Book Five, Chapter 51: Shopping

I stood in the middle of a large stone corridor, like something out of Hogwarts to my eye. Fancy stonework. No formed concrete. Yet, these walls were not for some royal courtyard. They were storefronts. On either side, there were eight to ten glass doors with big glass windows packed with goods to draw customers in.

The only exit out of the corridor I could find was the same way we came in.

This was a kill box.

If something were to chase you into this place, you’d have to gamble on which door you entered, hoping there was an exit hidden from view.

To my right, I saw a large glass window that had once been filled with mannequins dressed for a 1970s summer at the beach: bright colors, a fair amount of modesty, and a wave of nostalgia I had only experienced second hand through movies.

All of the displays had been crushed, however, and standing on their remains were dozens of aimless zombies—the blue and green kind from back when rotten flesh was considered too obscene for movies—who pressed against the glass half-heartedly. I always thought the non-rotten ones were creepier.

Maybe that was because as people rot, they get lighter. A fully desiccated corpse only weighed about forty pounds. I would know; I wrestled with one.

These zombies were still wholly hydrated. They were barely dead. I’d hate to mess with them.

They didn’t draw in any customers. This store, the only one whose door was locked (and chained), had once sold summer water sports equipment and beach attire but was now a monster lair for wandering cretins waiting for their storyline to be triggered. I could feel the monster lair with my Hysteric scouting trope so easily with all of the monsters right in front of me. If only the werewolves were on display like this.

“Are you sure that glass is going to hold?” I asked, looking over at Kimberly. It was flexing.

“It always has,” she said. “It’s best just not to look at them. Lara said the only way to clear them out is to either open the door, break the window, or run their storyline, but honestly, I don’t really want to shop there anyway.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Summer’s coming up.”

“That’s a good point,” she said. “I do like that shawl.”

I followed her eyes to a pink zombie wearing a sheer floral robe of some sort. It gave her that “just out of the pool” look.

I laughed.

Kimberly would know better than I would about whether the glass would hold the undead back.

The Mangler Outlet Mall had been a go-to spot back in the days of Camp Dyer.

I never went, but Eye Candies, Final Girls, and anyone who cared about the clothes they wore knew the routine. We couldn’t go to the actual mall because we’d die swiftly, but the outlet mall was a great alternative, a small taste of the kinds of stores that could be found in the real world.

Of course, the place was designed like a nightmare.

From the outside, it was a building with ornate stone walls defaced with advertisements for the stores inside.

The problem was that the building wrapped around a corridor that was shaped like a U, with the shops wrapped around the corridor where the shoppers were. You entered at one end of the U, and the other end was a dead end with two blind corners to get both in and out.

I hated it as a scout.

Though it would make a fine base.

We could only get to the stores by entering the corridor. It would be a terrible place to get caught in an apocalypse, a storyline, or heck, if somebody busted that glass and let the zombies out.

I led the charge at first, getting a lay of the land and an idea of where the Omens were and then opening it up for shopping for the others. It really wasn’t too bad if everyone was on the same page.

In fact, there was something oddly ASMR about listening to the moaning zombies mixed with the soft shopping music of the outlet mall.

I didn’t care what Kimberly said—I couldn’t stand near them.

I moved, careful to keep all of the players and Omens in sight.

The others were a lot more interested in the stores than I was. When I said that we were going shopping, I was talking about going to the special shops related to the actual game at Carousel, not to these superfluous retail outlets.

But Carousel had revamped these stores from their previous state; with the addition of trope items, even these mundane shops could be interesting.

“There’s a dollar store up on the right,” Kimberly said. She had this place memorized. Back in the days of Camp Dyer, players would go here to shop in huge groups; they would be loaded to the gills with firearms and other weapons, of course.

We were the same way.

I carried my special hedge shears in my hands, gripped tightly, ready for the moment I had to lop a head off.

We weren’t all clumped together like we normally were when we traveled—this was largely a safe place, and it felt safe because there were lots of NPCs just going about their lives here, ignoring the shop filled with zombies, of course.

Traveling had recently become even more manageable, given that we now had three whole people with scouting tropes capable of seeing Omens with little difficulty.

Lila’s trope was on par with mine as far as showing omens, and Isaac’s was usable if he paid attention. He would probably have to increase his Savvy stat quite a bit before it became as usable as ours, if it ever would.

Lila was taking a joy in being helpful. Maybe she thought that was her path to true forgiveness. It wasn’t a bad theory. I already appreciated her.

Her teammates needed time. Andrew was civil and even friendly to her, but he wanted his missing teammates back. That was all he cared about.

“There’s a candy store over there,” Kimberly said, “and an electronics store up here.” She pointed further down the corridor.

At first, I thought she was talking to everyone, but she was talking to me. Maybe she thought that was my jam: candy and electronics.

The electronics place was called The Bare Wire. While it had a showroom at the front of the store, I could see through the window that there were stacks of electronics in the back. Even at a glance, there were trope items, although I couldn’t quite focus on them enough to know what they were.

I wanted to go in there. It was odd. I felt I needed to look around. I didn’t know where those feelings came from. The place was depressing, frankly.

Still, I knew I would make a voyage there.

“The dollar store looks like it’s been wrecked,” Bobby noted.

“Yeah, all dollar stores do,” Isaac said.

From what I could see, the dollar store didn’t have any trope items—or any good clothes, obviously—but it did have toiletries and other quality-of-life items that couldn’t be found in any of the retail stores.

Kimberly’s goal was a clothes store at the very end of the corridor, which apparently had a wide variety.

We were still on the first arm of the U and needed to make two more turns to get there.

I didn’t have the freedom to shop wherever I wanted because I had to keep my eyes open for omens.

Not only were there Omens inside the stores, but occasionally, mobile Omens traveled around with the NPCs—like the man, hastily dressed, who ran through the crowd, being chased by men in suits who yelled for him to stop and radioed each other government-agent jargon as they went along.

The secret with him was not to let him bump into you because he would slip something into your shopping bag. Later, the government guys would do whatever it took to retrieve it from you after they viewed the security footage and realized you had it.

Luckily, that omen was easy to diffuse because even if he put whatever the object was inside your shopping bag, you could just take it out and drop it on the ground, and no bad would happen.

You’d be off the hook. The Atlas had told me that.

As I was reading that omen, I must have been smiling because Ramona gave me a funny look.

I told everyone in earshot not to let the guy bump into them or put anything in their bags, and then I continued watching for other omens.

“So that’s an omen, too? They’re literally everywhere,” she said.

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“They are,” I said. “Just gotta keep an eye out, and we’ll be fine.”

I thought that she was scared, but that wasn’t quite right.

“We used to come here when I was a kid,” she said. “’ Course, there were no zombies. It was just an ordinary place.”

She had grown up in a slightly altered version of Carousel, where Omens were either nonexistent or subdued—that was never made clear.

“I imagine this place really lights up around Christmas time,” I said. I had memories of Christmas shopping in a place like this.

She nodded.

“This is a great place to grow up, as funny as that might sound now,” she said.

We talked for a while as people browsed. We were making our way forward, and Ramona was only interested in buying new clothes, even though she didn’t have that much money.

“So you guys have Christmas?” I asked. They didn’t have our brand names, but they somehow shared some of our holidays. They also had a bunch we didn’t, of course.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what is that holiday about?” I asked.

“Mistletoe and presents and caroling,” she said, “that sort of thing. If you’re nice, you get gifts from Santa; if you’re bad, you get dragged out of your bed and eaten, you know, just things that parents tell children.”

The more she talked, the more I realized that when I said Christmas, she didn’t understand it to mean the same thing I did. Christmas was not a holiday here, not really; it was a setting for horror movies synonymous with winter and the solstice. Religion was incidental.

I tried to probe deeper into this subject, but it seemed that we were so far apart in our understanding of what religion was that I just got more confused. After all, Carousel had bundled together thousands of cults and scripted them to act like a pseudo-monotheistic culture. It was a dense and confusing subject, but hey, religion always is.

“There are lots of religions,” Ramona said, “the Children of Yashina, the Followers of the Hooded God. I was raised to believe it was rude to ask about that kind of stuff, though, and they mostly keep to themselves.”

The more she talked, the more it sounded like Silas Dyrkon’s version of Carousel was deeply complicated. At least Carousel Proper didn’t pretend it was a real town beneath the surface, but whatever Silas had created for his throughline had barely been coherent—and yet, to Ramona, it was perfectly normal.

“Do you want some candy?” she asked, glancing over at the window front where a man was pulling pitch-black taffey.

“Absolutely,” I said. “We just have to stay to the back of the group to watch out for omens.”

The candy store had a bunch of Omens, as would be imagined. They were simple to avoid.

“Just so you know, I’m not eating anything from here,” I said, “but I do like the idea of looking at the candy.”

“Oh, that’s probably a good point,” she said. “I didn’t even think about that. Some of these are omens, aren’t they?”

“Like 50% of it is Omens,” I said.

“That is a bummer. Show me,” she said.

“Do you see this apple with the glistening green candy coating?” I asked.

We stood in front of a small display where lots of apples, apparently freshly made, were stuck out on sticks. Each of them was collectively an omen, yet little NPC children grabbed them and put them in their bags.

NPC privilege was real when it came to not triggering Omens.

Ramona stared at the apples.

“Oh my gosh, how did I not see that?” she eventually said.

“Yeah, you gotta let your eyes go blurry and focus on what’s in your head,” I said. “Of course, I don’t have to worry about that because my trope makes them jump out at me.”

“Stepmother,” Ramona read off the red wallpaper.

“That’s right,” I said.

The poster showed a well-dressed homemaker holding one of the candy apples as if it were a flower or something. The picture cut her off at her neck so that I couldn’t see her face.

“So don’t eat the apple,” Ramona said.

“Don’t eat the apple,” I repeated.

Beyond that, there was a great deal of candy that didn’t have an omen attached to it, like candied shrunken heads, which were essentially giant gummy treats, or red sugar powder that was meant to be scooped out of a pouch with your fingers; when you licked the powder off, it left a blood-red residue.

“Is all of this candy poisoned?” Ramona asked. “I was hoping to get some of those chocolate orange treats. They were my favorite growing up.”

“No, of course not. Some of it just has razor blades in it, and there’s a thumb in that pop bottle over there. So, not all poison,” I said. “The orange chocolates look fine if you want to risk it.”

Ramona looked very disappointed. Another tainted relic of her previous life. The candy’s grotesque theme wouldn’t have bothered her because she was born and raised around it.

“Tell you what,” I said. “We’ll find a storyline one of these days that takes place near here, and then we’ll come inside this candy store and plunder it—because then it will be safe.”

“You’re sure?” she asked.

“Everything that I know tells me it’ll be okay, although this outlet mall has some tough storylines, so it may be a while. But we’ll try.”

She smiled, and we left the sugary horrors behind as a mother bought the pop with the thumb for her kid.

We slowly made our way deeper into the outlet mall. It was still early morning, and the sun was not yet overhead.

The corridor widened at the bottom of the U, and there were some tables with umbrellas set out for people to eat at. A few generic restaurants were situated there, but we weren’t there for lunch. We had all grouped up around one of the tables.

As far as I could tell, no one had actually bought anything yet. They were mostly window shopping and trying to find the trope items, but no one had found anything they wanted.

“Is the food here safe to eat?” Cassie asked.

“Yes, but don’t order a number six from the noodle place—it’s a tough omen. I’m not even sure what’s going on there,” I said.

Buying food in Carousel was always an option, and unlike the candy store, which seemed to be filled with gag items, restaurants usually did have safe food—unless they were burnt down or staffed by ghosts or something.

I was less interested in food, so I decided to go explore the electronics shop.

I told everyone where I was going. I felt like I was being pulled there.

“Get a TV for the living room,” Isaac said.

“No, don’t do that,” Kimberly said. “I hate the Carousel public access channels. They always come on when you’re least expecting them to.”

We didn’t have a TV at Camp Dyer, at least not that I saw. What would we have watched?

The Bare Wire was even more depressing on the inside. It had a few outdated electronics that reminded me of businesses having a going-out-of-business sale. It had one employee with a vest who seemed utterly uninterested in my presence as I walked through the doorway.

The music in the store was different from the rest of the outlet mall—the vocals were louder than the music itself, with a strange amateur, improvisational style, as if I were listening to someone singing to themselves.

I wasn’t interested in any of the actual merchandise or the omens, of which there were only a few. I was mostly interested in the trope items I’d seen peeking through the cracks in the stacks at the back of the store.

I wasn’t sure if customers were supposed to go back there, but the employee didn’t stop me. At first, I thought he was texting at the cash register, but as I walked by, I saw he was playing Snake on a little flip phone.

As I walked toward the back, I glanced over my shoulder out the window toward the small food court to make sure I was still visible to my teammates. I should have asked for one of them to come with me, but strangely, I felt very calm.

I didn’t feel in danger.

Then, I started to sort through the trope items stacked up on the thin metal shelves.

Oddly, the first thing that caught my eye wasn’t a trope object at all; it was an electric cord ending in frayed wires wrapped around a metal spear from a spear gun. It was being sold for $2.99, which struck me as a good deal. If only I had a spear gun.

After that, I found a large amp with a trope that would make it send a huge blast wave and blow up the speaker if you turned the volume all the way up and then sent sound through it. It was an Artist advanced archetype trope called Overloaded.

I knew that trope existed in movies; I remembered it from the live-action Ninja Turtles.

There was a vacuum cleaner with a Ghost Hunter trope that allowed it to suck up spirits, but it only worked in comedies. I had yet to see a true comedy horror, though we had come pretty close. The final cut of Delta Epsilon Delta definitely had a humorous tilt to it, though we did not play the part for that.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I was expecting something to be there. I was running on vibes.

I had my semi-psychic background trope equipped, but it was often hard to distinguish the effect it had on me from the effect of my scouting trope.

Here, though, I definitely felt something, though I probably couldn’t have articulated that as I walked through the paths of metal shelves, constantly glancing back out the window to make sure my friends were still there.

And then I saw it.

Isaac would have been delighted.

It was a television. Not a large one; in fact, it was so small that it had a little handle built into the plastic on the top that I could get my fingers behind and carry it. It had a built-in VCR, and though the screen looked small, it was plenty big for watching movies.

I would know.

Because I had one just like it.

The brand name was Philips, just like the one I’d had since I was a kid.

I couldn’t stop staring at it. I checked dozens of times to see if it was some sort of omen tricking me into thinking it was my old television, but I couldn’t see anything.

The TV was plugged into one of the many outlets around the store, so I reached over and pressed the power button.

It didn’t come to life immediately—those TVs never did—but I heard it click on, and slowly, the screen came into view, with the letters “VCR” in the top left corner.

I’d watched mine so often that my grandparents made me keep it in the basement so I wouldn’t spend all night watching it. Heck, my parents had had the same problem except they made me keep it in the den.

Mine had been an old friend.

I stared at the buttons. They were so familiar that I knew what they were just from touch. I ran my hand over the screen and felt the static slowly building up over it. Then, I found my way to the VCR slot and casually pushed it open.

To my surprise, there was a tape inside.

My fingers found the eject button almost immediately, but I hesitated. I needed to make sure the tape itself didn’t have any omens because that would be one heck of a trick for Carousel if I’d just pressed play or otherwise interacted with it.

But it had no omens, powerful or weak—none to speak of.

I worked up my courage and pressed the eject button.

When I pulled out the film, I nearly dropped it.

It read Candyman.

I had watched that movie as a preteen over a dozen times. It was a favorite. It terrified me.

As I stared at the television, an entry on the red wallpaper stared back at me. Appropriately enough, the trope attached to the television was called Watch Party. It was a Fanatic trope that allowed a Film Buff to play the movies they normally watched on the red wallpaper on the television instead.

That was great news, but I couldn’t focus on that.

This thing showing up was weird and strangely convenient.

And frankly, it freaked me out because I didn’t believe this television was just like the one I’d owned growing up and still kept in storage.

It was my TV.

I knew it was.

It was my actual TV.

Carousel was messing with me. It constantly prodded me about my childhood, my grandparents, and my… parents.

To what end? If Carousel was some sort of fear factory or monster prison, I could understand it. But why was it doing this? Why did it care about my family or what happened to me when I was young?

This wasn’t fear; it was pain.

Was it trying to get a reaction out of me? Well, it was succeeding.

What was the point, though? Just trying to dredge up old feelings, old memories that I had locked away?

My hand moved over the top of the TV affectionately.

I took the headphones from my Walkman out of my pocket and plugged them into the TV’s audio jack, then put the Candyman VHS back into the VCR.

That was how I’d done it, how I’d stayed up watching movies without permission. I’d lie down in a sleeping bag too close to the TV, watching whatever movie I could get my hands on.

I’d spent so many nights, so many days, so many hours with that little television—many of them watching that particular movie and dozens of others that I became obsessed with for no reason.

I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a gift or if, for some sick reason, Carousel wanted to force me to remember one night when I was little—when it happened… when my parents died.

This TV was there then, too.

I had to wonder: if I’d been in my bed that night instead of in the den with my ears covered by headphones watching a scary movie—not Candyman, but another good one—would it have all gone differently?

I unplugged the TV and grabbed it by its little built-in handhold.

It was twenty dollars.

I’d pay any price for an old friend.

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