Chương 432: Book Eight, Chapter 99: Wilted

Running while in the cradle was proving itself to be a deeply frustrating task. Something that had been a mere mind-blowing curiosity while the storyline was unfolding was that the cradle didn't make physical sense. Apparently, that wasn't Carousel's movie magic tricking me. The cradle itself really was at odds with my understanding of physics and space-time. It was difficult to find a direction we could run that made us feel like we were making any progress.

Hallways seemed to go on forever, and my own internal sense of direction told me that we should have been running in loops based on the turns that we took, yet the path we were running never intersected with the one we had already run.

"It's like he's coming from everywhere!" Anna screamed as we sprinted along. The others weren't taking it so well. I suddenly felt vindicated over having lost my cool so many times. It wasn't just me. There was something deeply disturbing about the footsteps and the breathing. Sometimes, it would feel like the axe murderer was right behind you, only for you to realize that it was your own breath you were hearing, your own footsteps.

"Just keep running," Roxy said.

"He's after Bobby, so stick with the group and don't rely on your stats to help you against him. Whatever he is, he doesn't care about that."

"I won't let any of you get hurt," Bobby said.

"I promise."

"Yes, I really sensed how much you cared for our well-being when you dragged us out here into the middle of nowhere," Antoine said, his speech broken up by random bursts of incapacitation.

"There was no way that could backfire."

"I just want to know what's going on," Kimberly cried, and no one, not even Antoine, tried to explain it. Unfortunately, how we had gotten in this situation was a bit complicated, and she was still operating under the assumption that we were here on a rescue. Antoine did try to comfort her, telling her it was going to be okay. He didn't seem so sure.

"I did what I had to do," Bobby said.

"I pushed the story forward. I pushed our story forward. Don't you understand that? In the scheme of things, this moment is going to be very important, and it looks like I'm not going to be around to figure out why." I wanted him to stop talking. He didn't deserve to explain himself now.

"What story?" Antoine asked angrily.

"The meta narrative," Bobby said, trying to give it the gravitas it deserved while sprinting down a giant hallway. I knew what he was talking about. We had discussed it at length, usually under the supervision of alcohol, and we had always treated it as hypothetical, mostly because we didn't want to believe it.

The idea of the meta-narrative was that everything that had happened to us since our arrival was part of one big storyline, and while I knew there was truth to it, the lack of confirmation had slowly allowed me to push it further and further into the back of my mind.

"You think that Carousel's big plan involved you sacrificing yourself to save us from a storyline that we didn't even have to be in in the first place?" I asked. Bobby was ahead of me while we were running, but he stopped to turn back and look at me.

"No," he said.

"I don't think that was the plan. I think the slaughter at Camp Dyer was First Blood, but after that, we were supposed to pick up the plot and start investigating, but we did whatever we could to avoid it. You did too, and so did I. We didn't push the plot forward." Suddenly he wanted to talk.

"Bullshit," I said.

"Do you know how much has happened to us since the reset? How can you say the plot hasn't gone forward?" I didn't want to talk to him about this. Not right then. Not ever. Roxy got the others to stop. We were at a five-way intersection in what would have been a very large and crowded market, I had to assume, if all of the furniture, booths, and goods hadn't rotted away long ago.

"We'll wait here until we get a fix on his location," Roxy said.

"When he makes his attack from one path, we choose a different route." What she didn't say was that when we ran off in one of the five possible directions, Bobby would stay behind. At the center of the intersection were the crumbling remains of a statue. I could tell it had depicted a human before it fell apart. I wasn't even sure what could have caused it to deteriorate in this environment.

"The plot hasn't gone forward that much," Bobby said.

"We never let it. Think about it. Project Rewind, my wife's death, it was all about resetting Carousel's throughline, and then when we had accomplished it, did we start that throughline? No. Then Silas Dyrkon offered us his throughline, designed to take us into the history of Carousel and maybe even find out how it started, but did we take that? No. Carousel even gave us a sanitized version of it that we could run ourselves, and we haven't touched that one either."

"I don't remember hearing you begging to go on Dyrkon's throughline," I said.

"Okay, but then you pull off this amazing stunt, and you discover the people behind the curtain, the Manifest Consortium. You find out about Narrators that all have throughlines we could take, but does that go anywhere? No. We don't trust the Narrators. Even. when one of them finally reaches out to us about his throughline on the river, we turn it down."

"There are reasons for the things we've done," I said.

"We always made it a group decision. It was never unilateral."

"It was never anything," Bobby said.

"We never made a choice, but then when we got forced into the river anyway, that's when I knew what was happening. Don't you know? It's the meta-narrative. We didn't make any choices, so choices were forced on us, just like in a storyline. We didn't make a move so we got thrown in shaken and unprepared." That had not gone unnoticed by me; I was too busy surviving to theorize much.

"That doesn't justify what you did," I said.

"We could have survived on the river. Whatever Carousel might have wanted to do to us, we would have had an advantage because we were innocent, and we were trying to save each other." I knew that much. We weren't exactly denying Carousel exciting footage.

"But that doesn't last forever," he said.

"You know that. After the midpoint, the players have to start pushing the story forward themselves, or else they just get killed. I think that's what this is. I think this is the midpoint, or it at least will be." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. He seemed excited to share his theories with me. The fact that he was about to die was wasted on him. There was a problem with these abstract talks. There was no proof that couldn't be dismissed.

I paced back and forth as he talked to me, so many emotions welling up inside me: anger at Bobby, disappointment in myself, agreement with some of what he was saying, and guilt for having given him permission to quit the game in the first place.

"The midpoint?" I asked.

"This? You thought summoning the axe murderer would somehow bring about the revelation at the center of the story? How exactly does that work? How does this push Carousel's narrative further?" Bobby was quiet for a moment, but then he said, "It brought us all the way out here, didn't it? That wasn't my goal. I didn't choose this storyline out here in the middle of nowhere. I pulled a thread, and it led us here. We are on the edge of a cosmic horror nexus, playing storylines that have never been played before.

We may be the first players to ever step this far. Well, other than Lucky's team." While I wasn't a hundred percent on board, it was pretty apparent that Carousel did want us in this location. Whether that was to fulfill Lucky's throughline or for some other reason, I didn't know.

"I just have a hard time with this, Bobby. I wish we could have this conversation some other time," I said.

"There was never going to be another time," he said, "because you could never talk about Janet." He had me there.

"Yes," I said.

"But if we could have talked, I would have told you that your logic is flimsy. You think Carousel relied on you making a pointless sacrifice in order to tell its story?" He shook his head.

"I think it was relying on you," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"In what way?" For a moment, there was silence as the others listened in, and even the breathing seemed to quiet down as it echoed from every direction.

"Has Carousel been teasing you about your parents lately?" Bobby asked. My eyes widened, and for a moment, I wasn't even thinking about the axe murderer.

"Don't you dare bring them into this."

"I can't," he said.

"It's too late. Carousel hasn't been teasing you lately, has it? That poster at the movie rental place, it had your parents on it. That's what everybody said. Your murdered parents, and Carousel was literally showing you a storyline poster of them. You could have seen them. You could have saved them if we had found that storyline."

"That is my business. I am not going to let them become playthings for Carousel so that people can stare at their death all over again. They are not subjects for other people's amusement," I said.

"I could never let them be that again." Carousel hadn't brought them up in a while, had it?

"I know," Bobby said.

"And that's why you never pulled that thread. What happens to a subplot when you don't pursue it? It dies. Carousel gave us so many options, and I would bet everything—I did bet everything—that all of those choices would have led us out here eventually. We just had to make one."

"Don't put that on me," I said.

"I didn't ask for this."

"I know," he said.

"None of us asked for any of this. Janet died, and she was barely even a plot point. People made fun of her. I met some people from the Consortium when I was talking to Lucky, and they all hated her. They couldn't even remember her name, but Carousel needed us to push the story forward, so if you guys weren't going to do it, I was... I was, if there was even a chance of getting Janet back." He was showing more emotion now than he had been when he triggered the axe murderer. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he spoke.

"But you pull a plot thread, and it gets bigger and bigger," he continued, "The more it comes up, the more important it becomes, and now Janet, her death, is important because of what I did, because it led us here, and we had to come here."

"You don't know what you're talking about," I yelled.

"I know it in my heart," he said.

"We had to come out here one way or another. You may not believe me now, but you will. I think Carousel wants to show you something, and when it does, you have to pay attention." Janet's death, as near as I could tell, was just one item on a list of requirements for Project Rewind. They needed someone to be a secret keeper, someone who would know that the axe murderer existed if and when that knowledge would be life-saving. It was a precaution, one of several safety nets. I didn't know if Bobby was right.

I didn't know if her death was suddenly important because of what it led him to do, that it led him to betray us and bring us out here against an unbeatable storyline. But there was some part of me that greeted that theory with open arms, the same part of me that felt guilty for never pursuing my parents' plot thread.

"Bobby, I don't know that we're going to find something that justifies all of this out here, and if we do, and it turns out that you've pushed the meta-narrative forward, I'm not sure we'll be glad that you did."

"You're not supposed to be glad," he said.

"No one should be happy to be a character in Carousel's story, but we are. We can't avoid it." I didn't have anything else to say. All of my emotions had poured out of me over the last few moments, leaving me drained and numb. What if he was right? What if we were taking things too slowly, believing that we could prep and research and grind until we were ready to take on the world Carousel made for us? It could have all been a misstep. Only time would tell.

But there was no more time to think about it because the breathing got louder, and the footsteps stopped being in my head; I heard them in my ears.

"He's here," I said. The axe murderer was right behind me. And so he was, walking slowly out of the shadows of one of the five paths intersecting at that statue.

"This way!" Roxy screamed, losing most of her composure, barely able to run as her feet tripped over each other. We all moved to follow.

"I'm right here!" Bobby screamed.

"I've been waiting for you!" I didn't know how he managed to face down the axe murderer with such conviction. The axe murderer was a man in a black hood and a rough-leather cloak, ancient and timeless at once. There was always a shadow over his face. Every inch of his skin was covered in one piece of apparel or another, but his face should have been visible in the pale light of the cradle. The shadow covered it like a living barrier that let no light through. I could barely breathe.

I could barely move, though I did my best to make my way past Bobby toward the route the others were taking. The axe murderer didn't run. He walked, yet with only a few long strides, he was upon me.

"I'm over here!" Bobby screamed. But the axe murderer didn't care. I had never seen him this close, and I didn't have my psychic powers the last time I saw him. Whatever this thing was, it deceived my eyes and ears, but that small psychic part of my mind, given to me by my background trope, couldn't be fooled. He was pure evil. Looking at the man was enough to paralyze my mind and turn my legs to jelly. He wanted to kill me. He wanted to kill everyone, and he wanted nothing else.

I was too slow, and suddenly he was too quick. He pulled back his axe, a simple, handmade implement with a large, sharp blade, and he swung it at me horizontally. There was no way I could dodge. My Hustle was useless. After all, it was movie magic, and the cameras weren't rolling now. This was the end, but I was going to try to run as best I could to dodge the strike. It was no use. I lost my balance, and when the blade got to me, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

The trope attached to my silver dagger told me as much. It was comically useless without Hustle. But then I heard a pop like a balloon filled with too much air, and instead of feeling the blade running through my body, I heard a loud wooden crunch. I heard glass shatter. I fell to the ground, having failed to dodge, and I looked up to see that the axe murderer, who gave no hint of a presence on the red wallpaper and didn't even trigger it, had accidentally sunk his axe into the wrong target.

"He he he. You won a ticket," a familiar voice chimed, albeit with a bit more distortion than I was used to. The axe murderer's swing had been interrupted when Silas, the Mechanical Showman, the mysterious dispenser of movie magic itself, had teleported right in the path of his blade. The axe murderer looked as confused as I did, even though I couldn't see his face through the veil of shadow that followed it. Suddenly, I felt myself being picked up by someone.

I looked back, expecting to see Antoine, Kimberly, or Anna. Heck, even Roxy might have lent a hand. But it wasn't any of them. It was Cassie. A ghost, sure, not just a memory of a loved one, but a fully fledged, partially corporeal ghost.

"You need to get up," she said as she lifted me to my feet and began pulling me along. All I could do was follow, sending one last glance over my shoulder at Bobby and the axe murderer. Silas, the Mechanical Showman, flickered away from view, his broken glass and splintered wood disappearing with him. Bobby stood in front of his killer and said, "The script is telling me to cower." Something about it struck him as funny. He laughed openly and loudly, as if it were the greatest news.

"I'll die before I do that," he said defiantly after taking a deep breath. And with a swing of the blade, he was proven right.