Chương 395: Book Eight, Chapter 62: Campfire Story

The fight between Antoine and the hag continued on just as it had the first time. By my estimate, he had about twenty seconds left before he died. He wasn't aware of the jump back in time. Only I was. The only thing I could change was my use of the Insert Shot. I had to hope it was enough. He was incredible, really. A true fighter, but unlike the first time, Carousel didn't bother to show too much of that, because a new development was brewing on the other side of the room. Anna was about to steal the scene.

"This is Ol' Nonnie," she said with a nervous voice as she pointed the camera at the hag.

"She's an ancient witch, a nature spirit, a dark Fae, something older than we could ever understand. She speaks with the voice of forest critters, and she calls you through the wind, asking you to come to her. Maybe she'll whisper in your ear, or in your dreams, or over a staticky radio broadcast, but she'll always call you one way or another. And if you fall for her trap, you'll never escape." The camera seemed to be operating just fine, though there were a few loose wires hanging from it.

I wasn't going to ask too many questions. Anna quickly pointed the lens at the cauldron and the action on the other side of the room. Suddenly, the fighting stopped as the hag turned her head toward Anna, sensing exactly what was about to happen. She picked Antoine up and threw him across the room toward the cage so that she could keep an eye on both of them. Even though Antoine was undoubtedly injured by that throw, he knew his job was to delay, so he got back up on his feet and went to flat-out tackle the hag.

"Get her, Antoine!" she screamed, using her Who's With Me trope to its best effect. Then she turned the camera to the witch.

"So remember," she continued, "if you hear someone calling you to an unknown place, making promises that are too good to be true, it might just be Ol' Nonnie, calling you for stew." She then took the camera, held it through the bars of the cage, and tried to toss it into the cauldron. Ol' Nonnie was wise to it, and pushed Antoine away easily, batting the camera off its path, but not well enough.

Antoine was quick as lightning as he leapt across the room to catch the camera, and he was just as fast to rebound it right into the cauldron, as well as he ever had back in his basketball days. There was a certain silliness to that. Carousel undercut it by showing an angle of it that included my remains. The hag started to howl in anger as the cauldron began to bubble, and large wisps started to shoot out. She panicked, grabbing at the wisps of smoke, trying to contain them, but there were too many.

Even as she pulled them and tried to breathe them in, to suck them out of the air, the wisps escaped. And Carousel decided to follow them and see where they went. The camera zoomed through the air. It wasn't clear where it was going at first, but soon, the camera dove into the sea, past the thick dome of Culver's Bay, and showed hundreds of wisps making their way across the compound. A montage started. First, a man in a control tower was struck with a wisp.

He didn't speak, but as the smoke hit him, he looked out over the dark interior of the dome and shivered. He pushed some buttons, and flood lights moved to drown out a large patch of darkness on the ground. The man breathed out, relieved. Then the scene changed. Two women were walking down the road back from the meager night life inside the dome, laughing about some strange joke, as wisps of invisible smoke hit them and, suddenly, they stopped laughing. They didn't speak, but something sobering moved within them.

Maybe they had been assigned to venture out of the dome earlier in the movie, in a part I didn't see. This happened a few more times, with people getting sobering revelations. It took me a minute to realize what was happening. These were all people Ol' Nonnie was trying to lure into the unknown. Now, they were suddenly very wary. The scene changed, and I saw the woman with her batch of children.

She was putting them to bed, but one of her little girls looked up at her and said, "I think there's an old woman under my bed."

"Oh, do you now?" the mother said. She seemed confused herself, but that wore off after a few seconds.

"Or maybe it was the old Crone of the Bayou putting thoughts in your head. Tempting you to go out into the darkness and leave safety behind." The little girl looked like she was about to cry, and the woman suddenly realized that maybe the little one was a bit too young for a scary story like that, or maybe she was exactly the right age.

"Don't you worry, my dear," the woman said.

"As long as you don't go listening to voices in the dark calling you out into the unknown, Ol' Nonnie can never hurt you. You got to stay here safe with your Mama." She grabbed the little girl and hugged her. The scene changed again, and this time it was the Arbiter again. He was staring at the radio in the corner of the room, which was relaying the distant signal that he long believed was a distress call from a distant dome.

He was concentrated, his face skewed by obsession and determination, as a tendril of smoke he couldn't see struck him in the side of the head. At first, the movie played the signal as he heard it: a series of dots and dashes hidden within static that were just regular enough to sound like data, possibly corrupted, coming from a distant source. But as soon as the smoke entered his mind, the sound changed. The signal, which had seemed human in origin, suddenly sounded like pure static, like nothing at all.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. He looked down at his desk with a stack of applicants for the next scouting mission, and he closed them as if he'd suddenly had a change of heart. He sat and thought for a moment, confused, but relieved too. The montage ended as the movie returned to where it had been previously, in the hag's hovel, as the ancient witch did her best to contain the fumes rising out of her cauldron, even attempting to tip the whole thing over.

But she didn't have time for that, because while she was ignoring Antoine and Anna in her panic, he had managed to let Anna out of her cage, and the two of them snuck up behind the hag. They grabbed her tight, picked her up, and pushed her into the giant cauldron as fast as possible while she was distracted. She went in with a splash, and even though it wasn't clear whether or not she should fit, she somehow did.

Quickly, Antoine unloaded his canisters of maps and other old news articles into the brew with her, and she started to melt and sputter, just like the Wicked Witch of the West. The strange thing, to my view, was that when the hag began to melt, she looked at her hand and saw what was happening, but she didn't look like she was in pain. She wasn't even screaming. She looked genuinely confused, like whatever was happening should not have been happening, and that was probably true.

As tough as she was, she most likely wouldn't have died if she had gotten tossed into her cauldron. Not in real life. She watched the flesh drip off of her, which confused her as it exposed layer after layer of additional flesh, almost as if her true nature was more like a tree than a human being. She wasn't dying because of her potion. She was dying because of movie magic. She was dying to a last-minute save by players of the game at Carousel, and nothing more.

She looked up at Anna, and then Antoine, and then finally she looked right into the camera, right at me sitting in the audience, and for the first time since I had seen her, she looked worried, because she didn't know what was happening to her. That was actually great characterization, because screaming in agony would have been pretty cliché, but true confusion at defeat seemed quite novel and inhuman. More wisps of smoke rose into the night sky, going all over the place, but not just back toward Culver's Bay.

Also, to other locations, showing the movie viewer that there were many other settlements of people the hag had been preying on. Cassie was right. There were other people who needed saving. The movie continued on as Anna and Antoine left the hovel behind, climbing up onto the hill as the sun rose because Carousel told it to. As they stared out in the distance, they saw a settlement far away. Antoine looked down at his ArGIS and saw that it had no signals left. No arrows. No orders.

"That way?" he asked Anna, pointing to the settlement on the distant mountain.

"What do you think we'll find?" she asked.

"Who knows?" Antoine asked, as he looked over at it hopefully, as if maybe his character's brother might be there. The end. I wasn't sure how the film turned out in terms of quality, but if the audience around me's reaction to the finale was any indication, it was a hit. They were genuinely afraid that we were about to lose, and that was well warranted. We were about to lose. Luckily, we all came together in the end.

I closed my eyes in a theater filled with clapping immortals, and opened them again back in the cell in the witch's hovel. I didn't really want to be there, but at least this time I had my whole intact body with me. Camden was lying down next to me. He looked up at me and asked, "Wait a second. Did we survive that?"

"Oh yeah. Piece of cake," I said.

"Luckily, we figured out that all we had to do was find a map and throw it inside that cauldron over there. Simple stuff, really." I stood, and then I held out my hand to help him up.

"Oh, you just figured that out on your own, huh?" he asked.

"Pretty elementary for someone who studies stories and movies as much as I do. Heck, I had guessed it about five minutes after you left, just from context clues." I was joking, of course. We couldn't have done it without Camden. He had figured out most of the important stuff, like the function of the broadcasting brew that was essential to our victory, and to the hag's scheme.

"Now let's get out of here," I said.

"I don't want to alarm you, but that hag is not actually dead. I can see her head moving." Unfortunately, despite my warning, he was quite alarmed when he looked over at the cauldron and saw the very tip of the hag's head sticking out. Despite my worry about what was in the cauldron, I still took the time to look through the stacks of bodies to find one of the old scouts that had come from our dome, and I removed the ArGIS unit from their arm. Mine had disappeared whenever I got my hoodie back.

I didn't know what I would use it for. It wasn't like I could use it in the average storyline, but it was a pretty robust computer with GPS, and given how flexible technology was in Carousel, it could be useful. We quickly exited the cage and gave the cauldron a wide berth. Even though the head inside seemed to turn as we went by. At the last moment, she rose out of the cauldron, and we made eye contact.

Although she didn't seem angry, it seemed the script was having an effect on her, or maybe she was genuinely so confused she didn't know what was going on. Suddenly, there were two living dead boys in her hovel. Must have been a strange day for her, all told. We scurried out of the rest of the hovel, which didn't obey the laws of space or time as far as I could tell, as the place got bigger in the direction you walked, like something out of Harry Potter.

We found the exit quickly and were greeted by Antoine, Cassie, and Anna.

"Did we lose?" Anna asked.

"I get the strangest feeling that we lost that one, and then, I don't know, it's like deja vu or something." I filled them in on what had happened in the theater, at first sticking to my last-minute save that Anna had been able to capitalize on. That freaked them out a bit. But then I had to tell them the other part. The part about our four friends having been captured in a storyline in a way we had never seen, somehow related to a storyline that Antoine and many of the others had gone on previously.

"Well, the bright side is," Camden said, "we know how to find them if Ramona is still with them."

"That we do," I said. We looked out over the wetlands behind us. When we first approached this place before the storyline was triggered, it was nothing but miles and miles of mud, moss, and dead trees, but now there was water everywhere. The storyline had demanded it, to make our trek even harder. We needed to get back to our boat as soon as possible, and we hoped we still had time to catch the magic cue ball before it headed off toward Ramona. This whole thing didn't sit right in my stomach.

We were missing something. And I was afraid to find out what.

"Now, where is that animatronic ticket dispenser?" I asked. Usually, it was Silas, the mechanical showman, waiting on us, and not the other way around. Maybe he was delaying his appearance to buy us more time. It wouldn't be the first time he had helped us out.

"Let's check the boat," Antoine said. And so we set out to do just that.