Arc II, Chapter 65: On the Fence

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.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

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.”