The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

The door down to the cellar was located near the gift shop. When we got there, Camden was waiting outside.

"I wasn't going in alone," he said.

"Yeah, there’s probably spiders down there," I said with a grin. Technically, Camden was third in line to be attacked after me and Kimberly, but I couldn’t blame him for not pressing his luck.

Anna shook her head and pushed past us, opening the door, and flicking on the light. The electricity in the castle was shaky at best. Even turning on this one light, you could almost feel the entire system straining. It had those old bulbs that you could hear warming up. Anna led us down into the cellar.

As I followed behind, I could feel the air get cooler. It was a small square room with a wine rack that stretched from across one whole wall. Like all the other rooms in the castle, the ceiling was high down here. We must have descended quite a bit. The floors were made of a cool bluish stone that was different from the rest of the castle.

Other than that, there wasn’t much to the cellar.

"Empty," Anna declared.

"Well, that was easy," Camden said. "Let's get out of here."

Camden and I feigned turning around and ascending the stairs.

There were a few boxes laid around the basement. They had contained wine at one point, but now all we could find were a few empty bottles. It made sense to me. I imagine that the Historical Society in Carousel might have helped themselves to any valuable specimens in the Halle family collection, assuming that there were any leftover after the estate sale.

Anna turned in circles in the small basement, looking for something of interest. "We need to look for any sign--"

A blood-curdling scream echoed throughout the castle. "Kimberly!" Anna said.

We all started running up the stairs and back toward the source of the scream. Antoine was supposed to always stay with her. The Athlete was the best fighting build we had, with Anna’s Final Girl being the next best.

"It's too early for this," I said. "We're still in the Party phase."

The little needle wasn’t quite to First Blood yet, so it made little sense for Kimberly to have been attacked already based on my understanding of how the plot cycle worked.

Last we knew, Kimberly and Antoine had gone to the main hall with the task of exploring and finding anything relevant to the plot. The main hall was at one time part of the showroom where we had seen exhibits inside glass cases, but a divider wall had been built by the Halle family.

As we ran, our footsteps echoed throughout the castle.

"Kimberly!" Anna yelled as we rounded the corner to the main hall.

When we got there, we saw Antoine and Kimberly standing near the back wall. They did not appear to have been injured. Looking at their statuses, they were both marked as Unscathed.

"What's wrong?" Anna asked.

Antoine turned his head to the wall behind them and said, "We found something."

Sure enough, they had.

What had appeared to be a solid stone wall with a simple bookcase had now opened up and revealed that a small portion of the wall was hinged and could swing on its axis. The seem was unnoticeable before. It was a secret door.

"We stumbled into it," Antoine said.

The five of us looked at the secret door and then back at each other. We couldn't see what was on the other side yet; it hadn't opened that much.

"Get ready," Anna said. She crept forward and placed her hand against the stone. She pushed.

This stone turned. The door rotated, with the left side opening into the wall and revealing a hidden room. The other side opened to the main hall, and revealing a staircase leading upward.

Where’s Scooby Doo when you need him?

At first, I wasn't even sure if the secret room had electricity. As Anna entered, she was quickly able to find a little switch on the wall near the opening.

Yellow light cast away the shadows of the room. I was able to see that the room was about the same size as the gift shop had been. I could also see that it had lots of books and artifacts that looked as old as the castle itself.

As we walked into the room, we saw that the space was mostly taken up by a large shelf filled with books. On the spines of the books, I could see words in languages ranging from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew all the way to Chinese and modern English. There were scrolls stacked on one of the shelves and display cases filled with what I could only assume to be preserved biological specimens. I didn't want to know what they were.

"It's a library," Kimberly said. Curiosity had taken some of the fear out of her voice.

"How old is this?" Antoine asked. He approached the table in the middle of the room and saw a metal mechanism that I assume had something to do with astronomy. It had little metal spindles with balls that I think represented planets. At first, he reached out to touch it, but then he thought better of it.

"I think this is my time to shine," Camden said.

It really was.

"Is it demonic?" Anna asked. "What kinds of books are these?"

As if to answer a question, Camden squared himself up in front of the large shelf of books and looked them up and down them, waiting for his Eureka ability to send him information.

"Oh, here we go," he said. He grabbed a book from the shelf. It was large and leather-bound. I couldn't understand the writing on the cover, but I think it was written in Latin.

"Ars Vitae: Liber de Speculo Stellarum."

"What does that mean?" Antoine asked.

"I don't know," Camden answered. "I don't read Latin."

"Your power doesn't let you read other languages?" Anna asked.

"No," he answered. "I guess not."

That would probably be another Scholar trope.

"Judy might know Latin," Anna suggested, looking at me. “She knew what the phrase under the painting in the showroom meant.”

She had a point. Why else would an NPC show up and demonstrate that ability if not to show the player that they can read Latin.

I wasn’t sold on the idea though. “Judy could easily be a cultist or monster herself. She could also be a Vampire’s familiar. Let’s not forget, in this story, she’s the one who lured us here.”

Anna clearly hadn’t considered this. She took a deep breath and ran her fingers through her ponytail, as she always did when she was nervous.

"Wait," Camden said. He turned around to the shelf again and, within a few seconds, selected another book.

"Munger's Latin to English Dictionary."

He flipped through the book so quickly that you might have thought he had the pages bookmarked. His Eureka trope told him exactly what page to go to and what line to look at. The display truly reminded me of how quickly characters read in movies. With a few quick turns, he was able to translate the title of the book.

"The Art of Life: Treatise on the Mirror of the Stars," he said.

Hmm.

"What's the mirror of the stars?" Kimberly asked.

"Telescope?" Anna suggested.

"I don't know," I said. The story was going in a different direction than I had thought at first.

As I was forming my new theory, Camden said, "This is going to take a while. But I can already see the passage that we need to read." He flipped open the book to the first few pages and found what I can only assume to be an introduction. He showed it to me, but aside from recognizing some of the letters, I couldn't really make it out.

Principium est ut anima a corpore separari et in speculo stellarum collocari possit, opus est ut crystallum immaculatum et perfectum ad animae retinendam concinnatum sit. Hoc perfecte compositam artem crystallographiae requirit, sicut indicat capitulum secundum. Tunc, ad idoneum statum crystallum perducendum, ut animam in eo collocare valeat, est necessaria scientia mineralogiae, ut capitulum tertium demonstrat.

Nam, crystallum debet ad certum statum reduci, ut possit animam custodire et in suo interiori complectere, prout capitulum quintum explicat. Et postquam crystallum ad idoneum statum perductum est, anima sua virtute in eo collocanda est, quod fit per operationem magis artis quam naturae, ut capitulum sextum ostendit.

Verumtamen, anima, una ex essentiis divinis, multis mysteriis involuta est, unde opus est ad scientiam magiae, ut anima in speculo possit retineri, sicut capitulum quartum explicat. Ergo, ut anima in speculo stellarum collocetur, est opus ut artes mineralogicae, crystallographicae, et magicae perfecte exerceantur, ut in processu omni peritus sis, prout capitula prima et septima ostendunt.

Octavus capitulum tractat de solutione chemicis argenti, quae, si recte praeparatur, astralem reactionem tollere potest. Tales praecautiones necessariae sunt. Anima non vincta interiore parte corrumpitur.

Forsitan aliquando, docti artibus astralibus, habebunt mechanismum computatorium, qui eis possibilitatem praestabit calculorum et mensurarum necessariarum ad mappam plani astralis delineandam. Tunc in futurum, discriminem inter vitam et mortem tollere poterimus.

The lights flickered all at once. We looked up at the yellow bulbs and realized how foolish it was to stay in the secret room. Presumably, this was somewhere the big bad came to often.

"Better get to it," Anna said. "But we should definitely go back to the gift shop."

No one argued. We filed out of the room one at a time. Antoine was the last one out. He reached in to turn off the light.

As soon as the light went out, something grabbed Kimberly's arm and pulled her, not into the library that we had just left from, but into the stairwell that had been revealed on the other side of the revolving door.

The door slammed shut, closing off access to the stairwell and trapping Antoine's foot as it closed. He managed to pull his leg out, leaving his shoe crushed in the door. Everything had happened in the blink of an eye.

"Kimberly!" Anna screamed. We could hear Kimberly screaming for a couple of seconds, but then all went silent. The needle on the plot cycle moved to First Blood.

"Kimberly!" Antoine screamed. He struggled to get to stand, but his foot was badly injured. It must have been broken, I couldn't tell, but at the very least, it was bloody, and he had trouble putting weight on it. Despite that, he put all of his strength into getting the door to move, but it would not budge.

"It's not going to open," I said. "I've seen this in movies a dozen times. When a door slams shut like this it's not going to open until it's too late."

I didn’t need a Trope Master ability to know that.

"Shut up," Antoine said. "Help me!"

He was right. I jumped in and tried to push along with Anna and Camden, but even with the four of us, the wall didn't even shake.

"Fuck, why were we so stupid?" Anna said. "We knew that she was going to get targeted first. We should have held onto her."

"It wouldn't have mattered," I said. I knew that, and Anna probably knew that too. Kimberly had a trope that meant she would get attacked at First Blood. There was no preventing that.

"Did anybody see what took her?" Anna asked.

Everyone shook their head. The stairwell had been dark, and then it all happened so quickly that I didn’t catch a glimpse of anything. I didn't even register any tropes on the red wallpaper because whatever creature had taken her had done so quickly that it was too far away from me for me to even use my Trope Master ability by the time I could react.

"This is supernatural," I said. "That's the only way it could be that fast."

"What about the books?" Anna asked. "The books are a clue. What do they mean? Is it some sort of cult?"

"I don't know," I answered.

There was only one way to know, and Camden was currently holding it in his hands.