Book Eight, Chapter 6: Open House

Our first stop for the day was Eastern Carousel. It was early morning, so some of the various nature spirits that lived among the crops and scrub trees in the area were still out and about, roaming through the fields.

Bobby’s house was in the distance. It had been a while since I had been there, but it, like many things in Carousel, was unchanging.

I let Antoine do the talking.

He approached the front door and knocked. It looked like he was going to give it three good knocks, but it was opened by the second. Janet must have been standing there waiting. The script, after all, would have known we were coming. Either that, or she was just standing there by herself, waiting for Bobby to return without a thought in her mind.

“Hey, Janet,” Antoine said. “Is Bobby around?”

“Yes, I can go get him. Did you find the place easy enough?” she asked. And she spoke so normally. If I didn’t know better, I couldn’t have possibly identified her as an empty shell.

“Yes, we had good directions,” Antoine said.

Janet leaned up against the side of the door frame and said, “We decided to get an Airbnb. No offense to you all, it’s just we needed space to ourselves. That way Bobby can go on his little trips with you, and I can finally get some reading done.”

“Sounds like a nice situation,” Antoine said.

In the distance, a rooster crowed, and something monstrous hissed and roared, causing the trees to shake. Janet didn’t notice.

“It really is a great situation for us. If I didn’t get a break soon, I was going to go crazy. I bet the folks back at the office could use the break from me, too,” she said with a smile.

Antoine nodded his head. It was an odd interaction all around. He was trying to be polite, but more than that, he was trying to talk to her like she was a person and not a sort of magic puppet that could be molded so easily around your words.

“I totally understand that,” he said. “Maybe I’ll take a break one of these days. So, do you think you can get Bobby for us?”

“Sure,” Janet said. “He’s out harvesting some corn that the farmer said we can eat. Check this out.”

She walked right past Antoine, out the door, toward a metal triangle hanging from the front porch. A metal rod was also hanging right next to it. She grabbed the rod and struck it against the triangle, dinging it around and causing the metal to ring so loudly that anyone nearby would have heard it.

It got the job done. Bobby ran a full sprint to us, bursting out of a field of corn like he was worried the house was on fire. When he saw us, he calmed down, but not that much.

“Janet, sweetie, I asked you not to do that unless it was an emergency, remember?” he asked. He was out of breath and shaken.

Janet looked at us and said, “Isn’t he such a worrier?”

She then giggled to herself as she walked inside. Yes, what would Bobby have had to worry about?

Bobby didn’t say anything for a bit as he stared at us.

“Is it time?” he asked eventually.

“We have a lead,” Antoine said. “We figured you should be there, all things considered.”

Bobby nodded his head. “Yeah, I want to go. I need to.”

We weren’t investigating Lucky’s Throughline strictly because of Bobby, but his situation was a big part of the reason. So yeah, he really did need to be there. I still didn’t know if we would actually go along with what Lucky wanted, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t take a peek.

We went back down the long road toward Central Carousel, where we met the rest of the group. They had sat there at a park bench waiting for us. Nicole was there with her security detail out, keeping everyone from any possible danger, including cars that might be driving a little too fast.

As a group, we retraced our steps back northeast to the neighborhood where Lark House was.

It was Thursday, the day of the open house. We might be able to actually do more than stare at the exterior of the building through a wall, hoping not to trigger any Omens.

When we arrived, the big gate was open, and balloons were hung all around.

“We can credit Camden with this, I guess,” Antoine said.

He had been the one to see the For Sale sign and conclude there was a way to clear out the Omens on the property. And he was right; there were no more Omens just lying about in the yard.

I took the lead, or at least I tried to, as Nicole’s main bodyguard led a squad ahead of us toward the house.

Past the gate, there was a large courtyard that had once contained a bunch of terrifying-looking statues of people that appeared to have been turned to stone. But now, the statues were replaced with large pots of plants and other normal things to find in a yard.

Still, no Omens.

As we moved toward the proper front of the house, which was not visible from the street, the nature of the house became clear. It was a bit artsy. I wasn’t nearly educated enough to say what style it was, but if I had to guess, it would be something like a Paleolithic mountain cabin. No, that wasn’t right… Paleolithic mountain mansion.

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The house comprised three main features: stone, which had stucco paint or whatever it was called globbed onto it, turning it white; glass, which came almost exclusively in huge wall-sized panes; and, most predominantly, large slabs of wood. The wood was not processed; it looked rough cut, so much so that I could see the saw marks still on it, but it was put together to help form the structure. I could see bark still clinging around the edges of the slabs.

“It looks like one of the houses that rich people would have in The Flintstones,” I said.

That got some laughs, but not as many as I thought it would.

There was something strange about the house, something that made it hard to laugh about. I didn’t know what the aura was, but it was something supernatural. I wasn’t afraid, but I felt a weight in the air that I usually associated with documentaries on genocide.

Laughter here was bad, and I felt guilty about the joke.

The wood was red—a deep, rich, earthy red—and each piece of it looked like it had been around for a thousand years, like it was some sort of petrified forest turned into a house.

The door, which itself was a large slab of wood, was propped open with a small statue.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sounds like a score for Camden… assuming we walk away from this.”

“And assuming the Omen is actually in here,” Camden added. “And assuming we can tell which Omen is the main Omen for the house.”