The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

I waited for the storyline to end, but it never did. The needle on the plot cycle said The End, but unlike normal, the needle never reset back to the beginning.

So there I stood, bleeding from my wounds, watching as the sun rose higher.

I was Off-Screen. Everything was Off-Screen.

In my heart, I knew what that meant.

Secret Lore.

When nothing started happening—when Silas never arrived with his red button—all I could do was begin to wander around. That was when I realized, from a distance, that there were no vehicles parked in front of the Manor house. There had been enough vehicles for each of us. I had a convertible, Antoine had a truck, and then there were several others, but none of them were there now.

The fountain, too, was gone. There had been a beautiful water feature of some kind—a statue of a woman—but it was also not there. As I observed that, my eye was drawn to the Manor house itself.

It was beautiful.

It was no longer the decrepit, dying place that teenagers would call haunted. It was new. None of the windows were smashed or boarded up.

With no other path clear to me, the only thing I could do was walk toward the Manor. As I did, I began to hear music—but not the type of music I would expect to hear from a Manor like this. Instead, it was a combination of drums and singing in a language I had never heard before.

I stepped closer to the Manor and, determined to end the movie, I opened the door.

The inside of the house was missing.

It wasn't as though it had been stripped or burned out—no. When I opened the front door to the Manor, I was opening a door to another world completely—a world of bright colors and beautiful smells, of people dressed in a way I had never seen anyone dress.

They wore lively shades of orange and blue, along with brass chains and jewelry.

There were booths set up and people trading fish, clothing, and dozens of other different goods, some of which I couldn't even describe. I was in the middle of a bazaar—a magical market from a place unlike anything back on Earth.

As soon as I walked through the doorway, the door disappeared, and it was just me.

The people didn't seem to notice me—not at first. They shopped and told each other jokes, and went about their day. But then I heard a voice, a voice that sounded familiar to me but that I had never physically heard before.

"This is Susan," the voice said, and it took me a moment to realize that the voice wasn't inside my mind—that it was literally right behind me.

I turned, and I saw two young girls, maybe 15 years old. They did not dress in the style of the people of the bazaar. No, they had much more European or American sensibilities—or that was the closest I could compare them to.

One of them—the one who spoke—was smiling at me when I finally locked eyes with her. I knew who she was, even though I had never actually seen a proper picture of her.

It was Clara Woolsey. She had blonde hair, but otherwise, she didn't actually look that much like me. That was all for the storyline.

She smiled.

“This is Susan,” she repeated. “She was my first crush, but I didn’t know that back then.”

Susan talked to her energetically, but I couldn't hear what she was saying—it was muted. I could tell it was the type of talk that all 15-year-old girls were known for throughout time: secrets and dreams and so many exciting things.

"Come on, quick!” Clara said to me again, with Susan not hearing. “We have to go before my mother notices. Father is busy speaking with the sharecroppers about a business deal. Hurry!"

Though she was dressed like she was from 200 years ago, she spoke in a much more modern manner—almost as if she had been reincarnated many times.

She and Susan began to run through the bazaar, stopping at stalls and trying on scarves and jewelry. No one got in their way. There were guards posted around the bazaar—guards that did not belong to whatever culture or country we were currently in.

This was occupied territory.

The girls ran, laughed, and bought food that looked delicious. It took everything from me to keep up. They were young; they were free in a faraway land. I would have been the same at their age.

They continued to run until they ran out of market to run through and found themselves in a place within the city that I didn't think they should be. But I knew better than to warn them—I was just a passenger in this story.

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We were in a place like a cemetery or some type of churchyard from a religion that I could not understand.

As they turned a corner, they stopped suddenly, their eyes locked on something. I walked up behind them to get a better look.

It was the strangest sight I had ever seen, even in Carousel.

Before us was a large stone table of some kind, with a man chained to it, lying down with his arms and legs outspread, facing the heavens.

People were surrounding the man, grabbing onto his arms and legs, holding him still despite how much he struggled and spat and screamed at them in a foreign tongue—in many foreign tongues all at once. Making sounds that no one person should ever be able to make.

His screams sounded like stadiums of people screaming, and sometimes they sounded like a monster's roar.

At the head of the table was an ornately dressed woman who was clearly highly revered from the way that people looked at her.

She was speaking a language I didn't understand, but I could tell she was praying from the way she held her hands on high. She was sprinkling the man with some strange red dust as she said the words.

This was an exorcism, I realized.

She was trying to expel demons or whatever this place had instead of demons.

Somehow, the woman knew that Clara and Susan were there. She turned her head and simply said, "You should not be here, young ones."

And she was right, because the man on the table seemed to notice the girls too. He stared at them, and after that one look, Susan ran, shoving me out of the way.

Clara, though—Clara couldn't take her eyes off the man.

"I had never seen anything like it before," she said to me. "A man possessed—a man going through true suffering. I lived a sheltered life, and that was the first time I had ever seen something so horrifying. But not the last."

The man continued to struggle against his chains and against the people holding him down while screaming profanities into the air.

Somehow, through a great burst of strength, the man managed to get one of his arms free from the chain, breaking it away from the stone table and pointing directly at Clara. He said some arcane words that seemed to travel through the air and wrap around Clara's throat.

She fell back onto the ground.

Out of instinct, I dropped down to try to help her, but the moment I did, all the sounds of the market in the distance disappeared. The sounds of the man on the table with his obscene tongue were gone in an instant.

We were back in the Manor house.

Clara was lying in bed, sickly ill, chunks of her hair missing.

A man stood over her, checking her eyes and skin. Behind him, a man and a woman stood holding each other. On the red wallpaper, they were known as Thomas and Agnes Woolsey—Clara's mother and father.

The man had good news.

"This is far less dangerous than it seems. It is a simple curse, as it were, and a simple herbal remedy is all that is required as a cure."

He took out a notebook and began writing down a list of ingredients. Then he went over to Agnes Woolsey and began describing to her how to administer the herbal treatment.

I still stood next to Clara.

"Father was ashamed," she whispered to me, "of himself, of having brought us to that foreign land. Whenever I was sick, he couldn't stand to look at me. Mother began to treat my curse herself. She became such an attentive mother."

In an instant, the room I was standing in was empty, and I could hear talking out in the main room of the Manor house.

I followed the sound and found a group of high-society women sitting around a large collection of chairs. Clara was among them, seated in a large chair that towered over her. She was washed and dressed in her best clothing, but it was still clear she was under the effects of the curse that the possessed man had given her.

"You poor young child," one of the women said. "You are so blessed to have a mother who could take care of you."

"Oh yes," another added. "Most would not be so knowledgeable. My family has long forgotten our traditional remedies."

The women continued to talk until one asked why the curse had been cast upon Clara. Clara stayed silent. She was completely out of it, an empty shell.

"Well," Agnes Woolsey said in a sickly whisper, "one of the local tribeswomen caught her husband staring at Clara and cast a curse upon her."

"Oh goodness!" one of the women said.

The other women reacted similarly, telling Agnes how they would never bring their children to another land, to an uncivilized place like that. Agnes assured them that she had fought against it, but her husband had overruled her—and he never would again.

The women continued to talk and to cast praise upon Agnes for her ability to keep her daughter alive.

Agnes liked that praise—it was so clear.

She reached out to hold Clara's hand, summoning the closest thing to a tear that she could, and confessed to them, "It is a mother’s purpose, after all, isn’t it? To care for her children?"

~

Suddenly, an image of a woman holding a one-hole punch filled my mind. I wasn’t sure what that meant. I didn’t have time to give it thought.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

~

Once again, the people in the room disappeared. Instinctually, I ran back into Clara’s room, where I found Thomas, Agnes, and Clara together again.

"I bought you this from overseas. It is a powerful relic—an amulet that is said to have the capacity to contain any curse," Thomas said as he wrapped a silver necklace around Clara’s neck.

She wasn’t an empty shell on this day, so she thanked him and admired her beautiful necklace.

From the look of it, it was a glass vial filled with clear water on a silver chain. It was not quite how it looked in the picture or when Clara’s corpse wore it. There was no silver liquid inside; it was just clear.

"Now," Thomas said, "I trust that this illness will end. Can you promise me that?"

Clara looked at him, confused, but she said that she promised.

Then she turned to me and said, "I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, I think my father doubted that I was still sick. He thought I was faking it. Maybe that’s what he had to think—that this curse wasn’t continuing to haunt me over a year after I had contracted it. That my poor state of health wasn’t his fault."

As I watched, the glass vial on the necklace—the crystal-clear water—started to darken just a little bit as Clara wore it.

"She will wear the necklace every day until this wretched curse is gone. Is that clear?" Thomas said. "I've spent a small fortune on it, and I expect it will cure what ails her."

"Yes," Agnes said, clearly bothered by it. "I suppose that when she’s cured of it, we will have you to thank."

"Darling," Thomas said, "I know that it is your healing hands that have kept our daughter from oblivion, but this amulet is said to be very powerful. There’s only one like it. The water inside is from a holy spring. Surely, it will only help in your efforts."

Agnes pursed her lips.

I couldn't place the look on her face. The way she stared at that necklace, was it anger she felt?

And then things began to get weirder.