Arc II, Chapter 23: The Off-Screen Death

Strander Blake, as the script apparently called him, stood directly behind the spirit of a drowned woman. I couldn’t see him, but I could almost feel the rage coming off of him.

It wasn’t just rage though. There was fear there too.

Dozens of ghostly arms appeared from behind the drowned woman. They belonged to different spirits that Strander had collected. They were all sewn to him. My brain could barely comprehend what I was seeing. It was almost an optical illusion as if the owners of those arms must have been somewhere, but they weren’t

We knew what came next. He would go after Isaac, the character with the lowest plot armor in the scene. That was how the game worked.

But Strander Blake didn’t seem to care at all.

The dripping woman walked forward quickly and one of his arms reached out and struck at Dina, who was closest to him. Dina tried to dodge, but it was pointless. The owner of that arm leaped out and struck her. She flew across the room.

I still couldn’t properly see him, couldn’t read his tropes. Perhaps he had a trope that allowed him to attack whoever he wanted. That certainly threw a hitch in my plans, but even as that thought went through my head, I realized I was wrong.

Strander Blake was reeling in pain. It was as if attacking Dina had physically hurt him if such a thing were possible.

He screamed in pain.

He was fighting for control.

I could see the dripping woman eyeing Isaac as Strander’s next target, but he screamed again and forced her to look at me. I could see the strands of black thread pulling against her. He was trying to resist the rules.

“I pick him,” he screamed. “You were mine. Your little tricks. I could watch but not touch. You were marked for death and now I’ll finish it!”

Was he mad about Oblivious Bystander? I let the steam out of his little trap and he hadn’t gotten over it.

I jumped back, but it was a pathetic attempt. He was so fast.

He screamed as he launched himself across the room at me. I backed up toward the first room I had played the Ten Second Game in and Strander tackled me into the darkness. He slammed the door behind us.

Off-Screen. We were Off-Screen just me and him.

He threw me against a wall hard.

He wanted to kill me, but he couldn’t. His threads tightened, threatening to rip from the ghastly flesh of his host, but she wouldn’t budge, couldn’t budge.

“This wasn’t what I was promised,” he said. “I was tricked.”

I was terrified and my brain was in fight or flight mode, but I was all out of fight. Just being thrown against the wall had Incapacitated me and Hobbled me. I couldn’t even tell what my injuries were. I hurt all over.

But curiosity was strong enough to fight through the pain.

“Who tricked you?” I asked.

He hesitated from answering, he must not have been sure.

“Silas Dyrkon,” he eventually answered. He was enraged and frustrated. “Said he had a player problem and I was just the one to fix it. He described his world as one of death and horror. How could I resist? I didn’t know he would do this to me. He lied. He said nothing of these…. Chains. How could he humiliate me like this? The Strand o’ Blac? Living Hell itself.”

He was new. Carousel had brought him here under false pretenses too.

“This is a circus. Everyone wears chains here,” I said. My heart was beating so fast I couldn’t even hear what I was saying.

“Not the guests,” Strander said. “Not yet.”

I could hear the others pounding on the door. Strander Blake still pulled against whatever “chains” he said were binding him, but he couldn’t kill me. I wasn’t next. We were Off-Screen. It might have been possible under some circumstances. If I were less prominent in this storyline, if he had the right tropes if he hadn’t disobeyed, but Carousel seemed to be making a point.

Eventually, he relented.

“I’ll finish the other,” he said. “Then I’ll come back for you.”

He stood and walked back toward the door. As he did, my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room finally and I saw the vanity in the corner.

It was the same one that Sidney had broken to obtain the mirror she wielded on the outside. Sidney knew the ghosts avoided mirrors. On a hunch, I did the only thing I could.

The Insert Shot ability allowed me to draw my allies’ attention to an important object from those objects discovered in the Party Phase. I had found one: the mirror in the bathroom where Kimberly had taken a shower earlier.

The mirror was poorly covered. Whatever reason it had been there originally (an unused subplot), it was still a mirror.

I activated my ability and sent out the information to my teammates.

Suddenly, right before Strander got to the door, they stopped banging on it. I heard them talking.

Before he opened the door, he tried in vain to do something I couldn’t quite perceive. At first, it was like he was trying to twist the drowned woman’s body and change the ghost he was presenting, but he didn’t seem able to.

It dawned on me what he was trying to do.

“You can’t use a spirit that isn’t a part of this storyline,” I said.

I could tell he was annoyed still.

He turned to look at me. As he did, the drowned woman disappeared and Kimberly emerged. “The script tells me to use this one,” he said. “Friend of yours?”

I nodded.

“Riley,” Kimberly cried. Her throat was crushed, but she didn’t seem aware. “What’s going on? I was lost in the dark for so long. I don’t know how I got back here. What do we do? How do we win?”

It was actually Kimberly. She didn’t know she was bound to Strander Blake. She was afraid.

“Antoine needs you,” I said. “He’s hiding in the bathroom across the building. You know the one. Go to him.”

She nodded.

She reached down and grabbed the door with her ghostly arm and walked out of the room. One of Strander’s many hands waved at me as she went.

On the red wallpaper, my Written-Off status was lit. I couldn’t help my friends this way. I had to trust that they could figure it out themselves.

The strangest thing happened as I stood there. I realized that the screen I usually use to rewatch old storylines was on the red wallpaper.

It was my Director’s Monitor trope. My Deathwatch ability had activated. At first, I feared I had been killed and just didn’t realize it, but as I checked and rechecked my trope, I noticed that Deathwatch didn’t activate when my Dead status lit up. It activated at my “demise”. That meant it still worked if I was “dead” because I was Written Off, not just when I was physically killed.

That was interesting.

I kept one eye on the screen, watching as Strander crept across the living room. Sometimes the footage was polished and perfect, other times it was rough, as if it had been cut from the final film. I was watching the movie in real-time.

That wasn’t how it normally worked. I usually only saw the finished product.

I worked my hardest to stand. I found out why my Hobbled status had lit up. My hip had been broken. Still, I crawled to the door and looked down the hallway.

I could see Kimberly/Strander Blake cautiously moving across the floor both in my head and with my eyes. I got the sense that Strander didn’t exactly get much say in the matter.

“Freaky,” I said under my breath.

I couldn’t bear to go any further with my hip’s condition. The movie continued to play on the red wallpaper.

“Antoine,” Kimberly said softly. She started to cry. “Antoine, where are you?”

She kept walking toward the bathroom until she got to the door.

She walked through and I lost sight of her, but I could still see the footage in my mind.

Antoine was in the bathroom with Isaac and Sidney. Bobby and Dina were in the wind, likely Off-Screen as backup.

“Kimberly?” Antoine asked. He was crying.

“I’ve been looking for you,” she said softly.

Antoine walked close to her and looked down into her eyes. “We’re going to be okay,” he said, fighting through the tears.

“We need to leave,” she said. “We need to… go somewhere safe.”

“You’re always safe with me,” Antoine said. “We’re going to be a family.”

Kimberly pulled against the threads in her arms and embraced Antoine. Antoine hugged her back, though he eyed the covered mirror.

Dina’s slender arm reached through the doorway and grabbed the towel off of the mirror.

What I saw there was terrifying.

I saw a dozen faces all staring at the mirror from behind Kimberly. Each was a terrifying visage of death. They saw themselves in the mirror too.

“Kimberly,” Antoine said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you or the baby.”

“What?” Kimberly asked.

Antoine pointed over toward the mirror.

Kimberly followed his gaze and stared at herself, her features reflecting in the moonlit room.

“It got you, Kimberly,” Antoine said. “I couldn’t stop it.”

Kimberly looked down at her nails, broken and bloody. She started to choke. Much as we had seen with Cassie, she became enraged, but more than that, the other spirits that had seen themselves started to reach out, to fight against Strander.

He started to scream, a half of a dozen ghosts ripped and tore away from him, snapping black threads and destroying whatever it was that he was made of. He cried out in genuine pain and anger.

This went on until Strander took the form of the drowned woman again and ran for the window of the nearest room. He opened it and practically fell outside.

Kimberly’s ghost stayed around long enough for a shot of her disintegrating right next to Antoine, but she didn’t hurt him.

There was a long moment of silence as things wound down. Sidney grabbed her little plastic clicker and went into one of the rooms.

When Antoine asked where she was going, she answered, “We have to keep playing the game.”

After a few more moments, Carousel had gotten its closing footage.

The End.

We had done it.

The lights came back on. Suddenly, my hip didn’t hurt.

I stood back up and walked into the living room. I was so tired I was willing to sleep even in the haunted house. That was even after Carousel reset us. Discovering a new use case for the Deathwatch ability was fascinating, but I was emotionally spent. I just wanted to next part to go by quickly.

Antoine approached me as soon as I was back in the living room.

His injury was gone, but the gaunt look on his face was still there. The light behind his eyes was out.

I knew what he wanted. I handed him my Out Like a Light trope. He took it and didn’t say a thing.

Isaac came out of the bathroom. He looked back and forth for his sister.

“She’ll be back soon,” I promised.

He sat down on one of the chairs.

“It’s kind of freaky, isn’t it?” I asked as Isaac ran his fingers through his hair, amazed at the absence of blood or injury.

He almost started to smile. “It’s amazing,” he said.

So often we were distracted by the abject horror of Carousel that we failed to recognize how awe-inspiring some of its abilities actually were. If it wasn’t dead set on torturing us, this place could have been wonderful.

“Just remember,” I said. “It’s easy to shake off injuries. I guess the adrenaline never really dies long enough for you to stop being in shock. Death take takes a toll. Psychological horror. That takes a toll.”

Isaac looked around.

“Cassie’s going to be messed up?”

I nodded.

His eyes shifted to the couch where Antoine had laid down. He had already used my sleep trope. He equipped his You were having a nightmare… trope. When Kimberly got back she would activate that trope and help alleviate whatever trauma he tried so hard to keep hidden.

Sidney had struck up a conversation with Dina while Bobby went around asking if anyone wanted food from the kitchens.

It didn’t take long for the crunch of broken glass to announce the return of both Kimberly and Cassie. They could have used the front door, but the window was closer.

Kimberly looked shaken but held Cassie’s hand. Cassie was crying. I couldn’t blame her. The first death of her career at Carousel was worse in some ways than any of mine.

“Isaac,” she cried out.

Isaac ran to hug her. He sat her down and they began whispering to each other. Isaac didn’t seem to know what to say or how to act so he just sat as his sister cried into his shoulder. I couldn’t hear everything she said, but I could tell that she was reassuring him and not the other way around. That was just her nature.

Kimberly saw Antoine sleeping and immediately sat down next to him and reached out her hand to stroke his head. She leaned in and whispered those magic words, “Wake up, my love, you were having a nightmare…”

There was a knock at the door.

The room went silent. Antoine opened his eyes and was immediately alert. He was up and off the couch in an instant. Bat in hand, he walked to answer the door.

“Who’s there?” he cried out.

“You have a library book overdue.”

Recognizing her voice, Antoine answered the door. Constance Barlow entered without any fanfare.

“Sidney?” she asked immediately, surprised to see our late arrival.

Sidney broke away from her conversation with Dina to greet Constance. They looked happy to see each other. Constance was the cheery version of herself I had met at the library.

The Paragons must have known each other very well.

Constance turned her attention to me. I sat, slumped in my chair, and waved.

She walked across the room and took a seat next to me. “I see you decided not to use me as a distraction for the monster you described.”

I shook my head. “I tossed the idea around, but I had a better idea.”

I explained how we ended up defeating Strander Blake.

“Angry ghosts. At least my research didn’t go to waste,” she said.

“Nope,” I said.

I had more questions to ask her, but before I could, a new appearance lit up the room.

“Congratulations,” Silas the Showman announced, “You won a ticket!”

Isaac looked like he had seen a ghost. Well… perhaps that expression wasn’t as useful anymore. He turned in his seat to get a better look. We had told him about Silas, but seeing a fortune-telling machine appear out of nowhere was not something you could prepare for, especially one as flamboyant as Silas.

As usual, Antoine was the first to get his tickets. We all got in line, including Constance and Sidney, which I found strange.

Before I could inquire, the line moved forward. Antoine was shuffling through his tickets and found something that appeared to have stumped him. He read through it before I had even gotten my tickets.

His eyes went straight to me after he was finished.

“Riley,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

It was a large, rectangular slip of laminated paper with lots of tiny words on them. I grabbed it and read it over.

License Number: [E-2455b-0465]

Issued to: [Antoine Stone]

ABILITY GRANTED: The holder of this license is granted the ability to invoke specific powers or wield certain objects from a horror movie realm without the need of a trope. This license authorizes the use of [“The Ten Second Bell”] from the movie(s) [The Ten Second Game, Reply the Departed].

Usage Permitted in: The Throughline [X], All Storylines [ ].

USAGE TERMS:

1. Lore Constraints: The holder may use the selected ability within the lore constraints without the need to activate the associated storyline.
2. Protection: The player is shielded from inadvertently triggering the original storyline or any mobile storyline that might migrate into that location.
3. Rule Compliance: The rules of use, as described in the storyline, must be strictly adhered to in addition to any listed conditions.
4. Consequence Awareness: The user is not immune to the consequences stemming from improper or natural use of the ability. This License does not prevent unrelated storylines from being triggered.
5. Rescue Clause: Death as a result of using this ability subjects the player to rescue from the respective movie’s storyline.

CONDITIONS FOR USE:

1. Keepsake Requirement: The player must possess a Keepsake of the targeted spirit or the applicable murder weapon.
2. Location Specificity: Usage must occur at the site of the spirit’s death.
3. Significant Date: Contact with the spirit should be made on a date meaningful to the spirit, with the date of death being highly effective.

NOTES:

1. Strander Blake will be kept at bay. Sincerest apologies from the City Council and the Mayor.

MISUSE AND REVOCATION: Improper use of this license or the granted ability or object may result in immediate revocation and additional penalties as per the governing laws.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep