Chương 287: Book Six, Chapter 49: The Body

We went Off-Screen, and Daphne jumped right into action, looting the corpse of the drowned giant. Her fingers were nimble as she moved through Ed's pockets. She was efficient and quick. In only a few seconds, she retrieved a wad of bills similar to those we had found on the fake receptionist.

"This must have been one of the blackmailers who killed Antoine," she said, as if it wasn't obvious; she was still playing a character Off-Screen. She quickly slipped the money inside her handbag.

"Did you bring the poison with you?" I asked.

"I found it," she said, "during exploration early in the storyline while I was trying to find out who was blackmailing me. Speaking of, let's not forget that I have to tell you about that On-Screen."

"Right," I said. A chill radiated through my bones. There was something I was trying to think of, but I was unable. Had I missed something? Forgotten an important clue? I couldn't tell. But I knew that whatever it was, it had to do with Daphne. Something was really wrong here, and I couldn't put my finger on it. Had this happened before? Yes. Only once. The Straggler Forest. These blackmailer enemies must have had a trope similar to the Stragglers, but what was it? Or was it something else?

"Come on," she whispered, as she moved back in the direction that Ed had come from before we trapped and killed him. I stared at his body. With a character like that, you half expect them to jump back to life at the last moment, but Ed didn't. I was fine with her leading me where we were going. Whatever was going on with her, I needed to keep an eye on her. They say keep your friends close and your girlfriends closer. Wait. That wasn't it. Oh well, I'd think of it later.

I followed her, and it was easy to trace Ed's path of destruction. My eyes had adjusted again, so when we passed through several rows of slot machines and I saw two crumpled figures lying on the ground, leaning up against one of the machines with their heads barely out of the water, I immediately recognized them even without a glance at the red wallpaper. It was Bobby and Jules. On-Screen.

"Mr. Gill," I said, running up to him. I wasn't particularly familiar with their characters, so the first name seemed inappropriate. Unfortunately, I didn't actually know Jules' last name.

"What happened to him?" I said, leaning down beside them. Jules was lying on the ground, supporting his body and helping to keep his head above the floodwaters. I could tell from the way his face leaned back too far that his neck had been broken.

"The damn fool jumped in the way," she said.

"I can't feel a pulse." She was playing a part. We both knew he was dead. The red wallpaper revealed as much. He must have sacrificed himself so that Andrew and Kimberly could get away. If only Daphne and I had been able to enact our plan a few moments sooner.

"We have to go," I said as I examined Jules. She was still severely injured, but I didn't know if things were worse than when I last saw her.

"Leave me, you idiot," she said, and I wasn't sure if she was saying that in character or out of character.

"She'll just slow us down," Daphne agreed.

"We need to go get help, and we can send them back here."

"Bull," Jules said.

"There's no getting help. Listen to your bride here. She knows I'm a goner." It was true. But I was facing quite the dilemma, because we had just lost a player at the precipice of Second Blood, and yet Second Blood had not triggered. I couldn't let Jules die over here, lying on the ground with Bobby. I might need her to do it On-Screen in the next scene. That was the kind of decision you had to make in the game at Carousel.

"Come on," I said, grabbing onto her and helping lift her to her feet.

"This is suicide," Daphne said.

"Better than murder," I said with more venom than I intended.. She pursed her lips. What was the thing I couldn't think of? Was there a subplot I was missing? Sometimes, on nights when I didn't use my Out Like a Light trope, I would have these terrible nightmares that I was back at college and had somehow forgotten one of my courses. That I had simply not shown up, and finals were coming up, and it was too late to drop the class. It was a recurring dream that was scarier in the moment than some killers had been.

This felt a lot like that. Like I had somehow forgotten something so brutally important, and I was running out of time.

"Which way did the others go?" I asked Jules.

"They went to the elevators," she said. I got the feeling that she understood why I was taking her with me. Maybe she was a sort of meat shield, although I hated to think of it like that. She stared daggers at Daphne, maybe for how easily Daphne had accepted leaving her behind. But then I realized she had always been short with her, so it must have just been a character thing. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It was going to bug me for the rest of the storyline if I couldn't think of the thing I was forgetting. Suddenly, I envied Camden's Red Thread Theory, which would keep track of all of his lines of thought and investigation.

"Let's go," I said.

"Rachel, you run up ahead and alert us at the first sign of trouble." Daphne nodded, but when she moved forward, she only walked. Like she was taking a stroll in the park. Far too slow. The image of her walking through the knee-high water in her wedding dress, so casually, without a fear in the world, was deeply troubling. It was almost frightening. She looked absolutely badass, but not in the way that a Final Girl might.

I could see her fiddling with her handbag, twirling its clasp between the fingers of the hand she was holding it with, as if she were twirling a pin.

"I don't hear the big guy," Jules said.

"He's not a problem anymore," I said, as I stared up ahead at the love of my life.

"How did you manage that?" she asked. I took a moment of silence as I stared ahead in awe. What else was Daphne capable of?

"I didn't," I said, as I looked at Jules. She looked back at me knowingly. We moved onward. I wanted to stay On-Screen, but there was nothing I could do to control it. If we went Off-Screen, Daphne was liable to run off again. I couldn't think of why she would do it, now that I knew her secret. But the fear rose up inside of me and pleaded with me to keep my eyes on her. Daphne, what have you gotten yourself into? I thought to myself. We went Off-Screen at the very moment I was pleading with Carousel not to.

Daphne didn't leave; she plodded forward just as slowly as ever, quietly, even when walking through the water We were only Off-Screen for a minute and a half or so, because when we arrived at the elevators, we joined a scene that Kimberly and Andrew were already in.

"Watch out," Kimberly said, calling out to Daphne. Daphne stopped in her tracks.

"What's wrong?" she asked. Kimberly contemplated not answering, but then she looked back at me and Jules and went ahead and said, "Tripwire. Right at water level." Ah. They had planned an ambush. A tripwire would definitely work on Ed, and then the kitchen knives that they each held in their hands would do the rest.

I noticed that Kimberly had not used her scrunchy trope to help transfer some of her Moxie into Mettle, but she did have a hair tie wrapped around four of her fingers on her right hand as if ready to activate the trope at any moment.

"Bobby?" Andrew asked somberly. I shook my head. But he knew that. We were dropping like flies. How many would make it to the finale, I wondered. And what would Second Blood look like? Fortunately, Carousel finally answered one of my questions. A cacophony of noise rose up all around us. Slot machines were starting up, dinging their bells. The lights above flickered on, and they blinded me as electricity flowed to all of the electronics and appliances that had been shut down for so long.

The storm was still raging outside, so it wasn't clear how the power had come back on, unless, of course, someone had gotten to the generator and repaired it. Probably the same person who had damaged it to begin with. My suspicions were confirmed as, moments later, a loudspeaker came to life throughout the casino with a hissing screech. A man's voice, deep and smooth with a Southern twang, rang out over the intercom.

"This has to end," he said.

"We need to negotiate a truce. There has to be peace, or this storm will take us all out. Miss Si— I mean Mrs. Lawrence. You'll never see us again once the water dries and we can hit the road. You'll never see or hear from us ever again." He had a clear speaking voice, but he was nervous and out of breath.

"We'll leave you be and you leave us be, and that can be that," he continued.

"This is not what we intended. I assure you that we are not responsible for whatever happened to your parents. We had no part in that. We were just here for the money, nothing else. But if you keep coming after us, we'll do whatever we gotta do, you understand? Stay off the fourth floor and we'll keep to ourselves. If you come looking for death, we'll give it to you... I promise." The intercom screeched again, and the voice was finished. A voice I recognized, but just barely.

He had said his name was Emmett Hutchins when I met him at the beginning of the storyline. He was a cousin of Daphne's, or should I say a cousin of Rachel's. But if Daphne's character was only pretending to be Rachel, then I suspected he might have been pretending to be her cousin. Suddenly, it all came together.

"What was he talking about, Rachel?" I asked because my character didn't know anything about what she had told me Off-Screen. Daphne didn't say anything.

"Rachel, what is he talking about?" She looked at me, and in the flickering lights I could see her well for the first time in a long while, and she seemed truly sad. She was a great actress.

"I love you," she said.

"Isn't that all you need to know?"

"I love you, too," I said.

"I… what was that man talking about?" She broke eye contact with me, and before she could say anything else, a ding sounded beside us. One of the elevators had powered on with the generator, and its door had just opened, letting floodwater inside, which seemed to cause the elevator to buckle slightly and shake as water tried to seep between the elevator car and the floor.

There was another crack and a bang as the access panel on the top of the elevator popped down, and something fell into the floodwater at the bottom of the elevator car. It was a body. It was Second Blood. It was Ramona. And suddenly I felt so incredibly guilty for reasons I didn't understand. Daphne was the first to move. She ran up to Ramona and quickly grabbed her by the underarms and dragged her outside of the elevator. She then knelt down and checked for a pulse. She looked up at me and shook her head.

Ramona, who should never have even been in this storyline, but was for some reason. I couldn't even see a wound on her body, but there must have been one, because she was bleeding. And the dried blood that soaked into her clothes was now rehydrated by the floodwater. Why did staring at her body suddenly make me want to remember that metaphorical course I had signed up for and then forgotten about? Andrew closed in and started examining her body. I was frozen. How did I let this happen to her?

Why hadn't I kept her safe? Andrew quickly found the wound, which was on the back of the neck, piercing the spine.

"Look at this," he said, examining one of her ears. She was missing an earring, but it hadn't been taken gently. It had been ripped out.

"Look, I can't do a full examination under these circumstances. We either need to get her upstairs or we need to move on."

"At this point, what more can we learn?" Kimberly asked.

"These blackmailers or whoever's been killing ever—" she paused, having noticed something that apparently sent a jolt through her, "wait… the earring's right there." She pointed at Daphne's dress. Sure enough, Ramona's earring was hooked onto one of the ornamental sections of Daphne's wedding dress. While there was a small splotch of blood underneath, I would have never noticed it if I hadn't been directed to it.

"It must have hooked on there when I grabbed her body," Daphne said.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to." There was a moment of silence.

"When you grabbed her body?" Andrew said as he examined Ramona's ear.

"This injury is old. It bled severely. It couldn't have just happened."

"What are you suggesting?" Daphne asked, first looking at Andrew and then up at me. What he was suggesting was that she had taken the earring, because of Logan's Dead Giveaway trope, which required a killer to take some form of souvenir from his victims. Or her victims. Dressing it up to look like an accident was actually brilliant. She grabbed Ramona's lifeless body to make it look like the earring had gotten snagged recently. Maybe she didn't count on a physician being there to examine things.

Unfortunately, it was just one too many coincidences. Or excuses. And suddenly, I remembered what my "forgotten course" was. I remembered the thing I couldn't think of. I stared at Daphne in horror, as I noticed something that should have stood out a lot more earlier. Daphne, the woman I loved, wasn't my girlfriend. She wasn't an ally. She wasn't even a player. I stared at her tropes, and suddenly I understood everything that had been happening in this entire storyline. Daphne was an enemy.