Chapter Forty-Three: Keeping Secrets

On the return to Camp Dyer, Carousel was like a new place. Janette’s I don’t like it here… trope was transformative. I could see Omens everywhere. No wonder she was freaked out all the time. I even saw things that Arthur didn’t mention as he guided us back.

When I looked at something that was an omen, I would see a brass display sign on the red wallpaper with the word “Warning.”

Sometimes, I would get a whole lot more information than that. I occasionally got entire posters, with storyline titles, vague suggestions of difficulty level, specific actions needed to trigger the omen, everything. The determining factor appeared to be my Savvy. Low-level storylines I knew everything about. For high-level storylines, I only got the “Warning.”

There was a storyline called “The Look Back” that could be triggered by walking through an alleyway and… looking behind you. The poster just showed a man carrying groceries with a look of horror on his face. Its difficulty level was “Get to the car now!”

Whatever that meant.

I saw another storyline called “Just Deserts” that took place at a sweets shop called “Just Desserts.” It was triggered by ordering something and not appreciating it (I’m not sure what that meant exactly). Its difficulty level was “I’m fairly alarmed.”

Very informative.

Most storylines gave much less information than that, but it was amazing to see beyond the veil if only a little. If I was in a better state of mind, I might have enjoyed looking around at all the stuff. That may just be me though.

As we moved past town toward Camp Dyer, I got less and less information. Things really did get tougher out this way.

Once we got back to camp, the tension in the air choked any conversation that could start. No one was looking forward to telling people what had happened to Janette. Arthur had assured us that he would be the one to tell everyone. Apparently, that had been something that he and Adeline had done many times over the years.

As we approached the lodge, we were greeted by a sea of curious players. What had happened that day was everyone’s business. I didn’t see Bobby among them. I really didn’t want to.

Adeline greeted us on the trail before we got to the lodge. We stopped to talk to her.

“Janette?” She asked.

Arthur shook his head. “Disappeared.”

Adeline nodded. I could tell from her face that she did have an understanding of what that meant. They had told me that she didn’t actually know about the axe murderer and yet I got the sense that she knew enough. As far as I knew Arthur and Adeline had been in Carousel for nearly 20 years.

How had Arthur kept the secret from someone he had known for so long?

Did he even have a choice?

As we approached the lodge Adeline was quick to gently get the word out to those outside about what had happened to Jeanette. Her “disappearance” was taken very well. The reaction was somber, but none of the veteran players seemed to be surprised.

My friends, however, looked horrified. I couldn’t blame them. They didn’t have the understanding yet.

This was clearly a big event. Even Dina, who only socialized to go out on storylines every once in a while, had stuck around awaiting our return. As soon as we got back her eyes zoned in on me. It looked like she was reading about me on the red wallpaper.

It was only when we got inside and everyone had gathered around to hear a rundown of what had happened, that Bobby Gill, husband of the deceased, made his presence known.

“Where is Janette?” he asked. He had been worried. You could tell he was a bundle of stress. He was standing with Travis and Co., ironically the exact people Janette had not wanted him to be around.

“Look, Bobby, maybe we should go outside,” Arthur said.

Travis shook his head, having apparently already figured out the bad news. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?” Bobby asked. “Where’s Janette?”

Adaline intervened, “Let’s go outside, Bobby.”

“Why? What happened to Janette?” he asked. “Tell me what happened to Janette!”

“She disappeared,” Arthur said.

Whispers echoed throughout the crowd from those who had not already heard. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I know they didn’t sound surprised either.

“Disappeared?” Bobby asked. “Where? How?”

“On the storyline we went on,” Arthur answered. “She didn’t show up at The End.”

Bobby didn’t get it. “I was telling them; she wouldn’t have gone on a storyline. She has anxiety. Why would she be on a storyline?”

He must have been told she went out on a storyline. He was still deep in denial over it.

“Just take a seat,” Adaline said. “Come here.”

She gestured for him to sit on one of the couches. When he didn’t move, she gently placed a hand on his back, guiding him in that direction.

“No!” he said. He pulled away from her. “Why was she on a storyline? We need to go find her.”

I could only imagine what was going through his mind at that moment. When you hear the word disappeared you don’t think “dead.” You think that there’s some hope out there. That was the flaw in using that term as a euphemism for death.

And yet, it appeared that everyone else did understand. They knew what”disappeared” meant. They probably even knew why she was gone, more or less. They just didn’t know about the Rulekeeper.

“People go missing sometimes,” Adeline said. “They disappear without a trace. I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Bobby said. “She would never have gone on a storyline. We talked about it; she was going to wait until I could go with her.”

Adeline explained everything that had happened. She talked about how the box had been delivered specifically for Jeanette and that there was no way we could have avoided sending her on that storyline.

She said everything short of “Your wife died because she broke the rules,” presumably out of some desire to treat Bobby delicately. It might have been better if she had just come out with it instead of relying on subtlety and tact.

“She wouldn’t have gone!” he yelled. “Not without telling me.”

At that point, many of the others who had been there to witness what had happened tried explaining that she had gone on the storyline. Unfortunately, so many people were talking at once that they may have actually made things worse.

“Who forced her to do this?” Bobby yelled.

“Carousel,” Arthur said.

The outsider, Travis, had the shadow of a smirk on his face. “Arthur forced her. It’s the sort of thing he would do. Any of them would. The moment she became a liability,” he said.

“Travis, get out of here,” Adeline said. “You’re not helping.”

The last time I’d seen Adeline and Travis butt heads, Travis had shown some scant level of reverence to her seniority. That was gone now.

“I’m not helping because I’m not complicit. You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that that chick had a screw loose, no offense Bobby, she just wasn’t cut out for this place.”

“We had no choice,” Arthur said.

Travis shook his head. “I don’t know that. I’m taking your word on that. We all are. I heard about what happened. What if you had just left the package there? It could have been gone in a few days. Why is it that in this place we are constantly struck with situations we have never seen before and yet we’re supposed to trust that you know the right way to handle them?”

“Now is not the time for this,” Arthur said through gritted teeth.

Travis laughed. “In Carousel, all we have is time and yet there’s never enough time to discuss things that you don’t want to talk about.”

At that point, the argument ended. Not amicably, but because Reggie had grabbed Travis and started to haul him out of the lodge.

“You want answers to your questions, Bobby,” Travis said as he was being hauled away, “Ask why the kid has her trope.”

Fuck.

Everyone in the room including my friends, including Adeline herself, turned to look at me. Even the teammates that I had just taken on the Grotesque storyline with hadn’t realized that I had gotten Janette’s trope.

Every eye in the building was on me.

“I got it as a reward,” I said. I must have sounded really nervous at the time. “From Silas.”

I hadn’t really thought about the implication of wrongdoing. I thought it was just another example of Carousel mocking us. Give the new guy the dead person’s old ticket. That sort of thing.

“What happened to Janette?” Bobby asked in a raised voice.

I panicked. I wasn’t prepared to answer that question. When Arthur had said that he would tell everyone I had stopped thinking about it. It took me too long to answer. I was acting too nervous. When you don’t spend a lot of time around people you get really bad at it. Most of the people I spent time with came with a pause and rewind button.

I actually did attempt to tell them what had happened. But when it came down to it, right as I was about to speak, I heard him.

I heard his breath in my ear. The axe murderer. The Rulekeeper. It was so loud I jerked around to look behind me.

“I don’t know,” I stammered out.

No one said anything.

“She…” How was I supposed to word this in a way that wouldn’t upset the entity that had apparently taken root in my brain? “She didn’t…”

Fortunately, it only took a few moments for Adeline to get her feet back under her after the reveal that I had been awarded Janette’s trope.

“It doesn’t matter. Carousel does things all the time to twist the knife,” she said. “I’m sure this was just part of that.”

“How do we know he didn’t just take it off her corpse?” Travis asked. Reggie had stopped dragging him out the door with the revelation that I had Janette’s ticket. As soon as Travis spoke up, Reggie resumed dragging him out. “We should at least check it for blood.”

He was thrown outside laughing.

“I didn’t…” I said. At that moment, I was searching for some proof that I was not involved in her death. I didn’t know how seriously people would take Travis’ accusations. I said the only thing I could think of. “I was given a background trope for it too.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to look at who it was. It was Roxie.

“Don’t worry about it. Travis is an asshole; no one’s going to take him seriously.”

I hoped that she was right but with the day’s events, the stress of meeting the Rulekeeper, the stress of dying…. I was in no shape to think clearly.

As embarrassing as it is to admit, it felt like I was about to tear up. Exactly no part of my personality would allow me to show emotion like that in front of people. I had spent decades building walls to prevent that exact thing.

I pushed my way through the crowd to the little room I shared with Camden and shut the door.

As I closed the door, I could hear Valerie explained that I had died for the first time that day.

I stayed there for hours. As silly as it sounds, I contemplated breaking the window so that I could leave the room without having to go back out through the crowds of people outside.

I laid on my bed hoping that sleep would give me a break from all of this, but it was hard to sleep until the sun went down because of the westward-facing window and because I had a million things on my mind.

How were we going to escape?

What was the story behind the axe murderer?

Why had I been given Janette’s old trope?

I thought about what Silas had said when he gave it to me. “It’s a shame to waste a good plan. Luckily, in Carousel, we recycle.”

Was that just Silas saying some canned joke or did it mean something… more?

As I thought about this, there was a knock at the door. I really didn’t want to answer, but if it was Camden, I couldn’t keep him out of his own room.

When I opened it, I was greeted by my friends. What was I going to say to them?

“Riley,” Anna said. “We didn’t get a chance to talk. Do you mind if we come in?”

I wasn’t sure if I was in a headspace to talk, but I waved them into the little closet Camden and I called home.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just let them speak.

“I heard you took out some monsters with huge Plot Armor,” Antoine said. “That’s pretty cool.”

We didn’t know each other very well, so he gave me a dude compliment.

“Yeah,” I said. Most of them technically had no Grit when I did, but it didn’t matter. He was just trying to be supportive.

“Are you okay?” Anna asked. “It must have been terrifying.”

I nodded. “At parts.”

“You know you can talk to us about stuff,” she said.

“Nothing to talk about.”

There was an awkward silence for a beat.

“You get any good loot?” Camden asked. He hadn’t spoken much since having died himself. But I guess it was his turn to hold the support baton.

I hadn’t thought much about the awards I had gotten. A spark of excitement ignited in my mind because that was something I could talk about. It was something I could distract myself with.

I reached into my pocket. It was strange. Even though I had a big stack of tickets now, I hadn’t noticed how inconvenient it was to carry them around until I went to grab them. It was almost like they weren’t even there until you reached for them. Strange.

Whatever the case, I took out the tickets and started to show them around. Most of them were useless to me. I showed Anna the Final Girl trope I had gotten, Stick to the Plan, and promised to give it to her. I explained how useful it could be. She conveyed interest, but I think her mind was on something else.

I showed them the monster ticket with a high-level Grotesque on it. I told them about the pawn shop Arthur had spoken about. I theorized we might be able to trade the monster tickets there.

Camden was amazed at how many tropes I had gotten, not to mention the stat tickets, which would put my Plot Armor well above his once I used them.

I read off the array of useless tropes I had gotten: A Glitch in the Matrix, Accidentally Captured on Film, Friends in High Places, A Story within a Story, and Watching over You, were among those that got the most attention. We spitballed at how they might be used for strategy.

Then I told them about On-Screen, Off-Screen manipulation, and how we had been able to keep Roxie alive long enough for a 13% debuff on all the creatures.

Of course, geeking out could only last so long.

“Was Janette… gone already when that happened?” Antoine asked. “We’re just curious.”

Kimberly and Anna gave him scolding look.

I couldn’t blame him. No matter what I said, the question that they would most want to be answered was what had happened to Janette. In my explanation of our exploits in the storyline, I had left her out altogether. She had been gone by the time most of the interesting stuff started.

I nodded quickly. I held my breath wondering if that simple answer would summon the phantom presence of the Rulekeeper. Luckily, I heard nothing.

I took out the “I don’t like it here…” ticket and showed it to them. “No blood, see.”

“We didn’t think you had anything to do with it,” Anna said.

“Do you… Do you know what happened to her?” Camden asked.

After having died nothing felt real. I felt like I was sleepwalking. Nothing felt important or urgent, not even the dire circumstances of my captivity here in Carousel. But as soon as I contemplated telling my friends about the axe murderer, suddenly everything felt real.

My heart was beating faster than it had been fighting the Grotesques.

I could hear him as if he was right behind me. I could hear his feet shifting on the ground, his breath in my ear.

Still, these were my friends, and keeping him a secret felt wrong. It felt like they deserved to know. I’d learned that day that everyone basically knew what happened to the people who “disappeared” but nobody knew the specifics. They also knew why It happened. No one had to be told why Janette had been singled out. Even then, telling them that there’s an actual entity enforcing the rules around here felt important.

And yet I was afraid.

I was afraid that I would be endangering them by telling them. I was afraid that I was endangering myself.

“She just… disappeared,” I said, much to my shame.

And as I scanned their faces—Anna, who was so trusting; Camden, whom I had shared my secrets with as a child; Kimberly, a sweet and honest soul; and Antoine, who might have had the strength to be honest if he were in my shoes…

I could tell that they knew I was hiding something.

I was alone again.

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