“Take this,” Carlyle said, handing me the script. He sounded annoyed at having to break away from our work. “Go through it and make sure everything is consistent with what we talked about.”

I tucked the pages into the inside pocket of the jacket I had been dressed in and nodded.

Carlyle retrieved his coat and a cane that he never actually used and led me out to the parking lot. As we passed by an office, I noticed that some headshots were pinned up on a bulletin board. One was labeled “Final Girl.”

The headshot was of Kimberly. She was playing the main character in the movie we were making. That made sense as far as casting went. I was a film director, and Kimberly was an actress. I saw her casting entry appear on the red wallpaper right under mine.

> Kimberly Madison: A talented up-and-coming actress who hopes to be seen as more than Eye Candy one day. She plays the lead in the new slasher Geist Productions is creating.

Thanks, Casting Director.

Off-Screen.

“Have you met her?” Carlyle asked.

He must have seen where I was looking.

“Oh, Miss Madison? Yes, a few times,” I said.

“What are your thoughts? Was she just cast for her looks, or do we have a real starlet on our hands?”

“I think she’s got what it takes to be a real talent,” I said. “Unfortunately, she’s been pigeonholed by roles that are more plot-focused, and she hasn’t had the opportunity to show her range.”

That sounded like the kind of answer I should give.

“Perhaps in the future, she will get that opportunity,” Carlyle said. “Back in the early days we would invest in our stars, give them room to grow. After I had to step back from the movie side of the business, the penny pinchers have just about killed my father’s legacy.”

“So this is permanent?” I asked. “You’re taking back over movie production.”

“Oh yes,” he answered. “I’ve been chomping at the bit to get back into showbiz for years. One thing after another needed my attention. Never could spare the time. Always had to make sure there was coin in the coffers, you understand.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

I had no idea what my car was supposed to look like. Luckily, there was only one car in sight. I reached into my pocket, and the car keys were there to greet me.

----------------------------------------

The ride there was pleasant. Carlyle talked about his plans to start making proper movies, not just the cheap slashers that had overtaken the brand as of late. He seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it. I got the impression that Carousel had been keeping him from his love of entertainment on purpose. Unlike Jedediah, Carlyle did not appear to believe it was a mystical conspiracy. He was fairly optimistic.

His attitude soured as we pulled into the parking lot of the factory in question.

“You can come inside,” Carlyle said. “No need to stay out in the cold. This shouldn’t take too long.”

I turned off the car and left the vehicle unlocked. Carousel was keeping an eye on it for me, I was sure.

I followed Carlyle inside. He continued to carry his cane but did not use it.

We were let into the factory by a guard who recognized Carlyle.

I had to suppress a grin as we walked inside the large building. It was a movie factory. I could see half a dozen or more products being moved around on conveyor belts in nonsensical ways. I saw raw metal scrap go inside one side of a large room-sized machine and come out the other side in little pieces that a factory worker quickly assembled into a die-cast horse toy.

The factory made everything from lunch trays to radios. I didn’t know a lot about how these types of places were engineered in the real world, but it couldn’t be efficient to arrange it like that. It was probably great for the camera, though. It was like watching Santa’s workshop but with more horror memorabilia.

“Look at this,” Carlyle said. He grabbed a die-cast kid’s lunchbox from a stack of boxes as we passed by it and handed it to me.

My heart nearly leaped from my chest.

“The Mysterious Scarecrow!” the letters on the front of the lunch box said.

I recognized the scarecrow. It was Benny the Haunted Scarecrow from The Final Straw II. He was strung up in his cornfield just as I remembered him.

“What’s this?” I said, turning it over. There was more writing on the back.

Beware! The Patcher's Family Farm hides a spooky secret—a mysterious scarecrow that appeared one dark night amidst the whispering cornfields. Is it a guardian of the farm or a ghostly presence with tricks up its sleeve? Dare to discover the truth at Patcher's Family Farm in eerie East Carousel.

Carlyle beamed at it. “The Patchers have a small time attraction over past the circus grounds. This is their newest feature. We gave them a deal on the merchandise, and they asked yours truly to voice the recording for their attraction—you know, the audio track that plays over and over near the concessions and whatnot. You should check it out.” He changed to his spooky announcer voice, “Beware the mysterious scarecrow that walks by the light of the moon and sees more in the dark than you do in the light!”

He smiled, proud of his narration.

“Sounds fun,” I said. I couldn’t think of something more engaging than that. Ordinarily, I would think this was Carousel teasing me about an old horrifying encounter, but Geists didn’t appear connected to the script. I got this strange feeling that Carlyle did that bit of his own free will.

“I was invited to the grand opening last autumn, of course,” he said. “I ended up not going. I might give it a try this year, health permitting.”

He turned and walked further into the factory. The deeper in we got, the louder things became.

On-Screen.

The offices were positioned above the factory floor at the back of the building so that someone standing in them could look out over the floor and watch the workers. We had to take a large set of metal stairs to get to the top.

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Before we got there, the door to the office swung open, and I saw none other than Bensen Geist (according to the red wallpaper). His Plot Armor was level 30. He was neither an NPC, a player, nor an enemy. He was a Geist. That was all there was to him on the red wallpaper. Bensen Geist, The Businessman.

“Son,” Carlyle said.

Bensen nodded as a greeting. “I apologize for calling you away from your hobbies.”

“You ought to,” Carlyle said. “Now tell me about this break-in.”

Bensen looked past Carlyle at me. “Perhaps we should speak alone.” He held out his arm, welcoming his father to the office.”

“There’s no need,” Carlyle said, walking past his son and into the office. “We won’t be here long.”

“They took the file about the nasty business last autumn,” Bensen said.

Carlyle stopped in his tracks, took a deep breath, and without turning around to look at me, said, “Riley, on second thought, you had better get going.”

“Will do,” I said. I glanced over at Bensen as a sort of hello or goodbye, but I was met only by his cold stare.

I turned and walked down the stairs. I wasn’t sure if I remembered the way out. In fact, I was almost positive I didn’t, but I still found my way to the parking lot in record time.

I was still On-Screen.

I walked back to my car, and before I even opened the door, a pair of headlights flashed at me from across the road and down the street. A brown car waited in the parking lot down there. Even from a distance, I recognized it.

It was the same car that had acted as the Omen, the same car that the future mayor was driving.

Why did he want my attention?

~-~

I drove my car over to the lot next to the brown car and looked over inside.

Future mayor Roderick Gray was there, as were Antoine and Isaac. Another man was there, a short man named Ricky Zaragoza. He was a regular NPC with 3 Plot Armor. He wore a button-up shirt with a huge winged collar.

> Antoine Stone: a former Geist foundry worker whose guilt over the loss of his friend and coworker Gale Zaragoza has driven him to take drastic action.

> Isaac Hughes: the ne’er-do-well son of a prominent Carousel business magnate. He seeks revenge for his family’s recent financial woes, resulting in his father’s early death, which he blames on the Geists.

For a moment, I thought Casting Director had finally given me something.

For a moment.

“Get over here,” Roderick said cooly.

I shut off my engine and stepped out of the vehicle and walked around to the door where they had left me an empty seat.

“The old man’s in there, right?” Ricky Zaragoza asked.

I got a sinking feeling.

“Yep,” I said.

“It’s all coming together,” Ricky said, slapping his hands together. “I can feel it.”

He yelled like he was cheering at a hockey game. Ricky was on some flavor of narcotic. Or several.

“There’s no backing down now,” Roderick said. “We came too far for this. Grab the flask.”

Antoine was in the passenger seat. He bent down and grabbed a large, leather-bound flask from his duffel bag.

It looked old. The body was constructed out of some sort of silvery metal, and the leather stretched over it was hand-stitched, with strange symbols in it. There was a large opening at the top with a cork to seal it.

“We sure about this?” I said. “Let’s go over it one more time.”

I was getting the feeling I knew what was about to happen, but wanted to be sure.

“All of our dreams are about to come true,” Roderick said. “We can’t keep going over this. We have to take action.”

“We gotta get revenge on those cocksuckers,” Ricky whisper-screamed. “They say those Geists get whatever they want because they worship the devil. We got ourselves a bigger devil. The chick who works at the psychic shop told us that.”

I couldn’t remember if I had heard an NPC cuss. I almost smiled from surprise. This must have been a serious storyline.

“She also said we shouldn’t be messing with it,” Antoine said.

“Are you getting cold feet now?” Ricky asked.

“No, he’s not,” Roderick said. “We’re all in this.”

Right after he said, “chick who works at the psychic shop,” my Casting Director trope activated.

> Cassie Hughes: a talented practitioner of the occult. She will help any cause for a price. Perhaps even she cannot handle the true cost.

“We all know why we’re here,” Roderick said. “Let’s get on with it.”

He pulled out a handful of small slips of paper from his pocket. “Ballots from that sham election,” he said. “I know the Geists are behind it. The moment I talked about raising taxes on their businesses, my campaign was dead in the water.”

It was probably dead in the water when he ran for elected office in his mid-twenties.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have won,” he said. “But I know I got more than three percent of the vote.”

He shoved the ballots into the flask’s wide opening.

Ricky was next. He had been sitting on a file folder that he produced and grabbed a large paperclipped stack from inside it. It appeared to be some sort of settlement from a lawsuit with the Geists. This must have been the file stolen from the factory office. He read selected lines from it. “Unfortunate lapse in judgment from Mr. Zaragoza. Unprecedented risky behavior. Repeated warnings. Improper use of safety equipment.”

He read each line with venom.

“They killed my brother,” he said. “And they said it was because of… because of, ‘an unfortunate convergence of bad luck’! That’s bull. Gale was more careful than anybody in that plant. Tell them, Antoine.”

Ricky started shoving bits of the paper into the flask. He couldn’t fit the whole thing, but he sure tried.

“He was the best,” Antoine said. “It was their negligence that killed him—faulty safety equipment, plain and simple.”

“Why make things safe when you have all the lawyers in town on the payroll?” Ricky said, crying as he talked. “They buried it. They gave us chump change. Gale’s poor wife was strong-armed. It wasn’t even in the newspapers.”

“Oh, it’s about to be in the papers,” Roderick said. He started to laugh.

I looked at Antoine and then Isaac. We were all freaked out. I wanted to leave at that moment, but it was clear this was the story Carousel wanted to tell.

Unlike Reply the Departed, which we knew had a very lax, straightforward plot where players didn't have to do much, this story probably wouldn’t allow us to opt out, at least if we wanted the true ending. We had to go along, and none of us wanted to.

“Antoine,” Roderick said, “You’re next.”

Antoine pulled out a pink piece of paper. “I said one word to that safety inspector after Gale died. I just told the truth. He ratted me out to management. He was corrupt. They fired me that same day.”

He shoved the pink paper into the flask.

It was Isaac’s turn. “They undercut my family business. One by one, that bastard Bensen Geist took out all of our companies. They could afford to price things at cost. Under cost even. How could we compete with that?”

He shoved what appeared to be a coupon for a set of tires into the flask.

Antoine leaned the flask toward me.

I knew what I needed to do. I now understood why every meaningful conversation Carlyle and I had was Off-Screen. They wanted to portray him in a particular way, whether he matched that persona or not.

“He brought me to this town with promises of creative control. He was going to let me make a name for myself. As soon as I got here, it was clear that was a lie. My career is as good as dead unless I do everything he says.”

I ripped off the cover of the script Carlyle had been working on with me and crammed it down into the flask.

Roderick took the flask from Antoine.

“There are a thousand other people who have legitimate grievances with the Geist family that can’t be here tonight. We’re doing this for them too. I talked to the lawyer,” he said. “The estate is all wrapped up in a trust controlled by the oldest living Geist and monitored by some banker named Dyrkon. We’re going to use this curse to kill the Geists one at a time. When they’re all gone, the estate gets sold. Carousel will be free.”

He started to laugh.

“The witch said we were supposed to put our intentions into the flask,” Isaac said, barely hiding a grin from having called his sister a witch, “Have we done that yet?”

“I think so,” Roderick said. “Now let’s do our duty.”

Roderick pulled out a match from his pocket.

“Wait,” Antoine said. “The psychic told us that taking revenge with a curse is risky. Are we sure we want to do this?”

“I am,” Roderick said. “We are.”

He struck the match against the side of the flask and dropped it in the opening.

Immediately, smoke poured out of the top of the silver canteen, and we all rushed to exit the vehicle.

Roderick still held the flask as the smoke built and was eventually blown away in the wind.

For a moment, we stood still and looked at each other.

“Did it work?” Ricky asked.

“It worked,” Roderick said. “I can feel it.”

Antoine, Isaac, and I looked at each other in horror.

On the red wallpaper, a screen appeared that was all black. Soon, I saw the night sky. The camera I was watching appeared to be flying through the sky with little wisps of smoke coming into frame here and there. I was seeing the smoke fly through the sky from its point of view. The smoke flew over the town and dove into a plot of earth. I couldn't tell where, but I could have sworn I saw a gravestone. Smoke poured down into grass and dirt. My view changed. I was no longer seeing the world from the point of view of the smoke. I saw dirt flying away from the camera.

We were seeing from the point of view of a person who crawled from the earth and looked around. I had seen a gravestone; they were in a cemetery. The person whose view the footage was coming from stood up. They were tall. They took huge, steady steps.

Whose idea was it to see from the killer's point of view again?

I looked over at Antoine and Isaac.

From the look on their faces, they could see it too.