Book Nine, Chapter 44: Sleuthing Around

“You never have let death get in your way, have you, young man?” Moonlight said with a chuckle after I stepped away from the grave and let the lid of the coffin close with a thud behind me.

“I try not to,” I said. “It would be a real handicap around here.”

The Departed Paragon nodded his head for me to follow as he turned to leave the grave. I did as he asked, trying my hardest not to pepper him with questions before the time was right. If memory served, Moonlight Morrow liked to savor a conversation, On-Screen or Off-Screen.

“So you went and triggered an apocalypse,” he said. “A bold move, Mr. Lawrence. A bold move.”

“Really?” I said. “Because I was getting the impression that we had no other choice.”

Truly, I would not have put my friends or myself in this level of danger if I didn’t think it was unavoidable and that charging into it was actually the safest course of action.

“Carousel has that way, doesn’t it? The right choice always seems inevitable, just like your little friend doing her dance with Mr. Rowe on the outskirts of town. No, you had choices, but I think you’ll find that the longer you wait, the worse your choices are going to be, and somehow they’ll always feel just as inevitable.”

We walked for some time as he commented on the color of the leaves and how crowded this version of Carousel was. Small talk. Not exactly something you want to have with Carousel’s own embodiment of the afterlife.

“You look nervous, young man. May I ask why? I assume it isn’t just the occasion.”

“As happy as I am to see you,” I said, “your presence here does imply a complication. We were expecting a psychic fight. Adding in ghosts can complicate things.”

“Ah, the departed ain’t just about ghosts,” he said. “No, there’s more than one way to depart, to cross to the other side, because there are many other sides to cross to.”

That was the confirmation I hoped for. We were dealing with some kind of dream world.

“So, do you have any advice?” We had left the cemetery and were now walking along the sidewalks of this larger version of Carousel.

“I sure do,” he said. He walked with a cane topped with a tiny silver skull. He tapped it twice on the sidewalk, and a long black car pulled up next to us on the road. “But I hate to say, you’re not the ones I’m supposed to give it to.”

He tipped his hat to me as he walked over, and the driver of the long black car opened up the back seat for him. He slid in and said, “Enjoy the end of the world, Mr. Lawrence.”

The car drove off.

So that confirmed for me that Moonlight Morrow was part of the storyline. He was a supporting character for the paragons playing the main characters, just as it seemed Doctor Mentes had been.

Maybe it was too much to hope that he would shower us with information. This was an apocalypse, after all. It wasn’t about us.

I headed back to the cemetery, where I ran into Kimberly, Antoine, and Dina, who had joined them. Apparently, she had managed to observe pretty much everything from the shadows.

“I’ve been On-Screen more in this apocalypse than I am in normal storylines,” she said grumpily.

“Well, get away from me then,” I said. I turned to Kimberly. “They say anything worth hearing?”

“I hope you remember where that psychiatrist’s office is,” Kimberly said. “That’s what they were talking about.”

Mentes’ office was in one of the tallest buildings in this version of Carousel, so remembering it wasn’t difficult.

-

It seemed the entire floor was devoted to a hallway, a waiting room, another hallway, and Mentes’ office. I didn’t know what he’d billed, but rent on that space must have been astronomical.

We ducked in under the police tape. The door was unlocked.

“All right, gang, spread out and look for clues,” Antoine said after closing the door behind us.

“He said that there’s construction going on,” I said as I pointed to the covered walls and furniture.

“This is a terrible place for a psychiatrist’s office,” Dina said. “What if someone’s afraid of heights?” She stood near the window looking out over Carousel and seemed to get a little queasy as she looked down.

“The big window could be useful,” Antoine said. “There might be witnesses to what happened here.”

“What exactly did happen here?” Kimberly asked.

There was a lot of blood splatter and random gore, but, in truth, it didn't reveal much more than the body did. I explained to them what I had seen in the coffin. That helped.

“I assume that the patient files are in this,” Dina said, pulling a large piece of plastic off of a row of wooden file cabinets.

“Please don’t be full. Please don’t be full. Please don’t be full,” I said as she pulled one of the drawers open.

“No luck,” she said.

There must have been hundreds of files.

“They’re not even alphabetized,” Antoine said.

Stolen story; please report.

I let them look through that stuff. Technically, I had higher Savvy, so theoretically I would find useful information faster than they would, but I was on the trail of something else.

“When I was here, he had this notebook that he wrote everything in,” I said. “I don’t see it anywhere around here.”

“Sounds pretty plot-centric,” Antoine said. “Maybe the main characters are using it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

“Riley Lawrence,” Dina read off one of the file folders. “It’s pretty thick.”

I knew she was just joking, but I really didn’t want her to look inside that file. She did anyway, but quickly closed it and didn’t say anything before putting it back inside the cabinet. Later, when she moved on to a different drawer, I looked inside. Carousel had found pictures of the Lake County Pallbearer's victims. Luckily, I didn’t get a glimpse of my parents. That would have been unfair.

“Here we go,” Kimberly said. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail to try to max out her Savvy using her Does Anyone Have a Scrunchie? trope. It allowed her to convert Moxie into Savvy, or any other stat given the situation. The conversion rate wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty useful because she had a lot of Moxie. “Sidney Martin. Now that name takes me back.”

“What’s in it?” Dina asked.

Kimberly flipped through it, searching for whatever information we might find.

“All right, it says that Sidney went through a traumatic experience when she was in high school, which landed her with a string of therapists, both real ones and quacks. Then, when she was in college, something really bad must have happened because it takes up most of the file and yet... someone scribbled all over it.”

She showed it to us. There were entire pages that, to my eyes, looked like someone had taken a black pen and gone over the words a million times, not simply scratching them out, but writing other words on top of them over and over again until the original text was indecipherable.

“It looks like the same handwriting,” Dina said. “I think Mentes must have done this.”

“So whatever happened to her in college traumatized her. She told Mentes, and it traumatized him too,” I said. Just as we expected.

“What does that get us?” Dina said.

“Nothing at all,” I said, “because we can’t prevent what’s about to happen from happening.”

“No, but information is useful,” Antoine said. “It can help us survive it.”

We were beginning to sound like movie characters in real life.

I was still going through the folders in the cabinet, looking for that notebook, when I stumbled across something a little more interesting. It was a file labeled Dina Cano.

We were Off-Screen, so I could discuss it, but the thing was, she had her Dark Secret trope equipped, so there was a reason she might not tell us she was a patient, because it might end up leading to her dark secret being exposed early, which would be trouble because once that happened, she would lose all her stats.

That was the kind of thing you had to plan around.

Since she had looked in my folder, I looked in hers and wasn’t exactly surprised by anything I saw. There was a picture of Sean. I had seen him several times at many different ages by that point, so I knew what he looked like, though usually he was like Moonlight Morrow, in contact with the world of the living but separate.

I did notice one weird thing. In real life, her son had died from cancer, but in the file it said he went missing. That had to be relevant, but because I didn’t want to step on her toes, I didn't say anything. She would reveal her backstory at the time she felt was best, and I wasn’t going to press it until I needed to.

I put her folder back in the cabinet. The others were still going through what scraps of information they could find in Sidney’s file. It wasn’t exactly crucial plot information, after all. Sidney was one of the main characters, and a paragon at that. She didn’t need to discover information about herself like we did. She could just see it on the script.

As the others worked, I began to walk through the interaction I had had with Doctor Mentes the day before.

I had noticed that he seemed to be hearing something that I didn’t hear, a noise that he apologized for and had ended the session early because of.

I didn’t hear anything then, and I still didn’t now.

But I did remember him constantly glancing up at one of the several walls that were covered in painter’s cloth.

“Did anyone at the funeral actually allude to what killed him? I mean, did you guys find any cause of death listed anywhere?” I asked.

We hadn’t been led to believe he was murdered. We just had no information. The obituary didn’t list what had done it, as to be expected.

I walked over toward the wall that Mentes had been staring at as he complained about the noises, and I listened closely to no avail.

“What are you doing?” Dina asked.

“Just want to take a look at the walls,” I said. They looked different than before. Less neat. As if they had been rustled.

I got to the wall at the place where the nearest crease in the cloth was and pulled on it. I just wanted to pull it back so I could look behind, but apparently I didn’t know my own strength because the entire cloth came down in spectacular fashion, pulling the pushpins that had been used to stick it up out one at a time, almost like the buttons on a man’s shirt popping off when he flexed or ate too much.

The cloth fell, revealing what lay behind.

“He needs to fire his contractor,” Antoine said.

I laughed and took a few steps back.

So the whole construction thing had been a lie. I wasn’t exactly surprised, but I wasn’t expecting to see the entire wall filled with holes. Not neat little holes drilled out into the drywall. No, it looked like Mentes, or someone, had taken a pair of scissors and maybe a heavy office implement and broken through the drywall all over the place. There must have been dozens of holes, and this was just one wall. I assumed that all the others looked the same.

“A psychiatrist going crazy,” Dina said. “Classic.”

“They say that doctors make the worst patients,” I said.

“Do we have any idea what he was doing?” Kimberly asked, hesitant to get closer to the holey wall.

No one answered or made any theories because, right then, something strange happened.

My Grit jumped four points.

That was it. I barely noticed it, and I probably wouldn’t have, except it immediately dropped back down and then jumped up again and then dropped back down.

We had been waiting for this.

I saw a familiar name on the red wallpaper. Just a flash. I could barely focus on it, but it was there.

“Cassie, if you’re here, make Dina’s Grit go up.”

A few moments later, my Grit dropped four points, and then Dina’s jumped three points.

Cassie’s trope, A Peek Beyond, allowed her to astral project, basically to let her spirit leave her body so she could act as a ghost and see things far away. While doing that, she was able to equip departed tropes like my Watching Over You, which I had picked up along with all the other tickets I couldn’t equip back during the Grotesque storyline. Watching Over You buffed the Grit of an ally when you were near them as a ghost.

We all laughed. Somewhere in Carousel, Cassie was lying on a couch or something, her spirit departed from her body.

But I got the sense that Cassie wasn’t laughing.

I couldn’t get a good fix on her, but when I did, she moved from Dina to Antoine to Kimberly, then back again. After a few moments, I was able to track her movement even better by getting glimpses of her on the red wallpaper.

The others noticed what I was looking at and did their best to perceive it as well, but all they could see were the stat increases. Maybe Dina saw more; she didn't say.

“It’s like she’s moving closer to the door over and over again,” I said.

I scratched my head for a moment and then said, “It’s time to leave. We need to go.”

We were familiar with the game of charades you had to play when one of your allies was a ghost. Many departed tropes had the job of finding ways to communicate with your allies from beyond the grave.

Cassie couldn’t have timed her warning better.

Because as we moved for the door, something, I couldn’t say what, started to make noise behind me. It sounded like it was coming from inside the wall. It was a flurry of scratches.

We ran as fast as we could before we could find out what it was that Cassie was protecting us from.