The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Mr. Kirst led us to a small dining room with a single window.

"You’ll have to forgive me; the formal dining room is damaged beyond repair," he said.

The (informal?) dining room we were in was probably the nicest room in the house. There were very few signs of a hundred years without affection; in fact, it only looked like it had been abandoned for less than fifty years. It was practically in mint condition. If we had to sleep in the Manor for this storyline, this would be the room to do it in.

There was a large round wooden table with place settings ready to go and little name cards for each of us, showing us where to sit.

"I chose a round table because I want this to be a conversation. I don’t want you to try to defer to me just because I’m your host," Mr. Kirst said. "And I hope you’ll notice that the silverware is genuine silver. There could be nothing less for a conversation like the one we’re about to have."

As we walked in, we were still On-Screen, but Kimberly managed to discretely elbow me and point to the painting on the wall of the dining room. It wasn’t quite the painting we had brought. It wasn’t The Omen.

It was a larger version of The Omen. Where the one we had purchased at the flea market only showed the woman’s head and enough of her torso to display her necklace, this one was a full-body portrait of her standing next to a window with a beautiful watery vista.

Still, the silver necklace was probably the most detailed and beautiful part of the painting.

It had no inscription or title that I could see, and when I asked Mr. Kirst about it, he simply said, "Oh, yes, that came with the house. You’d be shocked to know that the looters actually left some good stuff. Perhaps the best home defense is a reputation for being haunted."

I had to give it to him—Mr. Kirst was funny, always ready with a quip. Throughout much of the dinner, he showed himself to be a very inquisitive and knowledgeable man who could keep a conversation flowing masterfully.

He asked us about our experiences, and we told him to the best of our ability. Sometimes we were On-Screen, sometimes Off-Screen, as Carousel got its footage of the conversation and the charismatic, strange man who had brought us there.

"So, in all of your travels, you’ve never found a cure?" Mr. Kirst asked with childlike intensity. "Not one potion, not one spell?"

"The cure is silver," Antoine said. "Preferably in the heart."

"But that kills the werewolf," Mr. Kirst replied. "I can see why you're not the doctor at the table."

"Like I said, it's the cure," Antoine responded.

"Oh, I see. So you would never make an attempt to return an afflicted back to their human form? You’ve never even considered it?" Andrew asked, wine glass in hand.

"Never had the time," Antoine said. "Of course, I don’t study them in a lab. I’m usually running after them in the woods."

That got a laugh.

"Of course, I know the legends," Antoine continued. "To revert a werewolf to its human form permanently, you have to kill the wolf who turned them, but I don’t believe it. It can be hard to sort the chaff from the wheat when it comes to supernatural lore."

"No," Hawk Kipling said. "Not the werewolf that turned them; you have to kill the pack leader. All werewolves are bound to their pack leader, and if you kill their pack leader before the curse has taken hold, they will be freed from it."

I didn't know that. None of my videos had told me.

"It didn’t take us long to get away from the scientific, did it?" Mr. Kirst asked Andrew with a laugh.

"It rarely does," Andrew responded. "Unfortunately, this space is dominated by folklore and very little study."

Kirst laughed. "To the contrary. Lycanthropy used to be studied with some rigor, back before the advent of modern medicine."

"There's probably a reason for that," Andrew said.

"And what is that?" I asked.

"If you go looking for a magical curse and find only a dreadful disease, you probably lose interest," Andrew said with a chuckle.

"It is interesting you say that," Kirst said. "I cannot help but feel the reverse may be true."

Andrew took a short sip from his drink and said, "You believe the werewolf curse is really that, a curse?"

Kirst did not answer at first, but for a moment, I saw a glint in his eye that I could not place. He wasn't the flamboyant businessman for a moment. He was something else.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"I have made my fortune by assuming that men's pride is folly," Kirst said. "The very suggestion that this force of nature could be dissected and understood reads as pure hubris. No offense to you, Doctor Hughes; I admire the dogged pursuit of truth. This is a force we do not understand, and I believe we can count on that to remain the case."

There was a moment of silence at that statement. I couldn't help but wonder what it was we had gotten into.

We were eating some kind of roast with carrots that tasted like honey while discussing werewolves at length. The conversation was quite riveting, actually, because everyone had been given different bits of lore, and we were all discussing them.

As soon as we started, I had my tapes playing in the background of my mind, casually listening over and over. They were similar to the first tape, just interviews with folks who had lived long enough to have seen some things and heard some things—nothing hard-hitting.

"Now, what say your people?" Mr. Kirst asked, looking at Michael.

"We say the best cure is to never get bit, to never kiss strange women around the campfire, and to always wear silver around your neck," Michael said, showing a necklace he wore with an unformed lump of silver dangling from the end. “That’s as close to a cure as you’re going to get unless you’re chasing fairy dust.”

"What is it with silver?" Mr. Kirst asked, taking a large drink from his wine glass. "Why silver? Why does it have some interaction with werewolves? Does anyone have any idea?"

"Silver does have antimicrobial qualities," Andrew offered. "Perhaps the werewolf virus is particularly weak to its presence. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find an intact tissue sample from a werewolf."

"The damn things keep turning back into human samples, don’t they?" Hawk asked.

"As you say," Andrew answered.

"I’m sure that you didn’t have the presence of mind to do tests on that werewolf who shifted while you were operating on them like you were telling us about?" Mr. Kirst asked.

Andrew had told a story of performing surgery on a car accident victim who went wolf in the hospital.

"I didn’t, I confess," Andrew said. "I was afraid for my life and wondering how I was going to get my scalpel back after the beast’s flesh regrew around it."

Werewolves in this story could be drawn out of their human forms when injured.

More laughter. It was a genuinely good time.

"Well, I only asked if you knew a way to revert a werewolf to its human form permanently because I know that Christian Stone—your brother, Antoine—was a hunter who got bitten on one of his hunts, correct?" Mr. Kirst asked.

Silence for a moment.

"That was the risk we signed on for. Our dad always told us that you should only want to be alive or dead, nothing in between," Antoine said.

I don’t know where people got off calling werewolves undead, but that was often a category they were put into.

"But you didn’t even think for one moment about curing him?" Kimberly asked.

"By the time I knew he needed curing, it was too late to even think about it," Antoine said. "What’s done is done."

This was a great acting job from Antoine.

"A sad recollection," Mr. Kirst said, "a sad sentiment. More than a few at this table know the same. Miss Madison, would you care to tell us your tale again? I would like to hear it again."

Kimberly, who had barely touched her food, placed her fork down beside her plate. She had told us this story already, but we were Off-Screen.

"I remember everything," she said, "but nowadays, I don’t really tell the whole story. When people think that you lost your mind in grief, they’re okay with tolerating a simple, vague story—they never want details. I was camping with my friends at an abandoned summer camp we had gone to years earlier. A reunion, of sorts.

"We got attacked in the night, and my friends didn’t make it. I did, but I had help," she said. "Those monsters were just tearing the place apart because they could. There’s no way I could have survived. I wish I had more to tell you than that, but truthfully, that’s exactly what happened. It was a fun getaway in the woods, and then suddenly, people were just killed, and those monsters were all around. I kept myself locked away in one of the lodges. Then I heard yelping. When morning came, I went outside to see my friends, who had been mauled, and some naked people with silver bullet holes and stuffed bellies. And I found Antoine getting ready to go hunt down the ones that got away. I’ve been looking for people with stories like mine ever since."

She looked up at Antoine, and they shared a moment, locking eyes. Antoine didn’t say anything, but it should have been clear to anyone in the audience that they had a romantic history if it wasn’t already.

"Well, that is an amazing story," Mr. Kirst said. "Might I throw something by you—a rumor I heard about the cure for the werewolf curse?"

He paused as if we were going to say no.

"See, what I’ve always heard in all of my studies—my quite extensive studies as of late—was that the only way to reverse the curse is to kill the pack leader before the very next full moon. That’s when the curse sets in: the next full moon," he said, looking at Hawk as if completing the lore Hawk had presented. "In fact, I have something in my possession that I would love to show you. We could call it an experiment, but I like to think of it as a desperate last attempt. I’ll be right back."

And so he got up from the table and left the small dining room.

And we were left to wait On-Screen.

The longer we waited, the more concerned I became. Were we supposed to be talking? Perhaps but the plot cycle was moving forward, however slowly, which meant that we were just supposed to stay there and wait. But what were we waiting for?

"Oh my god," Kimberly said. Somehow, she was the first to notice.

She pointed up at the vents at the top of the room. A thin white gas snaked down from them. No sooner did we see it than we started to cough and feel its effects.

It fried my brain almost immediately. I was useless.

We began panicking, screaming, asking what was going on.

Our first thought was to try to leave the room, but when we went to the door, we found it locked and barred from the other side.

Antoine, with all his might, began beating on the door while Michael went to the window nearby. He found that while he could smash it, it was shuttered and, therefore, not usable for escape.

Perhaps with enough time, we could have gotten out; we had a lot of mettle in that room, after all.

But we didn’t have time because the smoke was making us drowsy.

In fact, by the time I felt I had my wits together, it was too late. I felt myself getting sleepy, and the "unconscious" light on the red wallpaper started to light up.

Adrenaline and fear kept me awake long enough to realize that it could be that simple—that this could be the end.

Had we just gotten postered?

"Why is he doing this?" Antoine said. "Why poison us?"

"It’s not poison," I said. "It’s knockout gas." But I didn’t get to say much more than that because my Grit was lower than some of the others in the room, and I soon found myself slinking to the floor.

I was out and at the mercy of Egan Kirst.