The cast and crew went about resetting to get the rest of the scene. I got close to Bobby in case he saw something on the script that might indicate Carlyle could survive the day. He didn’t say anything on the subject.

“The dogs are worried about something,” he said. “I feel worried about something.”

“It’s the Die Cast,” I said, explaining its tropes in more detail. We had time to kill Off-Screen, so why not give him more information than I had previously?

“Gale Zaragoza?” Bobby asked. “Got it. Jason Voorhees with the powers of Death in the Final Destination series. No big deal. Why would we worry?”

I had fallen behind in the references department. Glad Bobby was there to pick up the slack. I laughed.

“It has an aura. You’ll take the full blast of it when it gets close,” I said. “After that, your Grit might help mitigate it. The first hit is intense, though.”

I had seen that same aura trope before. It was the one the Unknowable Host had, but not nearly as powerful.

Still, we were mere mortals.

“Gotcha,” he said. “The dogs must be extra sensitive. Oh, and Riley?”

“Yeah?”

“When things go wrong, I have to get the dogs out first,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

Bobby's keeping his dogs around might have been an impediment, but this was not the time to have that conversation. I needed him alert.

“I work for the Geists,” he said. “I’m their personal vet for animals. They have all kinds. I had to manually check a horse for impaction. You know what that involves?”

“Nope. Don’t want to either,” I said.

He nodded and laughed. “I didn’t want to either. I handle animals for their movies, too, obviously. I know some things. Not a lot, but some things. I’ve been on their property all the way to where the manor is. I saw the asylum, too. Lots of screaming in there.”

“Anything I need to know?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not now. We’ll talk later. If we live, that is.”

That was a plan.

On-Screen.

“Alright, my friends,” Carlyle said loudly. “We have straightened out the knife issue and reset everything. Let’s not have any more delays.”

He started clapping. Everyone else clapped, too.

We all got back into positions. I was over behind the camera watching things on a little screen both in real life and on the red wallpaper, thanks to my Director’s Monitor trope.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Lawrence,” the prop master’s assistant said as she walked away with the real knife held out in front of her for extra safety.

Safety, yeah, that was the reason.

The dogs started barking. First Blood was here. The moment that had been teased for so long was upon us.

“Action!” I screamed. Because the story wouldn’t move forward without it.

Everything went into motion.

We had already done the running scenes. We started back from when the cameras changed angle after Kimberly had been tripped. It was no use redoing everything.

The killer reached out for her with the prop knife. Kimberly desperately reached for the gate with the barking dogs behind it. She trembled with a deep, palpable fear. Maybe that was her being good at acting. Maybe she trembled because she knew that the dogs weren’t acting. They were terrified of something, something that approached from the west side of the building.

I could feel the aura.

Kimberly almost had the latch on the gate when the largest of Bobby’s dogs, a wolfhound, threw itself against the gate, and the latch opened on its own from the hit.

The dogs tore out of the opening all at once, and they didn’t pretend to attack the stuntman wearing the killer’s costume like they had been trained to.

They bolted eastward.

Bobby went screaming after them.

“Bobby!” I yelled. My character would be screaming because my animal handler just messed up. I was screaming because I wanted to know what the script said.

Bobby turned to me for a brief moment. He shook his head, then returned to tracking down his dogs.

A black pit formed deep in my stomach. Carlyle was going to die. I knew not to get my hopes up. This wasn’t drunk teenagers performing some hokey séance in an abandoned house while ghosts and ghouls tiptoed around. Carousel had a story to tell here.

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The dogs had torn out of the pen and past the crew so quickly that many had been startled. One assistant fell down.

It was the prop master’s assistant.

She would never get back up. The knife she had been carrying so carefully had stuck in her chest. She was dead.

The whole crew panicked at the sight, and many gathered around her, screaming for a medic.

In the distance, a light fell from the ceiling of the large warehouse onto one of the fake houses that I would later learn was filled with boxes of costumes. Perfect kindling.

The house ignited quickly.

As the fire burned and smoke filled the air, the crew panicked to leave.

Gale Zaragoza, the Die Cast, was near.

“Riley!” a voice called out. I recognized the voice immediately. It was Carlyle.

I searched for him. He had run a distance toward the exit, but one of the crew had accidentally knocked him over, and he was struggling to get up. He looked back at me from the ground and asked for help. The crewmember who had hit him was running off, looking back at him with a guilty glance.

On-Screen, Off-Screen, it didn’t matter. Staying in character didn’t matter. Carlyle didn’t know the greedy director I was pretending to be hated him. He saw me as a friend.

I ran to him.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I helped him up and put his arm over my shoulder just as an explosion sounded off in the distance.

“It’s happening again,” Carlyle said. “You have to run. Leave me.”

Wait a second, did he know what was going on?

“Carlyle, we have to get out of here,” I said.

“No, you don’t understand,” replied, out of breath. “The Geist family curse. I’ll be fine. You need to leave.”

As a Geist, he had lived his whole life watching his friends and acquaintances befall terrible fates while he was unhurt. He must not have realized that this time, the terrible fate was his.

“Even so,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I pulled him forward. As I did, the main lights in the warehouse went dark. I could only see by the lights of the fires that had grown around the set. I had to give Carousel credit. The setting had turned from a suburban paradise to a hellish maze in an instant.

“Riley!” Kimberly screamed from somewhere in the distance. Smoke was building. I couldn’t see in any direction for too far.

Luckily, we were players and were able to see each other on the red wallpaper if we had a line of sight, even without good visibility. She ran to me.

“Where is the exit?” she asked.

I looked around. There was smoke and random suburban homes built to match all around. I was disoriented.

Still, we hadn’t moved that far. We could retrace our steps, but doing so would bring us back toward the Die Cast.

“This way,” I said.

I started pulling Carlyle along as quickly as I could. I felt the dark aura of our pursuer.

“Oh, my god,” Kimberly screamed. She must have felt it, too, and turned to look behind us.

Because he was there. Walking with a big stride.

Carlyle saw him too and exclaimed something like, “Dear gods, it’s here, isn’t it? The end.”

Gale Zaragoza. No emotion in his eyes. He was there to cause death, and nothing I could do would stop him.

I knew I couldn’t stop him. I hoped that Carousel would see me trying to save Carlyle and extend some proof that it approved, that it would warp the story based on my improvisation. Could I convince Carousel to change the story to save him?

There was no such luck.

I would go on to tell myself that I got lost, that the smoke, chaos, and firelight had confused me so badly that I had taken a wrong turn.

The truth was, I knew what I was doing. I was directing. I did my best to turn off my emotions and just get the shot Carousel wanted.

Carlyle had to die.

The street I took him down dead-ended at a row of fences. If Carousel were going to change its mind, it would have by the time we got to the fences. If it didn’t, the fences provided us with the perfect setup to survive, even without Carlyle.

I had no choice.

We stumbled further until we saw the row of tall wooden fences. A dead end for at least one of us.

Luckily, Kimberly and I could climb a fence. Hustle or adrenaline made it easy.

I left Carlyle with Kimberly, and I jumped up, putting my feet against the fence so I could see over the other side.

I saw a deck chair.

I quickly pulled myself over the fence, grabbed the chair, and dragged it near the wall. I stood on it and reached over the top.

“Kimberly,” I said, “Give me your hand.”

She did as I asked. I pulled her up with ease. The Die Cast was right there..

I felt like throwing up. I had doomed Carlyle. It was one thing to know he had to die and another to help set it up.

Kimberly was over.

I reached back for Carlyle. If I timed it right, I wouldn’t be able to save him. I hated that it came so easy for me to plan such a thing that way.

He didn’t reach for me.

I probably wouldn’t have had time to pull him over anyway. The Die Cast was upon us.

Still, Carlyle said, “Run. Don’t stay here for me.” He turned back toward the large stalker.

“Carlyle,” I screamed.

He thought he was saving me. That was the real gut punch. I set the whole thing up so he could die dramatically like Carousel wanted. His trying to save me made it all feel worse. So much worse.

Instinctively, I pulled myself up and reached out for him. It was no use. He was too far away.

Carousel did always have a sense of humor.

Just as I pulled back from my useless attempt to grab Carlyle, the large wooden fence I was reaching over buckled from my weight.

Talk about your bad luck.

The whole thing, the entire fence panel, started to fall forward toward Carlyle and the Die Cast.

I had thought the fence would be a dramatic barrier that would protect Kimberly and me while letting Carousel get what it wanted. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

The fence fell forward. Carlyle wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. The top of the fence hit him in the upper back, and I wasn’t able to get off the fence fast enough. I landed right on top of him with a crunch.

Three feet away, the Die Cast watched, uncaring.

His job was nearly done.

When the wooden fence panel and I had landed on Carlyle, something had broken. I could hear it.

I scrambled away as fast as I could. “I didn’t mean to!” I said instinctively.

What I had intended was for the Die Cast to kill Carlyle as Carousel demanded while I watched helplessly from the other side of the fence.

This was too much. I could still feel echoes of the disgusting crunch of Carlyle’s ribs or spine on my hands. I felt it right through the fence.

The Die Cast paid me no mind.

He knelt down over Carlyle and picked up the man’s head just long enough to make eye contact. That’s when I saw that Carlyle’s cane had been under him when he fell. The head of the cane had made contact with Carlyle’s forehead and caused a sizable welt.

Carlyle was out of it. He didn’t look Gale in the eye. He was too injured.

The killer grabbed the back of Carlyle’s hair and then slammed his head back down on the cane with tremendous force. That was more than enough. Carlyle was well on his way to the grave just from me falling on him. Gale Zaragoza finished Carlyle off just like that. Carlyle’s name became Carlyle Geist (Deceased).

Someone was pulling on my arm. It was Kimberly.

I was so distracted watching Carlyle die that I barely noticed that the giant stalker was not turning around and leaving after his kill.

He was looking for new targets.

He was looking at us.