"Before we show it to you, you have to understand that the cook here is from like the turn of the century or something. Not even this most recent century. He doesn't know all the modern food trends, but he did his very best with the instructions we gave him," Ramona said as she and Cassie held something behind their back in the doorway of the drawing room of the inn on Saltspar Island.
"Oh no, what did you do?" Camden asked, looking up from the hand of cards he was dealt.
"If you'll remember, we were all very adamant that we did not want to eat any chowder because we were worried that Carousel would put something in it," Cassie said. "We all discussed this. Just tell us you remember."
"Just show us," Antoine said. "I wasn't going to eat anything from this inn anyway."
"Oh, come on now," Ramona said. "Mr. Pease worked very hard on this, and we are going to eat every bite."
“Mr. Pees?” Isaac asked. That must have been his real name. I wasn’t sure that even Carousel would name a cook something that on the nose. They ignored his comment.
They worked together to slowly turn and reveal the large platter, upon which a disc of dark breading appeared, covered with a smattering of ingredients, including chunks of link sausage, smoked fish, and stewed tomatoes.
They lowered it down between all of us so that we could bask in its glory.
"What is it?" Isaac asked. "Some kind of pot pie?"
"No, Isaac, it is not a pot pie," Cassie said. "See, it turns out that in the early 1900s New England of the world that Mr. Pease is from, Italian immigrants had not yet come to his version of America and spread their cuisine, so the concept of pizza—"
"This is supposed to be pizza?" Camden asked. "Is that cheddar cheese? I don't think you're allowed to put cheddar cheese on a pizza."
"Well, you've clearly never had a frozen pizza," I said.
"Is this cornbread?" Antoine asked, poking the overinflated dough.
"I believe it's some kind of biscuit dough," Ramona said. "Please make note that the food before you is nothing at all like a chowder."
"It has all the ingredients of a chowder," Camden said, "put on top of a biscuit."
"I think you ladies have started a trend," Kimberly said. "I can already see it making waves in Carousel."
Unfortunately, Kimberly had unknowingly said a bad word.
"Don't say that," everyone said at once.
Then we silently waited as, outside in the distance, a large widowmaker wave crashed into the shore. Camden ran to the window, grabbed a pair of binoculars that we had left there, and stared out at the docks, trying to see if his boat had been bashed against the rocks.
"It looks like we're good," he said. "It hit further north, by the lighthouse."
Other words that couldn't be said were lightning, thunder, or any phrase that could ironically indicate the perpetual storm was easing up.
We returned to our game of Midnight Stalker, a card game where players drew and discarded cards in order to make matching sets of victim cards while simultaneously trying to ferret out which player held the Stalker card and was actually trying to obtain a hand composed of the Stalker and four separate victims. It was a morbid subject matter, but after being in Carousel a while, it felt like any other party game.
Camden was taking it very seriously. I suspected he was the Stalker.
Isaac wasn't playing. Instead, he was doing research on the Killers Row franchise for whenever we got the opportunity to rescue his brother Andrew from it. I heard through the grapevine that he wanted to ask Kimberly to call Sal, her talent agent, for information on the storyline, but he wasn't sure if that was in good taste yet after her recent ordeal.
I was trying to find one more Rude Robby, the try-hard scholar who stayed too long studying at the library and now had to walk home alone through the dark and dreary campus. I was doing my best to keep my mind busy.
Everyone was telling me how I needed to relax. My experience in Carousel, however, had taught me that when everyone was taking it easy, that was when I needed to be at my most vigilant. Ironically, the fact that my anxiety-inducing I Don't Like It Here scouting trope barely worked at all on Saltspar Island was making me anxious.
Not being magically anxious about what might happen was itself making me toss and turn and glance suspiciously at everything. One thing I scrutinized was the caretaker, who was always asking whether this storm was going to swallow the island whole. He walked by the doorway holding a wooden lamp without its shade. I wouldn't have noticed it except that the lamp was shaped like a bear, and the caretaker had just trudged in through the rain with it clasped in his hands.
The mutton-chopped old man stared down at it with a confused look on his face. Maybe they hadn't had carved wooden light fixtures in New England at this time period either.
It was my turn, but I could hardly focus on what I wanted to do. Did I pick up several cards from the discard, or did I just draw one from the deck? Where was my Rude Robby? There were enough Ditched Denises in the discard that I could probably get a set of those if I picked up all the cards there. Poor girl. She was the only one in her friend group without a fake ID, so she couldn't get into the bar with them that night… It wasn't worth it. There were too many other cards I would have to discard, and Camden already had a set, or so he wanted us to think.
I ended up just drawing from the deck and getting the Lovers Luke and Lois, whose limo driver on the way to the prom sure was taking a long time to fix that flat tire. I had no use for them.
Ramona caught my eye from across the table as she nibbled on a square of New England-style pizza. She could see I wasn't focused on finding sets or figuring out who the Stalker was. My heart just wasn't in it.
As much as I wished I could believe the Consortium when they repeated that the island was safe, I just couldn't. In Carousel, safe was the least safe thing you could be. If you weren't in trouble, you would be soon enough.
In the hallway, the caretaker still stared down at his wooden bear lamp, but eventually walked onward down the long hallway toward where his room was. And here I thought that we were going to have to soothe his worries about the storm again.
We played on, and eventually Cassie won by making three sets and discarding, thus clearing her hand. There was technically a scoring system, but we weren't keeping track. It was all just for fun. A welcome distraction.
I saw Kimberly discard her hand and said, "So you're the one who's been hoarding my Rude Robby."
"I knew he reminded me of someone," she said. "I didn't have the heart to let him go."
"Some say he's still in that library," I said.
She laughed, but I could tell she wasn't quite herself. The last time she had been coherent, the river was a monstrous enterprise, and here we were, casually hanging out on some island in the middle of a hurricane, literally surrounded by the metaphysical river.
It was always like that when someone came back after a long dirt nap. I wondered if I would ever get postered. Would I come back to find out Apocalypses weren’t that big of a deal? Was the Manyfold Hunger a pushover? How much would I miss when I went away? Maybe it would be nice. I could finally get some sleep. Or would I end up in the theater perpetually? I didn't want to think about it.
We didn't play another game of Midnight Stalker, but we had a pretty good time, or at least enough of us did that the energy in the room was good. Isaac still quietly pondered his brother's ill fate.
While we never ate anything in the form of chowder or stew in Carousel if we could help it, we would drink alcohol from pretty much anywhere we could get it. For whatever reason, it seemed off-limits to whatever pranks Carousel might try to pull. I wondered why we felt that way. I wasn't sure. Maybe it was because alcohol already came with its cautionary tales out in the open. You didn't need scary stories to warn you about those dangers. You just needed to open a newspaper.
Or maybe it was just peer pressure. Either way, the otherworldly New England brewed ale at the inn was fairly popular. I didn't drink any of it because I wanted a clear head, even if I wasn't sure what to do when I had one.
Anxiety had been my superpower, but on the island, I was powerless. Rain poured past the windows as we passed the time away. I stared at it until my mind was so numb I might as well have been drunk.
"We can't stay here for long, can we?" Kimberly asked from behind me.
I shook my head. "I think we've been here too long already."
"So why not leave?" she asked. "You look worried."
I took a deep breath.
"To leave, we would need a place to stay. To find a place to stay, we would have to run another storyline. People would have to die so that we would have a couple days of predictable safety. They need a break. It's been non-stop, everything going from bad to worse."
"Well, at least you rescued me," she said.
"Yeah, that's what I was talking about," I joked.
We stood there and talked about old times. I made a remark about how her loft was probably circus-themed.
"I still have a little bit left on my writ, or at least I did last I checked. There had better not be any clowns in there," she said.
The whole time we talked, I got the feeling there was something she wanted to say, but she was putting it off. Eventually, she just came right out with it.
"Where's Bobby?" she asked quietly.
I braced myself, expecting to hear breathing and footsteps at any moment, but I didn't.
I looked at her with a quizzical expression and then said, "I'm guessing you already know."
She looked down at the floor. She had been holding in some emotions. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. "I thought it was a dream," she said. "I thought it was a bad dream."
"Hey, you know there's still a chance it all is," I said, making a joke at the wrong moment.
I had wondered whether or not Kimberly would remember the events that happened in the Sunken Cradle. Was the version of her we had run into a copy or an NPC in disguise? I didn't know, but as Kimberly fell back into one of the wingback chairs in the room, tears flowing, it became clear that she remembered the axe murderer.
Of course, she couldn't say anything because not everyone in the room was in on it, so she simply said, "I'm just so happy that you rescued me," and everyone came in to hug her, including me.
There were no purely happy days in Carousel. Not in a long time. We had rescued Kimberly, but all that really meant was that she was alive to experience the horror with us.
I went back to my place in front of the window and watched the rain and the storm outside. I wondered how they would take it when I revealed to them my idea, my harebrained scheme, my doomed plan. We needed to make a big impact, and Carousel seemed to be making suggestions.
That night I would fall asleep, and I would dream of a slumber party that ended in tears. I would dream of something outside the upstairs window that I could never quite see, and I would hear the call of the ringmaster, Highbrow Hew, amplified by the narrative vacuum of Saltspar Island.
Was this one of those moments where I was supposed to know better and refuse to do the insane thing, just as we had refused to go on the river? Or was I supposed to charge head-first into my own destruction, dragging my friends right along with me?