Chương 343: Book Eight, Chapter 10: Drill

With the vault door uncovered, all that was left to do was wait for Dina to get it open. We had several theories on the plot going into this. Was getting into the safe something that would happen in the finale, or was it the thing that would trigger the monsters to come out and kill us? We didn't know, and we wouldn't know until we got in. So we went forward with the plans that we'd developed.

All you could do in the face of uncertainty was give Carousel something to work with so that it didn't have to do it itself.

"All right. Molly, Bobby, you two head upstairs. Keep a watch outside. If anybody rolls up or anything suspicious happens at all, I want you to tell us on the radio immediately." Not only did my character have walkie-talkies in his hotel room, but there were enough for each of us. We knew the rules. Radios like this were just too useful, so when we needed them, they'd stop working or something like that, but I wasn't going to turn them down. They were small and slick, a great way for us to keep up conversations.

We even did the movie thing where we put a piece of painters' tape on each of them and wrote our names on them, because surely we'd find one abandoned and need to know whose it was. As for why we didn't leave anybody out as a lookout to begin with, it was a little more complicated.

In a movie, they'd have a lookout who would stay with the van, usually the getaway driver, and logically we should have, but the problem was if you had a character who didn't go into the haunted house, they wouldn't die, and therefore you couldn't lose the storyline, which was why Carousel had the Written Off status. Try as we might, looking through the Atlas, we didn't really know what the bright line was.

If we left someone outside the house, how long would it be before they were taken out of the story altogether? It was something that we bellyached over for far too long, but at the end of the day, we just couldn't leave anyone outside. Almost all of the story was happening in the house. With a little bit more prep and maybe some better intel, I might've made a different decision. Molly pushed her purse up on her shoulder and said, "Sounds like a smoke break to me."

Bobby was annoyed, probably in character but perhaps in real life. I didn't know. We all wanted to see what was inside the safe, not just our characters.

"Just call me before you get the safe open," he said.

"Yeah, sure," I said.

"It'll be my top priority. Just remember to keep in touch, all right?" I held up my radio so he could see what I was talking about, and we could give the audience a glimpse of them. They held up their radios in response. I was sending him off with Molly because her Null Force trope would make the supernatural dodge around her for laughs, at least for a while, and that might end up protecting them both if Bobby played his part in the routine. It was strange.

First Blood had already passed, and while I could definitely tell we were in a supernatural place, I hadn't seen anything dangerous yet. In fact, I hadn't seen anything trigger on the red wallpaper at all as an enemy. I had no tropes to look at or analyze. Meanwhile, Dina was completely zoned out as she followed whatever instructions her Savvy Safecracker trope was giving her about how to open the vault. She was smiling from ear to ear.

I didn't know if that was a character choice, the result of her trope, or just her own personality, but she seemed to be having a blast as she listened to the lock with a stethoscope, turned the dial, and started smacking the safe with a hammer.

"This'll take a while," she said.

"Could be an hour, but it'll probably be longer." I nodded.

"Do your thing," I said. She crouched back down by the vault door, hugged right up against the steel slab like she was trained to sense its soul or something. I left her to it as we stood back and watched. We went Off-Screen for a while, but not for nearly as long as I'd expected from Dina's report on how long it'd take to crack the safe. We waited for something to attack us, or maybe for a ghost to float from wall to wall, but it didn't come. Even the strange, unsettling faces in the wood had disappeared.

It was like we were only standing in a basement, cracking a safe or something. How mundane. And yet we were On-Screen. Luckily, it turned out that Nicole was every bit as good at this part of the game as I'd expect from a Vet.

"If I had another week on this listing," she said, "I'd have my contractor swap out half this premium wood for knockoff panels. Sell the originals piecemeal, maybe bulk, but I wouldn't be holding my breath." Camden, whose character was a shady builder, was a natural fit for that conversation.

"Really?" he asked.

"I've always heard of operations like that, but it's one of those contractor tales, you know?

'We used the right material, but then someone came in and swapped it out.'" They shared a laugh.

"It's real, sure," Nicole said coolly as she stood watching Dina work.

"You own that shop up on Biles Street, right? It's a great opportunity if you ever want to cash in on your reputation for a few million." Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Camden laughed.

"Yeah? How's that work exactly?"

"Just a quick swap. Take the materials we want, swap in cheap stuff," Nicole said.

"And no one catches on?" Camden asked.

"Sure they do," she said.

"But then my third-party contractor goes out of business and starts up again under a new name. As long as it doesn't get traced back to me, what do I care? You have to play it by ear. Look for the right situation. Someone croaks, and their out-of-town relatives inherit their creaky old fixer-upper. You offer to do everything for them—renovate, modernize, sell—a package deal.

Of course, you strip the moldings, fixtures, the old vintage bath, and the big cooking range out for some modern stuff, but they don't know better. The old stuff looked tarnished and needed paint. The new stuff looks fresh. They thank you for it." Nicole was really getting into character. I'd told her to think through how her character could be a criminal, and she'd totally done her homework.

"So you sell the priceless antique materials and put in shiny crap in its place," Camden said.

"Oh yeah," Nicole said.

"Sometimes we actually sell it to the buyer. They come in upset that someone, the previous owner presumably, went and modernized this classic house, and we're the hero because we just happen to know a place they can buy accurate materials for a premium price. They jump at the opportunity because now they can make it all authentic. We're making money coming and going." To be honest, I found it a bit funny. She'd clearly rehearsed this at some point in time while waiting for the real part of the story to start.

I did wonder why Carousel was interested in it. We were On-Screen. Was there a ghost there I couldn't see, but the audience could?

"I may have bought some of your stuff then," Camden said.

"A new house with rescued and recycled materials is all the rage."

"Sure it is," she said.

"It's got that great classic look without all the ghosts." After she said that, I practically held my breath waiting for Carousel to respond, but it didn't. What in the world was going on in this storyline that we could just sit around dropping ironic lines like that, and Carousel wouldn't respond? I knew that it was supposed to be moderately easy, but I assumed the supernatural forces were at least awake. Maybe we did have to wait for the vault to open before things could get started.

"This red cedar here would be a great example," Nicole said.

"We could clear out this whole basement, and the house would be all the better for it. Wood from a sacred forest. I could see it now, just getting close to the buyer and whispering how the wood would be illegal if it were harvested now. There's no way they wouldn't snap at this. I'd make my commission three times over again on that." Camden shook his head.

"You'd think so. I bought all you see here and more when the opportunity came. Expensive, beautiful wood, sure, not legal, but you could always say it was recycled from back when it was legal, as long as you age it outside so it looked the part. Thought it would sell before anyone started asking where I got it. No one ever pulled the trigger on it. They say they will, they're very interested, very motivated, but in the end, they go with something more ordinary.

People love the romance of this stuff, but they hate the price." Nice double meaning.

"Not Red Jack Bellanti, I see," Nicole said, looking around. She rubbed her finger over a red cedar beam, admiring the texture. Camden attempted to laugh, but it was more of a snort.

"Yeah, he saw it, and he wanted it. That was a guy who was never afraid to pull the trigger." I couldn't hold back a laugh on that one. Luckily, it was something my character would find funny too. We all thought it was funny. Even Dina laughed. Dina began marking up the vault with a grease pen, finding all the places she needed to drill or something. I didn't even know if the things she was doing would actually help a person access a vault in real life, but they looked really good, and she looked good doing it.

Her hands moved quickly and nimbly, like she'd done it a thousand times. We had given her a lot of funny banter to try to make her a big character in the story, given that she actually had criminal tropes, but it was when she was opening the safe that she really took the spotlight. When we found ourselves On-Screen with nothing going on once again, I lifted up my radio, pressed the button, and said, "Bobby, Molly, you two set up outside yet?" It had been fifteen, twenty minutes at least.

The response was static because Carousel had never actually seen how walkie-talkies worked, but then again, they always work differently in horror movies. Actually, they work differently in any movie. I thought about how in Die Hard, the characters were arguing over the radio and interrupting each other, despite the fact that if your finger was on the button, you couldn't hear what the other person was saying in real life.

"We're—" Bobby said through the static.

"We're trying to find the stairs." So it's going to be like that, I thought to myself.

"The stairs to the second story?" I asked.

"Why do you need to go up there?"

"Not those stairs," Bobby said over the radio.

"The stairs out of the basement?" I asked.

"Are you still down here? It was like five turns and a straightaway to get out." I waited, hearing only more static.

"Yeah, we, uh…" Molly said over the radio.

"We had a disagreement about how to get back." Camden looked at me and said, "I can help them. I have the plans memorized." I waved him off. I knew it was a supernatural kind of lost, and I didn't want to press the issue until it was the opportune moment.

"Make a loud noise so I can hear you," I said.

"Shazam!" Molly screamed over the radio. She screamed so loud that not only did I hear her through the speaker, but I also heard her through the walls.

"Not into the radio," I said.

"Never mind. I can hear you over there. You sound like you're near the stairs. What's the problem?"

"I think we are," Bobby said.

"There's another staircase here now. I don't… hang on." We waited. In the distance, I thought I could hear them arguing, but it might've just been in my head. We were Off-Screen, so Carousel was catching at whatever it was. Finally, my walkie-talkie clicked back to life.

"Riley, which set of stairs do we go up?" Molly asked. Her voice cracked like she might've been a little afraid. They had clearly seen some architectural shenanigans on their way over there.

"There's only one set of stairs," I said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" All I heard was static after that, but underneath it there was something else, a voice that wasn't Bobby or Molly. It might've been a radio station, or it might've been my imagination. But it sounded like a man's voice. What was he saying? I picked up my walkie-talkie and said, "Molly, Bobby, talk to me now." We waited for another beat, and finally—"There—there…" Bobby's voice crackled over the radio.

"Okay, we found the landing. We're good. We're upstairs… It's really dark up here, though." I looked around the room. I had to mix being freaked out because of my character's perception of the supernatural nature of the place, but also act like I thought they were being goofballs, because it wasn't time for me to buy in yet. For a moment, there was a tension in the air, like something was about to happen, like we were finally going to see what it was we were up against. But then Dina said, "Got it. Almost there.

Just a bit of tenderness left, and I should be in." She picked up the large drill that was part of her kit and started driving it into the metal. The sound cut through everything, even the strange aura the wood let off, and suddenly, there was normalcy, and the tension ended, at least for a while. Whatever supernatural force was at work here, it was waiting to make an entrance. Or, perhaps, an exit.