're suicidals, but whatever."
Riley looked at me sideways. "You have a weird way of making terrible things sound almost okay."
"It's a gift," I said.
We walked. Arthur dodged another Omen, this time making us cut through an alley between two buildings that smelled like mildew and something I couldn't identify. The alley was dark enough that I couldn't see the ground, and I had to trust that the path was clear because Arthur was moving through it without hesitation. Trust was a weird thing in Carousel. You had to give it to people you didn't know based on nothing but the fact that they'd survived longer than you.
On the other side, we emerged onto a street lined with Victorian-style houses. One of them had a woman on the porch, crying, bleeding from her wrists and nose. She went inside after a moment, but not before hurling a large silver mirror into a trashcan near the street. It landed perfectly angled so that anyone walking by would see it glinting in the fading light.
"That's a really pretty mirror," Kimberly said softly, slowing down. Her hand reached out toward it.
Anna took her by the shoulders. "Let's keep moving."
In the book, this was one of the Omens that Todd had warned Riley about on the way back from Halle Castle. Don't take the mirror. The book didn't describe what storyline it triggered, but the woman's bleeding wrists and the fact that she'd thrown the mirror away like it was cursed told me enough. Pretty things in Carousel were bait. Always.
Kimberly shook her head as they walked away. "What just happened? I don't even care about mirrors."
"Omen," I said quietly. "The mirror is a trap. It looked appealing because it's designed to look appealing. That's how lures work."
"How do you know?" Kimberly asked.
"Because it's a perfectly good mirror thrown away, of fucking course that shit's haunted in some way, it's easier to assume everything that isn't another player like us is a trap ready to be sprung to be honest." I said.
Kimberly looked at me like I was insane. Which, fair enough. But she also didn't go back for the mirror, so the insanity was functional.
We passed more streets. More buildings. More NPCs going about their scripted lives in the background of a world that existed to kill the foreground characters. A man changing a tire on the side of the road waved at us. Arthur steered us past him without a word.
"Let me guess," I said to Todd, who was bringing up the rear near me. "Don't help the guy change his tire."
Todd looked at me with something between surprise and amusement. "The book?"
"Jesus, is everything I say have to be related to the book? This one's just common sense. Every helpful stranger in a horror movie is a setup. Too many hitchhiker-based movies begin with a shitty tire or otherwise impromptu stop at the road."
"You're going to be fun to have around," Todd said, and I honestly couldn't tell if he meant it as a compliment or if he was being sarcastic.
The last stretch of the walk took us around the southern shore of a lake I could only catch glimpses of through the trees. The water was dark and still, the kind of still that you see in movies right before something surfaces. I didn't look at it too long. In the book, the lake had water monster storylines that could be triggered just by being too close to the water. The shore was safe. The deeper water was not.
I made a mental note. Another data point for the notebook. Stay away from deep water. Don't swim in the lake. Don't take a boat unless you know exactly what's underneath you.
The list of things you couldn't do in Carousel was significantly longer than the list of things you could. But that was horror in a nutshell. The genre was built on restrictions. Don't go in the basement. Don't read the book aloud. Don't say the name three times. Don't look in the mirror. Don't answer the phone. Every horror movie was a list of prohibitions, and every victim was someone who broke one.
Carousel had just made the prohibitions literal.
By the time we saw the sign for Camp Dyer, the sun was gone and the stars hadn't come out. The forest had thickened into a proper canopy, blocking what little twilight remained. The air smelled like pine and lake water and something faintly smoky, like a bonfire that had been burning for hours.
I knew this place. I had read about it in such detail that walking through it felt like returning to a location from a dream. The lodge was where the book said it would be. The restricted cabin on the eastern shore, the one that was boarded up and surrounded by police tape, was exactly where I expected it to be, nestled in the trees on a finger of land that jutted into the lake.
That cabin was tied to a storyline so high-level that even the veterans avoided it. In the book, Riley couldn't even read its name on the red wallpaper. All he got was "Warning." I looked toward it now and got the same thing. Just a faint, ominous pulse that said, in no uncertain terms, fuck off.
I fucked off.
As we entered the main complex, I heard giggling. NPC campers. Little girls in pajamas and braided bracelets, lurking in the dark, watching us with bright, empty eyes. The same kind of wrong that I'd noticed at Patcher's Farm, except worse because these were children and children should not be lurking in dark forests making synchronized giggling sounds. That's, like, page one of the horror movie manual.
Arthur's jaw tightened. His hand moved to his hip.
Then the singing started.
"Suzy Snyder, six foot five, haunts Camp Dyer, still alive. She went missing long ago, leaving campers in..."
Arthur raised his voice. "Go to bed!" He pulled a revolver and fired three times into the air.
Half a dozen little girls exploded from the bushes, shrieking, and sprinted back toward the cabins.
Arthur stomped into the lodge and slammed the door behind him.
Todd turned to us. "Arthur doesn't do well around creepy children. It's his thing. And that sucks because there are a boatload of creepy children in Carousel."
In the book, this moment was played for dark comedy. In person, Arthur's hand had been shaking when he fired those shots. Not from fear. From exhaustion. The specific kind that comes from dealing with the same bullshit for over a decade and running out of patience for all of it.
We followed Todd inside.
Dyer's Lodge was big. Massive log walls, a huge common room with couches and tables and a fireplace tall enough to stand in. Twin staircases to a second level with bookshelves and planning areas covered in maps and documents.
The west wall was entirely glass. Through it, the lake was a dark mirror. Somewhere across it was the mountain. The one with the lights. The one that held secrets I knew about from the later books and web serial chapters.
And inside the lodge: about six dozen people. Players. Survivors. All of them standing and watching the door and waiting.
When we walked in, they erupted. Clapping. Cheering. Someone handed me a beer. Someone slapped me on the back. It was aggressively welcoming in a way that was clearly rehearsed. This was orientation. A choreographed emotional response designed to make the newcomers feel less like they'd been abducted by a horror dimension.
I took the beer. Didn't drink it.
"How did ol' Benny treat you?" someone called out.
"They got a Film Buff," another said. Several people turned to look at me. "Two of them," someone corrected, and the attention split between me and Riley.
Two Film Buffs in one batch. Film Buffs were rare according to the book. The archetype didn't get assigned to many people. Having two arrive simultaneously was apparently noteworthy enough that multiple veterans were openly staring. I felt like a zoo exhibit. A rare species just brought in from the wild.
A woman stood in the center of the lounge. Early forties, calm and commanding. I looked at her on the red wallpaper.
Adeline Winter is The Final Girl. Plot Armor: 64.
Adeline began speaking. "Welcome to Dyer's Lodge. As you probably already know, my name is Adeline. I wish that we could have met under different circumstances..."
"No!" a voice screamed from upstairs. "Please, no!"
A man came running down the stairs. Older version of Antoine. Same build, same jawline.
On the red wallpaper: Christian Stone is The Athlete.
Antoine dropped his luggage. Chris ran to him.
"Not my brother. Not my brother."
"Not you too!"
I watched the reunion from across the room, my back against a log post, holding a beer I wasn't drinking. I had read this scene. The rage and sorrow of a man who had been trapped for eight years discovering that the trap had caught his little brother too.
Everyone was crying or trying not to. I was dry-eyed. Not because I didn't feel it. Because I had processed this scene months ago on my Kindle, in the back of a car in a Walmart parking lot in Tulsa. The feeling I'd had then was the same feeling I had now. A cold, steady ache that sat below everything else and didn't interfere with the excitement or the analysis or any of the other things my brain was doing simultaneously.
Riley had been lucky, in a way. No one outside Carousel to worry about. His parents had died when he was little. Same as me, both our parents were murdered, the only difference is that Riley still had some family after that incident, while I had nothing.
Nobody was going to come looking for Nolan Cade. Nobody knew I was missing. Nobody had been paying attention in the first place. In most contexts, that would be devastating. In Carousel, it was armor. Can't threaten you through loved ones if there are no loved ones to threaten.
At least, that's what I told myself. Whether I believed it was a different question.
The celebration settled into something quieter. Valerie guided us to a circle of couches. Veterans dispersed. Some went to bed. Some stayed up at tables covered with weapons and trope binders, planning their next storyline runs.
I watched them work. Binders of tickets organized by color. Bronze for backgrounds. Green for buffs. Blue for insights. Purple for rules. Red for actions. They argued about builds and loadouts with the intensity of players debating character builds in an MMO, except the stakes weren't raid progression, they were literal death.
I thought about the two background tropes sitting in my pocket. You Don't Belong Here and My Father Was a Pastor. Two keys to two different sets of doors. I hadn't even begun to think about build strategy yet, and I was already ahead of where most newcomers would be at this point because Silas had apparently decided I deserved the VIP treatment for kneeling in dirt and pretending to talk to God.
A Soldier archetype named Garrett came by. Broad shoulders, flat affect, no-nonsense energy. He didn't smile. He didn't try to sell me on the positive aspects of supernatural imprisonment. He just said, "Stay alive, keep your head down, learn the system," and walked away.
I liked him immediately. Straightforward people were rare everywhere. In Carousel, they were precious.
A woman named Grace brought out food. Real food. Turkey sandwiches with avocado and some kind of homemade aioli that had no business being this good in a horror dimension. The bread was fresh. The fruit was ripe. It was the best meal I'd had in months, and I'd eaten it standing up next to a phone that was an Omen.
That phone. The one sitting against the log post near the kitchen counter. DO NOT ANSWER. DO NOT LISTEN IN. I knew about it from the book. Kimberly was going to pick it up and hear men talking about hiding a body. Any minute now.
Bobby found me at the food table. He'd left Janet on a couch with a blanket.
"She won't talk to me," Bobby said quietly. He picked up a sandwich, looked at it, put it back down. "I don't know how to help her."
"You can't," I said, and that came out harsher than I intended. "Not right away. People process trauma at their own pace. Give her time."
Bobby was quiet for a moment. Then: "In the maze. She was screaming. And I could hear her through the corn, and I knew the rule said don't cut through, but she was screaming, and I just..."
"You cut through the corn."
"Yeah."
"And the scarecrow was right there."
"Like it was waiting for me."
"It probably was waiting. That's one of its tropes. It punishes people who break the rules of its domain. Probably has a trope that allows him to know when someone breaks the rules related to his domain."
Bobby was quiet for a beat. "The book you mentioned. Does anything like the corn maze happen in that?"
The lie from earlier. I had to maintain it.
"I'm not sure," I said. "But the book describes a lot of different storylines. The rules are consistent across all of them. Carousel always operates by rules, and the creatures have their tropes."
"So the scarecrow targeting me for cutting the corn..."
"Consistent with how every monster in the book operates, internal rules and tropes."
Bobby processed this. I could see him fitting this into his framework. He was a horror forum moderator. He understood narrative structures. He understood that monsters in horror movies always had rules, even if the characters didn't figure them out until too late.
"It's not fair though," he said. "Janet was screaming. What was I supposed to do, just stand there?"
"In Carousel's logic? Yeah. That's exactly what you were supposed to do." I took a breath. "Horror punishes the people who care, Bobby. The parent who goes into the basement. The boyfriend who goes back. The friend who stays behind. The genre is built on exploiting primal feelings. What's more primal than love?"
Bobby stared at me. "You're eighteen."
"So people keep telling me."
"How do you know things like that?"
"I've been studying horror since I was seven. It's the only subject where I'm not completely useless."
Bobby almost smiled at that. Almost. "You should write that stuff down. The rules, the patterns, how the monsters work. For the others."
"I'm pretty sure that whatever I have written on my notes is nothing in comparison to what the veterans have written up, besides, from what I understand, giving spoilers about the monsters is not a good idea since our rewards would be diminished."
"Can I see it?"
"Tomorrow. I need to organize it first. Right now it's mostly stream-of-consciousness analysis and half-finished theories."
Bobby nodded. He picked up the sandwich again. This time he actually took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed. The simple act of eating seemed to ground him, to remind his body that it was alive and functional and capable of things other than panicking.
"This sandwich is actually pretty good," he said.
"Grace made it. She's apparently the camp cook, probably has a trope for it."
"It's the good bread too."
Bobby took another bite. He was thinking. I could see it in his eyes, the same slow churning that happened when he was writing one of his deep-dive forum posts, assembling pieces into a framework that made sense.
"The Wallflower thing," he said. "My archetype."
"What about it?"
"Is that what I am? A background character? Because that's what it feels like. Like I'm not supposed to be important."
This was a more complicated question than Bobby realized. In the book, the Wallflower archetype started as exactly what he described: a background character. Low profile. Easy to overlook. Easy to kill. But later, much later, Bobby's archetype evolved into something else entirely. The Wallflower who could slip into NPC roles. The Recast. The player who could become someone else within a storyline, transforming a throwaway background character into someone plot-critical.
I wasn't going to tell him any of that. Not yet. Not because it would hurt, but because it would create expectations. If Bobby knew that his archetype had an advanced form that was genuinely powerful, he might rush toward it instead of developing organically, and in Carousel, rushing was how you got killed.
"Every archetype has a purpose," I said. "Just because we have minor archetypes doesn't mean we're useless, just means we have to use our stuff in different ways. I'm sure that you could ask for pointers from other Wallflowers, and maybe even get a veteran Hysteric to explain how Janet should play the game."
Bobby looked at me. "Did you just turn my existential crisis into a pep talk?"
"I guess, I'm just saying what I'm thinking, I'm probably the worst person to give a pep talk, never was one to make people feel better."
Bobby actually laughed at that. Short, surprised, genuine. The first real laugh I'd heard from him since the parking lot.
"I can work with that."
He finished his sandwich. I finished mine. We stood there in silence for a moment, two horror fans in a horror dimension, eating good sandwiches next to a phone that was a portal to a murder confession, and somehow that was just... Tuesday now. Or whatever day it was. Time didn't work right here in the same way it does outside, not with Dina and Riley's group being years between, and me and Riley's group also being years in-between.
Valerie sat down with us on the couches. She gave us the orientation speech. Stick around the lodge for a few days. Then start leveling up. Can't go into town with your current Plot Armor. There are safe starter storylines.
Kimberly mentioned the mall.
"Don't go to the mall," Valerie said, with a speed that suggested this was a reflex, not a decision.
Veterans piled on immediately.
"Stay away from the mall."
"Mall's dangerous."
"Don't step foot in there."
The unanimity was almost funny. Almost. Kimberly looked deflated. I knew why the mall was dangerous from the later books, but I wasn't going to explain. She just needed to stay away from it.
Camden leaned over to Riley. "Did you catch the thing about Valerie keeping us calm?"
"Yep," Riley answered.
"You thinking mind control?" Camden asked.
Anna interjected. "Maybe we shouldn't be talking about this with so many people around."
"Look at Valerie's tropes," Riley said.
They looked. I watched their faces change as the red wallpaper fed them the information. The Good Shepherd. An Honest Reputation.
"We were shepherded," Camden said.
I could have mentioned that I had The Good Shepherd on my list of equippable tropes now, thanks to My Father Was a Pastor. I didn't. That was information I was keeping close for now. Not because I was being secretive for the hell of it, but because I don't have the trope to equip in the first place.
"The second trope is worth paying attention to," I said instead. "An Honest Reputation. It makes people believe what she's saying, but only when she's telling the truth. If she lies, it backfires."
"How do you know that?" Camden asked.
"Red wallpaper. I can read the description, or is that because of Trope Master?" I shrug, didn't care that much about the specifics.
"So she was telling the truth about everything?" Camden said.
"The trope implies it, yeah. She couldn't have lied without the trope working against her."
"That's both reassuring and deeply creepy," Anna said.
"Welcome to Carousel," I said.
Across the room, Janet had come out of her catatonia and was loudly demanding to speak to whoever was in charge. Adeline was handling it. Bobby was hovering behind them, doing the helpless-husband thing where you want to fix it but don't have the tools.
Kimberly joined us on the couches. Sat alone. Didn't speak.
"You all right?" Anna asked.
Few seconds of delay. "I don't know."
Then Kimberly spotted the phone. I watched her look at it, look away, look at it again, stand up, walk toward it, pick up the receiver.
Her eyes went wide.
Roxy appeared out of the crowd like she'd been waiting for this exact thing. She took the phone from Kimberly's hand and slammed the receiver down.
"No, no, no, girl." She pointed to the sign. DO NOT ANSWER. DO NOT LISTEN IN.
"There were men on the phone," Kimberly said through tears. "They were talking about hiding a body."
You know, after Bobby, Janet and Dina were all fucking murdered by Benny, I never understood why this scene elicited Kimberly to cry. So many movies, action movies and comedy movies had a scene about hiding a body. I didn't say that because I didn't want to sound insensitive.
"Why would you have a phone like that?" Anna asked.
Because Carousel is an asshole that leaves landmines in your living room. That's why. But I kept that thought to myself.
Travis showed up. White T-shirt, crooked smile, energy of a man who had given up on sincerity as a coping mechanism.
"Well, there has to be a way out, right?" Camden was asking the group.
Before Travis could answer, I cut in.
"There's supposed to be," I said.
Everyone on the couches looked at me. Camden. Riley. Anna. Kimberly. Even Travis, who had been winding up his signature brand of weaponized pessimism, paused.
"In the book," I said, "there's a concept called a Throughline. It's like a long-form quest chain. A series of connected storylines that, if you complete them in sequence, lead somewhere. There are multiple Throughlines, run by different... entities, I think. And at least one of them is supposedly Carousel's own Throughline, and it's related to escape."
The silence was heavy. Travis's smirk had evaporated entirely, which based on my reading of his character in the book, was roughly equivalent to anyone else having a full emotional breakdown.
"How does it work?" Camden asked.
"I don't know the specifics," I said. "The book was still being published when I got lured here. The Throughline concept was introduced but not fully explained. I know they exist, I know they connect storylines into a larger narrative, and I know that one of them involves getting out of Carousel."
"But you don't know how to start one," Anna said.
"Or what it requires." Camden continued.
"Pretty sure that just wanting to get the fuck out of Carousel is enough to trigger the basic Throughline to leave the Carousel, but I know that Throughline exist and that it works." Although I'm not completely sure if it's for the best, given NPC-Janet, who I'm pretty sure is a Throughline that was there solely for Bobby.
Travis leaned back. The smirk returned, but softer. "That's more than anyone here has been able to confirm in twelve years. You got that from the book?"
"The book has been accurate for a lot of stuff, so I assume it's right here too."
Travis looked at me for a long moment. Then he turned to Camden. "Does there have to be a way out?" he repeated, echoing his own question. "Maybe. But don't get your hopes up, kid. This place has been promising things for a long time."
"Travis," Adeline said, materializing behind him. "What did we talk about earlier today?"
Travis stood, grabbed his cup, and delivered his recitation. "We calm new players. We reassure new players. We remember what it was like when we first got here, and we draw upon those feelings to empathize blah blah blah. We manage their expectations by focusing on achievable, realistic, and productive goals."
He backed away, grinning at Adeline. "When they ask about escape, we firmly and gently address their inquiries, leaving no room for ambiguity. We tell them we have tried everything. We tell them they need to focus on resting and getting their minds right so that they can adjust to their new lives."
Then he left.
I watched him go. Even Travis had paused at the word Throughline. Even he wanted to believe there was a door somewhere. He just needed to be the first to explain why it was probably locked.
"I'm sorry about that," Adeline said. "Travis has his own way of coping."
Yeah. His way of coping was making sure nobody else got to cope. I'd met Travis's type before. In the foster system, in shelters, on the road. People who had been hurt and decided that realistic expectations were more valuable than hope. They weren't always wrong. But they weren't always helpful either.
The word Throughline was in the air now, though. I could see it settling into people.
Whether I'd given them too much too soon remained to be seen. But the alternative, letting Travis's nihilism be the only framework available, seemed annoying though.
As the evening wound down and people drifted to bed, Todd came with room assignments. Camden and Riley bunked together. Antoine with Chris. Kimberly with Anna. Bobby and Janet together.
"Nolan Cade," Todd said, checking his list. He paused. "We didn't have space enough for you."
"Story of my life," I said.
"Storage room on the second floor. Small, but it's got a cot and a view of the lake."
"Better than most places I've slept," I said. And I meant it. A cot in a storage room in a haunted summer camp was a genuine upgrade from a Honda Civic in a Walmart parking lot.
Todd nodded. "Before I show you up, though. We'd like to talk to you. About the book."
I'd been expecting this since the parking lot.
Todd led me to a corner table where Valerie and Arthur were sitting. Arthur had a fresh cigar. Valerie had herbal tea. They both looked tired, but underneath was the sharp focus of people about to conduct an interrogation that they were pretending was a conversation.
I sat down across from them.
"So," Valerie said. "The book."
"Three published novels and an ongoing web serial," I said. "Set in a place called Carousel that matches this place in every detail I've been able to verify."
"How detailed?" Arthur asked.
"Very. The five stats, Plot Cycle, archetypes, trope classifications, how star ratings work, how leveling works, storyline structures, the difference between buffs and insights and rules and actions. Background tropes and how they enable multiclassing. How rescue tropes used to work and why they were removed."
The rescue trope mention got a reaction. Arthur's cigar paused. Valerie's teacup stopped. Todd shifted behind me.
"The book describes rescue tropes?" Valerie asked carefully.
"Past tense. It describes them as something that existed and was taken away. Apparently the veterans abused it and now it's just gone." What I didn't mention was how they came back. Which duh, no fucking way I'm telling them about it, I don't trust them.
"And the Throughline thing you mentioned to the newcomers," Arthur said. "The escape route."
"Long-form quest chains. Connected storylines building toward a larger goal. Multiple Throughlines available. At least one tied to escape. Specifics unclear because the book was still being serialized when I got pulled in."
"So we know there's a door but not where the key is," Arthur said.
"Better than not knowing there's a door."
"Maybe." Arthur was quiet for a moment. "What about the players? Does the book describe specific people?"
Here was the line.
"The book is told from one person's perspective," I said. "A Film Buff. He describes people around him, his group, some veterans. But I can't verify how much matches real people versus fictional characters the author created. Some details line up with what I've seen."
That was important. I needed to establish that the book wasn't a perfect one-to-one account, which gave me room to selectively share information without people assuming I had a complete script of their futures.
Because I didn't have a complete script. I had a partial one, written from someone else's perspective, with gaps and blind spots and an ending that hadn't been published yet. And even the parts I did have might not play out the same way, because I was here now, and the book hadn't accounted for Nolan Cade.
"And the author," Valerie said. "This Rob Lastrel. You said he messaged you online."
"Through Discord, it's a communication app. Text only. Never met him, never spoke to him."
"We think the author may not be real," Valerie said.
"I've come to the same conclusion."
"Carousel manipulates technology," Arthur said. "Phones, video calls, entire personas. A fake author online isn't beyond its capabilities."
"But why?" Todd asked from behind me. "Why would Carousel write a book about itself? What's the play?"
I'd been waiting for this one.
"I don't know man. Why does Carousel make movies?" I said.
Silence.
I looked at each of them. "Because if Carousel is making films, there must be someone watching them. And if someone is watching, then a book that attracts new participants, new characters..." I let it hang. "That's just marketing."
Arthur's cigar had gone out. Valerie set her teacup down with excessive care. Todd made a sound behind me that was halfway between a laugh and something much worse.
"An audience," Valerie said quietly. "You think there's an audience."
"I think the entire system is designed around entertainment," I said. "And entertainment without an audience is just a guy talking to himself in an empty room."
Nobody answered that for a long time.
"How old are you again?" Arthur asked eventually.
"Eighteen."
"And you drove here alone. Does anyone know where you are?"
"Nobody knew where I was before Carousel either. I've been on my own since I was sixteen. Shelters, couches, cars. Got my GED. Worked odd jobs." I paused. "Including four horror movies."
"You've been in horror movies? Talk about perfect casting." Todd asked.
"Just small ones. Indie productions as a supporting actor."
They exchanged a look. Less suspicious, more calculating.
"How many storylines does the book cover?" Todd asked.
"Maybe thirty or forty in detail. More referenced without full descriptions."
The weight of that landed. Thirty or forty storylines. Years of accumulated intelligence. Information that veterans had gathered through scouting tropes and trial and error and dying over and over and over.
I had it in a notebook.
"We want to go through the book information in detail," Valerie said. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. Can you write up a summary? Mechanical stuff, system rules, anything useful for training newcomers?"
"Already started," I said. "I've got a few pages done."
"Good." She hesitated. "Nolan. Is there anything in the book that you think we shouldn't know?"
I held her gaze.
"Yes," I said.
"Can you tell me what it is?"
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
"Because the last thing I need to deal with is a bunch of Veterans forcing decisions on newbies for the sake of replicating what happened in the book, which I'm not completely sure follows a specific group or if the Carousel just made up people and plotlines."
Valerie was quiet. I could see her processing the implications.
"I'm not withholding to be difficult," I added. "I'm withholding because horror movies have taught me one thing above all else: knowing the future doesn't save you. It just changes which mistakes you make."
"Fair enough," Valerie said. "But if anything puts people in immediate danger..."
"I'll tell you. Immediate danger, you'll hear about it before it arrives. I promise."
She accepted that. Arthur accepted it too, though the unlit cigar between his fingers said he had opinions he was choosing not to voice.
"Get some rest," Valerie said. "Tomorrow is going to be a long day."
Todd showed me to the storage room. Small. Cot. Window facing the lake. Smelled like pine and dust. Someone had left a pillow and a folded blanket on the cot.
"Bathroom's down the hall," Todd said. "Communal. Breakfast is whenever Grace feels like cooking."
"Thanks."
Todd lingered in the doorway. "Film Buff, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Two in one batch. That's never happened before."
"Carousel's got a sense of humor."
"Don't I know that, kid." he said softly. "Get some sleep, kid."
He closed the door.
I sat on the cot and pulled my backpack onto my lap. Inside: my copy of The Bystander, signed by a ghost. My notebook. A water bottle. A phone charger for a phone with no signal.
I opened the notebook. Valerie wanted a summary. I was already a few pages in from what I'd started writing in the margins during the walk. Now I had time to do it properly.
I wrote out the stat system. The Plot Cycle. Star ratings. Leveling. Trope classifications. Archetype descriptions, as many as I could remember. The concept of Aspects, unlocked at Plot Armor 21. The concept of Throughlines, kept vague because my own information was vague.
I did not write about the Rulekeeper.
I did not write about rescue tropes and the real reason they disappeared.
I did not write about Secret Lore or the Manifest Consortium or the Narrators.
I did not write about Dina's letters, or her quest, or her son.
I did not write specific character fates. Because telling someone like Janet that she just gets offscreened by a crazy Ax dickwad was bad business. Party that was Promised and all that. Let the story unfold. Let people make their own choices. Let the book be a reference, not a prophecy.
I wrote the manual. Not the story.
I also wrote down what I knew about my own build situation, because I needed to think about it and writing helped me think.
Current stats: Mettle 1, Moxie 3, Hustle 1, Savvy 5, Grit 1. Plot Armor 13. Two unspent stat point tickets. Film Buff archetype. Cinema Seer and Trope Master as starting tropes. Two background tropes: You Don't Belong Here and My Father Was a Pastor.
Background tropes gave me access to tropes from other archetypes. Between the two of them, I could potentially equip tropes from Outsider, Wallflower, Bruiser, The Man Out of Time, The Witness, Soldier, Psychic, Monster Hunter, Doctor, Hysteric, and Final Girl.
While that was good at later parts, it annoyed me that I had those things too early, since I didn't have any trope that Riley didn't have, but Riley had tropes that I didn't like the Oblivious Bystander, which is much better than having two possibly conflicting backgrounds if I decided to go with the two of them.
Access didn't mean possession. I had the keys, but I didn't have the tropes yet. I needed to find or earn each individual trope before the background would matter. And some of those tropes might not be available for years, or ever.
But the potential. God, the potential. I could be like Megumi in Jujutsu Kaisen with the amount of potential.
I started sketching out possible build paths in the notebook. Not commitments. Just possibilities. What-ifs. The kind of theorycrafting I used to do for fun on Discord, except now the character sheet was mine and the stakes were my actual life.
Path one: Double down on insight. Push Savvy higher. Equip Trope Master when scouting unknown storylines, unequip it for known ones. Add Know Thy Enemy from the Pastor background to stack even more enemy intelligence. Become the ultimate information gatherer. The guy who walks into a storyline and knows everything about the enemy before the first scene ends.
Pros: Plays to my strengths. Maximizes the Film Buff's core identity. Makes me invaluable as a scout and strategist.
Cons: Glass cannon. One hit and I'm down. I can see everything coming and do nothing about it. And if the enemy has tropes that counter insight abilities, I'm dead weight.
Path two: Shore up the weaknesses. Put both stat points into Hustle or Grit. Stop being the slowest and squishiest person in every storyline. Accept that my insight abilities are good enough at Savvy 5 and focus on survival.
Pros: Harder to kill. Can actually run from things. Can take a hit without immediately going to Hobbled status.
Cons: Mediocre at everything instead of excellent at one thing. In a system built on suspension of disbelief, a Film Buff who's moderately fast is still not as fast as an Athlete who's slightly fast.
Path three: Become a hands-on fucker. I could buff Grit and Mettle and try to build myself to be a Fanatic aspect Film Buff, which is supposed to be a heavy hitter.
Pros: Unique. Nobody else in the lodge has this combination, although that's more of an 'I don't want to be Riley number 2.', and I kind of want to have high enough stats where I can go and do movies by myself.
Cons: Untested. The book doesn't really mentioned what happened to the Film Tropes outside of Riley and few mentions of the others. And in Carousel, improvising without a guide was how people died.
I stared at the three paths. I didn't choose one. Not yet. I needed more data. I needed to get more tropes before I thought better on that.
But I was leaning toward path three. Because path three was the one that nobody had tried before, and in a game where the system had been running the same plays for decades, doing something new might be the only real advantage I had.
That, and a notebook full of someone else's story.
I stared at the stat point tickets. Two of them. Where to put them.
Not tonight. Tonight I was going to rest and think and let the knowledge settle.
I put the notebook down after midnight. Through the window, the lake was black glass. Somewhere across it, the mountain had lights that I couldn't see from this angle but knew were there.
I lay on the cot and looked at the ceiling.
In the book, Riley described his first night at the lodge as restless. Afraid. Unable to stop thinking about everything he'd seen.
My first night was different.
I was lying on a cot in a supernatural horror dimension, surrounded by people who had been dying and coming back for over a decade, holding a notebook full of secrets and a pocket full of seeds and two background tropes that opened doors to archetypes I was never supposed to touch, and I had a Plot Armor of thirteen and no friends and no family and no way out.
And I felt, for the first time in eleven years, like I was somewhere I belonged.
Which was ironic, given that one of my tropes literally said I didn't.
I know that's wrong. I know a therapist would have a field day with it. I know that finding peace in a horror dimension suggests some fundamental wiring problem in my brain.
But Carousel was honest. The real world lied. It told you that you were safe when you weren't. It told you that bad things happened to other people. It told you that the rules would protect you. And then a man broke into your house at three in the morning and proved that all of it was fiction.
Carousel didn't lie. It told you, upfront, that it was trying to kill you. It gave you stats. It gave you rules. It gave you a Plot Cycle so you'd know when the danger was coming. And if you followed the rules and played the game and performed your role, you survived.
No ambiguity. No false promises. No pretending the monster wasn't real.
The monster was real. The stats were real. The game was real.
And for the first time in my life, I knew the rules.
I closed my eyes.
The last thing I heard was NPC children laughing somewhere in the camp. And beneath that, softer, almost imaginary: the rustle of corn in a maze that I'd left behind but would probably hear in my sleep for a while.
In the morning, I would start learning how to survive. Or rather, how to help other people survive while I figured out what the hell Carousel wanted with a kid who had read the manual before he walked through the door.
I was home.