Chương 339: Book Eight, Chapter 6: Open House

Our first stop for the day was Eastern Carousel. It was early morning, so some of the various nature spirits that lived among the crops and scrub trees in the area were still out and about, roaming through the fields. Bobby's house was in the distance. It had been a while since I had been there, but it, like many things in Carousel, was unchanging. I let Antoine do the talking. He approached the front door and knocked. It looked like he was going to give it three good knocks, but it was opened by the second.

Janet must have been standing there waiting. The script, after all, would have known we were coming. Either that, or she was just standing there by herself, waiting for Bobby to return without a thought in her mind.

"Hey, Janet," Antoine said.

"Is Bobby around?"

"Yes, I can go get him. Did you find the place easy enough?" she asked. And she spoke so normally. If I didn't know better, I couldn't have possibly identified her as an empty shell.

"Yes, we had good directions," Antoine said. Janet leaned up against the side of the door frame and said, "We decided to get an Airbnb. No offense to you all, it's just we needed space to ourselves. That way Bobby can go on his little trips with you, and I can finally get some reading done."

"Sounds like a nice situation," Antoine said. In the distance, a rooster crowed, and something monstrous hissed and roared, causing the trees to shake. Janet didn't notice.

"It really is a great situation for us. If I didn't get a break soon, I was going to go crazy. I bet the folks back at the office could use the break from me, too," she said with a smile. Antoine nodded his head. It was an odd interaction all around. He was trying to be polite, but more than that, he was trying to talk to her like she was a person and not a sort of magic puppet that could be molded so easily around your words.

"I totally understand that," he said.

"Maybe I'll take a break one of these days. So, do you think you can get Bobby for us?"

"Sure," Janet said.

"He's out harvesting some corn that the farmer said we can eat. Check this out." She walked right past Antoine, out the door, toward a metal triangle hanging from the front porch. A metal rod was also hanging right next to it. She grabbed the rod and struck it against the triangle, dinging it around and causing the metal to ring so loudly that anyone nearby would have heard it. It got the job done. Bobby ran a full sprint to us, bursting out of a field of corn like he was worried the house was on fire.

When he saw us, he calmed down, but not that much.

"Janet, sweetie, I asked you not to do that unless it was an emergency, remember?" he asked. He was out of breath and shaken. Janet looked at us and said, "Isn't he such a worrier?" She then giggled to herself as she walked inside. Yes, what would Bobby have had to worry about? Bobby didn't say anything for a bit as he stared at us.

"Is it time?" he asked eventually.

"We have a lead," Antoine said.

"We figured you should be there, all things considered." Bobby nodded his head.

"Yeah, I want to go. I need to." We weren't investigating Lucky's Throughline strictly because of Bobby, but his situation was a big part of the reason. So yeah, he really did need to be there. I still didn't know if we would actually go along with what Lucky wanted, but that didn't mean we couldn't take a peek. We went back down the long road toward Central Carousel, where we met the rest of the group. They had sat there at a park bench waiting for us.

Nicole was there with her security detail out, keeping everyone from any possible danger, including cars that might be driving a little too fast. As a group, we retraced our steps back northeast to the neighborhood where Lark House was. It was Thursday, the day of the open house. We might be able to actually do more than stare at the exterior of the building through a wall, hoping not to trigger any Omens. When we arrived, the big gate was open, and balloons were hung all around.

"We can credit Camden with this, I guess," Antoine said. He had been the one to see the For Sale sign and conclude there was a way to clear out the Omens on the property. And he was right; there were no more Omens just lying about in the yard. I took the lead, or at least I tried to, as Nicole's main bodyguard led a squad ahead of us toward the house. Past the gate, there was a large courtyard that had once contained a bunch of terrifying-looking statues of people that appeared to have been turned to stone.

But now, the statues were replaced with large pots of plants and other normal things to find in a yard. Still, no Omens. As we moved toward the proper front of the house, which was not visible from the street, the nature of the house became clear. It was a bit artsy. I wasn't nearly educated enough to say what style it was, but if I had to guess, it would be something like a Paleolithic mountain cabin. No, that wasn't right… Paleolithic mountain mansion. This book is hosted on another platform.

Read the official version and support the author's work. The house comprised three main features: stone, which had stucco paint or whatever it was called globbed onto it, turning it white; glass, which came almost exclusively in huge wall-sized panes; and, most predominantly, large slabs of wood. The wood was not processed; it looked rough cut, so much so that I could see the saw marks still on it, but it was put together to help form the structure. I could see bark still clinging around the edges of the slabs.

"It looks like one of the houses that rich people would have in The Flintstones," I said. That got some laughs, but not as many as I thought it would. There was something strange about the house, something that made it hard to laugh about. I didn't know what the aura was, but it was something supernatural. I wasn't afraid, but I felt a weight in the air that I usually associated with documentaries on genocide. Laughter here was bad, and I felt guilty about the joke.

The wood was red—a deep, rich, earthy red—and each piece of it looked like it had been around for a thousand years, like it was some sort of petrified forest turned into a house. The door, which itself was a large slab of wood, was propped open with a small statue.

"Yeah," I said.

"Sounds like a score for Camden… assuming we walk away from this."

"And assuming the Omen is actually in here," Camden added.

"And assuming we can tell which Omen is the main Omen for the house."

"Yes," Antoine said.

"Assuming all of those things, we will be just fine." We needed to find which Omen triggered a storyline that, if defeated, would reveal the secret base of Lucky's former team of players. But which one? We worried it would be hard to tell. But it wasn't.

"Anything?" Antoine asked me.

"No Omens out here," I said.

"They really did clean the place up." We walked to the front door, but of course, Nicole's bodyguards had beaten us there by some time, and one of them stood outside with his hand up, preventing us from entering.

"I'm afraid these premises cannot be secured, ma'am," he said.

"I'll have to insist that we turn around and leave through the front gate."

"Oh, come on," Nicole said.

"Can't we just go in and look around a little?" The bodyguard didn't answer, and he didn't move.

"You may have to turn that trope off if we're going to get a good look inside," I said.

"I better not regret it," she said as she reached into thin air, pulled out her trope, and deactivated it. Her bodyguard looked really confused after that happened. He and all the other security guards wandered away as if they were all struck with sudden amnesia and couldn't figure out why they were there.

"All right," Camden said.

"Do we have to knock? I've never been to an open house."

"Just walk in with intention," Nicole said.

"Don't look too interested, or the agent will get excited." With that, I led us through the front door, and we were greeted by a large room made of the same giant wooden slabs. Many of them were not perfectly rectangular, but they were all fit together like puzzle pieces, making up the siding on the walls and the dividers that lined the hallways. There were wooden slabs on the ceiling, and some structural supports were made from the same red wood.

Near the entrance, a real estate agent, the same one we had seen with the red blazer, was talking to some NPCs. She looked up at us and said, "Welcome, folks. Come in and have a look around. I'll answer any questions you need, just give me one moment." We weren't going to talk to her if we could avoid it. She might try to sell us the house. If we all put our money together, we probably wouldn't be able to put in a deposit on a place like this.

It was one of those houses that seemed like a great place to have a party, but not the type of place you would want to live. Honestly, given the oppressive nature of the aura, I wished we could just watch a tour of it on YouTube.

"Didn't expect the interior to be this aggressive," Antoine said. He might have meant it as a joke, but I could tell that he felt the weight of the place, too.

"You picking up something weird?" I asked. He was using his Gut Instinct trope, which was much less exact than other Insight tropes, but it was very strong and visceral from what I understood.

"Something is definitely dangerous at this place," he said.

"Yeah," I said, as I looked around at the expensive furniture and strange collection of objects that appeared to have been purchased from all around the world. Lots of tribal things, though I couldn't detect any recognizable origin.

"There's only one Omen in this whole house, but I'm getting a strange feeling this place might be setting off my psychic background or something."

"Definitely supernatural," Antoine said.

"Obviously it's supernatural," Camden added.

"The walls are bleeding." He pointed straight ahead to one giant slab, which was, as he stated, bleeding, or that's what it appeared. It was a large stream that slowly moved down toward the ground. The red liquid that came from the wood was thick and dark. We got closer. I read about it on the red wallpaper.

"That's our Omen," I said.

"If it touches our skin, that's the trigger. Well, technically, it's when you notice later that it's on your skin, but all the same."

"Don't touch the wall blood," Camden said.

"Got it." I grabbed a pamphlet that the real estate agent had left on a nearby table, and I stuck it in the liquid, getting just enough so that we could take it home with us and activate the trope at our leisure.

"It's sticky and thick. I don't think this is blood," I said. I would know. I'd been covered in blood plenty of times.

"It's sap, I think," Camden said, as he watched me try to get a glob of the stuff on the pamphlet without any of it touching me.

"Or maybe it's resin. I think this might be cedar." The moment I picked up that little glob of resin on the pamphlet, the effects of the dark aura intensified. I tried to even out my breathing so as not to scare the others.

"That's strange," I said.

"The title is red wood. According to the red wallpaper, the difficulty is easy, well, not the easiest, but a little bit under average. Actually, that's surprising. From the way it feels, I thought it would have been a hard one." We all just stared at the sticky substance for at least a minute. The feeling that radiated from it wasn't aggressive or angry. It triggered a feeling of contemplation, almost reverence.

"Why would they lock their base with a storyline that's easy for a team at our level range to beat?" Camden asked.

"That doesn't make any sense." He was right about that, but given the current composition of players we had with us, the storyline was not that bad. It wasn't exactly a catnap, but I had no problem believing we could beat it. I turned around from the wall back toward the other players, and as I did, I saw something that nearly made me drop the pamphlet. Trees were standing freely in the room as if they had been there the entire time, growing right out of the ground, large trees with red bark and barren limbs.

I realized that what I was seeing was something no one else was, because they even followed my gaze, wondering what I was looking at.

"I have no idea why this storyline is supposed to be so easy, but this is the one. This is the main storyline of the house. I can feel it. This storyline is about the trees. Give me a bag; I need to get rid of this." Nicole had a plastic baggie that she fished out of her purse, and I very carefully, using all of my Hustle, placed the pamphlet and the glob of resin inside the bag and sealed it.

As soon as I did so, the trees that only I could see faded—not wholly, but they became what they always were, I suspected, which was ghosts.

"The ghosts of trees," I said under my breath.

"What will Carousel think of next?"

"Antoine," I said as we were leaving and I could get him alone, "I think you may want to sit this one out." He looked me in the eye, having clearly perceived the danger, and said, "I think you might be right."