Carousel Book Nine, Chapter 26

The dream that night began as it always did. I was alone in the kitchen of a middle-class two-story home in some suburban copy-and-paste neighborhood. Upstairs, the girl that I liked, that my character liked, rather, was at my little sister's slumber party, and I was listening for any sign of their existence just so I wouldn't feel as lonely down on the first floor.

Being that age was really hard. Those unpracticed emotions were hard enough the first time. Now, I had to relive them through some doomed Carousel child. What kind of Apocalypse felt like this?

It was a dream. To me, it felt normal.

I found myself staring around the room, out past the tile flooring of the kitchen, into the many shades of brown living room. I had never focused my attention over there. It was never important. Everything was dark, but perhaps through the powers of imagination, I could still see it. Though on some instinctual level I feared looking into the dark corners of the house, even though I could feel my character knew the place well.

This moment was a boundary. That was the best word I could use to describe it. A boundary between a life before and a life after. The last breath of normalcy that my character would feel for a very long time, if ever.

There was a bump upstairs. One of the girls must have been stomping. He wondered if it was the girl that he couldn't get out of his mind, but his thoughts went through my mind as if they belonged to me.

Don't think about the future, they said. Don't think about what's outside.

Wait… What's outside?

Was that his thought or mine?

It didn't matter, because it was a good question. My attention, which was mostly spent on trying to interpret the hushed murmurs of the girls above me, suddenly darted to the front door. The door was a whole house away from where I was standing, and yet as I stared at it, it felt like it was getting closer, my attention homing in on the rectangular plank of wood with a small diamond-shaped glass window in the middle, frosted so I couldn't see out.

Someone was standing on the other side. This had never happened before.

I was afraid. There was no being brave in dreams. Like NPCs in Carousel, in a dream you're attached to a script written by an unknowable consciousness. I was supposed to stand there in the kitchen until I heard a scream. That was my job. That was what was supposed to happen, because that was what had originally happened. A boy in a dark house, standing in the one spot where the sounds of the girls upstairs could be heard clearly, smelling burnt cookies and wishing he had friends of his own, just like his sister did.

But someone was at the door.

Please don't let it be him.

Anyone but him. He's not supposed to be there.

A sound rang out all over the house. It felt like what I imagined a cerebral hemorrhage would feel like. A radiating injury. The pain of a memory taking a left turn and becoming something else.

This wasn't supposed to happen. I was supposed to wait there for the scream.

The sound rang out again, and I realized what it was this time. I was prepared. It was the doorbell.

That's not going to work, I thought. There's no one to answer it. All the girls are upstairs, our parents are away, and I'm over here in the kitchen, eavesdropping to the best of my ability on the party above me.

Who was going to answer the door?

The doorbell rang a third time, and as it did, I felt the vibration work its way through my brain and wake me just enough that my character's voice died down a little, and suddenly I found myself lucid enough to be slightly more than a character in my own mind.

That wasn't going to make a difference. I knew better than to answer the door in a prelude-to-a-nightmare dream like this one. The people who answered the door in a dream like this would get eaten by some make-believe creature, or some nearly human horror would appear, curdling the food in my stomach.

But ignoring it was never an option. Being smart was always an illusion. I had to be dumb strategically.

I walked over to the front door. It took half a second. I did my best to stare out the frosted diamond window, to no avail. The dream wasn't going to let me see out. There was only one way to see what was on the other side of a door like this at a moment like this. You had to open it.

So that's what I did, and the face on the other side was a familiar one. Or it would have been if she was facing me.

"Dina?" I asked the woman on the other side. She was turned around, but I knew it was her, dressed in her leather jacket and torn jeans, a leash wrapped around her hand, connected to a big fluffy wolfhound named Shasta.

Bobby's dog. This was awkward. What was I supposed to tell her?

Shasta knew what had happened to her master. I could see it from the way she looked at me. Was she angry, or was she the manifestation of guilt that I had been waiting around on ever since Bobby punched his own ticket?

Dina spun and looked at me. It was really her. There was no scary ghost face or liminal horror monster waiting for me. Just a surprised and annoyed Latina with her mouth hanging open.

"You're alive," she said. "How are you alive? It's been so long."

"Just lucky, I guess," I said, and then my body reached out and hugged her. I was in a dream. None of my normal antisocial impulses were firing correctly. I hoped she didn't take it too poorly.

She hugged me back. What a weirdo. I wasn't sure that we were ever close enough to be in hugging territory, but it was a dream, and we had been apart for like a month or so through terrible circumstances.

We separated slowly and then just stared at each other for a moment.

I didn't know what to say, but my character did.

"Is he over there in the yard?" I asked.

"I don't want to look," Dina said.

"You probably shouldn't," I said.

And that was the end of that conversation.

"How are you here?" I asked. "You were supposed to unequip your medium trope so that you didn't trigger the apocalypse. Wait, did you trigger the apocalypse? That would save me from a tough decision."

She glanced down, maybe out of shame. "Not yet,” she said. “If the worst was going to happen, I wanted to see my son again."

That made sense. Her psychic Encouragement from Beyond trope was what connected her to the psychic apocalypse and allowed her to see her son on occasion.

"He's back at home," she said, looking over her shoulder down the street. "But I can't always make it there, no matter how hard I try."

I had no doubt that Sean, her son, really was in this dream, at home, waiting for her. He got around pretty well for a kid in his condition.

"Look, Riley," Dina said. "Things have gotten really bad. We're almost out of food. We're down to scraping around for edible loot in the dungeon. The apocalypse hasn't left, and it's been so long since we've played a storyline, we're starting to worry the worst might happen."

Players usually bunkered down during apocalypses, but they never lasted long enough to worry about the consequences of not playing a storyline.

"We don't know what's happening, and at this point, I think we're going to do something desperate," she said.

"Join the club," I said. "Carousel is in the mood for desperate acts. What are you guys thinking about doing?"

"Making a run for it, maybe. Building a raft to take on the river, like you guys did. Do you think that would work?"

"Who knows," I said. "It mostly depends on where the narrative momentum is strong enough to keep you alive. Do you have narrative momentum?"

"Not lately,” she said. “Did Isaac, Kelsey, Ramona, and Bobby survive? We were told they ended up in the drink."

"Yep," I said.

Shasta barked at me, chastising me for lying. Bobby didn’t survive, not for long.

"I'm not supposed to tell her about that," I said.

"Are you ever coming back?" Dina asked. "Or is this just a dream? Because we're thinking about doing something desperate. Making a break for it. Trying to find a storyline we can run. Maybe we could stay there for a few days. Find some food."

"If you are going to run over land, at least that mall ninja killer left," I said. "I wonder where he ended up."

"Yeah," she said.

"Here, you can have this," I said, pulling a ticket out of thin air and handing it to her.

"What is it?" she asked, grabbing it from me. "Is it a coupon for an ice cream sundae? Because you know I don't like bananas."

"I know," I said. "The Consortium gave it to us for a free delivery. You can get a lot of food, but it only works once, and the delivery man will get mad at you if he recognizes you as a player in Carousel, so you better have one of the lesser-known players do it."

"I'll get Kyle to do it," she said.

I nodded.

Shasta was getting restless. She looked up at me with her sad, mopey puppy-dog face.

"I know it's about to happen," I said. "I can make it to the stairs just as quickly from here as I can from the kitchen."

She didn't seem so sure.

"Look," I said. "Something bad is about to happen, so you better get out of here. I don't know what he'll do if he catches you."

"Me neither," she said as she stared at the ticket I had just given her. "I think he already has. Not me, but me. You know?"

"Bad time to be walking your dog," I said.

“This isn’t my dog,” Dina said.

Don’t remind me. Don’t I have enough on my plate?

"Would you hate me forever if I triggered the apocalypse?" I asked.

"No," Dina said, as if I had just asked her a perfectly mundane question.

That was good.

"But what if we can't beat it? I mean, do you really think Carousel is going to let us survive?" I asked.

"I think that's all Carousel is going to let us do," she said. "If we die, then the game is over, and who needs the game more than Carousel?"

"I don't think that's how it works," I said. "I don't think that it can just make decisions like that. It's bound by rules. Arbitrary rules of movies. And we're just imposing a personality onto it. Do you ever think that?"

"Sometimes," Dina said. "Isn't that what we used to do with God?"

Even in a dream, I wasn't gonna touch that.

"I'm sorry about Bobby," I said to Shasta after she whined once more. "I really was going to help him get his wife back eventually. Or at least I thought I was. But the truth is, I have a hard time imagining a moment where anything would ever be safe enough that we could take a risk like that."

Shasta howled.

"My son won't talk about what happened to Bobby. He said he saw him in a cave somewhere, but now he won't say what happened," Dina said. "He's afraid."

He must have seen Bobby take the express train.

"Well, anyway, don't be surprised if the apocalypse triggers," I said. "Even if it might be a mistake, I think Carousel wants us to do it."

"That's good," Dina said. "We really need you to get back here, Riley. We're afraid that something's watching us. Clearing the dungeons is harder and harder, and the circus... the music is getting louder. We're going to die soon."

"Okay," I said.

Upstairs, a girl screamed.

"Don't look in the side yard," I yelled to Dina as I ran toward the stairs, and I didn't stop until I was in the girls' bedroom, trying to look out a window and failing, like I failed at so many other things.