Book Five, Chapter 61: Strike!

Ramona was the first to notice that something was wrong.

“Riley, are you OK?” she asked, or something like that—I wasn’t paying attention.

I just needed to get a closer look at the poster because there was a block of text at the bottom of the poster, and I needed to read what was in that text. I walked forward without thinking about it, just trying to get close enough to make out what those letters said.

That was all.

I wasn’t going to follow Gus up the stairs. I just needed to read what it said because it did say something, and I could tell that the first word was “you.”

I pulled forward, and I could feel the rope tugging at my belt loop because the others were not nearly as interested in following me. They even started making a commotion about it.

I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were saying and didn’t notice them, particularly until Antoine grabbed my arm.

“What is wrong with you?” he screamed because the back of the store, with its barren shelves and flickering lights, had scared them.

I didn’t respond to him.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, following my gaze.

I didn’t know if he recognized me as a kid or if he just noticed how central and prominent that poster was, but he managed to put together what was going on.

“Oh, dude,” he said, a bit transfixed himself.

“I just need to get close enough to read it,” I said. “I’m not gonna go in the hallway.”

I wriggled a bit out of his arms because he wasn’t holding that tight once he saw the poster, and as I took another step forward, I could see more of what the poster said:

“You never know where you’ll find…”

I tried to read more, but the text was too small, so I took another step and…

A piercing wail broke through the store, louder than any scream I had heard.

It was a baby crying.

That snapped me out of it. I looked back at Kimberly, who was now the one holding the crybaby because Antoine was still grabbing onto my arm. The crybaby was crying its haunted, staticky cry.

And suddenly, my curiosity was replaced with fear because I realized that had we not had that crybaby and had we not been tied together, whatever danger we were being warned of would have consumed me.

As I looked back at my friends, I saw something rare. I saw Dina crying. And when she noticed I was looking at her, she pointed back toward the hallway with the eyeball poster, the stairway going up, and the stairway going down.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked. “This is what Sean was warning about. Look at it.”

I looked back at it and realized that we had been warned about this place, even though we didn’t know it.

When we ran Permanent Vacancy and then used Samantha’s Damsel trope to make it a supernatural story, Dina’s trope that allowed her to communicate—either literally or metaphorically—with her dead loved ones went into overdrive. Her son, or at least something that looked like him, had come in spectral form and kept her safe from the zombies we had summoned.

As a parting gift, she told me her son had warned about this very place, about a choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it.

Something about that warning had felt so out of place that I dismissed it, and we hadn’t spoken of it since. But here it was.

When you have the choice to go upstairs, downstairs, or through a door with an eyeball on it, the choice I was supposed to make had been given to us explicitly clear.

“Downstairs first,” I said.

Dina nodded.

Almost on instinct, I took another step toward the hallway, but as soon as I did, the baby started to cry again, this time even louder. We just stood there as Antoine relayed what he had seen on the poster to the others.

“Am I supposed to go down there?” I asked Dina as if she would know the answer.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the whole point of the warning. You have to go downstairs. Don’t you want to know where this is going?”

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And I did—of course I did—but by then, anytime I even thought about moving toward the stairs, the baby started to cry. There was a danger there, something that we could not know.

I looked around, seeking permission to go anyway. I didn’t know if I would, but I couldn’t shake the desire to just know the truth, whatever the cost.

Yet a feeling, like dread, moved over me, centered in my heart and not in the back of my neck like normal. I knew that I was not going to go. I knew that was not happening.

I walked back toward the group and realized they were debating things, and all of them but one had come out on the side of me not going down the murder staircase. I felt the rope in my fingers and traced it back to my belt loops.

I couldn’t go, even if I wanted to.

That lasted long enough for me to get some of my wits back and realize that it would be a stupid decision. Even with Dina’s little warning from beyond the grave, it would be a dumb decision to see what was down there.

And yet, there was another problem—a deeper horror—as I realized that I was never going to just get over it. Even as I stood there, realizing my breath was fast and that I was sweating, I knew I would toss and turn over this simple question: What was in the basement of Carousel Family Video?

I could hear them arguing, still with me, kind of, but mostly with themselves because I wasn’t participating.