The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

🔴 REC    SEP 23, 2018 00:05:29    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

It occurred to me that, as much of an obstacle as the found-footage format could be, it did give me the ability to explicitly state my objectives and thoughts—like a sort of diary.

I couldn’t waste that opportunity.

“All I can think about, how that tape of the collapsing stage could have gotten into that box, is if somebody filmed it and then snuck in here and placed it in there with the others for me to find before I got back from the dance,” I said in a low whisper—the kind you’d hear on footage of a man wandering through a dark museum in the middle of the night.

I continued walking for a little bit. “I sound like a crazy person,” I said, “but what other explanation could there be? For a person to do that, they would have to be able to get into the museum. It’s not yet open to the public; it certainly wasn’t open earlier today. That means that whoever it is—”

I stopped talking as I heard a noise from further down the hall, on the first floor where the offices were.

“There’s someone here,” I whispered.

Slowly, I made my way across the first floor, doing my best to stay out of the way and unseen as I moved toward the offices.

I peered into the dark room with all the cubicles. The only light came from my computer monitor, and from the door, I could see a man standing next to my computer, staring at the footage I had left up on the screen.

It took me a moment to make out what I was seeing, but on the red wallpaper, I knew immediately who I was dealing with.

I reached over and flipped on the light to the room. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

The man was startled; he nearly fell back in my chair. It was Bobby.

“Security,” he said. “I’m the… the new security guard.”

I looked him up and down, and sure enough, he had been randomly cast as a security guard—which, in my book, was a huge win. Sitting next to him obediently, at the ends of their leashes, were Bobby’s two big dogs, Shasta and Doughboy.

“Oh my God, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize anyone else was here,” Bobby said quickly, standing up and moving toward me.

“You’re Bobby, right? Bobby Gill? Kimberly told me about you. I just forgot when you were supposed to start. You’re Michael’s replacement, right?” I asked.

Bobby held out his hand, and I shook it. “Yep, Bobby Gill—that’s me,” he said. “I don’t know anything about who I’m replacing. They didn’t tell me much.”

“No?” I asked. “Yeah, Michael was the last guard overseeing the property during the renovation. He was a character.”

“And what happened to him?” Bobby asked nervously like he was spooked. “Why isn’t he working here anymore?”

“He maced a teenager, I think,” I said, “and it turned out he was building booby traps—which is illegal—but damn if he wasn’t a good security guard.”

I started to laugh, and Bobby nervously copied my laughter.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “You seem a little shaken. Heck, I probably seem the same way to you.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, looking back at my computer. “I’m sorry—I snooped, but I saw you had a video queued up and—”

“Did you watch it?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how to play that interaction. “You didn’t watch it, did you?”

“I did,” Bobby admitted. “I’m not sure what I saw, though. Is that from a movie?”

I moved over to my computer, sat down, and saw that he had been watching the scene of the tour boat getting crushed by a car.

If my character didn’t know Bobby and was just meeting him, there was no way I would confide the truth in him, so I lied.

“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of. About fifteen years ago, the Historical Society—you’ve probably had some run-ins with them—decided that we needed to recreate some of the infamous crimes of Carousel. The historical disasters, that kind of thing. And they took it very seriously—hired a horror director and everything. I’m combing through it to decide if any of it should go on display or be used for social media. It’s taking me forever.”

Bobby was either getting really natural at acting or he was genuinely disturbed by the video he had seen because he was looking at my computer monitor like there was a demon on it.

“I don’t think you should put that on social media,” he said.

“Me neither,” I agreed.

After a lull in the conversation, I had put my camera down so it would film out toward the door and pick up Bobby while not showing me.

It was a shot I had seen in a lot of movies—you need to get a static shot of a doorway or similar because, before too long, someone is going to walk past, and you won’t know about it until you watch the footage later.

“Did you hear about what happened downtown?” Bobby asked. “The stage collapsing at the Daylight Dance.”

“I did,” I said but didn’t go into detail about having filmed it. I didn’t want to come across as overly macabre or too desensitized, which I feared would make my character less relatable. Obviously, I had to be a little grim—but not too much.

And honestly, I was not sure how to react to it.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “I wasn’t there myself, but I did help afterward. It was terrible. And just last week, we had that plane crash, right? I was reading about that in the newspaper. The world is crazy.”

Points scored for Bobby. We planned to try and find as many disasters in recent history as possible. He had gotten a head start.

“These things come in threes,” I said, and I meant it. When we had gone through the Town of Carousel book, we noted that disasters really did come in threes, usually. I didn’t know if that was an important detail or just Carousel’s sense of humor.

“Well, no offense, but I hope you’re wrong about that,” Bobby said.

“Me too,” I said, and then, after an awkward beat, I asked, “What brings you here in the middle of the night? I mean, normally, security guards show up before midnight. You have a key, right?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “I was looking at our security monitors for the museum system, and one of the windows on the backside of this building triggered. It wasn’t hooked up to the alarm, so the police weren’t called, but somebody was trying to open it. We don’t have the security cameras hooked up yet, so we don’t know who, but I thought I’d come over here with my hounds just to look around.”

“Some people just can’t wait to learn about Carousel’s criminal history,” I said jokingly. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

He nodded, still a little freaked out from the video and possibly from the day he had spent cleaning up from that disaster.

“You never said your name,” he said.

“Riley. Riley Lawrence.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Riley,” he said as he guided his dogs out the door into another part of the museum. I stood up, making sure that I was in the frame of the camera, picked up the tape that had said daylight dance on it, and then looked in the direction Bobby had just gone, attempting to imply to the audience that I suspected him—or at least suggest I suspected something.

This whole storyline was going to have pacing issues. That was a common feature of time-travel narratives—constantly finding new places and exploring them, often sidelining the main plot.

I needed to give us some breathing room before I settled on the conclusion of time travel being involved. It would play better, I felt.

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We needed to explore the story as if it were a mystery, as if we were dealing with some sort of mundane explanation—like a society of people somehow connected to all these disasters.

In order to bolster my credibility, I couldn’t jump to the craziest solution, even if it was the correct one. I turned back to the computer and decided to try to watch the rest of the films.

■ STOP

Lila had equipped Bobby’s And that’s lunch trope, which extended the breaks between scenes.

Once I stopped recording, I was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing was happening On-Screen. My Quiet On Set trope confirmed that—or at least it confirmed that there was no noise happening On-Screen.

Still, I didn’t sleep. I wanted to watch all of the films so that when my character watched them On-Screen, I’d know how to react. Truthfully, these films were quite disturbing. Even though I’d been in Carousel for a year, it was still unsettling to see them presented so casually and voyeuristically.

I just wanted to be ready.

I watched through the films one at a time, narrowing down which ones I’d show to Kimberly the next day.

Bobby came back into the office with his dogs and sat with me. We watched the films together and discussed our plans for how to unveil them.

“Anna should be showing up soon, right?” Bobby asked.

“She’s the main character,” I said. “The plot cycle isn’t going to move forward until she finds us—not too much, at least. But when that happens, this is going to transition from a strange, vaguely supernatural mystery to a time-travel mind-freak situation.”

Bobby nodded. “This is going to be one of the harder storylines,” he said. “I don’t get it. My last storyline had a serial killer in it and it didn’t freak me out this much. And he buried people alive—oops, sorry, that’s spoilers.”

“I kind of figured from the poster,” I said. The Groundskeeper poster consisted of a recently dug-up plot of land shaped like the kind a grave digger would make. The dirt had flowers planted in a neat little zigzag pattern, meant to look like a heartbeat monitor line from above.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “But all these people dying at once—it’s hard to remember that it’s just a game. It’s hard to remember this isn’t really happening.”

It was happening. It had happened before—maybe even in real life somewhere—and it would happen again, most likely. But I wasn’t going to say that. However Bobby managed to cope, I wasn’t going to ruin it for him.

And he was right. What I had witnessed that day was truly one of the most stressful and terrifying moments of my life—and I had died some gruesome deaths.

It just felt raw. It felt wrong. The people On-Screen were acting like normal, real people you’d find in your town—not like the exaggerated, cartoonish characters from scary movies.

Horror movies were supposed to be a funhouse version of real life and real horror, but what we had just seen felt too real.

All the tapes we had just watched were viscerally jarring. We witnessed everything from intentional mass murder to hot air balloons falling out of the sky because a bird collided with them, ripping a hole in the balloon.

Unlike in horror movies, our voyeur never cut away from the gruesome parts. He just kept filming—and only cut away long after I couldn’t stand to watch anymore.

🔴 REC    SEP 23, 2018 09:18:30    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

“This had better be good,” Kimberly said as she walked into the office the next morning. “You called me on the one day I can actually sleep in.”

“What, does your church start late or something?” I asked sarcastically.

“Oh hush. Just tell me what you found,” Kimberly said.

“You’re going to want to sit down for this,” I said.

I filmed her as I played through the video of the car crashing into the tour boat. She jumped back in shock as the roar of the engine broke through the peaceful tranquility, shattering the moment and destroying those innocent people.

“What is this?” Kimberly asked. “When did this… Is this a movie?”

“I looked it up,” I said. “This event actually happened. And the guy who was driving the car was incarcerated in this very jailhouse before getting executed.”

“This is a real event?” she asked. “Did he get someone to film him do it?”

“He must have,” I said. “And then someone transferred it onto a tape format that was invented 30 years later.”

Kimberly sat back in her chair. “We’re going to have to bring Logan in on this. Maybe he knows something about it. He’s studied Carousel’s criminal history.”

I nodded.

“How many of these tapes are there?” she asked.

“Fifty or so,” I said.

“Fifty?” she asked. “And they all have this type of—”

“Yes,” I said. "So far."

I had seen them, but my character had not yet.

She was silent, clearly trying to process what we were supposed to do next.

“Do we ever get a look at the person filming?” she asked. “Do they ever speak into the camera? Do we know anything about them?”

I shook my head. “Not that I saw,” I said. “But I did notice some strange things. Like, watch this—”

■ STOP

▶ PLAY AUG 04, 1995 10:26:37

I clicked on one of the videos I had already uploaded onto the computer. The tape had been titled kiddie ride—a title that terrified me to my core. I braced myself to watch, but luckily, it wasn’t what it sounded like.

The video began with a carnival ride appearing on the screen—a tilt-a-whirl-type attraction with individual cars. Each car had a wheel in the center that riders could spin to make their car rotate faster. Footage from around the area showed what looked like a lively event.

Then, the ride started to malfunction. The sound of grinding metal filled the air, and it seemed as if the entire structure was on the verge of coming apart, putting everyone onboard in serious danger. The ride operator frantically tried to regain control of the machine. When he finally pressed the emergency brake, something inside the machinery gave way. There was a loud, gut-wrenching crack, as if the very inner workings of the machine had exploded.

The riders, thankfully, were safe.

The video then shifted to chaos—people running away, screaming, most of them not even sure what they were running from. They must have thought a bomb had gone off. A group of terrified individuals fled down an alley near a downtown building adjacent to the malfunctioning ride. Their fear and desperation were palpable as they pushed against each other in their attempt to escape.

The alley narrowed, and the rush of people intensified. What followed was one of the most agonizing displays of crowd crush I had ever seen.

I had seen videos of this sort of thing before on the internet, but nothing could prepare me for this. People were trapped, their limbs tangled and wrapped around each other, crushed beneath the weight of the bodies piling up. Those at the back of the crowd, desperate to move forward, only worsened the situation, compacting the mass of people even further.

I hit the spacebar.

■ STOP

🔴 REC    SEP 23, 2018 09:21:15    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

I looked back at Kimberly and pointed at the screen. Before I could get any words out, I saw that she looked mortified, covering her mouth, on the verge of tears.

I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” I said. “But this girl”—I pointed back to the monitor—“this girl right here with the ponytail and brunette hair, standing next to the dude with his Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned? That girl appears in other videos. Both of them do, but mostly her.”

Kimberly looked at me, her expression projecting that her character wouldn’t understand the significance of what I was saying.

“This accident,” I continued, “was a real-life accident. It happened during the Carousel Summer Days in 1996. We don’t even have that carnival anymore—we renamed it to something else and changed the date.”

“What other videos was she in?” Kimberly asked.

I showed her some other videos, but I never turned my camera off. Kimberly’s reaction would be more impactful than actually showing the next video. It was called teenage angst.

Disturbing sounds of people choking and calling for their mothers filled the air. Tears rolled down Kimberly’s face as she watched the video.

“Is this real?” she asked. “Did this really happen?”

“Yes,” I said. “About ten years ago.” I hit the pause bar on the video and pointed. “This young woman and her friend—right there, you see? They’re wearing the exact same clothes. And she hasn’t aged a day.”

Kimberly looked at me, confused.

“See?” I said. “These were clearly all filmed within the same time frame. And this background actress was at both shoots.”

“Oh… oh thank goodness,” Kimberly said, exhaling in relief. “I thought we stumbled upon a bunch of snuff films.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “I was about to be on the phone with the CBI.”

Kimberly found a tissue and started wiping the tears from her eyes, laughing as she did. “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?” she asked, hitting my arm playfully.

“I’m a videographer,” I said with a shrug. “It’s all about presentation. But, uh… I still haven’t explained some other stu—”

At that moment, Logan walked through the door. We spent some time going back over things with him so his character would be up to speed. Whether or not Carousel would use the footage wasn’t clear.

“What was it you were saying wasn’t explained?” Kimberly asked, after Logan had a similar reaction of relief upon realizing the videos must be fake—because the same woman with the same clothes appeared in multiple videos.

“Here’s where it gets a little weird,” I said.

I started playing daylight dance. They watched intently, but a look of confusion spread across both of their faces as they realized…

“Is this yesterday’s dance competition?” Logan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you showing us this?” Kimberly asked.

“This was on one of the tapes in the box,” I said.

“What?” Kimberly asked, her eyes wide.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Whoever shot this film must have snuck into the museum and put the tape in the box so that I would see it.”

They both looked at me like I was insane.

“Wait,” I said. “Look at this.”

I switched the video over to the footage that I had shot myself at the tragically fated dance.

“This is the footage I shot,” I said. “You see where I am, up at the top?”

They nodded.

“Now look at this,” I said, letting the camera pan over the audience after the disaster. I hit the spacebar.

“What the heck?” Kimberly said.

“That can’t be her,” Logan said.

“It sure looks like her,” I said. “And she’s wearing the exact same clothes.”

Anna had been captured on film at all three disasters, spanning 30 years.

“That’s not possible. Is this a prank? Are you pranking us?” Logan asked, turning to Kimberly. “Is he pranking us?”

“This is not a prank,” I said. “But check this out.”

I rewound the film to just before the disaster and zoomed in as much as the computer would allow. The image didn’t get any clearer, but it did get bigger.

“You see that guy holding a camera?” I asked, pointing to a man wearing a trenchcoat and a fedora. “I think that’s the guy filming this footage,” I said, holding up the tape we had found in the box. “Look at him.”

Logan shook his head. “No,” he said. “When we unpacked this, I made a list of every object in the box.” He walked across the room to his desk and came back with a piece of paper.

“What did you say the title of that tape was?” Logan asked.

“daylight dance,” I said.

He ran his finger down the paper. “No… no. I wrote this a week ago. There must be a mistake. You must be messing with us.”

He turned the page around, showing me that daylight dance was already on the list.

That could only mean one thing: No one had snuck in and placed the tape in the box. It had been there before the dance even happened.

The three of us looked at each other, unsure where to go next with the conversation. To save us the trouble, I reached over to the camera and shut it off.

■ STOP

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