Chương 444: Book Nine, Chapter 1: Saltspar Island

The dream came for the third night in a row. Like the two before it, I actually believed I would take control this time. I was standing in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling in a suburban home that would have been old a decade before I was born. It wasn't my home, but it felt like it was. I was living a memory that belonged to someone else, to a fourteen-year-old boy who cared only for the sounds coming from the upstairs bedroom where his sister was throwing a slumber party.

A girl that he liked was up there, and if all he could hear was the sound of her laughter, then his patience would have paid off. I had been here before. It was so familiar to me that if I found out I had dreamed it every night since the circus first arrived, I would believe it, even if my memory contested it. At any moment, a scream would come from upstairs, and I would finally be able to move, to see a little more of this dream world; it would never be enough.

As much as I tried to walk across the room to a window to peer outside, it didn't work. Each step I took carried me no further toward my chosen direction. I never got far enough away from the kitchen counter that I couldn't simply lean over onto it and inhale the scent of burnt cookies that the girls had made earlier. I really needed to go outside. I needed to look, to see what I was missing, to find out what happened to her, whoever she was. Struggle and perseverance paid no dividends here.

All I could do was wait, and sure enough, right on time, the scream came. It was loud enough to break through the fog of the dream and make me fully aware. Suddenly, my steps took hold, and I could run to the stairs, all the way up to the second floor. Big brother to the rescue. Down the hall to a door that's already open, and when I get close enough to see what's inside, I pay close attention. Ramona, or at least a young version of her, was scrambling to get out of the bed where she had been sleeping.

Cassie was panicked, unable to make any sense with her words. A sleeping bag belonging to the fourth girl who was missing lay on the ground like a ghost in its own right, and I knew the person it belonged to was doomed. Anna was the only one who acknowledged me. But it wasn't supposed to be Anna. That wasn't the way that the dream went the first time. She was standing where Kimberly was supposed to stand. She was pointing in the direction that Kimberly was supposed to.

She directed me to the window, which was open to the night sky. I rushed over to it, noting the snow on the ground. There were footprints, tracks in the snow. I didn't remember seeing them before. I reached my head out the window and looked down, but before I could see anything, I woke up, as I always had and I always would. The world I woke up in was no less of a nightmare than the one I woke up from. I sat upright in my tiny feather bed. It was the third night in a row that the same dream had haunted me.

It wasn't supposed to work that way. I hadn't even equipped my psychic background, and yet, as I wiped the sleep from my eyes, I noticed that it had somehow reequipped itself in the night. There was no escaping the dream. Antoine, Isaac, and Camden still slept. Their minds were not burdened in the night. We each had our own bed, which had been handmade at the Saltspar Inn for generations, a point of pride for the innkeeper.

They had to be proud of the craftsmanship because they certainly couldn't be proud of the size. The beds were comfortable enough. As soon as you lay down, you would sink in just long enough to wonder if you would ever stop, but they were short enough that Antoine's feet hung off the end of his. To their credit, they didn't creak when I moved to get out of bed. As I stood up, thunder crashed outside, and the wind howled as it had been since we had arrived days earlier. The storm was always coming to Saltspar Island.

For now, only the lightest of rain pitter-pattered off the roof, and the wind shook the branches of the trees outside. We were safe. That's what the Manifest Consortium told us. I left our room and made my way down the hall. It was late at night, but I didn't take any care to be quiet because this was not an ordinary inn. Most of the guests here slept like the dead. The creaky floorboards and the perpetual storm that never broke and never landed became a lullaby, making it easy to fall asleep.

But the dreams got in the way. After we found the sanctuary for the Consortium, or at least that's how they tell the story, they set us up with a ticket, something new they were trying out. It was a vacation within Carousel where a lucky winner could come and see a bit of the horror for themselves in a bite-sized, manageable way. I wondered what kinds of people would take up that offer. There were ghosts at the inn, sure.

It was very, very old, set in a version of New England from a story, something that could never quite have existed, at least in my world. Of course, these ghosts were all NPCs, not an enemy among them. You could only see them from a distance, at the end of a hallway or perhaps at the bottom of the stairs, but never up close. The Consortium made sure of that. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

I had learned to ignore them because they were basically just people, natives of the island. They weren't even trying to haunt. They didn't know they were doing it. Another such native, the caretaker, whose only name or title was "Caretaker," passed me as I walked down the stairs.

"They say it's the storm of the century," he said anxiously.

"They say it'll wash the island clean. What do you think?" He was an older man with a red nose and a white beard, dressed like he should be cobbling some shoes in an old painting, just an ordinary NPC.

"I think it'll pass," I said.

"Nothing to worry about." He nodded his head.

"My family's been on this island for four generations. Hadn't seen a storm that could change that yet." I smiled and nodded back at him, and for a moment, it seemed like he wasn't going to worry about his livelihood or his life, but I knew before long, he would be back to his worried, anxious glances. We had had that same exchange many times. Of course, the storm had wiped the island clean, as he said, else why would he be in Carousel? But he didn't need to know that.

The history of the island, including its final moments, was documented in displays around the inn that he couldn't see or acknowledge. He was part of the museum. The storm had flooded the island, and the sharks had snuffed out whatever was left of its inhabitants. In Carousel, it was one scary story among many.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I almost ran into a group of teenagers, or at least a group of people who appeared to be teenagers but in actuality were some of the immortal employees of the Carousel operation of the Manifest Consortium. They were product testers, so to speak, exploring the island. They ran into me, full of laughter, fleeing from some ghost who was never after them. When they saw it was me, they stepped back and apologized.

They quickly ran off in another direction, snorting and chastising each other for their foolishness. I ignored them. I got the sense that they were told not to talk to us anyway. My destination was the drawing room. It wasn't particularly spacious, but it had a couch and some chairs, along with some board games for guests who got tired of jumping at the sight of ghosts. The others had already made it there before me. This was becoming a nightly ritual.

As we shared the dream, we would all find ourselves unable to sleep, and we would walk down here. Ramona, Cassie, and Anna were huddled around a fireplace, the signs of exhaustion still on their faces.

"Long time no see," Ramona said when she saw me. I gave her a quick smile and then asked, "Did you guys learn anything new?" Cassie nodded. She was more worn out than the rest of us. Something about her psychic archetype was wreaking havoc on her ever since the dreams returned. I looked at her expectantly.

"I threw something under the bed right before whatever it is that happened happened," she said.

"Or maybe it was right after." Despite being in the room when the screaming started, none of the girls actually remembered what had caused it. They all awoke into consciousness in the dream around the same time, never questioning their circumstances, but never fully understanding them either.

"You threw something under the bed?" I repeated.

"What was it, like a Ouija board?" She shrugged but didn't meet my gaze. Anna reached out and comforted her, then said, "I really think we should talk to one of the people at the Consortium. Do they know for sure that we can't trigger the apocalypse?" I rolled my eyes as I stared at the fire.

"They know everything for sure," I said.

"I've never known them to be unsure of anything." They had given me an explanation. Apparently, when they had created the island as a baby's first visit to Carousel concept, it had become sort of a narrative vacuum. Without any tension here, some interesting interactions happened under Carousel's hood. One of those things was that the dark signal sent out by the Red Chalk Circus apocalypse featuring its headlining show, Ringmaster, reached a little further than it should have.

Needless to say, that was very little comfort. I found my place to sit in a chair near the girls as I waited for my mind and body to come down off the supernatural jolt that had prodded me awake. Ramona paced back and forth, possibly trying to wear herself out, but more successfully working herself up in a rage at the Consortium. They hadn't exactly been communicating with us freely. Cassie was the first to finally fall back asleep, and that was lucky for her.

I occupied myself by looking at the mostly handmade map that we had developed over the past few days as we searched for an appropriate venue for Kimberly's rescue. We needed a city with places to hide. Unfortunately, our best option was currently occupied by a circus apocalypse that would never end. So our search continued. We could come and go as we pleased, but since the Manifest Consortium had converted into full research mode on the sanctuary, they weren't exactly pouring their attention on us.

They treated it like they had caught Carousel in the process of some rare natural phenomenon, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. I knew nerds when I saw them, and they were nerding out. At the very least, I understood how they had managed to make such fundamental changes to the way the game at Carousel worked. They were smart people, maybe not as smart as they thought they were, but they were quite capable.

Personally, I didn't want to stick around while they were researching the sanctuary because I knew the time would come when they asked us to walk down there ourselves, and I didn't know what our answer should be. Going there ourselves would be terribly imprudent, but it would also push the story forward. I didn't want to think about it. Planning Kimberly's rescue was something that occupied our minds, and the island inn was not a bad place to stay while we did it.

"I don't know," Anna said.

"I get this sense like there's this force that doesn't want me in the dream. Do you know what I mean?" Anna had not been part of the original Ringmaster dream when we were at Halle Castle, but she had since acquired tropes that qualified her for the psychic night-terror network, so she had taken Kimberly's place in the narrative.

"Well, lucky you," I said.

"Honestly, I'm not sure what the story has to do with me. I literally just got cast as the nosy older brother." Anna stared forward at the fire and said, "Somehow, I think you're going to find a way to make that an important role. You always do." I shrugged.

"Once we get Kimberly back, I bet we can beat it," Anna said. When did running an Apocalypse storyline get put on the table?

"We used to say similar things about you," I said.

"It's easy to discount your own contributions."

"Easier when you're me," she said. She was feeling a bit insecure about her role in the storylines we had run. In typical storylines, Final Girls were often the main character, but we rarely ran typical storylines, and when we did, we did not run them the typical way. Maybe it was a bad habit. After having lost two of our major archetypes for so long, we leaned into plot manipulation and improvisation.

The problem was that when you did that, the plans that Carousel laid for the main characters didn't always fit anymore.

"Just some growing pains," I said.

"We've got plenty of grinding to do to work out the kinks." She didn't say anything in response. She just stared at the fire. In the distance, the storm continued to brew. The sharks circled all night long in the stormy sea, only illuminated by the occasional lightning strike. Ramona paced. Cassie slept, and Anna stared at the fire. I made plans. I had to. Multiple plans. Backup plans. I wondered if all my efforts were like that storm outside, always brewing, never landing.

And yet I kept right on at it, into the morning hours, where I could sleep without fear of dreaming.