Book Nine, Chapter 42: Funeral

The first thing I did that morning was buy a newspaper. I looked for any information I could find about the footage I'd seen the night before. I expected it to be headline news, that many deaths with mysterious causes, but that wasn't the case. I found information, sure, but a lot of it was in odd places.

Dr. Mentes was mentioned, but no article explained what had happened to him. Instead, I found him in the obituaries, which included all the information I needed to attend his funeral later that day. Carousel sure was efficient with the death-autopsy-burial pipeline.

The other deaths I had seen could be found littered throughout the paper in different sections, human interest stories and the like, oddities, small mentions here and there. A vague mention of an accident on Dyers Lake. Hikers going missing in the woods. That sort of thing. I didn't know if Carousel was teasing me or if I should interpret this level of information as a clue. This early in the story, it was possible that these deaths were being dismissed as accidents before the pattern emerged in an undeniable fashion.

After all, in every zombie apocalypse, somehow the world doesn't know about the monsters until well past the tipping point. It would seem The Walking Dead were not newsworthy until they became a horde.

Luckily for me, my character's closet had all the requisite clothes for a funeral. That meant black clothes, slightly loose to show how disheveled I was. They even seemed to have that tint, a bluish-greenish hue, built right into them, the kind you see at every funeral in a movie.

The only downside was that it meant I had to take off my hoodie.

Afterward, I hailed a taxi and went right to the cemetery.

I knew I was in the right place immediately. This was a classic movie funeral, with groups of mourners who would never be seen or heard from again speaking in hushed voices, crying about the poor deceased doctor.

On the red wallpaper, they were only called mourners, and they stood so that they were framing the two main characters of the scene for a perfect shot. No one walked in front of the shot. I could almost tell where the cameras were because the NPCs were walking around them.

I recognized one of those main characters.

The first was Sidney Martin, the Scream Queen Paragon, and she was not having a good time. It was a very hard funeral for her, quite clearly. The last time I had seen her, she had been in teenager mode, but now she was in full adult mode, late 20s or so. She had been complicit in Silas Dyrkon's attempted deception at the Centennial, but it was hard to hold things against paragons. They seemed to be on everyone's side, including the players.

The woman she was with was about the same age. She was black, with her hair tied back, dressed very prim and proper. Her name was Geneva "Genny" Banks. Why she would get a cool name like Geneva and decide to go by Genny, I would never know. In the Atlas, that was the name of the Sleuth Paragon. From what I understood, she was a regular Nancy Drew.

They were doing what paragons did, playing their parts. I could see them going On-Screen and Off-Screen on occasion. This was very workmanlike, getting new shots, repeating lines for Carousel to get the best ones. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but I could tell they hadn't gotten to the juicy parts yet because they were still whispering.

I noticed no one standing behind them. That probably made the shot a little better, and it helped frame a big black Jeep-type vehicle parked along the road in the background, which I assumed was relevant. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in frame. I assumed it was one of their cars.

"We have to quit running into each other like this," someone said behind me.

I recognized the voice immediately. I turned to see Kimberly. She smiled. Somehow, even dressed as a mourner, she seemed to be the best-dressed person there. Antoine stood back, probably trying to get a little extra mileage out of his Gut Instinct trope to really read the room.

"Yeah, it seems like we only hang out when people die," I said.

"Have you seen any of the others?" she asked. "Dina's across the street at the flower shop. I don't think she plans on actually showing up to the real funeral. The shopkeeper is talking her ear off." She started to laugh. "I think she's regretting the Newcomer aspect."

"Well, if the point was to force her out of her shell, then I guess that's what it's doing," I said. "I assume you clocked the paragons."

"Clocked them?" Kimberly asked. "We followed them here. How did you get here?"

"He was my therapist," I said. "Died last night before I ever made a breakthrough, and they're already burying him."

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Antoine walked up and said, "This place is safe, but I'm telling you, something is going on."

I felt similarly because of my psychic background.

"If only we could find a storyline where nothing was going on," I said.

"Damn straight," he said. "We need to check the Atlas."

"How about you?" I asked Kimberly. "Is your Compulsive Vetting turning up any dirt?"

"I've got something," she said, "and I bet you're not going to get it."

I followed her gaze, and what I saw was the group of pallbearers carrying a polished wooden casket. I looked from face to face, hoping that Carousel wasn't going to do some sort of pun-based horror and have the Lake County Pallbearer there. As far as I know, it didn't. I had no idea what he looked like. Any of those generic tall dudes could be him.

This funeral seemed incredibly mundane for the storyline we were in.

"All right, how about you just tell us?" I said.

"That casket," Kimberly said, leaning in. "It's empty."

"Well, hold on," I said. "Are you saying that Dr. Mentes faked his death? A lot of twists and turns in this story so far."

"I'm saying that when they picked it up, they were all shocked by how light it was, but that's just because I was paying attention," she said.

I looked over at them, and sure enough, they didn't seem to be struggling.

"Mentes wasn't exactly bulky," I said, "but he was over 6 feet. An empty casket, that's interesting."

"What could it mean?" Antoine asked. "That he's not really dead?"

"Well, there are mundane explanations," I said. "We know that Camden's background means that there's going to be some big secret organization involved with the story, however distantly. Maybe his death was covered up, and his body is in a freezer somewhere being studied. Heck, for all we know, Camden's poking into it right now."

Of course, the person who would have been most useful to do an autopsy was Andrew, but he wasn't an option.

"You would think that if that was the case, they would just cremate him and not go through the charade."

"Yeah, maybe," I said, "but then you don't get the scene where the two main characters fight at the funeral." I looked over at the spot near the grave where Sidney and Geneva were standing.

Finally, the whispering had turned into something more substantial.

"You told him. You weren't supposed to tell anyone. We promised," Geneva said.

I listened closely like I was some sort of spy in the Cold War. I had one of those pamphlets they give you at a funeral with information about the deceased. It was filled with recipes for some sort of French pastry, with only basic information about Mentes that I already knew, but it gave me something to do while I eavesdropped.

"I didn't know," Sidney said. "I was having a hard time. You don't understand. Not all of us can just forget things like you can. We can't all pretend that nothing happened."

The fight raged on, and unfortunately, they realized people were staring, so they moved away back toward their car. It was quite obvious that the scene went with them because the NPCs literally started packing things up after they got a shot of the casket being lowered into the dirt.

"You guys follow them," I said. "See what they're talking about. I'm gonna take a peek."

"You would volunteer for that," Antoine said jokingly.

We immediately split up as Kimberly and Antoine did their best to move toward the line of cars, the same direction Geneva and Sidney were going while performing their scene. My gut said that it was largely a rehash of I Know What You Did Last Summer, where they were both about to realize how messed up they felt about some tragic thing that they were complicit in.

At least it was nice to see there was actual plot. I was afraid that the nightmares were going to start running down the streets before we learned anything.

Meanwhile, I was completely Off-Screen, standing right next to the grave. No one seemed too worried about me being there, but a few of them did watch to see what I would do. It was funny to think that if these people were meta-aware, they probably knew who I was. Were they cheering me on, or did they think I was weird for what I was planning?

The casket had been lowered into the ground, but the dirt had not been poured over it. I assumed that was because the gravediggers reused this grave over and over again because of its prime movie funeral location, overlooking a pond with picturesque fields of gravestones behind it.

I reached out, grabbed the edge of the casket, and pulled up.

"What in the world are you doing, boy?" someone cried out.

To tell the truth, I expected it, and I wasn't going to respond. They were probably just playing a part. I wasn't On-Screen, so it didn't really matter. Whatever footage Carousel wanted of me, it had been captured in two- or three-second increments while I was walking around the funeral before.

I held the casket open with one hand, but then, in some remote part of my mind, I recognized the voice of the person who had just spoken to me.

I looked over and saw a man standing there whom I hadn't recognized at first because he was dressed in black, not purple. But there he was, the mayor of Carousel, the Departed Paragon, Elliot "Moonlight" Morrow.

"It's not what it looks like," I said jokingly.

He had a smile on his face, so I knew I wasn't actually in trouble. He was every bit the mystical bluesman I remembered. He knew how these things went. I would have been a fool not to look in the casket after Kimberly's observation. Heck, I was probably going to do that anyway. I'm paranoid. I don't believe in closed-casket funerals.

Moonlight looked down into the casket before I did even and said, "It looks like a very dead guy."

I glanced down and saw that Kimberly had misinterpreted the facts.

The casket was probably far lighter than it normally would be, but not because it was empty. Doctor Truman Mentes' corpse wasn't missing. Well, not all of it, at least.

Down below me in the casket was what remained of my very short-term psychiatrist. A skull, some shoulder bones, one arm, much of the rib cage, and some hips. There might have been leg bones somewhere, but I couldn't see them without opening the other section, and I wasn't going to stick my head in.

I had no idea whether this was actually Mentes because his skin was mostly gone, as was his hair and anything else that wasn't glued down. The bones had been scraped, not clean, but reduced to a red, pulpy mess, partially by whoever had done the autopsy, sure, but there were deep gouges in the bones themselves.

To my eyes, they looked an awful lot like bite marks.