Arc II, Chapter 19: The Ghost Collector
My Oblivious Bystander strategy was running thin. Even with the darkness that could conceal the enemy from my gaze and all of my efforts to provide cover, we were in danger. Our strongest hope was that Carousel had other plans for us.
I had watched my other uses of Oblivious Bystander on the red wallpaper before using Director’s Monitor. Usually, Carousel used ten or so seconds of the footage it shot. Just enough to show me at risk and then it would cut to something else. By the time the camera came back to me, the threat was practically gone.
The exception was the time I used eating cereal as cover against Ranger Danger. Carousel showed almost that whole scene combined with the murder I was ignoring. I looked like a lucky idiot.
The question was, when would we go Off-Screen? When would our pursuer lose interest?
I pictured the scene in my mind, trying to will it into reality. I rush to check on Antoine, the monster watches from afar, and CUT. The camera goes back to Isaac or Bobby or Dina…
But there was no cut.
It was only then that I remembered that I was in a storyline with Outsiders and a Wallflower. They were not really scene stealers. Dina was probably using her trope to stay Off-Screen. I doubted Isaac was doing anything too interesting as a Comedian and Constance was just researching.
Antoine and I were probably the most interesting characters at that moment. The plot was not moving forward anywhere else.
The monster was behind us by twenty yards or so. Surely that meant it wasn’t about to go in for an attack? We weren’t even next on the priority list.
Why continue to watch us if it wasn’t going to attack?
As I pondered all of this, my heart nearly beating out of my chest, my muscles sore from carrying much of Antoine’s weight, something changed.
A message appeared on the red wallpaper.
“Straight downhill past this tree. Bunch of dead people. Actual bodies, not ghosts. Off-Screen the whole time. Watching from the shadows. Son is scared. -Dina”
Dina had the ability to post messages for her allies on the red wallpaper with her Pen Pal trope. The only catch was that the messages were tied to a specific location. This was the first time she had used it to my knowledge.
I recognized this location as the place we had split up. It made sense she had chosen that spot.
I couldn’t go check out the bodies she was talking about. It would be hard to justify that change in direction. Plus, that was a hard right turn that would inevitably lead to me seeing the monster in the darkness behind us.
We had to keep going uphill.
Off-Screen. Finally.
As we continued walking, I could still catch glimpses of something behind us in the corner of my eye. I still heard the occasional laugh over my music.
Was it just going to stick around even without the camera? The Chase Scene status wasn’t even lit because Oblivious Bystander prevented that.
Was this thing just watching us out of curiosity?
For five minutes it kept watching us as we climbed upward.
We kept up the ruse of me helping Antoine the whole time just in case, but I got this feeling that Oblivious Bystander had deactivated long ago. We should have been safe.
And then the creature quickened its pace. It was running behind us. With Antoine Hobbled and me carrying him, we weren’t going to be able to outrun it.
That didn’t actually matter.
It ran past us. Right past us, practically nudging me out of the way as it went.
What I saw was difficult to describe. It was the type of thing only possible in dreams. It was a man—a ghost to be more precise. He was dressed in a blue button-up shirt and a yellow neon vest. He wore a tool belt. He was probably in his early thirties, slightly overweight, dark hair, unshaven. He was an electrician to be more exact if the lightning-shaped burns on his face, neck, and shirt meant what I thought they meant.
He turned his head to me as he passed. The man himself looked confused, lost. It almost looked like he wanted to ask me a question.
I felt an aura as he passed that chilled my blood.
Black thread wound around and through the man’s skin all over. It looked like he had been in some sort of industrial sewing machine accident.
Behind him, there was something. I couldn’t describe it any better than that. There was a dark, blurry figure. I felt like I could see more if I just craned my neck, but it was impossible. This guy passed me and the figure still looked like he was standing behind the electrician. The logic made no sense.
A woman’s hand stuck out from behind the man as he passed me and waved. Then another arm shot out, again, waving. The arms were dead. That was scary enough, even in the moonlight they looked pale.
That wasn’t the thing that scared me though.
I hadn’t been able to see the poster for the ghost who had waved at me when I played the Ten Second Game. I didn’t know if that was a trope effect or if I just didn’t see them clearly enough.
I saw these three on the red wallpaper though.
The electrician was a Wandering Spirit like J.T. Guzman had been. Same tropes. I didn’t catch his name because I was distracted.
The first arm was from a woman named Marla. She was called a “Presence” on the red wallpaper.
Marla Keen (Presence)
Plot Armor: 7
__________
Tropes
Unfinished Business
This entity didn’t manage to accomplish something in life and now lingers.
Ambient Energy
This entity serves as a spiritual battery for other entities.
Peer Pressure
This entity may not be aggressive, but will join with other entities as part of a collective.
Her tropes were not even close to being the worst part. One detail I often skimmed over when analyzing enemies was the poster itself. I mostly focused on the nameplate underneath which often contained a description of what the enemy was.
The poster itself was usually not that informative because most of its text was usually something like “So and So is The Bad Guy in The Horror Movie Title.”
It just wasn't the information I usually needed because the nameplate had all the important stuff like Plot Armor. Plus, the smaller trope posters usually took most of my attention.
Whatever the case: the poster was usually not that important other than for getting a better look at the enemy.
Marla’s poster showed her floating in the shadows behind a door in an old house at night. Spooky. Not important.
But the text itself was important.
“Marla Keen is a Presence in The Fixer Upper.”
I stopped and reread it. The Fixer Upper?
The other arm didn’t belong to Marla. It belonged to someone called Newscaster (Dusty). I didn’t see his tropes. I wasn’t looking at them. I saw an image of him on fire.
“Newscaster (Dusty) is a Haunting Vision in They Never Sleep…”
Antoine and I stopped in our tracks and watched as the electrician and the many entities behind him continued up the path.
I never saw the shadowy figure on the red wallpaper. It was shielded somehow. Perhaps that was why it hid behind things.
When it was out of view, I asked Antoine, “Did you see that?”
“That’s the thing that killed Kimberly,” he said. “It had a hundred arms.”
“Killed Cassie too. Remotely,” I said.
Antoine drew a deep breath. “It could have killed me. It didn’t. Maybe because of Plot Armor, I don’t know. It just played with me. It broke my leg. Snapped it in half On-Screen and one of the ghosts told me I wasn’t ‘going to walk that off.’”
That was worrying. Antoine’s Walk It Off trope would allow him to recover from his Hobbled status, but that wasn’t going to work if the audience saw it get visibly shattered.
“It can see our tropes,” I said.
Antoine nodded. “That’s what I figure.”
“Did you look at the ghosts on the red wallpaper?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah, why?”
Antoine didn’t have an Insight trope that would make examining enemies on the red wallpaper a priority. He hadn’t noticed what I did.
“Not all of the ghosts are from this movie,” I said.
“They’re from different storylines?”
“Yeah. Different tropes and everything. Different types of movie ghosts altogether.”
That was a big deal. I had never seen an enemy in the wrong storyline. Even the Avenging Dead had said they were from Permanent Vacancy even though they were clearly not a part of the original storyline.
“What does that tell us?” he asked.
“All I have are theories,” I said.
He digested what we had just discussed.
“You saw Dina’s note?” he asked.
I nodded.
"There's a lot going on here," he said.
We started making our way further uphill in the direction the monster had gone. Our characters wouldn’t know it had gone that way or even that it had been following us. We had no choice but to pretend.
One benefit of being Off-Screen was that we didn’t have to be so careful. Antoine was holding back before. Without having to keep Oblivious Bystander active we made our way up the hill much faster.
“I’m glad to have Grit,” he said. “I barely feel my leg right now.”
Grit could help you not feel pain. Antoine also had a tendency to lie about his pain.
“Maybe I should get some,” I said. I had plenty of experience with getting hurt.
After we had been going for a while, he said, “Thanks for rescuing me.”
“No problem,” I said.
I was barely able to restrain myself from saying I told you so. I had listed the virtues of the strategy numerous times. I was just glad Antoine knew what to do when I showed up.
“This is not designed for new players,” he said.
“Nope.”
We moved forward as fast as possible until eventually, I heard a scream ahead. We were still Off-Screen.
We sped up as much as possible. Antoine had lost his bat. There wasn’t much we could do to help if we got there, but still, we had to hurry.
“That sounded like Isaac,” Antoine said.
“The newbies are not off to a fun start, are they?”
We ran forward until we burst forth from the tree line at the top of the hill. I could see the hotel suite again.
We were too late.
The ghost of Cassie stood near the open window of the house. She was crying for her brother, begging for help from the rest of us. She was a player still and had both of her player tropes, but she was Dead and Infected on the red wallpaper. She had additional enemy tropes, the same ones that J.T. Guzman had.
She didn’t know she was dead.
I couldn’t see the black threads from where I was, but I expected that she was not moving of her own accord. The shadowy figure had her. I was sure of it even if I couldn’t see him.
Isaac lay on his back, Bobby standing over him. Isaac appeared to have been grabbed by his shaggy hair and yanked so hard that his scalp ripped, revealing part of his skull. Blood poured down his face profusely, but he was alive. It wasn’t Second Blood yet. He didn’t have to die. It wasn't clear why the figure had not just killed him though.
“Settle down,” Bobby said nervously as he yanked off his hotel employee shirt and held it against the wound on Isaac’s head. “You’ll be okay. I gotcha.”
Isaac had a trope that might have been able to heal his injury depending on how much the audience saw, but he was not thinking straight enough to activate it.
He was dry-heaving while Bobby tried to staunch the flow.
The Stranger was with them. He stood over and rambled through a few choice phrases like “Why would it just do that?” and “I thought it wanted…” and “Why didn’t it kill him?”
I wasn’t sure what expression was on his face. Shock? Guilt? I wasn’t sure what he was trying to convey.
“You thought it wanted what?” I asked.
He looked up at me like a deer in the headlights. He had been so distracted he hadn’t seen me arrive.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You know something you aren’t telling us!” I screamed.
In the distance, Cassie’s ghost turned and suddenly someone else was standing in her place. A young red-haired woman who was just as scared and afraid as Cassie had been. I recognized her well enough to know who she was without even looking at the red wallpaper.
The red hair was a dead giveaway.
“That’s,” I said… “That’s one of the guests whose luggage was delivered to our room.”
They were four siblings. Their things had gotten lost by the airline and were delivered to their hotel long after they arrived. I had seen their picture.
“You said you scared them away!” I yelled.
“No, no,” The Stranger said. “You don’t understand. You can’t imagine.”
“What did you do?” Antoine screamed, acting as if he would lunge at the man if he were able.
I heard laughter coming from the direction of the hotel room. The ghost amalgam had climbed in the window. It closed the window and sat on the bed in the room, staring back at us.
Suddenly, the hotel seemed further away than it had. I could see it in the distance. I could even see the ghost of J.T. Guzman running around upstairs as if looking for a place to hide.
“It said it would give me my daughter back,” The Stranger confessed. “I just had to find new players. That’s all. It wanted to talk to the living. I didn’t know.”
“You served those people up to it!” I said. “Shit, is that what we were?”
A man just got scalped, I figured curse words were okay.
“No!” The Stranger said. “Honest. I really did want you to stay away. I was going to play the game by myself.”
“Wait,” Antoine said, “How did you know that it wanted new players? When did you talk to it? When you played the Ten Second Game or…?”
Antoine let the question hand in the air.
“The voicemail,” I said. “You talked to it.”
The Stranger looked away in shame.
“Play it,” I said. “I want to hear it.”
The Stranger pulled a phone out of his pocket. He stared at it for a moment and even pressed some of the buttons on the side. I got the sense that he didn’t have much experience with them. Then he tossed it to me.
It was a normal smartphone of a generic movie brand.
“What’s the password?” I asked.
“Sidney.”
I typed in 743639. It unlocked. I went to the big icon that said voicemail and put it on speakerphone.
“…You have three saved messages. First saved message: ‘Dad, I need you to come pick me up. Tonya’s friend J.T. is too afraid to contact the dead with us and he’s being a creeper. It’s really bringing the vibe down. We haven’t even seen the scary blue light yet. If you come, can you bang on our room’s door? He’s really jumpy. I just want to see him squirm. Love you!’ Second saved message: ‘You said you were coming an hour ago. Where are you? Why are you not picking up? Something strange is happening. I feel like it’s working, but I’m getting a funny feeling. Please hurry.’ Third saved message.” A different voice came on, a man’s voice. “’Hey, Dad, Sidney can’t come to the phone right now. I see you banging on the doors out there. Unfortunately, you’re too late for tonight’s game, but you can start another really soon. This silly ritual is really growing on me. I think I’d like some more players so I can get some practice. Gather some for me and I’ll think about letting poor Sidney back in from the cold. Can’t wait to see you. Better not play any tricks either. I would get mad if you did that.’ End of messages.”
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