Book Eight, Chapter 10: Drill

With the vault door uncovered, all that was left to do was wait for Dina to get it open.

We had several theories on the plot going into this. Was getting into the safe something that would happen in the finale, or was it the thing that would trigger the monsters to come out and kill us? We didn’t know, and we wouldn’t know until we got in.

So we went forward with the plans that we’d developed. All you could do in the face of uncertainty was give Carousel something to work with so that it didn’t have to do it itself.

“All right. Molly, Bobby, you two head upstairs. Keep a watch outside. If anybody rolls up or anything suspicious happens at all, I want you to tell us on the radio immediately.”

Not only did my character have walkie-talkies in his hotel room, but there were enough for each of us. We knew the rules. Radios like this were just too useful, so when we needed them, they’d stop working or something like that, but I wasn’t going to turn them down.

They were small and slick, a great way for us to keep up conversations. We even did the movie thing where we put a piece of painters’ tape on each of them and wrote our names on them, because surely we’d find one abandoned and need to know whose it was.

As for why we didn’t leave anybody out as a lookout to begin with, it was a little more complicated.

In a movie, they’d have a lookout who would stay with the van, usually the getaway driver, and logically we should have, but the problem was if you had a character who didn’t go into the haunted house, they wouldn’t die, and therefore you couldn’t lose the storyline, which was why Carousel had the Written Off status.

Try as we might, looking through the Atlas, we didn’t really know what the bright line was. If we left someone outside the house, how long would it be before they were taken out of the story altogether? It was something that we bellyached over for far too long, but at the end of the day, we just couldn’t leave anyone outside.

Almost all of the story was happening in the house. With a little bit more prep and maybe some better intel, I might’ve made a different decision.

Molly pushed her purse up on her shoulder and said, “Sounds like a smoke break to me.”

Bobby was annoyed, probably in character but perhaps in real life. I didn’t know. We all wanted to see what was inside the safe, not just our characters.

“Just call me before you get the safe open,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “It’ll be my top priority. Just remember to keep in touch, all right?” I held up my radio so he could see what I was talking about, and we could give the audience a glimpse of them.

They held up their radios in response.

I was sending him off with Molly because her Null Force trope would make the supernatural dodge around her for laughs, at least for a while, and that might end up protecting them both if Bobby played his part in the routine.

It was strange.

First Blood had already passed, and while I could definitely tell we were in a supernatural place, I hadn’t seen anything dangerous yet. In fact, I hadn’t seen anything trigger on the red wallpaper at all as an enemy.

I had no tropes to look at or analyze.

Meanwhile, Dina was completely zoned out as she followed whatever instructions her Savvy Safecracker trope was giving her about how to open the vault.

She was smiling from ear to ear.

I didn’t know if that was a character choice, the result of her trope, or just her own personality, but she seemed to be having a blast as she listened to the lock with a stethoscope, turned the dial, and started smacking the safe with a hammer.

“This’ll take a while,” she said. “Could be an hour, but it’ll probably be longer.”

I nodded. “Do your thing,” I said.

She crouched back down by the vault door, hugged right up against the steel slab like she was trained to sense its soul or something. I left her to it as we stood back and watched.

We went Off-Screen for a while, but not for nearly as long as I’d expected from Dina’s report on how long it’d take to crack the safe.

We waited for something to attack us, or maybe for a ghost to float from wall to wall, but it didn’t come. Even the strange, unsettling faces in the wood had disappeared. It was like we were only standing in a basement, cracking a safe or something. How mundane.

And yet we were On-Screen. Luckily, it turned out that Nicole was every bit as good at this part of the game as I’d expect from a Vet.

“If I had another week on this listing,” she said, “I’d have my contractor swap out half this premium wood for knockoff panels. Sell the originals piecemeal, maybe bulk, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.”

Camden, whose character was a shady builder, was a natural fit for that conversation.

“Really?” he asked. “I’ve always heard of operations like that, but it’s one of those contractor tales, you know? ‘We used the right material, but then someone came in and swapped it out.’”

They shared a laugh.

“It’s real, sure,” Nicole said coolly as she stood watching Dina work. “You own that shop up on Biles Street, right? It’s a great opportunity if you ever want to cash in on your reputation for a few million.”

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Camden laughed.

“Yeah? How’s that work exactly?”

“Just a quick swap. Take the materials we want, swap in cheap stuff,” Nicole said.

“And no one catches on?” Camden asked.

“Sure they do,” she said. “But then my third-party contractor goes out of business and starts up again under a new name. As long as it doesn’t get traced back to me, what do I care? You have to play it by ear. Look for the right situation. Someone croaks, and their out-of-town relatives inherit their creaky old fixer-upper. You offer to do everything for them—renovate, modernize, sell—a package deal. Of course, you strip the moldings, fixtures, the old vintage bath, and the big cooking range out for some modern stuff, but they don’t know better. The old stuff looked tarnished and needed paint. The new stuff looks fresh. They thank you for it.”

Nicole was really getting into character. I’d told her to think through how her character could be a criminal, and she’d totally done her homework.

“So you sell the priceless antique materials and put in shiny crap in its place,” Camden said.

“Oh yeah,” Nicole said. “Sometimes we actually sell it to the buyer. They come in upset that someone, the previous owner presumably, went and modernized this classic house, and we’re the hero because we just happen to know a place they can buy accurate materials for a premium price. They jump at the opportunity because now they can make it all authentic. We’re making money coming and going.”

To be honest, I found it a bit funny. She’d clearly rehearsed this at some point in time while waiting for the real part of the story to start. I did wonder why Carousel was interested in it. We were On-Screen. Was there a ghost there I couldn’t see, but the audience could?

“I may have bought some of your stuff then,” Camden said. “A new house with rescued and recycled materials is all the rage.”

“Sure it is,” she said. “It’s got that great classic look without all the ghosts.”

After she said that, I practically held my breath waiting for Carousel to respond, but it didn’t. What in the world was going on in this storyline that we could just sit around dropping ironic lines like that, and Carousel wouldn’t respond?

I knew that it was supposed to be moderately easy, but I assumed the supernatural forces were at least awake. Maybe we did have to wait for the vault to open before things could get started.