The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Book Five, Chapter 7: Search Party

Dina continued to fight back tears as Benny watched his son run off into the distance.

"I'm so sorry about that, ma'am," he said. "The boy's just going through a lot right now. Not as much as you, I'm sure. But he's just gonna go to one of his hiding places, and he’ll be fine."

He kind of looked down, unsure of what to do next, taken by intense emotion. "I'll fix your car. I can do that. I'll fix it," he said, looking at Kimberly. Then he walked off to do just that.

We were still On-Screen, so Kimberly continued to console Dina, and Dina continued to be inconsolable.

"She tells me she's at peace, but I don't want that. I want her home," Dina said.

Kimberly looked at me and then back to Dina. "You saying your daughter's talking to you?"

"Don't look at me like I'm crazy," Dina said. "Please don't look at me like I'm crazy."

"I'm not," Kimberly said softly.

"He is,” she said, looking at me. “I can see it. How couldn't he? Who could hear something this ridiculous and not think I was crazy?"

"My grandmother, she said that she could see things, hear things, feel things," I said. "She always hoped I'd take after her. When I was young, I always thought she just did it so she could win arguments by saying that she had the gift and that she knew better… But after I lost her, I feel like I can feel her too," I said, and in that moment, a tear escaped my eye that I didn't intend.

"Are you really going to help me look for her, or is this just some news story?" Dina asked.

I looked at Kimberly, and then Kimberly said, "We really want to find her."

"We’ll do whatever we can," I said.

Kimberly nodded.

Off-screen.

"Woof," I said. "This one's making us emotional, huh?"

Dina nodded. "I've got to go to some dairy farm. Patcher Dairy, I think. My character's daughter is hauling me around all over town so that Carousel can get shots of me looking all over for her."

"Do you need a ride?" Kimberly asked.

Dina shook her head. "No, my character has a bicycle."

We slowly walked back to Benny's garage, and Dina grabbed her bicycle with its little woven white basket and rode off to her next destination. As she did, an announcement started playing over Benny’s radio, calling for volunteers to help in a search party near White Lawn Church.

Kimberly and I looked at each other. That was a pretty clear-cut call to action.

Benny managed to get Nick's sedan fixed in record time, and he set us off, not without lecturing Nick about proper maintenance and telling him he wouldn't get lucky twice. The next time, he'll be buying a new car.

~-~

White Lawn Church, on White Lawn Road, was abutted by a field of wheat where the search would start.

Kimberly stood with her back to the field and the many volunteers in it.

“I'm here with Sheriff Miller, who has been leading a citywide search for Tamara Cano. Sheriff Miller, can you tell us anything about the current search efforts?”

The sheriff, who was a smooth-talking man and clearly a city slicker, stuck out like a sore thumb around Eastern Carousel. He wore pomade in his hair and had a clean-shaven face. He and Robert Redford were probably made from the same mold.

"I'll tell you, we are going to find this missing girl," Sheriff Miller said, "because we have three things: we have a generous population who is giving of their time and resources to help search for this girl, we have an unbreakable spirit and the power of believers coming together, and we got award-winning hunting dogs that are trained for competitions to follow the scent of a target from miles and miles. With those three things, I am confident we are going to find young Tamara and bring her home where she belongs. I will not rest until that happens."

He nodded his head and then walked back to his cruiser, where Antoine and another deputy named Tommy Patcher were in the process of providing a clothing sample to a trio of baying hounds. I made sure that Nick caught this on film. It seemed like an important part of the investigation. Sheriff Miller pulled a small white sock out of a paper sack and held it out to the dogs to get an impression of.

After a few sniffs, the dogs were off.

"And we're out," I said.

Off-screen.

Kimberly and I stared out at the field beyond the little white church. There were acres and acres of wheat. Dozens of volunteers walked through the wheat out toward the woods in the distance, walking with intention and keeping their eyes peeled on the ground and in the distance.

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We had sat around getting footage of these efforts for nearly an hour. Antoine was busy being a cop, and at a glance, it seemed that he was On-Screen constantly as he struggled to keep one of the hounds from tearing its leash out of his hands.

"Where's Bobby when you need him?" I asked.

"I know, right?" Kimberly said. "We finally have a story that actually calls for dogs, and we left him behind."

"He's going to be devastated," I said.

I looked around. I didn't anticipate that there would be anything worth finding out in the fields in the distance, and if there were, the volunteers would call out.

"Let's check out the church," I said. "What do you think?"

"Good," Kimberly said. "My character didn't wear shoes meant for running in the fields."

As we made our way over toward the church, we saw an NPC named Eustace Patcher.

Kimberly politely said hello as we passed.

He grumbled something that didn't sound friendly.

"Excuse me?" Kimberly asked.

"You heard me," he said.

Neither of us had.

We never went On-Screen, so that interaction couldn't have been too significant, but it was interesting.

The man was watching as they trampled the wheat in the field beyond the property line of the church. I had to assume that his bad attitude was related to that. The wheat was frail, and you could see the lines where people had been walking through it. Was that his field? Were those his crops?

We went On-Screen long enough to be filmed walking in the church. That was good; it meant that we were going in the right direction.

The church had one room, but it was a large room.

Religion was an interesting concept in Carousel. There were plenty of signs that the people of Carousel worshipped some sort of generic monotheistic religion if you only gave a passing glance, but the churches were not Christian churches, though you would be forgiven for assuming they were.

As we walked into the church, I was brought back to memories of my younger years being brought to a small, non-denominational church just like this.

This church had stained glass windows, though the stories depicted in them did not seem familiar.

This was a struggle. I didn't know if we were supposed to see this unique religion as being part of the story or if it was just background. Was it merely decoration? Or was it a cult? Carousel had so many cults. There was a whole section on them in the Atlas.

I picked up a hymnal. It was filled with songs singing praise, even songs that felt very familiar, but they didn't feel right; they felt off.

"It's kind of spooky, isn't it?" Kimberly said.

"It is," I agreed. "It's sacrilegious, Carousel copying religions just to help fill out a setting."

The front of the hymnal just said "Hymnal," but as I glanced at the book, it almost looked like there should have been more words, as if the real text had been stricken. This might very well have been a real religion once, but it had been turned into a prop.

Spooky indeed.

On-Screen.

"Check this out," Kimberly said. She pointed to something that looked like it might have been an altar. In fact, it was the only thing in the church that actually looked like it wasn't meant to be generic.

"What would you say this is?" Kimberly asked.

"A shrine, maybe," I said.

There was a picture of a man and a woman. It was an old picture. 19th century old. Below it was a little placard that said, "Aurelius and Mavis Patcher." On a flat surface under that were candles, flowers, and little glass ornaments. One of the candles was lit.

There was an inscription below the names on the placard that read, "In family we find purpose."

"Interesting," I said. "These Patchers seem to be everywhere, huh?"

"Small town like this," Kimberly said. "Wouldn't be surprised if everyone was related."

After a few more moments of looking around, we went Off-screen.

When we returned outside, we found that the dogs had been yanking Antoine and the other deputies around in circles.

"They didn't find a hit," Antoine told us over his shoulder as he saw us watching. It was a shame.

The sun was going down, and people were leaving the search. It was a failure.

"Keep your chin up," the sheriff said to the people as they left. "We are going to find her. No news is good news," he added.

As we went back to the car, we found Nick there waiting on us, saying that he couldn't wait for us to get back to our place. It was supposed to be nice.

~-~

And it was nice. It was a large white plantation-style house that had been turned into a boarding house called Miss Moreland's Boarding House.

Obviously, it was owned by a Miss Moreland, and when we saw her, that was all that was on the red wallpaper, leading me to believe that her first name actually was Miss.

She didn't say much, but she definitely eyeballed us as she showed us to our rooms. Kimberly got the attic suite, which was a large room with lots of space. Miss Moreland was very clear that Nick and I were not to stay the night in that room because she didn't want the appearance of impropriety in her boarding house.

I wasn't going to argue with her. She was a thin woman who wore clothes that were 70 years too old for the 1960s. She might look more like a ghost walking through these halls than a living proprietor.

She called herself the lady of the house, and that she was.

"Breakfast will be served at 7:00, no sooner or later," she said as she walked away from Kimberly's room, intentionally leaving the door open.

"Very nice digs," I said.

"It's a beautiful house," Kimberly agreed. "A boarding house? I've never heard of that. It's like we're staying in a really nice bed and breakfast."

I agreed though I suspected that in a different storyline, this B&B might be a little bit scarier. The house was very nice but also very dated. Antique decor that looked like new was not something out of the ordinary for Carousel, but this place really felt like it was lost in time.

~-~

I lay on one of Kimberly's couches and watched the first batch of raw footage that I was given from The Dailies.

It was incredibly dull. All of the footage could potentially end up in the final cut of the film, but that didn't mean it was interesting. It was unedited, and I felt like I was back watching security cameras in Subject of Inquiry.

Most of the clips didn't seem to contain much information, so I skipped between them just by thinking about it. I found a clip that included Dina talking to Deputy Patcher. She was giving him effects from her daughter: a hairbrush, a doll, and some yellow frilly socks that someone might wear to fake Sunday school.

Then, I began watching footage from the search party. It really concerned me. I had expected to see lots of footage of people trekking through the fields, the creeks, and the forests, but most of the footage was of people watching us—Kimberly and me. These were intentional shots.

I told Kimberly what I was watching.

"Well, maybe they were just staring at us because we're from out of town or because we have a camera."

"I'm not sure," I said. "The shots are framed really ominously. There are people searching through the fields, and then one person will turn, look back, and stare at us blankly with suspicion. There were at least a dozen people who stared at us. That includes the rude guy that we saw outside of the church."

"That's concerning," Kimberly said.

"I'd say so."

After I'd made my way through my current batch of clips, I decided to go down to my room, which was in the basement. Nick and I were sharing a bunk bed. It was like I was back at Camp Dyer.

I fell asleep trying to piece together the disparate pieces of information we had been given so far in the story. I didn’t see the whole picture yet, but I trusted I would soon. I slept soundly through the night. Didn't even need my sleeping trope.