Chapter Three: The Final Straw II

As I was trying to deal with the revelation that Arthur had laid on us, I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Janet rushing back toward the parking lot, her husband in tow. He was trying to get her to stay, but she wasn’t having it.

“Wow,” Todd said. “Normally it takes a bit longer to convince people we’re telling the truth. I see this as a win.”

“I thought you were keeping them calm,” Arthur said sharply to Valerie.

“I tried. I am,” Valerie said. “She must have gotten a high roll.”

A high roll?

Like in a roleplaying game? If that meant what I thought it meant, then Valerie was somehow keeping us from panicking and running away like Janet had.

A thought entered my mind: Should we be runni—

“No worries, you all,” Valerie said. “Everything will be fine.”

There she went with that zookeeper’s voice.

And it worked. The spark of panic that had risen in me was extinguished.

I felt like everything would be all right. We just needed to get to the bottom of things.

“Go get the strays,” Arthur said to Todd.

Todd nodded and followed behind them, his jester’s grin never fading.

As we waited, Arthur and Valerie spoke to each other in hushed tones. I thought I heard them call Janet a “hysteric.” A little extreme. Heck, I had half a mind to follow behind and hitch a ride out of here.

I didn’t expect to see them come back. Janet looked determined to be rid of this whole mess. After I heard some tire screeching in the distance, I figured they had hightailed it, but ten minutes later they reappeared on the road. Janet looked terrified. Bobby looked puzzled. Todd was laughing up a storm.

“The exit is gone,” Bobby said in a low tone. “The road we came on . . . was just gone. This convention is . . . something else.”

He was still clinging to the theory that all of this was part of some elaborate interactive horror convention. In a small way, so was I.

As the couple slowly made their way back to the group, Arthur continued to explain the malevolent entity known as Carousel.

“You have to be careful around town,” he said. “There are a thousand different ways to get killed here, and some of them are really hard to see coming.”

Valerie took over. “Carousel is a terrifying place, but it operates under predictable rules. One of those rules is that when you get here, you have to complete a storyline.”

She pointed back toward the wrought-iron fence where we had seen the terrified woman. “That woman is named Samantha. She is a non-player character for a storyline called Permanent Vacancy. It’s a medium-level storyline, so we didn’t want you to interact with her, or else you might get stuck in the story. The fact remains: you do have to complete a storyline soon. Carousel is going to keep trying to push you into one. So, we picked one out for you—one that we think we can help you complete without much trouble.”

The three guides waved us farther down the road.

And we followed, shell-shocked and numb.

As we walked, we passed by a patchwork of crops.

“This is the wrong time of year for this stuff,” Camden whispered to me and Anna as we walked. Antoine and Kimberly walked farther behind us.

I looked around. He was right. Corn, wheat, pumpkins, and sunflowers. Those are not something you would see at the beginning of summer. Those were fall crops.

The crops weren’t the only thing that was wrong. The weather was too cool. Even the sun and the sky didn’t look right for summer.

I was working full time trying to rationalize everything I was seeing. This wasn’t helping.

Could this be real?

I thought about what we had been told about storylines. I pulled out my tickets. My “Plot Armor” was eleven, but it would be reduced by half when I entered a storyline.

In a movie, “Plot Armor” is a term that is used to explain away improbable plot points. The masked killer takes out the ex-marine like he’s made of cardboard, but the high school cheerleader manages to fight him off—that’s Plot Armor.

One character dies from getting tapped in the head; another survives three explosions and four stabbings. Plot Armor.

The bad guy is unkillable by a minor character, but the protagonist manages to get the better of them with ease? Two words. Plot. Armor.

I don’t know how it functioned in Carousel, but if it meant what it sounded like—and all of this was actually real—it could only mean one thing: that I was screwed.

We walked for so long that we started to see buildings. Eventually, we came upon a large gate that read “Patcher’s Family Farm.” I was almost shocked to see that, unlike the rest of Carousel that we had seen so far, this place had people—in fact, it had kids running around screaming and having fun.

Patcher’s Family Farm was an agritourism destination. You know, one of those places with hayrides, pumpkin chunking, and farm-themed carnival games.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

None of the people on the farm paid us any mind. I got a very strange feeling from them. This is where my visions of the red wallpaper really started to flare up. I saw words that I couldn’t quite read, but I knew something was unusual about them. I suspected that, like the bloody woman Samantha, these people were NPCs.

They also wore an aggressive amount of denim.

I don’t know which of those things made me more uncomfortable.

We were led to the back of the farm where there were no NPCs. A huge display of pumpkins was set up on hay bales. Next to them was a booth that read “Corn Maze $5.” A sign on the booth said “Open.”

As I was reading, the words “The Final Straw II” flashed into my mind.

“Where’s the attendant?” Janet asked. She had woken up from her fearful hibernation.