Chương 158: Book Five, Chapter 61: Strike!

Ramona was the first to notice that something was wrong.

"Riley, are you OK?" she asked, or something like that—I wasn't paying attention. I just needed to get a closer look at the poster because there was a block of text at the bottom of the poster, and I needed to read what was in that text. I walked forward without thinking about it, just trying to get close enough to make out what those letters said. That was all. I wasn't going to follow Gus up the stairs.

I just needed to read what it said because it did say something, and I could tell that the first word was "you." I pulled forward, and I could feel the rope tugging at my belt loop because the others were not nearly as interested in following me. They even started making a commotion about it. I wasn't really paying attention to what they were saying and didn't notice them, particularly until Antoine grabbed my arm.

"What is wrong with you?" he screamed because the back of the store, with its barren shelves and flickering lights, had scared them. I didn't respond to him.

"What are you looking at?" he asked, following my gaze. I didn't know if he recognized me as a kid or if he just noticed how central and prominent that poster was, but he managed to put together what was going on.

"Oh, dude," he said, a bit transfixed himself.

"I just need to get close enough to read it," I said.

"I'm not gonna go in the hallway." I wriggled a bit out of his arms because he wasn't holding that tight once he saw the poster, and as I took another step forward, I could see more of what the poster said:"You never know where you'll find…" I tried to read more, but the text was too small, so I took another step and… A piercing wail broke through the store, louder than any scream I had heard. It was a baby crying. That snapped me out of it.

I looked back at Kimberly, who was now the one holding the crybaby because Antoine was still grabbing onto my arm. The crybaby was crying its haunted, staticky cry. And suddenly, my curiosity was replaced with fear because I realized that had we not had that crybaby and had we not been tied together, whatever danger we were being warned of would have consumed me. As I looked back at my friends, I saw something rare. I saw Dina crying.

And when she noticed I was looking at her, she pointed back toward the hallway with the eyeball poster, the stairway going up, and the stairway going down.

"Don't you remember?" she asked.

"This is what Sean was warning about. Look at it." I looked back at it and realized that we had been warned about this place, even though we didn't know it. When we ran Permanent Vacancy and then used Samantha's Damsel trope to make it a supernatural story, Dina's trope that allowed her to communicate—either literally or metaphorically—with her dead loved ones went into overdrive. Her son, or at least something that looked like him, had come in spectral form and kept her safe from the zombies we had summoned.

As a parting gift, she told me her son had warned about this very place, about a choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it. Something about that warning had felt so out of place that I dismissed it, and we hadn't spoken of it since. But here it was. When you have the choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it, the choice I was supposed to make had been given to us explicitly clear.

"Downstairs first," I said. Dina nodded. Almost on instinct, I took another step toward the hallway, but as soon as I did, the baby started to cry again, this time even louder. We just stood there as Antoine relayed what he had seen on the poster to the others.

"Am I supposed to go down there?" I asked Dina as if she would know the answer.

"Yeah," she said.

"That's the whole point of the warning. You have to go downstairs. Don't you want to know where this is going?" If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. And I did—of course I did—but by then, anytime I even thought about moving toward the stairs, the baby started to cry. There was a danger there, something that we could not know. I looked around, seeking permission to go anyway.

I didn't know if I would, but I couldn't shake the desire to just know the truth, whatever the cost. Yet a feeling, like dread, moved over me, centered in my heart and not in the back of my neck like normal. I knew that I was not going to go. I knew that was not happening. I walked back toward the group and realized they were debating things, and all of them but one had come out on the side of me not going down the murder staircase. I felt the rope in my fingers and traced it back to my belt loops.

I couldn't go, even if I wanted to. That lasted long enough for me to get some of my wits back and realize that it would be a stupid decision. Even with Dina's little warning from beyond the grave, it would be a dumb decision to see what was down there. And yet, there was another problem—a deeper horror—as I realized that I was never going to just get over it.

Even as I stood there, realizing my breath was fast and that I was sweating, I knew I would toss and turn over this simple question: What was in the basement of Carousel Family Video? I could hear them arguing, still with me, kind of, but mostly with themselves because I wasn't participating.

"He should go look. He has to pull that thread. I have to know why my son told him to go downstairs," Dina said. No one else was having it, but Dina persisted. I hated the discussion being about something involving me. I didn't like being the center of attention, so as Dina argued about how we were supposed to take risks and how this was a huge development, I said, "We'll have to wait." My ears popped, and suddenly, I was back in reality, standing at the back of the store.

"What?" Dina asked.

"Wait until when?" I took a deep breath.

"Wait until we're strong enough that it doesn't matter what's down there," I said.

"Don't you want to know? We were supposed to go there," she said. Of course, she would say that. This was the woman who came to Carousel knowing what was here to save her son, so of course, she was going to be on the side of pulling the thread.

"We'll wait until we're so high-level that there's no risk," I said.

"Besides, I doubt that this is required. It's a side quest, clearly." I didn't know if I believed that. One thing I did believe was that none of this (none of anything in Carousel) was supposed to be about me, and the thought of that comforted me. I was just an afterthought, invited on a whim. That's what I told myself. I'm not chasing a picture of my family to my doom. None of it was supposed to be about me.

Before Dina could respond, a young woman with a long brown ponytail, wearing a polo with the logo of Carousel Family Video on it, appeared behind us. Her name was Vangie on the red wallpaper. She was a standard NPC, just like Gus had been, except more believable.

"I'm not even gonna ask what the rope is about," she said in a chipper customer service tone. We all turned to look at her.

"Can I help you find anything?" she asked. We took a moment to shift gears.

"We're looking for a werewolf movie starring Grace Varga," I said. I needed to leave that space.

"Sounds like you like mysteries," she responded.

"Follow me, I'll go look it up in the database." She led us to the front of the store, where the checkout area was, logged into a computer with a black screen filled with green text, and started typing really loudly.

"Alrighty," she said, "I have a list of all of Grace Varga's films. Do you have any idea what the title is? I don't see any that have the word werewolf in them, of course. That would be too convenient."

"Can I see the list?" I asked.

"Sure," she said, rotating the computer monitor around for me to see clearly. I looked through the list. I found The Strings Attached, as well as every single movie that I remembered from the bowling alley. I continued looking through the list.

"That's gotta be it," I said.

"#26." She turned the screen back around." Stray Dawn: The Mark," she said.

"That's aisle 42, section 6, and it looks like we have it in stock. You can go check it out. If it's not there, just tell me." It seemed to me that the word "stray" worked for a werewolf movie well, as did the word "dawn." We practically ran, in one big blob of people tied together, to aisle 42, which was upstairs (the staircase in the middle of the store, not in the back), section 6. As soon as we got there, it practically jumped out at us.

The cover featured Grace, our favorite detective, dressed like she was about to have a night out. I could practically smell the hairspray from the way her hair was done. Beside her was Bella, a Bully Bruiser on the bowlers' team, as expected. On the side of the VHS, there was an illustration of the fully transformed werewolf from the movie. We all celebrated and hugged each other because we had succeeded in finding the film. To the best of our knowledge, it all just fit together so well.

Not only did the werewolf match the drawing we had the clown do, but it had the bowlers in it.

"Some secrets were never meant to see the dawn," Antoine read from the cover of the movie. It was a late '80s, early '90s-looking movie with lots of punk angst, ironically starring women in their 30s in something that looked like it was designed to appeal to teenagers.

"Do we have to buy it first to read the back?" Kimberly asked.

"What did the Atlas say?"

"Reading the back is not spoilers, but they did insist that you paid to rent the movie if you're going to read it," I said. It was a real gamble. In the real world, the back matter of a VHS tape could spoil the entire plot or it could spoil absolutely nothing. There was no way to tell until you read it. But I was confident that the Atlas knew what it was talking about. I also just couldn't resist.

I turned the VHS over, and Antoine read off the synopsis: After fleeing their broken pasts, sisters Grace and Bella arrive in the isolated town of Carousel, searching for a fresh start. However, their plans unravel when Bella is drawn into the seductive world of a mysterious group of outsiders led by the charismatic and dangerous Serena. As Bella falls deeper under their spell, Grace is left torn between saving her sister and saving herself from the dark secrets that linger in Carousel.

With time running out and trust slipping away, Grace must confront her deepest fears to prevent Bella from straying too far into the night. It was an angsty, emotional werewolf movie. Checking out was a breeze, and as we walked out of the store, our moods could not have been higher. I almost forgot about the call of the poster with my family on it and the question of what lay beneath Carousel Family Video. Almost.