Book Nine, Chapter 48: Rewrites

Between Kimberly and me, we managed to start a real fire.

As I looked up at the tower behind me, black smoke filled the sky, and I could see flames leaping out of a window that had shattered and spread glass all over the street.

When did that even happen?

For a moment, I was worried that I had messed up, that instead of being consumed by nightmare rats, the main characters I was trying to protect would be consumed by flames or die from smoke inhalation.

My friends and I stood on the other side of the street, watching and waiting for any sign of the paragons whose continued survival could help us. It took them a while to come out. When they did, Ace, the Athlete, was on a stretcher, his arm bleeding. Geneva and Sidney followed behind him, frazzled and quite concerned.

He was pulled up to the back of an ambulance, and the police questioned him On-Screen. I could hear what they were saying from where I stood outside the police line.

“How exactly did you cut yourself?” one of the officers asked.

“They're not cuts,” Ace said. “They're bites.”

The police officer didn't believe him, so he tried again.

“Just little nips,” he added. “Cut myself on some glass accidentally.”

“Oh, I see,” the officer said. “Yeah, people underestimate how dangerous glass can be in a fire.”

As quickly as Carousel had started filming the scene outside the lobby, it ended it. At the end of the day, it probably didn't need much footage after it was established that the main characters made it out of the building.

I heard the firefighters talking about an electrical fire being the likely culprit. Something about frayed wires.

We were ready to follow the paragons wherever they went. We needed to know more about the plot. We needed to stay ahead of what was happening. Now that we had prevented their deaths by rodent, something else was going to come for them, and if they survived that, something else would. Playing against the script meant losing.

“Sidney!” we called out, trying to get the paragon's attention.

“Can't you at least talk to us?” Antoine screamed.

They looked right at us and seemed to be considering it. I could literally see them reading their scripts on the red wallpaper because they didn't know what to do now that they had survived.

I could also tell the moment their instructions came. That happened to be the same moment a white, full-sized passenger van arrived on scene and a sophisticated, professor-type man stepped out of the front seat. His suit jacket even had elbow patches. He was older, with dark gray hair down to his shoulders and a smart pair of glasses to top it off.

His assistant got out of the van right after him, wearing a tropical shirt and surf shorts.

“I spy with my little eye a rogue Scholar,” Antoine said.

Camden Tran made his approach on the scene On-Screen, following behind what was clearly a much more significant character. In fact, Camden was holding the other guy’s things. On the red wallpaper, the older man's name was Dr. Clark Meridian.

“Sidney Martin, Geneva Banks, and Ace Borden,” he said loudly across the sound of the busy street.

Apparently, when he said their names, they could hear him.

They turned and looked shocked.

“Why am I not surprised?” he said. “Let me guess. You've had one hell of a week.”

Geneva eyed him cautiously and then said, “You're Dr. Meridian. At the Geist Institute.”

“So you remember,” he said.

Off-Screen.

If that was all the setup they needed for his character, he must have had several scenes before this.

The paragons immediately started walking toward the passenger van. I had to assume that they were going to climb into it and have their next scene back at whatever offices Meridian had.

I was mostly right. The only thing I was wrong about was the timing.

Instead of going directly into the transport phase, Meridian and Camden had to do some dialogue.

“A fire,” Meridian said. “Do you think that's related to the entity?”

“It's difficult to say,” Camden said. “I wouldn't think so, no, but who could know? All this time and we’ve hardly learned a thing.”

They were filming this scene away from the paragons. To the audience, it would probably look like they were doing it before they even interacted with the main characters.

When almost everyone was on a script, scenes didn't need to be shot in order.

I could tell, though, that after they were done with a few more lines discussing whatever it was their subplot entailed, they were about to get in the van and go off to their next scene. I imagined it would be a scene with lots of the exposition we needed.

Of course, they didn't indicate that we were supposed to go with them. But they didn't stop us when we snuck into the back of the passenger van. It was the big, long kind usually used for taking patients on field trips, perhaps.

Once they went Off-Screen, Camden ran to the van and looked in the open sliding door.

“You guys see a van headed toward a mental hospital and just assume that's the place you need to be, huh?” he said with a smile.

“We were hoping you accepted walk-ins,” I said.

We laughed, happy to be reunited.

“Something screwy just happened,” he said. “I think a lot of scenes that we shot got scrapped. I don't think they were supposed to survive whatever just happened. It's hard to tell. I was busy researching.”

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He spoke fast, like any minute we might go back On-Screen and he needed to go back to his rightful place as the silent sidekick that Dr. Meridian could bounce ideas off of and say clever one-liners to.

“It was rats,” I said. “They were going to get eaten alive by rats. We had to do something. Civic duty and all that.”

“What a good Samaritan,” he said.

He glanced from me to Kimberly to Antoine to Dina.

“Where's Cassie?”

Why would he only ask about Cassie unless he already knew where Isaac and Ramona were?

“She's with us in spirit,” Kimberly said.

Camden nodded.

“Look, I don't know about any rats. I've only seen one of the monsters in the menagerie or whatever it is, and I'm telling you, if everything is like this, there's no way we're going to survive. Sorry, I meant for that to come out less pessimistic.”

“It's all right,” I said. “The rats were pretty scary, so I think we're on the same page. Be ready to improvise why we're in the van. We were all Dr. Mentes' patients.”

I had to assume he recognized the name.

“That's great,” Camden said. “I think that Meridian and Mentes were, like, either dating or something ambiguous, but he was very upset when that guy died. They went to school together.”

“So he's basically just a substitute for Mentes in the plot,” I said.

I was wondering if our actions had somehow spawned this character into existence, someone who could play the role that Truman Mentes was supposed to if he wasn't scripted to die a terrible death early into the storyline.

Camden walked away and whispered into Meridian's ear. The man looked over at us and held up a finger to indicate that he would be with us shortly.

When you were a low-level NPC-type bit player, it really was easy to maneuver yourself around the story. No wonder Bobby liked it so much.

-

The paragons got on the bus shortly afterward. They had to film a few scenes with Meridian while Camden stood behind him, trying not to draw too much attention.

Camden drove.

“I gotta say,” Ace said, “that was a clutch save. There are a lot of terrible deaths in Carousel, but getting eaten by rats has to be top ten.”

“Getting eaten by anything,” Sidney said, “assuming it takes more than one bite.”

“Number of bites has a lot to do with it,” Ace said. “And those rats were just nibbling. They weren’t even hungry. I felt like I could eat myself to death faster than they were.”

The guy had a pretty good attitude for someone who was missing 20% of the skin on his forearm.

“I hope you guys have a plan,” Geneva said. “The script is giving us nothing except for the fact that we're going to die.”

“In a way, that's what all of our scripts say,” Camden said.

“Yeah, but some of us die a lot less than the others,” Ace said, nudging Sidney.

“Yes, isn't it weird how people who try to body-slam a horde of rats don't end up living long?” she replied.

“I tripped,” he said. “That's the second worst part about those rats; they're smart enough to trip you, as if they needed to.”

Finally, the paragons were breaking out of their shells. Maybe we could get some useful information out of them.

“So I assume that your characters somehow heard about a certain flamboyant ringmaster,” I said.

“That we did, almost ten years ago today,” Ace said. “I wonder if there's a reason it's ten years or if it just sounded nice.”

“Ten years is long enough for even the most juvenile college kid to become something interesting,” Geneva said. “The audience likes watching how people's lives change when time is skipped. Usually, when it happens to me, I end up being a detective or something, maybe working with a federal investigation body. People like to imagine that amateur sleuths eventually go professional, but in real life, I was a mathematician. I only ever solved crime on the side.”

She stretched and went about straightening her blouse like she was getting ready for the next scene.

“That's funny,” Ace said. “Usually, after ten years pass, my characters are working at a fast food restaurant, or maybe they're, like, a fitness trainer or something. Maybe if the role is really Stud-centered, I might end up a politician or running my character's dad's business.”

At first, they wouldn't talk to us, and now they were talking too much.

“While this is fascinating,” I said, “I was really hoping for information that can help us survive the apocalypse.”

The three of them looked at me, then at each other.

“That's asking a lot, brother,” Ace said. “Maybe your Final Girl can survive, but Film Buffs aren't long for the end of the world.”

“We don't actually have a Final Girl,” Kimberly said softly. “She's in another storyline.”

Geneva elbowed Ace and then looked to us and said, “I'm sorry. That was in our notes, but some people don't read them. Look, we're not exactly sure how to survive this, but there has to be a way. You have to pay attention and think it through. Whatever you do, I advise you to wait as long as possible before letting your characters find out about the ringmaster’s existence, because once you do, death is going to be right around the corner.”

“So it's going to play out as an actual cognitohazard,” I said. “Ignorance can keep us safe.”

“It can,” Sidney said, “if you don't go wandering right into the path of a monster or a pack of rats.”

“Not us,” Antoine said. “We mind our own business.”

The drive didn't take too long. After all, we were going to the Geist estate, somewhere I hadn't been since the Centennial. Fortunately, this was a different version of it, one that wasn't cultivated by Silas Dyrkon. I wondered what differences there would be. I had to imagine there were probably more Geists alive. He had a habit of killing them.

Much like the Geist estate from the Centennial soundstage, this one was beautiful, and even though it was centrally located within Carousel proper, it was gated off and seemed distant because of all the tall, old-growth trees and long paths through manicured gardens. Funny enough, the graveyard on this one didn't take up half the square footage the other one did.

One thing it had in common, though, was that lots of signs pointed to different houses owned by different Geists. The main mansion, the one we had seen burn to the ground, was there and looked pretty much identical. We passed by it on a lonely path, but that wasn't where we were headed.

We were headed to the institute, the asylum, the sanatorium. I knew it immediately. It stood atop a barren hill against the blood-red setting sun. It had Gothic architecture, not unlike other buildings on the Geist estate, but there was something more brutalist, more industrial about the institute.

“If you weren't insane when you entered a building like that, you would be by the time you left,” Dina said, speaking up for the first time since we got in the van.

“That's a great attitude,” Ace said. “You stick around Carousel long enough, you're gonna go insane several times, but don't worry. The trip back to sanity is shorter every time you take it.”

We unloaded and made a beeline toward the location of the next scene, which was somewhere deep inside the institute. It was large, as big as any hotel, with hundreds of rooms.

We were Off-Screen most of the trip, but of course, Carousel wanted to get some reaction shots as we passed by the electrotherapy room, as well as some footage of us reacting to the various patients at the hospital.

How trippy must it be to be a mental patient at a hospital in Carousel?

I didn't know exactly where we were going, but somehow, I expected a nice, well-furnished office with a fireplace and comfortable furniture. That's how I pictured the offices of doctors in charge at a place like this, somehow keeping themselves in comfort that the patients never got.

I wondered what a real asylum looked like. I only had movies as references.

We passed by what I assumed was one of the world-famous rubber rooms you'd expect at a sanatorium like this. The only view inside was a little porthole with a blurry, smudged window.

Inside that window, I saw Isaac's face smashed up against the glass. He must have been on his tiptoes trying to see out.

“Help me,” he said. “I've been trapped in here for hours,” the moment he saw us.

“I can't find the key,” Camden said, “and I've been busy.”

“You guys aren’t patients here? That's not fair,” Isaac called after us as we passed.

I didn't know where they were leading us, but we went the wrong direction to be headed toward the offices. If the signposts were correct, we were headed toward the long-term ward.

I had a feeling who I would see when we got there.

What I didn't expect was that it was behind a locked door with a security guard and passkeys required for entry.

When we made it through security, we found ourselves in a long room filled with neat, empty beds. Inside the only occupied bed was Ramona Mercer.

Her eyes were open, but she stared at the ceiling lifelessly.

I didn't even notice that she was behind glass at first, but as we got closer, it was apparent that she was boxed in.

“Is she being protected from something on the outside, or...” I started to ask.

“We are being protected from her,” Camden said. “Well, from her admirer.”

I didn't know exactly what he meant until we got close, and I saw that in the corner of her little glass cubicle, staring at her intently, was a figure of absolute horror.