Chương 371: Book Eight, Chapter 38: Tangled

We took the boat the long way around the lake, sticking to the shoreline instead of cutting across anywhere, making sure we got a good look at every nook and cranny where a boat might be found. Funny enough, for as much ground as we covered, we never saw any of the other rescuers. It was like their script was telling them to avoid us to make us feel isolated on a wild lake. Carousel could take the footage and make it look reasonable, but anyone who actually saw the lake would know how silly that was.

It wouldn't take more than a few hours to see every square inch of the Carousel Basin Lake.

"Got a boat up ahead," Antoine said once we were On-Screen. This one was harder to see. It was dark-colored and ran up under some fallen scrub oak that had fallen into the water.

"I don't see anyone aboard," Anna said.

"Well, that one's closer to the bank," Antoine said as he powered down the engine.

"Let's stick to the trolling motor. We don't need to get our propeller gunked up… You know, I think this is close enough to the edge that they could have climbed up onto land if they wanted to." And they would have had to climb, because it was a steep incline from the lake to the forest above. If they were properly motivated, they could have made it, although it wasn't clear whether the boat drifted to that location or was maneuvered there.

As we moved closer, it was easy to see that this boat's propeller was also tangled in plant matter.

"Got some aggressive freshwater seaweed or something around here," I said. They might not have been able to see the propeller yet. I could because I was zooming in on it with my powerful camera. Camden shook his head.

"The population of underwater foliage has been rebounding ever since we started restocking the lake. We had a warm spring in the last couple of weeks. The bladderworts have been popping up all over." For as smart as Camden sounded, I could almost see him reading off the red wallpaper where he had memorized information using his Photographic Memory trope. Anna flipped through some papers in her hands that she had brought.

"Wait a second," she said.

"This isn't one of the boats registered for the tournament." That made some amount of sense. It was a pontoon party vessel. There were no fishing poles or any fishing gear on it that I could see, other than a long-handled fishing net. It was a double-decker. The pontoons underneath were bigger than most conoes.

"That's one of ours," Camden said.

"I'm sure of it. That's one of our research vessels. It was just at the docks before we left." I continuously filmed between those who were talking.

"Are you saying that this boat was abandoned in the last hour?" Antoine said. He was at the front of the boat steering the trolling motor, so getting a good shot of him was easy.

"I swear it was there. I sent my secondary team out on it," Camden said.

"Get me up close. I need to get up there." Antoine did as requested.

"Maybe we should leave it alone," Cassie said, speaking up for the first time.

"You shouldn't disturb the vessel of the dead."

"Oh, hush," Camden said.

"We don't know anybody is dead." He jumped from the front of our boat onto the pontoon deck and quickly made his way to the pilot seat.

"I smell a blown engine," Antoine said.

"Twin engines. Wow." I smelled it too. It really was so easy to blow an engine by movie logic. I zoomed in on the vegetation that had wrapped itself around the boat's propellers underwater. It was so thick I could see the yellow flowers all throughout.

"They were taking samples," Camden said.

"They must have been interrupted because they didn't even close their kit." Then he paused for a moment as he clearly tried to remember the names of his assistants.

"This is Jezebel's, and that's Dieter's. All the others, too." He made those up. They must have gotten so little screen time that he hadn't thought to remember them, which was ironic for a guy who could literally remember anything if he chose to, through Carousel's magic. Maybe Jezebel and Dieter were real. What did I know? I shut off my camera when we went Off-Screen. I had to change the battery. Then I had an idea. Carousel must have liked it too, because we went On-Screen almost as soon as we had gone Off.

I plugged in the new battery and said, "You know, the place we were fishing this morning must have been right in view of the yellow boat we found earlier. I think I'll go over some of our footage to see if we caught anything." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. I powered on my camera, flipped out the viewing screen, and started fast-forwarding through all the footage I shot.

While we were going through the interviews, something I noticed was that of all the people at the docks, only a fraction of them were wearing life jackets, and one of those people happened to be Robbie, the drunkard who had survived whatever monster had attacked. I looked over on the boat toward the stowing area where all of our life jackets were stored. It was such a silly thing to overlook. In Carousel, you couldn't really drown unless you wanted to or something else wanted you to.

Grit helped you hold your breath, Hustle allowed you to maneuver easily, and you hardly needed Mettle to paddle because you were basically using plot armor as a flotation device. That was just movie magic. I made a mental note to put on a life jacket, seeing as my low plot armor was about to become really relevant. Finally, when I had passed all the interviews I had taped, I saw footage of us out fishing.

Skipping ahead, I found footage from the cove where we had filmed most of our successful work, pulling in catfish after catfish. Because of the nature of how we had to work together to pull in those big fish, a lot of it wasn't on film, and I had to point the camera away at times, leaving it on its tripod. But sure enough, we got lots of footage of the cove where the yellow boat had been discovered. I wondered which happened first.

Did we happen to catch footage of that area because that's where the yellow boat was, or did Carousel put the yellow boat over there because that's where my camera kept pointing? I would never know.

"It looks like it's already abandoned," Antoine said as he stared down at the yellow boat.

"It's not moving. Whatever happened must have happened just after sunrise."

"Yeah, looks like we got to our spot too late. We had meandered a bit," I said. But then I saw it. We may not have caught what happened to the yellow boat exactly, but we caught something. A human arm reached up from the water, not fifty yards from our boat. Then another arm, and the beginnings of a human head, unable to break the surface tension of the water, splashing and struggling, all while Antoine was giving some speech about how to catch catfish as best he could with the information he had.

We didn't hear anything because we were focused on catching fish. There was no screaming. I probably wasn't even looking into the camera when this was being filmed. It was up on the tripod. But there it was, what appeared to be a young blonde woman struggling to stay afloat.

"That looks just like Joanne," Anna said as tears started to flow.

"That looks like any blonde girl," I said.

"It's too far away to tell. There are like six pixels there." But Anna seemed convinced. And if the ghost of a drowned teenager wasn't enough to make that footage freaky, what happened next did. The arms stopped flailing. The head stopped fighting to reach above the water. It didn't go back down. Instead, the arms stayed straight up in the air. The wrists were limp. The hands just stayed there, perfectly still, no bobbing, no trying to struggle. They weren't sinking.

And when they finally went back down underwater, it was slow and deliberate.

"What in the world just happened?" Antoine asked. We didn't even have words for it. It was such a switch to inhuman behavior that we didn't know what to say about it. It was like that humanoid thing realized it wasn't going to get our attention and stopped pretending. About that time, Camden hopped back down onto the boat.

"No sign of where they might have gone," he said.

"Looks like they were more interested in studying the local flora than rescuing any fishern—holy hell, who's that?" We looked up from the camera and saw him pointing over in the distance. And just as we did, we saw hands and a head sticking up out of the water, flailing, looking exactly like a young woman drowning.

"It can't be," Anna said. She jumped up on the front of the boat and took over the trolling motor, maneuvering us out toward the other side of the cove we were on, to where the apparently drowning young woman was. I quickly put on a life jacket and encouraged the others to as well. We didn't all have Last One Alive to keep us safe. The little motor did its best to get us across the cove quickly, but it wasn't exactly designed for speed, as much as Anna wanted it to be.

When we arrived, Antoine jumped up on the front of the boat and grabbed onto Anna to give her an in-character reason why she didn't just jump into the water or do something stupid, as grieving sisters are known to do. What I saw when I looked overboard made the Uncanny Valley look like Any Town, USA. It was convincing at first: the young woman with blonde hair, a pearl necklace, and flailing hands. Anna was screaming her sister's name, and all I could do was stare at the little girl.

I could understand why someone would jump down and grab to pull her up if they saw her. Cassie started to say something about how her spirit is angry, but then she thought better of it.

"This isn't her," she said. Cassie had a few vague information-gathering psychic tropes. I didn't know which one of them told her that the thing that looked like Joanne Reed wasn't actually her, but one of them did. The power I used was my two human eyes, because if you slowed down and really tried to look at her, things didn't make sense.

The face looked human while it was moving under the surface of the water, but at any moment it stopped, you'd notice that the eyes were too far apart, or that the mouth was crooked, and that the nose didn't have any nostrils, just two dark marks. The hair was stringy, the right color, sure, but not the right texture. All of that disappeared when it moved. If I weren't playing the game at Carousel, I would have reached for her immediately.

But just as the one had done in the video, when no one went to help her, it stopped trying. And when it stopped moving completely, it became clear that whatever this was, it was never human. The arms were colored correctly, but they were woody and poorly articulated. The hair was like roots or tendrils floating in the water. The head and face had a celery-root texture. This thing in the water that slowly sank down out of our vision wasn't human. It wasn't a fish or a mammal. It was a plant.

And as I stared down into the water, lit by the setting sun and a flashlight Antoine had thought to grab, I saw little yellow flowers as the last remnants of whatever it was sinking down below. It didn't even register on the red wallpaper. It clearly had a trope to disguise it.

"We're getting out of here," Antoine said. He pulled up the trolling motor, then jumped into the boat's cockpit and powered it on. But the moment he tried to put on the gas, the engine made a horrific sound, and black smoke poured from it before it blew. One look over the backside, it was clear that those same yellow flowers and vegetative matter had wrapped around our propeller until we couldn't even see its shiny metal.

"That doesn't make sense," I said.

"That motor wasn't even on. How did we get tangled up?" But I knew the answer. Something had tangled us. Something that could look almost like a human unless you stared at it up close. Something under the water with little yellow flowers.