Chapter Thirty-Five: The Rulekeeper

I could hear his footsteps. It was like they were right behind me. His breathing got louder as he walked toward us. Why did it sound like he was so close? What was going on?

“Come on,” Arthur said. “To the church.”

We started to run. I couldn’t believe that we were really going to leave her behind. It occurred to me that Janette had the exact same Hustle stat as me so if she ran with us, how could I outrun her?

Yet somehow, I did.

We were Off-Screen and Roxie’s Mystifying Geography ability was boosting my Hustle up to the same as hers. However, it wasn’t boosting Janette’s. That ability was supposed to work on all allies.

Was Janette not an ally anymore?

As we fled, I did not want to look behind and see what was happening, but I felt like I needed to. When people asked me what happened to Janette, I needed to be able to give them a definitive answer. So much of what the veterans had told us at that point had been vague and useless information. Was that because they always ran whenever danger came around?

“Can you shoot him?” I asked.

“Don’t shoot him!” Arthur said. His reaction was visceral. I’d forgotten he had given me a gun.

We zigzagged through the gravestones and stone planters between us and the church.

I could hear Janette screaming behind us. Yelling for us. Pleading for us to return. I remembered back in the corn maze when I had seen Janette killed by Benny the scarecrow. I had done nothing to help her. When that happened, I was truly disappointed in myself. Yet here I was, not helping her again.

I tried to push those thoughts out of my mind.

As we raced to the church, I heard a louder scream far from behind us. I turned to look. If I couldn’t help her, I would at least be a witness. Not that she would appreciate that. She was out of my line of sight, so I turned and climbed up on a stone bench to get a better view.

In the distance, I saw that the man with the axe had caught up to her. She had not done a remarkable job in evading him. I had seen her survival instincts in the corn maze. She wasn’t a fighter. She wasn’t even the type to flee. She froze.

She screamed loud and shrill.

That should have made her invincible. It was one of the few tropes she had. Her scream should have protected her, if only for a moment.

But it didn’t.

He cleaved her at her collarbone, slicing her torso in half all the way from her shoulder down to her waist with one swing.

Oh fuck.

With that one swing of an axe, Janette disappeared from the red wallpaper. Her status wasn’t dead or mutilated or written off. She was just gone.

The last thing I saw as we rushed into the church was the axe murderer lifting her body over his shoulder and turning to walk away.

In a way, she got what she wanted.

She had found a way to quit the game.

“Why would she do that?” I screamed as soon as we entered the church and found a room where we could talk privately.

Roxie and Arthur didn’t answer me at first. They appeared to be listening for something. I paused and listened too. I could hear footsteps walking away from us. Faint breathing.

I could still hear the axe murderer.

“Why can I hear him?” I asked.

Roxie and Arthur looked at each other.

Roxie spoke up. “Everyone who sees him can hear when he’s around. And sometimes when he’s not.”

“Everyone who’s seen him?” I asked.

Roxie nodded.

“The higher-level players? Who? Who knows about him?”

Arthur gestured toward a chair and said, “Sit.”

I wasn’t going to argue.

“Who all knows? Is it everyone but me and my friends? Because I know you guys are keeping secrets from us. Why would you not tell us what happens if we broke the rules?”

“Just under a dozen of us,” Arthur said. “The others… they understand but they don’t really know.”

“They don’t know that you get butchered just for breaking character?” I asked. Janette’s death had freaked me out. It was so terrifyingly final. In The Astralist storyline, Kimberly had freaked out too. How close was she to getting killed?

“No,” Arthur said. “It’s not just breaking character. It’s not just breaking the rules. Everybody does that, especially in the beginning. Carousel can be pretty forgiving with that stuff. It’s about doing it on purpose. That’s what matters the most.”

“Why are you keeping this a secret?” I asked. “If Janette had known that this was going to happen she would never…”

I lost my words. I had just seen a death. A real death.

“We couldn’t. We’ve tried. She knew what would happen. Even if she didn’t know how. We made sure of that.”

“What do you mean you’ve tried? Does Adeline know? Valerie? Reggie?”

Arthur took a deep breath. “You have to be careful how you phrase things. When you try to talk about him, it sounds like he’s right behind you. Like he’s watching what you say…”

At that moment I could still hear the axe murderer faintly in the distance. Would I always be able to hear him?

“We just say that players disappear.”

I wasn’t in a state of mind to really think about any of that.

“Adeline doesn’t know. Reggie and Valerie do.” Roxie said.

Wait…

“Every single veteran player on this team knows about… him?”

What were the odds of that?

“We call him the Rulekeeper,” Roxie said.

“No, we don’t,” Arthur said.

“We call ourselves the Secret Keepers.”

“No, we don’t.”

Had this whole thing been a setup? What are the odds that every veteran player chosen for this storyline just happened to be one of the few players that knew about the axe murderer? Why was I here?

“Well, you don’t have any excuse now,” I said. “Tell me everything you know about him.”

Arthur didn’t put up a fight. I suppose on some level he thought I deserved to know. Now that he could tell me, he was willing.

“Few years after I got here, some of the folks noticed something out west, past the lake. There’s a small mountain. You know the one?”

I nodded. I had woken up to that view every morning. It was more like a big hill, but I wasn’t going to argue.

Arthur was having a tough time telling me this. I could see it on his face. He had clearly spent years keeping so much of this a secret.

“There’s something on the other side of it,” he said. “When the sky gets overcast, you can see lights reflecting up on the clouds. It’s like there’s a building there or something—something with bright lights. Well at that time it was the only lead we had. We started devoting all our efforts to getting over there. But that was a huge problem; the further west you go the harder the storylines get. You even get halfway around the lake, even I would be under-leveled.

“So, we tried to get clever. We tried to sneak over there in between scenes of other storylines. Can’t trigger a storyline if you’re already in one. We’d start up one of the easier stories and then as soon as it was time for a scene to end we would steal a car and head west. That was the plan at least. Three of our group tried it. They were just supposed to go scout things out and come back. They never did.”

Arthur took a moment to compose himself.

“Whenever a group dies in a storyline, a missing poster appears on this bulletin board outside the diner. But for the players that tried to sneak out west, no missing poster appeared. We had no idea what happened to them. Don’t get me wrong we’d had players go missing—players that never got posters on the bulletin board. We never knew why.

“So, we gave up on that plan. We decided that if we couldn’t sneak over that direction we would just have to level up so high that we could beat any storyline they threw at us. There’s a road south of the lake with a trolley track built into it. Never seen the trolley but the road seems to go right in the direction we need. We figure that’s the right route to take. If you go over the lake, there are all types of water monster storylines that you can trigger just by being in the water out that far. The forests are just as bad. But that road seemed like our best bet. More manageable, maybe.

“The question was: how were we going to level up enough to get over there? Took us years to find an answer. There used to be these things called rescue tropes. They were these marigold yellow tickets you could get. If you had one of those you could grab somebody’s missing poster from the bulletin board and you could go rescue them from whatever storyline they died in. All the archetypes had their own kinds that worked in different situations.

“I had one called Trail of the Monster. There were all kinds. That used to be how things worked. If a team ever died another team would go rescue them. The trouble is a rescue storyline is always more difficult than the base storyline. At least on paper.

“The truth is in some situations the rescue storylines were actually easier because they were more straightforward. And the thing about rescue storylines is that they paid off way bigger than normal storylines. You’d get 10 times the cash, a handful of tropes, and far more stat boosts than you would normally expect.

“We got greedy. We would have teams purposefully fail storylines. What did it matter? We had died hundreds of times before at that point. What was one more death? Then another team would come to rescue them. Once we started this we leveled up as much in six months as we had in the five years before that. Felt like we had found a loophole that could get us out of this place. Finally had momentum.

“One day we were doing a rescue run. My team drew the short straw. We were going to die and one of the other teams that were with us at the time would come to rescue us. Only after they rescued us, the axe murderer showed up. It was the first time I saw him. He killed that whole team like it was nothing. Ripped right through them.

“After that our rescue tropes disappeared and Silas stopped handing them out. In fact, most of the players here today don’t even know they existed. This would have been about 12 years ago. Without being able to rescue each other, leveling is slow-going—especially once you get up to around my level. My plot armor hasn’t gone up in nearly two years. We should have known better. We cheated the game.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There was a way to rescue dead players and they had gotten it taken away?

Roxie took over. “I met him on my first day in Carousel. Arthur and the others didn’t manage to intercept us when my friends and I got here. Some NPCs ended up herding us into some type of tutorial. It was a nightmare. Three storylines back-to-back. Almost no explanation for what was going on. It was like they thought we should know certain things already. My friends quit before the third storyline was finished. Then the Rulekeeper showed up and killed them right in front of me.”

A tear dripped down her face.

“Truth is, I didn’t keep playing because I was smart or brave. I kept playing because I was too afraid to stop.”

Losing all of her friends on the first day… I couldn’t imagine that.

“A tutorial?” was all I could think to ask.

“That’s why we take you to The Final Straw II. Benny’s got a gentle touch by comparison. Anyone who tries to quit the game, he ends up killing them before the guy with the axe shows up,” Arthur said.

It made sense. Benny kills anyone who tries to cut through the walls of his corn maze. Any player that tried to quit would get turned into one of his minions before they had the chance to leave the story.

“Seen him off and on throughout the years since,” Arthur said. “He kills rule breakers. Disappears. Won’t bother you if you play the game.”

“The other players speculate about what happens to them,” Roxie said. “They get the gist, but not the details.”

For a while, I just sat in silence as I absorbed everything they had just told me. They did have a plan to get out of here. They just gave it up a long time ago. We weren’t working toward anything anymore. We were just trying to stay alive. But for what?

For all they knew about the axe murderer, they didn’t really know much at all. Who was he? What was he? Where does he go? Why does he do these things?

“I don’t understand one thing,” I said. That was a lie. There were a dozen things I didn’t understand. “Did she think that she would really be able to get out of this just by quitting? How is that rational?”

I didn’t want to blame what happened on her. Ever since I had gotten to Carousel the goal of staying alive had been so clear. Every single action I had taken had been motivated by trying to stay alive. Living long enough to figure out what was going on. To figure out what the veterans knew. To find a way out.

I couldn’t imagine giving up that soon.

“You think we’re the rational ones? We have to die over and over.” Arthur said.

“Dozens of temporary deaths have to be better than one permanent death,” I said.

“Get back to me when you’ve died dozens of times,” Roxie said.

Arthur shook his head. “In a few years when you’ve died a hundred painful, terrifying, pointless deaths and you’re no closer to getting out of here… then we can debate about whether playing the game is the right decision. I’m not saying she thought it through. She was probably just scared…”

I imagine Arthur and Roxie had put a lot of thought into this very thing.

“It’s just… Not everyone wants to survive at any cost. Some of us really take to Carousel. Others don’t. I’m not sure which group is the sane one,” Arthur said.

Janette had been scared. That was true. You could hear it in her voice. But she had refused to adapt to the situation. I didn’t think I would ever understand that.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” I asked.

Roxie had implied as much when the “Rulekeeper” showed up.

They didn’t answer for a moment. Arthur appeared to be choosing his words carefully, but Roxie spoke up before he could.

“We did know this was going to happen. Ever since she first refused to go out on a storyline. We could tell. She was going to get the axe. The only question is… what’s with the theatrics? Was this whole Grotesque thing just a trick to get her away from the lodge? Or was it really trying to give her a second chance?”

“This wasn’t just about her,” Arthur said. “It’s also about him.”

“Me?” I asked. “How?”

“Because Carousel is always trying to bring in Film Buffs. One out of every ten players that have lived at Camp Dyer over the years were failed Film Buffs. Like Bobby. He was invited here because of his horror interest, wasn’t he? Only half a dozen have actually gotten the archetype. Since you did, I think it wanted you to know the stakes.”

“Wait… There are no other Film Buffs,” I said. I hadn’t seen any other Film Buffs at Dyer’s Lodge, let alone half a dozen. I had wondered since the day I got there why I was the only one. Sure, there were minor archetypes that were pretty rare, but the Film Buff was the only one with just one player.

“That’s the thing about Film Buffs,” Arthur said. “They… disappear.”

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