Book Five, Chapter 132: The Long Red Hallway

After I stepped into the long, dark hallway behind the theater screen, it only took a moment for my base instincts to trigger a fear response.

Megalophobia- the fear of gigantic things. I didn’t even know I had it until I looked up.

The theater had a high ceiling, but this hallway put it to shame—I couldn’t even see the ceiling. The hallway was like a long, dark crack in reality, with many doors spread along its walls.

The art style was Art Deco. Why I was thinking about that at that moment, I didn’t know. I didn’t even realize that my art history classes had sunk in, but as I looked at the satin draped walls and the gilded moldings, I recognized it.

The hallway extended in both directions as far as my eyes could see, with a slight curve that led me to believe the building was one enormous circle. It was wide enough for ten men to walk through shoulder to shoulder, but since the hallway had been used as a storage area for large wooden crates filled with props, the place was much more cramped than it should have been, given its size.

I stared up at the back of the screen from the theater I had just exited. The image could be seen cast upon the fabric by an invisible projector, but now that I looked at it from behind, I realized that the image was practically paused.

Of course, it was.

There must have been some spell designed to make someone in the theater perceive a fairly polished rough draft of the final cut in real time.

The only way for that to work was if the theater itself made time slow down—or at least altered your perception to make you think it did.

The real image on the screen was moving very slowly as Carousel gathered keeper footage of my teammates preparing for the coming battle.

I couldn’t focus on that right now. I didn’t have forever, and I needed to get answers—I needed to get a solid direction for us to move in.

I stared down the hallway to the left and right.

There was no indication of which way I should go, but before I could make that decision, my eye caught something hanging on the wall behind a stack of crates.

How had I not immediately seen this?

The wallpaper along the hallway was red. Even in the darkness, I could see it.

Normally, I only saw this pattern and color in my mind’s eye, but here I was, looking at it for real.

It was red wallpaper.

The red wallpaper.

I quickly moved the stack of crates as best I could. Luckily, they weren’t filled to the brim and seemed to be mostly padded with straw. It looked like there was Egyptian pottery inside. Probably pretty valuable stuff in the world it was from. There it was, sitting in a box in a hallway.

Once I moved the crates, I saw that there were lamps mounted on the wall—two separate lights that both pointed at the same space on the wall. I reached out and touched one of the lights, feeling around to find some sort of knob that would turn them on.

And then I found it. A pull chain.

The hallway was mostly dark, and as I pulled the chain, I found myself so shaken that I forgot to breathe.

As soon as I heard the click, the lights—both of them—started to flicker on. These were the type of light fixtures meant to brighten up things like paintings at a museum or, in this case, posters at a theater.

I saw a familiar image of an Asian American woman holding a flashlight and walking through a dark alley. The outline of an axe could be seen dropping into frame from above as the woman stared—not in abject terror, but with a healthy dose of fear.

Valorie Choi is The Final Girl.

Valorie. It was her poster.

This was the red wallpaper. Not just like the red wallpaper—this was it. When I had met Valorie on my first day in Carousel, this spot on the wall had been what I saw in my mind’s eye.

Now, it grew dusty from disuse.

None of the variety of things that might appear on the red wallpaper were apparent here. There were no tropes, no stats. Below the poster and its gilded frame was a copper panel filled with lights—although only one of them was lit.

The panel looked like it might belong on some sort of elevator at an old-timey hotel—except, of course, for the labels.

The labels had things like Mutilated, Unconscious, and Incapacitated.

The only one of the lights that was lit was the one labeled Dead.

Valorie, like so many others, was dead.

I stared left and right down the large hallway with the impossibly high ceilings and realized that there were dozens upon dozens more of these little nooks—no doubt devoted to various players.

I couldn’t see any that were lit up properly, but I could see the faint glow of dozens of little Dead indicator lights.

Other than some very dim light fixtures that looked like seashells and the backs of the occasional movie screen, those little Dead indicators were the only source of light at ground level in the hallway.

As my eyes started to adjust, I began to understand more of the design of the building I was in.

Up above, there was a network of elevated walkways crisscrossing from one area to another. I didn’t see anyone on these passageways, but they looked thin and haphazard, meant for workers to scurry from one place to another unseen.

I was convinced that there was some kind of large window on one of the walls up high, as there was a diffuse glow coming from above that didn’t quite reach the hallway where I stood, but it did cast highlights on the metal walkways.

It must have been night outside in Carousel proper. I had spent so much time on sound stages that I had no concept of day or night.

All I knew was that I had to find a way out of the hallway with all of the posters of my fellow dead players.

I started moving quickly. I just picked a direction at random. I had no idea where I was going.

It didn’t take long for me to get out of the area dominated by the backs of theater screens. That was just as well because I had no intention of finding my way back into a theater.

The screens were replaced with yet more doors and more darkened posters of players, but I tried to ignore those.

As I went along, I noticed that many of the doors were labeled, and while I wasn’t sure where I needed to be going, I had to start turning doorknobs soon.

I stopped running.

How had I not managed to see a single person in all my time in the hallway?

I spotted the nearest door and its simple label. “Deli on Fourth” was all it said.

Apparently, this place I was in had a deli, and I wasn’t going to complain.

I approached the door, put my hand on the handle, and turned it cautiously, pulling the door toward myself.

As I opened it, a small amount of light flooded the hallway.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I didn’t dare step through the door, but I peeked through and saw a dining room of sorts, with chairs stacked on top of tables like they had closed up for the night.

I quickly looked at the back of the door I had just opened and saw that it was labeled “Maintenance.”

Looking around, I noticed that to my right, there was an oven, and to the left, past the tables, there was a large window opening up to a street.

Fourth Street.

That was not too far from Kimberly’s loft.

Quickly, I closed the door, and the hallway grew dark again.

I took a few steps to the right and found another door. This one was labeled “Muriel Pryce, Retirement.”

I opened the door just a bit to peek through, and on the other side, I saw a woman—or at least the back of her head—as she sat in a rocking chair, watching an old-fashioned television. A flickering image played on the screen: a cowboy riding a horse across the desert.

She was in a small apartment or, as the door suggested, a retirement suite.

And the back of her head was all I needed to see to know that she was an enemy.

Only a few seconds later, my mind started doing backflips as I pictured the woman in the chair getting up and turning her head to look at me.

This wasn’t happening in real life—she was just sitting there, watching the television.

But in my mind, I could see her getting up and looking at me. Just an old woman with a knitted shawl and piercing cold blue eyes—unnaturally blue.

I couldn’t stop picturing it. My mind was sick with the image playing over and over.

I blinked.

She was doing something to me.

I quickly closed the door, and whatever it was ceased immediately. Moments after I did, something bumped up against the other side of the door, but it didn’t open.

Suddenly, I noticed there was something different about the doorknob.

There was a wire wrapped around it, and hanging from it was a thin wafer of metal wrapped in red paper.

It had been there before, but for some reason, I had ignored it. Somehow, I knew that Muriel—the woman in the chair—had something to do with that.

I backed away from the door and continued down the hallway, one doorway at a time, ensuring not to open the ones with the little red tags on them.

One of the doors was labeled “Subway East Substation.”

As I opened the door, I could hear the screech of a subway car start to sound through the hallway. I immediately closed the door—I didn’t want the sound to carry too far and attract attention.

Another door said “Halle’s Castle, Basement,” but it had a red tag, as if I would need to be told not to open it. There was another door that also said “Halle’s Castle, Shop,” but it didn’t have a red tag—not that that made a difference to me. I ignored it.

In total, I must have opened a dozen doors. Most of them opened to nothing—just empty buildings without NPCs because it was nighttime.

Still, others opened to homes that were clearly occupied.

This was how they did it.

This was how they moved around and set up scenes right under our noses.

Lila’s trope for traveling from soundstage to soundstage looked like child’s play compared to this.