Arc II, Chapter 45: The Graveside Chat

“Come here, boy,” Bobby said. “You can do it!”

The tall wolfhound from the Permanent Vacancy B&B stepped over the boundary they were previously unable to cross. It joyously hurled itself into Bobby’s arms. He nearly fell back onto the ground as the beast put its full weight against him.

Bobby looked happy. That’s all that mattered.

We had trekked across the town so that Bobby could check in on his dogs. He fed them, played with them, and talked about his plans with them for at least an hour. The rest of us hung out on the porch of the B&B and waited.

Bobby had been asking for an escort over here for days. We finally relented when the news told us the roads were opening back up.

“There’s still Dr. Pepper in here,” I said as I sat back down in one of the chairs. “Otherwise, it hasn’t been reset at all.”

It felt like a lifetime since that simple discovery of Earth-branded soda had brought me so much joy.

“Something happened to Samantha,” Kimberly said. What a change. I wanted to talk about meaningless drivel, and my friends wanted to talk about heavy stuff. “She knew something bad would happen to her. I could see it in her eyes.”

“Maybe she’s on the run,” Antoine said. “Staying one step ahead of Carousel.”

“Maybe,” Kimberly said.

I stayed out of it. To my knowledge, Samantha had been axed for helping us escape or something similar to that. Either way, I wasn’t going to start theorizing.

“How is the whole dog thing going to work?” Cassie asked. “Did the other players do things like that?”

“Vicious dogs are a staple of all good horror movies,” Isaac said.

“Some of them,” I said. “Not usually the main characters that have them, though.”

“He’s not a main character,” Antoine said. “He’s a veterinarian who specializes in large breed dogs.”

“Well,” Isaac said, “He does have first-hand experience.”

As Bobby’s license stated, if a dog got killed or hurt On-Screen, it would backfire on us, especially if our characters put the dogs in danger. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be used, but they were a liability.

Still, I wasn’t going to try to tell him that. So far, he had been pretty realistic. He wouldn’t bring the dogs with us until we had a place to stay. He would tell the dogs to leave at the first sign of danger, stuff like that.

I tried to be optimistic.

“We’re going to the graveyard after this, right?” Cassie asked.

I nodded. We had some threads to pull over there. I wasn’t as optimistic about that. So far, the little to-do list Carousel gave us was very scant and vague. Things weren’t going to be that easy.

After we waited for Bobby to finish, we headed back across town toward the general area where we knew the main Geist estate to have stood. It was hard to miss. The whole property was surrounded by black wrought iron.

The Geist estate graveyard was so far away from the ruins of the mansion that I couldn’t even see the building. We never even caught a glimpse of it. It was truly a beautiful graveyard, though.

Truly.

Not just in the way normal people might appreciate a solemn place to remember deceased loved ones but in the sense that it looked like a wonderland where ghosts and ghouls could roam freely. Leaves blew in the wind, covering the ground in a crisp orange blanket. The graves were expensive and expressive. Each was a work of art. There were busts of dead Geists here and there. In fact, there were all manner of statuary spread around. If The Grotesque had been set here, we would have lost for sure. Street signs would lead you to different branches of the family, from the main Geists to the Carraways and the Madrigals, who were Geist cousins.

The graveyard was divided between a section labeled “Lost, but not forgotten” and a section titled “Forgotten, but not lost,” which was a pauper’s grave from what I could tell. How generous of the Geists.

Much of the cemetery was cordoned off, likely because they were sets for various storylines and not genuine parts of the Geist graveyard.

It took us thirty minutes of walking under the overcast sky to find the main branch with all of the right dead Geists.

None of it made sense. Many graves had to be older than Carousel itself, or at least they were older than the current claimed age of Carousel. The dates were worn down even if the names and strange inscriptions weren’t.

We found a large monument to the Geists who died in a blaze in 1984. Black humanoid figures danced freely atop a large fountain that had run dry years ago. They didn’t have individual graves as I was hoping. Lillian Geist’s name was on the monument, though someone had taken a chisel or something to it to deface it. That might have been a good clue had we come here first.

“There’s nothing here,” I said after we had investigated every grave. I meticulously wrote down the name of every Geist in that section, including dates. It would give us a rough estimate of who died when, but I had been wanting something else—something more.

“What were you hoping for?” Antoine asked, holding Kimberly in his arms as they surveyed the gloomy grounds.

I shrugged and moved a clump of leaves off of one of the grave markers with my shoe. “I was thinking we would find a grave for Lillian Geist, but we know she didn’t actually die in the fire. One of us would ask, ‘if she didn’t die in 1984, then what’s buried underneath her grave marker?’ Then we dig it up and… treasure or clues or something. I don’t know.”

Antoine chuckled.

“Didn’t quite work out like you planned,” Dina said. She walked over the graves like a ghost, reading every one of them somberly. “These people bred like rabbits. There must be cousins, second cousins, all of their extended family. There’s no way all of these people are Bartholomew Geist’s descendants.”

I could tell she noticed the same thing I did: a lot of Geist children just went missing. Not death dates, just a sad inscription pleading for their return.

“Doesn’t really line up with the timeline,” Antoine said. “Geists were only here for sixty years. The town was only founded a hundred years ago. If the story is to be believed. This whole graveyard makes no sense.”

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“They could have moved the older graves,” Kimberly said. “The ones with the dates worn off could have been transported. The mausoleums, too.”

That was true.

“Could just be props,” Bobby said. “A graveyard with twelve people in it doesn’t work as well in a movie.

That was also true.

“Could be that the Geists didn’t get here a hundred years ago,” I said. “The Throughline story isn’t supposed to be perfectly accurate.”

“It’s looking like a dead end, isn’t it?” Bobby said. “I was hoping it would be more than this.”

We got the tip to go to the graveyard from a random NPC who Bobby asked for information. It made some sense that the lead wouldn’t break the case, but still, finding a bunch of non-answers was disappointing. The only real benefit is that now I had a list of Geists. In the long run, the trip was worth it.

“Back to the drawing board then?” Isaac said. “What exactly was on the drawing board? I forget. Do we have any ideas?”

All eyes were on me. How many times could I fail to have the answers before they stopped doing that?

“I have some thoughts. I’m still working on them. They aren’t exactly organized yet,” I said.

“Let’s talk it out,” Antoine said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Alright… Let’s talk.”

I sat down on a small concrete bench that I only realized later was actually the tombstone sculpture for one of the Geists.

“Two weeks,” I said.

“Two weeks,” Antoine said. “That’s what Willis told us. We had to wait a couple of weeks.”

He had let go of Kimberly, and both of them stood with the others in a circle near where I was sitting. Isaac lay on the ground, looking up at the gray sky.

“Strange. Don’t you think so? Are we really thinking that Carousel is giving us a break? That’s too generous.”