The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG -
Chapter Seventy-Five: Notes from Experiment 17
Kimberly screamed.
“Oh my god!” Anna yelled.
I stared at the corpse, looking for some trace of what might have done it. It was the work of something very strong, that much was certain. It didn’t really help narrow down my top three theories very much, though out of ghosts, demons, and psychic phenomena, the latter was still in the lead by quite a bit.
But there was more to learn.
Camden slowly walked into the elevator.
“Please present your identification,” the voice repeated.
He knelt down over his former supervisor and plucked the ID badge from his chest. He backed out of the elevator and showed it to us.
“This might be able to get us into the patients’ rooms,” he said. “When it’s time for that.”
I took a closer look at the body in the elevator. The wounds were clean as if done by a blade, but I couldn’t imagine how a blade large enough to do this would be snuck into the facility.
As I turned to leave the elevator, I noticed something quite concerning.
“The elevator only goes up or down one floor,” I said.
That was strange, even within the world of Carousel. Unless… there was something about this building we didn’t know yet. “Wait a second, this isn’t right.”
I saw that the floor above us was labeled, “3B.” We were on “2B.” That seemed backward.
In the other elevator, it looked like 2B was two floors underground, a sub-basement. But this made it look like there were any number of floors between us and the surface.
“We are a lot further underground than they told us,” I said.
The others ducked their heads into the elevator to confirm my findings.
“But why would they lie to us?” Kimberly asked.
Why indeed.
“Where do we go?” Antoine asked.
“Well,” Camden said. “I have to think going up is better. We aren’t safe here.”
“But the thing that did that was up there, wasn’t it?” Kimberly asked.
Actually, it wasn’t that clear. Had the entity been in the elevator when it brought the body back down to this level?
“It doesn’t matter,” Camden said. “We can’t stay here.”
“He’s right,” I agreed. “Down here we’re sitting ducks. At least up there we might find the way out.”
And so, it was agreed.
For obvious reasons, we chose the stairs over the elevator.
It might have been a mistake. It was clear that floor 3B wasn’t right above 2B. There appeared to be a great deal of distance between the two floors.
“This is like a hundred feet,” Antoine said. “More than that.”
He was right.
After many flights of stairs, we eventually made it to an exit. The stairs stopped. They didn’t continue upward. The exit was a simple wooden door with the label “3B.”
Antoine took the lead, his baseball bat in hand. He gave his baton to Anna and his pepper spray to Kimberly, though I could hardly imagine that helping much.
Antoine tested the door. It didn’t even require ID.
The door opened easily.
As it did, a woman’s body slumped out to greet us.
Kimberly screamed again. I swear, I thought she might have pepper sprayed the corpse if she hadn’t gotten control of herself.
“That was one of the lab techs,” Camden said, staring down at the woman’s body. She wore a blood-stained lab coat.
Antoine took a few breaths and stepped over the woman’s body and into the well-lit room beyond it.
We followed one at a time.
The room inside was another laboratory. This one was far more sophisticated than the ones on 2B.
“Why did they have me lugging that machine around when they had that?” Camden said, looking at a giant series of monitors that showed five of the Mercers' vital statistics, all of which appeared to be updating in real time. Their hearts were racing. Alarms were going off.
His attention was soon stolen away from the monitors. The laboratory, it seemed, was an even more prolific murder scene than we knew.
There were three more bodies strewn about. All of them were killed with large, clean gashes carved into their bodies.
The room smelled of blood.
“What the hell did this?” Antoine asked.
The private elevator doors for this floor were to our left. A door led out and around. Antoine took the lead and slowly crept out of the room and into the hallway.
The longer we walked, the more bodies we found.
“They were running away from something,” I said, having noticed the orientation of the bodies.
“The elevator is that way though,” Camden pointed out.
It was true. They were running away from where the main elevator would be located.
“We have to risk it,” Antoine said.
He moved forward.
We followed him.
As we walked, the differences between this floor and 2B became more obvious. This floor was more populated, for one. Or at least it had been. Bodies littered the ground in every direction. More than that, this floor appeared more well-used. There were desks, calendars, snack tables, and all manner of office equipment on this floor that didn’t appear on the one below it.
The further we walked, the more the layout began to diverge.
“There’s the elevator,” Antoine said.
“Please present your identification,” this elevator said. Just like the last one.
The major difference between this one and the last one was that this one had its outer door ripped open. The elevator car was visible, though it wasn’t even with the floor. It appeared as though it had begun to rise when something stopped it. The elevator car was not level either. It had been damaged.
As we walked near it, there was a loud crack as the elevator car snapped loose and fell.
There was a screeching of brakes, but the brakes failed too as the elevator car continued to fall far below 3B. Very far below. Eventually, we hear a crash hundreds of feet down.
“Guess that’s what yellow means,” I said.
“Look,” Kimberly said. She pointed to a large door, a bigger version of the secure door that was on my control room downstairs.
The door was open just a little bit. I stepped forward and slowly built up the courage to pull the door open further.
“Oh shit,” I said, as I pulled open the door and found a severed hand still wedged into the handle on the inside.
“They were trying to get out,” Anna said.
She was right. A group had crammed themselves into this room for safety but had found none.
This room was a surveillance room like mine, but it also housed a series of desks and computers. It was much larger than my room. It had far more surveillance monitors than mine did too.
I saw a familiar face on the ground. It was Mr. Rowe. He was supposed to be at home on his five days off. What was he doing at work?
“Look,” Camden said. He pointed at one of the monitors. It was an image of a stairwell. It wasn’t one of the ones we had been in. It showed Dina walking down to one of the lower levels.
None of us commented on it, because at that moment, we heard a cough.
I nearly jumped out of my skin.
The cough had come from the other side of the room behind a large desk. As we slowly moved over there, we saw him.
It was Dr. Truman Mentes.
He was in terrible shape. He made eye contact with me as soon as he saw me. He couldn’t speak, his throat had been slashed superficially and his stomach had been gouged open.
“How do we call for help?” I asked.
If he heard me, he didn’t show it. Instead, he pointed up toward his terminal computer. I made eye contact with him for a few moments more. Was I supposed to try to help him? To patch his wounds? No. Moments after pointed at the terminal, a gargling sound came from his throat. Soon, he stopped moving.
He was dead.
I looked at the terminal. It was a simple computer that apparently ran on a strange, older OS. On the screen was a list of log entries.
“What that?” Anna asked.
“Audio logs,” I said.
I took the mouse and clicked on the first one and then the second and so on. The logs told us almost everything we wanted to know and more. As the logs played, the camera went on and off screen, capturing snippets of the audio before leaving. I could only imagine that there was a flashback or similar. I couldn’t know for sure.
Logs of Dr. Truman Mentes, Project Distortion, Experiment 17
Audio Journal 17.1:
Date: June 07, 2006
Audio Journal 17.2:
Date: June 07, 2006
Audio Journal 17.3:
Date: June 07, 2006
Audio Journal 17.4:
Date: June 08, 2006 - Morning
Audio Journal 17.5:
Date: June 08, 2006 - Afternoon
Audio Journal 17.6:
Date: June 09, 2006 - Morning
Audio Journal 17.7:
Date: June 09, 2006 - Afternoon
Audio Journal 17.8:
Date: June 09, 2006 - Evening
Audio Journal 17.9:
Date: June 09, 2006 - Evening
Subject 1.
I was Subject 1. We weren’t employees. We were the guinea pigs. So much made sense now. How had we not seen it before?
We were rats in a maze.
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