The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Book Five, Chapter 6: Sunflowers

I looked Benny right in the face. Underneath the grease, he had one of those cherub faces that looked the best when it was smiling. His thinning hair was curly but well-kept. Though he kept casting glances back at the green sedan that had caused him so much pain, he was polite and attentive and seemed, to the best of my understanding, very concerned about the missing child.

"Yeah, it was me and my boy," he said as Kimberly held the microphone in his face. "We've seen that girl coming around here a lot. She likes looking at the farms and the plants and the trees in the fields. Nice girl, never done anything wrong. And on this day, I remember she looked upset. That's what I told the cops. Normally, she's smiling and skipping like the sun is her best friend, but that day, she was sad, and I could see she had been crying. I wish I had called out to her to see what was wrong. I had no way of knowing, you understand," Benny started to say before the words caught in his throat. He almost got caught up in his emotions. His brow was heavy, and his eyes were clear due to a thin covering of tears.

"And this was three days ago?" Kimberly said.

"Right."

"Yes, ma'am. Three days. Me and the boy been out in the woods and the fields looking for her. We've been doing our part. She was headed back toward town. I just don't know what could have happened to her."

"So you've heard it here, a tragedy in Eastern Carousel. Tamara Cano remains missing. If you have any information on the missing girl, please call the Sheriff's Department number on your screen," Kimberly said to the camera. "Citizens of Eastern Carousel like Mr. Benjamin Harless are out in droves searching for the missing girl, and hope remains high that she will be found and returned to her mother. This is Kimberly Madison with Carousel News 9."

"And we're clear," I said. I wasn't actually sure if news producers were supposed to say "cut" or not, but I vaguely remembered someone saying something like “and we’re clear” when I was watching April O'Neil do a news report in a Ninja Turtles movie.

I didn’t even know if that film was being broadcast. Nick took care of everything. I just wore headphones and looked intense to try and seem like I was working.

~-~

"How did I do?" Benny asked earnestly. "You think this is going to help find that girl? Tamara used to come around. She used to play with my son, Rustle. I don't know what I'm going to tell him if something's happened to her."

"Your son?" Kimberly asked. "He knows Tamara? Is there a chance that we'll get to meet him?"

"I suppose that'd be all right, but you gotta know he… he had a hard life before he came to us, and he don't talk. But he can understand you, and he's real smart. The thing is, he gets nervous around some people, so if he don't want to talk to you, it ain't gonna happen. Hope you understand."

"I totally understand," Kimberly said. "I'd just like to see if maybe he has something to say… in his own way."

We were still On-Screen, so we didn't have the opportunity to talk about anything with each other, but things were moving forward at a very organic and slow pace, so I felt comfortable.

Kimberly was in her element. While she didn't have the natural warmth of Anna, she was good at talking to people and knew all the right places to sigh and look sad. That was a skill in and of itself.

"Let me do the talking," she said as Benny led us around to the other side of his shop.

"You realize you aren't the only one with... moxie, right?" I said.

"I realize," she answered.

As we rounded the shop, my jaw dropped at the reveal of one of the most beautiful and intricate gardens I had ever seen. It was late fall, so most of what was still green were the plants that held squashes, pumpkins, and corn along with as many different kinds and colors of sunflowers as I had ever seen.

"This is wonderful," Kimberly said.

"Well, thank you," Benny answered. "But I can't take credit; that'd be my wife and my boy."

As soon as he mentioned them, I saw them out in the garden. His son was small, but if I were to guess, he must have been around ten years old.

As I watched the sun shining off his face, he was pulling a large worm or perhaps a caterpillar off one of the sunflowers. He looked at the worm in awe and wonder and dropped it into an old coffee can as he continued to search for more worms.

On the red wallpaper, his name was Rustle, not Russell, but Rustle as in what leaves do in the wind. The woman next to him noticed us as we arrived. Her name was Rose Harless. Both of them were NPCs.

Rose gave new meaning to the term flower child. She was wearing a tiara of white flowers and a sundress that I thought only the fae were known to adorn. She was barefoot and her hair was long and flowing. She looked at Rustle like he was the sun to her flower.

From the way Benny had talked, Rustle was not biologically related to them but was adopted. To look at him, that sounded accurate. The Harlesses had dark hair and Mediterranean features, whereas Rustle had pale skin and hair so fine it was almost white.

Benny went over to his wife to discuss the arrangement. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but she was clearly hesitant. Despite this, she relented. She grabbed Rustle by the hand, and she and Benny led him back to Kimberly and me.

"No cameras," Rose said. "And I don't know if Benny told you this, but if Rustle doesn't like you, there's no talking to him. That's that."

"Absolutely," Kimberly said. She knelt down to around Rustle’s height and said, "How about it, buddy? Do you think you could talk to me about your friend Tamara? I'm just trying to find her, is all."

Rustle got close to Kimberly and looked her in the eye. Quietly, I saw an eerie intelligence in his eyes. They were piercing dark—so dark I couldn't find his pupil. After a moment of intensity, Rustle smiled. He looked back at his mother and nodded. Then he looked at me and then back at his mother.

"Well, all right then," Rose said. "Go put on your baseball cap, honey."

Rustle listened and went to fetch a small blue and white cap from out in the garden. He placed it on his head and twisted it around so that the bill faced backward. He was a thin and athletic ten-year-old. True to his father's words, he never spoke, but he definitely communicated in other ways.

"We have a table and chairs out on the deck," Rose said. “Let me go get some herbal tea."

She pointed toward a comfortable set of furniture that looked like it had been made by hand. Benny, Rustle, Kimberly, and I found our seats while Rose went to prepare the drinks. As soon as she was gone, Benny turned to us and said, "So, your friend doesn't do anything to maintain that car, does he?"

"That would be my guess," I said. “He’s more of a camera guy.”

Benny nodded. "Yeah, I could tell just listening to it running down the street. I don't know what he's done to it. Normally, I can tell just like that,” he said as he snapped his fingers, “but we got multiple things happening under that hood. You mark my words—it's a party of bad maintenance and bad parts, let me tell you."

"So, how long have you been a mechanic?" I asked.

"Since before I knew the word 'mechanic,' I was under hoods busting knuckles. The Harlesses get to work young. Rustle here has been working in the garden since he was real little, haven't you, buddy?"

Rustle nodded with a smile. He pointed out at the sunflowers and then pointed back to himself.

"What's that, buddy?" Benny said. "Oh, he's trying to tell you that he was the one who found the sunflowers. He likes to go tramping through the woods, and he found some sunflower seeds that he planted last year, and then this year, he planted the seeds from those seeds, and now we got ourselves a whole forest of sunflowers."

"That is so cool," Kimberly said. "They're so pretty."

Rustle beamed.

As I scanned the garden, I saw something that made my heart jump. It was a scarecrow. This one looked like a normal scarecrow with overalls and an old plaid shirt stuffed with straw. It had no gloves and no name tag. The face, though—the face with its buttons and its little sewn-on hat—was the same scarecrow head that I recognized from Benny the Haunted Scarecrow. It was not sun-bleached or threadbare like I remembered, but it was the same one.

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This scarecrow did not fly or cut people's heads off. It just hung from a little wooden cross, scaring away crows.

~-~

We talked for an hour or so.

"Really, we were just glad that he had found a friend. So many of the children around here can be judgmental. Tamara was different. They had their own little silent language. She would come over here, and they would play in the fields, and she would help Rustle with his work in the garden," Rose said.

"Rustle has been very upset since we found out she had gone missing," Benny said. “I don’t know why they didn’t spend time together that day. Normally, she only leaves to get home before dark. I don’t know why she left early that day.”

Rustle sat in his seat and looked down at the table. His bottom lip was firmly tucked in between his teeth as he chewed on it, a nervous gesture.

"I was just wondering," Kimberly said, "is there someplace that you and Tamara would go? Maybe a clubhouse, a cave, or a special spot that you would go out to in the woods?"

Rustle shook his head.

"We've actually been all through the area that they would have gone together," Benny explained. "They did have some stomping grounds over near the creek and through the forests and the fields out north, but we didn't find her there. We had a whole search party in that area; no one saw a thing."

Trying to talk to Rustle was difficult. Part of it was because he was nonverbal; another part was because he just didn't want to tell us everything, or at least that's how his mother, Rose, put it. He was a very secretive boy, and that had nothing to do with his not talking.

Rose stared off into the distance, not making eye contact with either of us as she said, "I know my son, and if he knew anything about this girl's disappearance, he would say something. He'd find a way."

And so the conversation went on with mostly pleasantries. Kimberly and I hadn’t had a chance to make a plan of attack since we had gotten here. We were just talking and trying to dig further.

As Rustle played in the garden, we continued to talk to Rose. Benny was already waist-deep in Nick’s car, trying to fix all that ailed it.

"I don't know if this is rude to ask," Kimberly said, "but why exactly doesn't he speak? Does he have autism or some sort of learning disability?"

"No, it's fine to ask," Rose said. She looked away from Kimberly as she spoke. "He has what the doctors are calling aphasia voluntaria. The fact is, he should be able to speak—that's what they tell us. The truth is, he came to us when he was four or five years old. We have no idea what happened to him before that. Doctors think maybe he wasn't exposed to language or, worse, maybe it's some sort of trauma response. One doctor said it was a symptom of severe anxiety. He was tested for all sorts of things like brain damage and autism, and they all came back negative. The truth is, me and Benny prayed for a child for so long. I don't care if he ever talks. Benny says there ain't nothing wrong with him. That some people are just different. I believe it. He is the way he is."

Kimberly looked at me. If we weren't On-Screen and if we were actually able to leave, we probably would have continued our search elsewhere, but the fact that we were On-Screen and our car was in pieces meant there was something here for us to learn. There had to be.

"This may be very personal, but when you say he came to you, does that mean you adopted him, or is he a foster child?" Kimberly asked.

Rose wore a blank expression on her face and didn't meet Kimberly's eyes. "No, no," she said. "We found him in the field, naked as the day he was born, covered in mud up to his eyebrows. We don’t know where he came from. He was abandoned. No one claimed him, no one reported him missing. We did everything we could to keep him when no one else tried. Like I said, we had always prayed for a child."

At that, Rose looked back at Kimberly in the eye and smiled. "Would you like some more tea, dear?"

"I would love that," Kimberly said. "Thank you so much."

As Rose went inside the old farmhouse, Kimberly started to lean over and whisper something to me, but before she could, we heard a hollering out in the garden and a screaming that sounded like it was coming from a child.

We were up and out of our seats and running toward the sound before we even had a chance to speak.

As we got closer, we saw what was screaming. It wasn't a child; it was a rabbit. It was caught inside of a metal trap, the kind that an animal might wander into and then get stuck in—a no-kill trap.

Rustle had picked up the trap and was walking away from the garden while banging on it with a stick. The rabbit screamed and screeched. I had never even heard a rabbit make a noise like that. It was somewhere between a child yelling and a baby screaming.

"What the heck is he doing?" I asked.

He continued walking the cage toward the road, up past the automotive shop. He banged on it loudly and constantly, terrorizing the poor little rabbit inside. When he set the cage down on the ground and opened the trap up, the rabbit bolted out of the cage at a speed most animals will never reach in their lifetime. It was across the road and lost in the thick brush almost immediately.

Kimberly and I were both speechless.

"Oh, don't look so alarmed," Benny called from inside his shop. "You gotta scare the animals, or they'll just come back and eat your crop. Rustle knows that. The only way to protect them is to scare the heck out of them."

Rustle picked up the trap and looked back at Kimberly and me, then casually walked back toward the garden as if nothing had happened. Kimberly and I looked at each other, unsure of what to make of what we had just seen.

~-~

We were On-Screen and Off-Screen throughout the next few hours as Benny worked on the sedan. He made quick work of it; he identified the problems and fixed them almost immediately.

"Now I'm going to set you up with this for free, and you gotta go out there and you gotta help find that girl," Benny said as he was finishing up.

"For free?" Kimberly asked.

"Got to do my part," Benny answered.

While he spoke, I looked back at the car he had been polishing when we had arrived, and he caught me staring.

"Oh, you like that, do you? An Imperial Phantom 1948. A year too old to be the kind that collectors are after, unfortunately, on account of their bad transmissions and brake design. It's a shame; I love that car. Can't keep fixing it, though. She’s too pretty to scrap, but Rose is tired of looking at it, tired of me messing with it on the weekends. She said I either had to get it to run or junk it. Really is such a shame."

"Can't find a buyer?" I asked.

"Not for the '48, you can't. Sure, I got offers for the seats because those were the same as the '50 and the '52, which are the real collectors' items, but I'm not going to just strip the seats out of it, no, no. Ain't got the heart for it. I got old Tugg Montgomery coming to haul it off. He's a regular mercenary; ain't much for fixing them up, but he can tear them down with the best of them. Sad to see. Still shines like new because I take care of my vehicles," he said, eyeing the green sedan and Nick who stood beside it.

As we stood there, Kimberly noticed that Rustle was staring at her, which she took as an invitation to have a conversation with him that didn't include his overbearing mother. She walked back past the mechanic shop toward the garden, and I followed.

"Hey, Rustle," Kimberly said, "Is there something you want to tell me?"

Rustle looked down at the ground and then back up at Kimberly. There was clearly something on his mind.

"You can tell me," Kimberly said.

Still, Rustle didn't look like he could trust her, but he did look upset.

"I'll tell you what," Kimberly said. "Whatever you have to say to me, I promise I will not judge you, whether it's good or bad. Do you believe me?"

Rustle looked at her. At that moment, his face took on a more ancient visage, a look of wisdom far beyond his years, a look forged by distrust. He started to walk away and then looked over his shoulder back at Kimberly and me, then continued walking.

We followed.

He led us to the other side of the mechanic shop, where a field of sunflowers with beautiful orange and red petals was planted. They were the only batch like them in the whole garden. He pointed at them. At first, I didn't know what he was pointing at, but then I realized that he was pointing at ten or so stems that had been cut and their flowers removed.

"Did someone take the flowers?" Kimberly asked.

Rustle nodded his head and then pointed at himself.

"What did you take the flowers for, sweetie?" Kimberly asked.

Rustle didn't answer, but Kimberly seemed to be connecting dots before I did, and she pulled out a folded-up copy of the missing poster.

"Did you give the flowers to her?" she asked.

Rustle chewed on his bottom lip and stared at the picture of Tamara. I couldn’t read his face.

"Hey, folks," Benny called from over near the mechanic shop. "We got someone here that would love to speak to you."

I turned to see Benny walking over to us in his greasy coveralls. Hot on his heels was Dina, dressed not in a dress or skirt like Kimberly or Rose, but in jeans. They weren't ripped jeans like the ones she normally wore, and her leather jacket was replaced with a brown one with a ridged fabric. I could see that she had an apron tucked into her pocket, as one of the strings and the neck loop was hanging out.

"Miss Cano," Kimberly said, "I recognize you. My name is Kimberly Madison. I'm with Carousel News 9. We're currently investigating your daughter's disappearance."

Kimberly stuck out her hand to shake Dina's. Dina, playing her part, kept her arms folded for a time and then reached out and shook Kimberly's hand.

"Are you here to be vultures?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," Kimberly said. "I don't know what you mean."

"The news people. They come here to feast off the dead. To make a living off of other people's misfortune. Is that what you're here for?"

"No," Kimberly said. "I'm here to find out what happened to Tamara."

Dina and Kimberly locked eyes and stared at each other for a moment.

"Well, at least somebody is," Dina said at last. Her eyes went past Kimberly and past me, and she saw the beautiful sunflowers next to Rustle. She rushed toward them.

"Tamara has been giving me flowers just like this for the last few weeks. Is this where she's been getting them?"

Credit to Dina, who normally put very little effort into acting. She was on the verge of tears as she spoke, and moments later, the tears broke, and she started to cry.

Benny rushed to his son's side. "Rustle, have you been giving Tamara these flowers?"

Rustle nodded.

Dina, who had started to cry and was trying to stop, turned away from Benny and put her head in her hands.

"Well, ma'am, we're searching all over for your daughter, and we really hope that you find her safe," Benny said, close to tears of his own. He pulled a pocket knife from his coveralls and moved toward the sunflowers. He grabbed one of them that was right for cutting and started to take it down, but Rustle pushed his arm away and stood between him and the sunflower, shaking his head.

"Son, I know you don't like things messing with the garden, but this is what these flowers are for. We give people beautiful things to make them feel better, you understand?"

Rustle's eyes began to tear up and he pleaded with his father not to cut down the sunflower. When Benny finally relented, Rustle grabbed the pocket knife, put it inside his own pocket, and then ran back inside the house.

Benny turned to Dina and said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry. I don't know what's going on, but Rustle sure did care about your daughter, and he's having a hard time with it."

"It's okay. It's okay," Dina said. "All I care about is finding Tamara."

"We're gonna," Benny said. "She's... she's gonna be just fine."

Dina dropped to her knees and said through tears, "I don't think she is. I can feel her. I don't think she's coming home."

Dina's tropes allowed her to connect to her character's dead loved ones. Perhaps some connections did more harm than good.

Kimberly hugged Dina, and Benny offered her his least greasy rag to wipe her tears.