Chương 388: Book Eight, Chapter 55: Over the River and Through the Woods

We didn't travel very far that day after we found the body. We followed the arrow on our arm-mounted devices as fast as we could, but the sun moved faster in the sky than it should have. Before we knew it, it was time to set up camp again. The world around us had gotten wet again. We were in some sort of swamp or bog, but the old roads that had been built hundreds of years earlier were still there, and mosquitoes couldn't make it through our suits, so it didn't bother me much, though it was quite hot.

I was tired after hours of walking, and I found it easy to slip back into sleep, hoping to escape the danger for a little while. But unfortunately, my Call Sheet trope told me we would be back On-Screen within a few hours. I didn't know what it meant. I assumed it meant we would be woken up in an emergency. After all, we had zoomed through the Rebirth phase with the discovery that we were not the first group to be sent on this particular mission, and while we weren't quite at Second Blood yet, we would be soon.

When Call Sheet said I would be going On-Screen in three hours, it didn't mean my body. I had to sleep if I was going to think clearly. It would be nice to get my mind off things. But that didn't quite work, because when I slept, I dreamed. And when I dreamed, I dreamed of the body. The same one we had just found on the side of the road. We had examined it, but it had happened Off-Screen. It wasn't clear why Carousel didn't want the footage, but it turned out that it did. It just wasn't using its cameras.

It was using mine, the one mounted on my shoulder, and it wasn't going to present that footage straight up. It was going to use it in a dream sequence.

"His tent is still on his back," Cassie noted.

"That means that he didn't follow the voice that we heard on the audio log." Everything I was seeing, I was seeing from the perspective of my camera, so it was like I wasn't even there.

"That makes sense," Antoine said.

"If he had followed the voice, why would his body be on the side of the road? It would be wherever Camden is." This man, Cole Maddox, had run from the voice, but whether it was hunger or thirst or just pure exhaustion, he had not made it home. And then, at once, I was no longer viewing the footage from my shoulder-mounted camera, at least not footage I had taken already. I was watching footage of myself walking through a distant village.

It was a classic post-apocalyptic village with markets and rusted cars, but there were no people, and there hadn't been in a long time.

"You were meant to see their story," a voice told me, kind and maternal.

"You were meant to tell the world what happened to them." While I knew that the voice talking to me was the enemy, I really wanted to believe those words, and not just about this storyline. I wanted it to just be true. I wanted to see the end of the world, the end of Carousel, just to watch it. I wanted to follow my curiosity all the way until the last thread unraveled.

"You were meant to document it," the voice continued. I probably should have been interested in the voice, but I wasn't. I liked its promise, but I knew it was false. It was feeding my ego. I walked through the streets of the abandoned village, trying to learn whatever the dream was supposed to tell me. It didn't seem clear. I wasn't being led anywhere. It was as if the opportunity to film things was supposed to be enough. I continued walking, looking for any signs of life or narrative, and I found none.

Not in the village, at least. It wasn't until I wandered out a rusted gate and saw a tree upon a hill that a strong feeling of fear overcame me. And then I was gone again. This time, I wasn't anywhere, but I was looking at something. I floated in a black, inky nothing, and all that was in front of me was a wadded-up piece of paper. I unfolded it, maybe with my mind, because my hands certainly didn't do it, and what I saw inside were a few scribbled words.

"She's afraid of the maps." There was more written on it, but for some reason, I couldn't force my eyes to look at it. Was it because I didn't have high enough Savvy, or was it simply too much too soon? The paper was old. It looked handmade. I could see the individual fibers that made it up.

"She's afraid of the maps." The words flashed again in my mind, and I recognized the handwriting. It was Camden's. Suddenly, images replaced the words, and what I saw was one large piece of paper being split in two. One side was crumpled up and thrown, but I couldn't see where. The other was folded and squeezed between two pieces of stone tiling.

"She's afraid of the maps." The words appeared in my mind again. After that, the inky black darkness consumed me, and all I could hear was a woman's laughter. Not just a laugh, no, a cackle. And then there was nothing, and I faded into a deep, restful sleep until morning. - When morning came, we were back on the trail as soon as we had light to see by.

"Did anyone else have a weird dream last night?" I asked as soon as we were On-Screen.

"I did," Cassie said.

"A whole village of people. They were living outside, not even in a dome. Can you believe that? Living right out under the sun and stars, just like everybody used to. But they're afraid, and they need us." As we marched uphill, following the arrows on our ArGIS devices, I made a face of dissatisfaction.

"I had a similar dream," I said, "except the town was empty. Everyone was gone or dead." If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Well, you've always been very antisocial," Cassie said.

"Even in your dreams, apparently."

"Did anyone else have a strange dream?" I asked. Anna and Antoine had not.

"Why are you asking?" Anna asked after they had both denied having dreams.

"There was a wadded-up piece of paper in mine," I said.

"Did you see that too?" I asked Cassie. We had already established that our characters were having dreams about this place we were supposed to go to. I figured it was high time we stopped dancing around the issue and treated it as real.

"Something about maps," Cassie said.

"She's afraid of maps," I said.

"That's what the paper said in my dream." Antoine chuckled.

"That's a strange thing to be afraid of," he said.

"Who is she?" I looked over at Anna. A kindly older woman had been haunting Anna's daydreams, encouraging her to travel into the wilds.

"I think we're dealing with some sort of creature that looks like an older woman. Do you know anything about that from your books?" I asked Cassie. It wasn't clear if my character would know what a witch or a fairy was, or at least he wouldn't know much about them. Cassie's character, however, would.

"Yeah, I know a little bit about that," Cassie said.

"There's a story about a woman who lures children to a house made of candy so she can cook them and eat them."

"So you're saying there'll be candy?" Antoine asked.

"What are we waiting for? Let's pick up the pace."

"I'm serious," I said.

"I think that's what's at the end of the road. Some sort of evil woman. That's not too crazy, is it, with what we've seen and heard?"

"It's just the right level of crazy," Antoine said.

"I'm thinking it's going to be bigger and meaner than that." Anna didn't say anything, but she did look uncomfortable about the inquiry. She might have been lost in thought, or even a daydream, but I wasn't sure if she was On-Screen inside her mind.

"That's a possibility," Cassie said.

"I told you the shadows looked like a woman to me, but it could be so many things, just playing tricks on our minds. Maybe I saw a woman because that's what I wanted to see. Antoine saw a monster because he wanted something he could shoot, Anna saw some type of animal or plant because she didn't want to deal with a human, and you saw nothing because that's what you wanted."

"Yeah, maybe," I said. All I really cared about was that when we found out what we were up against, it was something of flesh and blood that followed rules that could be understood.

"If it is a woman," Antoine said, "that means Camden should be alive still. I mean, how much of him could she have gone through in this amount of time?" That was a wildly dark comment, but I understood why he said it. After all, our "goal" was to rescue Camden, so we had to at least, on some level, believe he could still be alive. But still, that was a morbid thought. We went downhill as we followed the road down into the wetlands for miles.

All around, it was just water and mud, with the occasional crop of trees popping up every once in a while. Luckily, the road was still navigable, and we were making good time. The problem was that Second Blood was coming up, and it wasn't exactly clear who would be targeted. If it was based on savvy, I would be next. If on skepticism, it would probably still be Antoine. Of course, it could always be for some other reason.

Unfortunately, in the game at Carousel, it often takes multiple deaths to form a pattern that can be recognized. We continued on down the road, with mucky water on both sides, and once we'd gone for about a mile or so, I started to notice that we weren't quite alone. I could see for miles around, so the Unknown, which had been a force I could perceive, was no longer in the distance. There was no darkness for it to hide in, or hills for it to hide behind. There was only one place for the Unknown to hide. The water.

The murky brown and green depths all around us could have contained anything. But what popped out of them was still unexpected. Something broke the water in the distance. It looked like a crocodile, just by the way it moved through the water. Maybe a snake.

"Middle of the road," Antoine said.

"Guns ready." He must have been able to see the battle tactics it was about to take. High Mettle would give you that insight. He could see the battle tactics, and I could see the tropes. That was the division of insight between a combat class and a meta class like mine. The problem was that the tropes I was seeing were not enemy tropes at all. The first one that came to mind was called Eureka, the scholar trope that allowed them to sort through written text as if they knew where the answers were.

The monster in the water wasn't even an enemy. It swam, no, it slithered, and reached toward us. And when it got to the road, it rose up where we could see it clearly. I saw a giant, warped hand and arm reaching out of the water, its fingers stiff, struggling to move at first, but then figuring it out. On the red wallpaper, it read Camden Tran, scholar. It was Camden's arm. Somehow, it was the length of a school bus. It looked emaciated, but most of all, it looked like it wanted to grab one of us, and so it tried.

Reaching out of the water, onto the road, it came down right on top of me. I dodged to the left. Everyone else dodged to the right, so when it reached over toward me, it was very clear who it was aiming for. Luckily, I managed to jump over it as it swung toward me, and I ran toward the others on the road. Antoine and Anna were shooting at it, but the bullets were just going right through without bothering it in the slightest.

We ran as fast as we could to get away from the arm, and when I looked back, it had disappeared. But not for long. More arms, just like it, reached up out of the water around us and started grabbing at us. And while it looked like they were attacking all of us, in truth, they were aiming for me. It could have been because of my savvy, or just my low plot armor. I had no way of knowing. We ran as best we could, but we were on a long stretch of road through the swamp.

More arms popped up the further we went, and then they started to appear ahead of us as they disappeared behind us. They could take all of us if we weren't careful.

"Go, go, go!" Antoine was screaming, but I was hardly listening to him at that time. I knew what was about to happen. I was going to die, and all that mattered was what I managed to accomplish with my death. Saving the others so that they could go on to the finale would be worth whatever pain was in store. I pulled back as the others ran, and the arms acted immediately, surrounding me. The others tried to shoot and free me, but they knew the drill. Still, I wasn't going to go easy.

As the arms surrounded me, I jumped over them. One tried to land on top of me, and I managed to do a roll like an action star to evade it, but there were just too many. The others ran ahead. I was surrounded by many hands, but when it finally grabbed onto me, it was just one hand. All the others were gone. I thought about making a quip, but in truth, I was too freaked out by it being Camden's arm. It picked me up by the leg and violently dragged me into the water, where the Unknown was waiting for me.

I couldn't perceive it, but I had experienced something like this before. It was like when I saw Time in Post-Traumatic. The very concept of Time transformed into an enemy whose power I couldn't even begin to understand. The Unknown was all around me as I was dragged through the murky depths. I couldn't see its name on the red wallpaper. I couldn't see its tropes or its plot armor, but it was there. An empty space on the red wallpaper that teased the existence of something beyond my imagination.

And then suddenly, I wasn't in the swamp anymore. The giant hand pulled me through the cold depths, but as I went, the water got hotter and hotter until eventually I could feel boiling water through my suit as I was pulled through it, and then suddenly… I emerged from the middle of a large cauldron about the size of a washing machine, and I was pulled up and out of the cauldron and onto a cold stone floor, where I landed with a crack as my camera unit shattered.

I struggled to turn around to look up, and when I did, I saw her, and I knew exactly what we were up against. Ol' Nonnie, the Crone of the Bayou. She towered over me, and in her right hand, she held an amputated arm, dripping with the same brew that covered me. It was Camden's arm. She looked at me and smiled, and as she leaned down, revealing her crooked teeth and beady black eyes, she said, "Oh, there you are." In the end, we weren't fighting an abstract idea, or a concept, or some invisible spirit.

The enemy, as far as I could see, was an ancient, wicked woman. Not a proper witch. Not a proper human, but human-shaped. She was a hag.