Book Five, Chapter 49: The Crooked Hallway

As we walked back to the loft with our bounty of 1970s general store groceries, I still felt nervous about bringing newcomers to our base.

It was just an inherently risky thing to do.

We had dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s, but at the end of the day, all we could do was stick to the plan. And the plan involved creating a robust stable of players we could use to beat the game at Carousel.

That was the task looming far in the distance, somewhere past my current goal of rescuing Anna and Camden. We would have to attempt to escape Carousel and trigger its throughline.

I took a deep breath to push away the stress, and I could tell the three new players read something into it because, whatever they were talking about, they stopped. Isaac was practicing navigating with his scouting trope. He didn’t seem to notice anything that wasn’t an Omen.

“So, what’s next?” Andrew asked after a beat. “What’s the current mission?”

“There’s a whole list,” I said.

A long list that grew every time I thought about it.

As I walked down the road, my arms loaded with groceries packed into paper bags, a hole formed in one of the bags, and a glass bottle of ketchup popped out. I stopped and grabbed the bottle. It hadn’t broken, and though the bag now had a hole in it, it still seemed secure enough to contain everything else.

The puncture was not catastrophic.

I simply popped the ketchup bottle into my hoodie pocket.

The thing was, it was a little big for the pocket, but of course, it slipped right inside with no problem.

This didn’t go unnoticed.

I remembered that these players didn’t know about Luggage Tags, which allowed you to create a “bag of holding,” so to speak. I had used mine to give my hoodie pockets more room than they should have had.

I was about due for another because I was close to my weight limit, but anything that could fit into the opening of my pocket could be contained in there up to the weight limit.

It wasn’t such a remarkable magic trick that any of them said anything at first, but they did look at each other funny as the large ketchup bottle just seemed to disappear.

It didn’t look like it was being shoved into my pocket; it looked like it fell in, like I had opened up a hole and dropped it.

Before picking up the bags again, I reached into my pocket and withdrew one of the halves of my hedge shears—the ones with the trope attached to them—and then I drew the other half out. They were basically a giant pair of scissors and they disconnected at the bolt that connected them when I loosened it.

I reattached them, tightened the bolt, and watched as Andrew, Michael, and Lila looked on in amazement.

I remembered doing something similar with Cassie and Isaac when they arrived, but all I had were cans of Dr. Pepper, and they looked at me like I was some dorky magician playing a prank on them.

The hedge shears were a lot stronger of a flourish, especially since they had a trope on them, and up until that moment, none of these players had seen an item with a trope before.

That was a new thing in Carousel. Even the Atlas didn’t have information on these.

“Things have changed a bit,” I said as I disassembled the hedge shears and put them back in my pocket.

“How are you doing that?” Michael asked.

I explained Luggage Tags, but I couldn’t show them the actual tag because I was currently using mine.

“We have some catching up to do,” I said, and suddenly, I felt optimistic.

Giving fallen players the bad news that they had been sacrificed for a worthy cause was a downer, even if the conclusion was ultimately optimistic.

Showing them the new toys we had to play with was more fun.

I picked up my bags, careful to make sure the tear wasn’t spreading, and we continued our way to the loft.

Whoever was working the telescope spotted us before we got to the loft, so we were greeted in the restaurant down below.

Isaac and Cassie were happy that everything was coming together for them. Their brother was back with them. I was happy to see them being happy.

I wondered if I would get to feel that.

Lila immediately noticed that there were no Omens in the restaurant, which would seem strange because most places with lots of foot traffic did have Omens.

Kimberly softly said, “You’re safe here.” And they talked quietly.

“It’s like the kitchens at Camp Dyer,” Andrew said. “Tell me, are we able to eat the food provided here? Because at Camp Dyer, we could eat whatever the campers were eating, and no one would stop us.”

“All the chili dogs you could ever want,” Michael said. “It was heaven on earth.”

I remembered those chili dogs. Heaven, they were not. That wasn’t even to mention the fact that they only fed those kids once or twice a month. Poor things. The bottom line was that we couldn’t have survived at Camp Dyer on chili dogs alone.

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“You have to buy the food here,” Cassie explained. “It’s not super expensive, but it really adds up over time.”

“Not exactly,” Isaac said. “You can eat the food that the NPCs don’t eat, that they’re about to throw away, but if you steal any of their food before then, it ends up on your bill the next time you order something.”

He had been experimenting.

“I don’t think we need to eat out of the garbage, Isaac,” Andrew said. “If so, we wouldn’t have brought all of this.” He stretched out his arms, which were as stacked with paper sacks of food as mine were.

Michael had taken wheelbarrow duty and brought a few cases of beer because he didn’t have anyone to tell him not to.

“Thank you for grocery shopping,” Kimberly said. “But tonight, I say we eat at the restaurant. After all, we did just get a big payday.”

We sure had. Rescuing players was good money. After weeks of scrimping by, we had hundreds of dollars in the till.

“Sounds like dinner’s on you,” Michael said as he eyed a waitress walking across the room carrying a plate with a T-bone steak on it.

Carousel did have the best meats.

No one mentioned the awkwardness of Lila.

No one wanted to.

At the end of the day, if we decided we were going to trust her—in as much as we could say we trusted Lila—then we had to go with it. We couldn’t keep bringing up doubts. That would destroy cohesion.

That was our decision, and we would go with it until somebody burned us. We just had to hope it wouldn’t be soon.

We ate like kings and queens that night.

Isaac had found a fishing pole at Bobby’s place.

I had no idea where he had managed to find it.

He said it was up in the rafters, but I still didn’t know what he was referring to until he explained that he had climbed into the attic. I didn’t know there was an attic. The house wasn’t big enough to have a full attic. It was more of a crawl space.

The fishing pole was kind of like the telescope we found at the loft—it had an Omen-detecting ability. I wouldn’t say it was anywhere near as useful, though.

It was an Adventurer trope called Strange Attractor, a play on the cliche from movies in which compasses acted oddly around supernatural phenomena and often pointed the way to the source of some arcane or sci-fi energy.

It would cause the compass to point toward an Omen, or if you were in a story, it would point toward some strange source of power.

Of course, the trope wasn’t attached to a compass. It was attached to a fishing pole. And Isaac proudly demonstrated that if you let out a little bit of line, the hook would attract toward Omens.

He dangled it off the roof and instructed us to watch as the lure pulled across the street and pointed toward a disgruntled postman who was indeed an Omen.

“And it’s so convenient,” Antoine said, “not like this bulky telescope.”

Everyone laughed at that, even Isaac, because he was having a good time with his discovery.

I supposed the fishing pole was a mismatch with its trope unless you were searching for a powerful object underwater.

I had to wonder why Carousel would make such a thing and what real practical use it had.

It went to show that perhaps not every trope object we found was going to be super convenient like the telescope—or heck, even the hedge shears.

“You have to wonder if we’re going to find a way to make our own trope items,” I said.

“It does really get the juices flowing,” Andrew said. “The possibilities.”

They had been quiet guests as they got used to their new abode.

It was the middle of the night when we got a knock at our door.

Lila was sleeping in the back bedroom where Cassie had been, who was now with Dina. Lila had offered to sleep in the open living room space as if she was submitting herself for inspection and didn’t want to be seen as secretive. Because of the late-night knocks, we didn’t want her near the front door. We said we’d trust her, but having her sleep next to the Omen spawn point seemed too trusting.

Andrew bunked with Isaac, and Michael slept on the roof because, as Andrew put it, he had an aversion to comfort—something psychological, like he thought it was bad luck.

I didn’t mind someone sleeping in the living room. After all, the loft was probably designed as an open-concept living area before hallways and bedrooms were attached to it. There was plenty of room for a player to bunk, and one day, when we got enough furniture, we might be able to screen off a section for them.

As I walked through the dark loft, I contemplated how many people we were going to try to squeeze into this base. We might end up with a lot of people living in the open living room.

I waited for the others to get out of bed. Eventually, they all did, except for Michael, who was on the roof and didn’t hear the knocking.

Isaac came out of his room with the fishing pole, the lure hanging in front of him. It pulled as if magnetically toward the door.

“I think there’s an Omen out there,” he whispered, barely suppressing his chuckle.

I wasn’t exactly in a joking mood. No one was, so Isaac quietly put the fishing pole down against the wall, walked to the door, and looked out the peephole.

He had gotten some practice at this and didn’t feel the need for me to take a look as well to get a second opinion. Maybe he was showing off for his brother.

“The image of the hallway sure does look crooked,” Isaac said. Then, there was a pause as he read something on the red wallpaper. That was the way his scouting trope worked: He had to point out that an Omen looked obviously dangerous, and then he would get information about it.

He was clearly having trouble figuring out what to say to send the Omen away.

I didn’t want to embarrass him, but I thought I’d take a crack at it. I quietly walked up beside him, being careful not to be in the blast path of Dina’s shotgun, and took a look outside. I understood what he meant when he said the hallway looked crooked.

At first, I thought it was something like a serial killer holding up a picture of the hallway so that we would think no one was there and it was crooked, but that wasn’t what he meant. He meant the hallway was crooked in the way that some psychological horror haunted houses were, like House of Leaves or 1408.

I looked at the red wallpaper, trying to figure out what to do with this Omen, because just by looking at it, I felt some sort of effect—disorientation. The storyline was called The 4th Floor, and the Omen, of course, was staring at the impossible architecture that was now the hallway outside our front door.

How did we send it away? The hint of how not to activate the Omen, which was how my scouting ability worked in combination with Kimberly’s Writ of Habitation, said simply: Ignore the fine details.

I turned to Isaac and said, “I don’t know what you’re looking at out there. It’s just a hallway.”

I gave him a friendly smack on the arm and walked away from the door.

If this were a normal Omen, you would enter it by staring at the strangeness of the hallway’s design and how it didn’t quite make sense logically or within the realm of physics. To get it to go away, we just had to ignore it. That was the best I could figure. Made sense enough to me.

Everyone still stood frozen, unsure of whether the Omen was gone. After all, something had knocked at the door, and that something could not be heard walking away like a normal Omen knocking at that door would.

From what I could tell, the storyline was about a haunted place. Rather than ghosts, a haunted place was itself some sort of evil, so the knock had not likely come from a human hand but rather from some ambiguous living evil.

Of course, that wasn’t very satisfying.

And it just so happened that I found the answer to my question from earlier that day. What exactly was the use of a fishing pole whose lure moved toward Omens and powerful things? It was as if Carousel had answered my question. Was Carousel being playful again, sending evil architecture at us?

You could use it to tell if an evil hallway was gone.

I gestured for Isaac to pick up his fishing pole, and as he did, the lure moved toward the door. But after 30 seconds or so, it dropped away, pulled only by gravity.

The evil hallway was gone.

“That’s the show, folks,” I said as I went back to my room.

Sometimes, I just had to will myself to get used to things. And evil hallways were just one of them.

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