Book Nine, Chapter 47: Ramona Interlude Part Two

“I don't think I've ever seen waves this big on a lake,” Ramona Mercer said as she stared off the back deck of the cabin overlooking Dyer’s Lake.

“Don't worry,” Tommy said, leaning against the rail, not staring at the water but instead looking straight at her. “It’s nothing to worry about. The lake is shaped like a crescent moon, and sometimes the wind can hit it just right so that it gets trapped in the valley and pushes the water all the way from that end to this one, and you get waves like this.”

The water was loud but soothing.

The cabin they were staying in was up on a small cliff, thirty or so feet above the beach. If Ramona looked to her left a few hundred yards, she could see the remains of the bonfire. Only a few coals still burned, shining resolutely in the darkness.

“You know, I've lived a twenty-minute drive from this place my whole life, and I only came here once,” she said. “My family vacationed over in southeastern Carousel. We were river people, my family.”

“Southeastern Carousel has some good vistas,” Tommy said as he slicked back his hair. “But if they could charge you money to look at them, they would.”

“They do,” Ramona said. “The, uh, little viewfinder binoculars they have out by the canyon, they cost fifty cents. When I was a kid, that was so much money. I thought I was spending a fortune. Fifty cents felt like a fortune. Sometimes you wish you could go back to that.”

Tommy laughed as he finally turned his gaze away from Ramona and looked out over the lake. The moon peeked out from behind some clouds.

“Everything feels like a luxury when you're a kid because you don't know what it means to need something yet. Well, not if you're lucky.”

“I was a lucky kid, all things considered,” Ramona said. “Things went to hell right when I became an adult, but my childhood was something else.”

Ramona had spent most of the night just talking to paragons. A lot of it was On-Screen, but not all of it. She had never been so focused on in all her time in Carousel, but that was probably because she was always so underleveled. Being the center of attention reminded her so much of her life back before she discovered everything was a lie.

She wanted to focus on this moment, to enjoy the good things in between the bad things. That was how she could make it through, but she wasn't made for the softer side of life. Her emotions ran on high voltage because she was wired for conflict and friction. Every time she found herself in a peaceful state of mind, she knew that she was just passing through.

Off-Screen.

“We have to go inside sometime,” Tommy said with a knowing look.

She could tell that he felt sorry for her. He could see the script. He knew what was coming.

So did she. She just didn't know how it would happen.

“Just another minute,” she said.

“That's no problem,” he said. “We have all the time in the world.”

-

Later, when she finally walked inside the cabin and saw how it was set up with a communal sleeping place: one pair of bunk beds, a large queen bed, and several pallets made out on the floor in front of the closed-up fireplace.

Oscar lay in the center of the room on top of a white fluffy rug. He was not as wise as Ramona and had indulged in certain recreational activities that left him less than clear-minded.

“This carpet feels like they skinned a stuffed animal,” he said. “And they were so proud of it, they just had to lay it out here in front of the fireplace. A trophy, like they killed a great beast.”

The others were varying degrees of the same state of mind, with an exception of Celia, who, like Ramona, had not imbibed much, if anything. But that didn't help. She sat on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed with her knees to her chest and her eyes directed at the floor. The hypnotism-induced dream memory had really rattled her.

Ramona chose one of the pallets on the floor. It was a small cabin, and she didn't want her back to the door, so she found herself in the corner, watching the shadows on the walls projected by a small gas lantern. All the windows were open, though they had screens to keep the bugs out.

The rest of the paragons were distributed casually around the room so they would all be visible to whatever cameras were hidden inside.

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“It's so awful,” Celia said. “I can't remember if it really happened. I feel like I'm losing my mind.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Ace said. “I'd give you mine if I could.”

Celia laughed, breaking through whatever darkness had overcome her.

“I'd choose no mind over yours,” she said with a soft smile as she looked over at him.

“They'd be pretty hard to tell apart,” Geneva said from up on the queen bed, where Sidney lay next to her, her nose firmly planted in a paperback book with well-folded corners from decades of readers marking their place.

Everyone laughed, even Ace. His glance lingered on Celia, an empathetic gesture that she understood and returned with a smile.

“The strangest thing is, I swear I saw him before,” she said, unable to contain herself.

The whole room groaned, and Ramona joined in because she could see it coming.

“Maybe he was on a TV show when we were kids,” Geneva suggested. “Highbrow Hew. What is he, like a clown or something?”

Celia gazed out in front of her, trying to remember.

“He's dressed like a ringmaster, you know, the person who announces stuff at a circus, who seems to be in charge. I guess he might have been a clown too. I don't know. I don't want to remember his face, but his name was spelled the word ‘hew,’ like to cleave something, instead of the name Hugh. I have a hard time believing there was a kids’ show with that type of pun.”

“How do you know what it was spelled like?” Oscar asked. “Do your dreams have subtitles? And for your information, there are all kinds of children's media that would adore that pun. In kids’ TV, you can only horrify through implication because killing people is bad, but a fate worse than death is okay.”

Ramona noticed that he was playing up his mental state for laughs. Some boys will do anything for a little attention.

“I don't know,” Celia said. “It's not like I saw the words. It's just… know it, as in, like, it's innate, like it has to be true.”

“I'm going to be honest,” Ace said. “It freaks me out a little bit when you talk about it. I'm not afraid to admit it. Also, point of fact, no one ever wants to hear about anyone else's dreams. Maybe some people will be polite and listen, but nobody cares. Just throwing that out there.”

“It wasn't a dream,” Celia said. “It didn't feel like that.”

“Dr. Bob wants to hear about your dreams,” Oscar said. “Hey, Sidney, what would Dr. Bob say about Celia’s inside-of-body experience?”

Sidney didn't hear him at first. She was too busy reading. Everyone was quiet, waiting to see if she would respond, and when she finally did, she did so by reading a passage from the book:

“It is only by the abstraction afforded to us by the collective unconscious and by the symbology of the innate mind that we can truly understand the nature of humanity and, by consequence, of individuals. We all bear that arcane architecture which produces for us the faculties for reason, imagination, and emotion. Like a supercomputer calculating a rocket's trajectory in orbit, our minds exist as an array of calculations, algorithms, and subroutines, in the midst of which vulnerabilities lie. Errant code, flaws in construction, and simple bad luck might topple this great machine. It is unknown which folds of the brain control the inner world which we all share and tread on, but we know that such a place can only be surveyed in dreams or, as I have theorized and will demonstrate in the following passages, through hypnosis. Perhaps the collective unconscious contains knowledge that the conscious mind cannot comprehend except through imagined imagery that we experience as the defragmentation process known as dreaming. What knowledge lies locked behind the human ability to comprehend? What truths do our psyches scream to warn us against? What is the shape of our common destruction?”

The room was silent for a moment as the weight of that verbose passage was processed by all who heard.

“I often wonder that myself,” Oscar said eventually, chuckling.

“You said Dr. Bob gave you that book?” Geneva asked.

“He says that if you can understand the nature of fear, it can help you overcome trauma,” Sidney answered.

“And this is supposed to help you understand fear?” Ace asked. “If you want to understand fear, you don't stimulate the bookish part of your brain. You gotta talk to the monkey hidden inside. To the great ape.”

“A lot of us don't have a monkey hidden inside,” Oscar said. “Be more considerate.”

Ace laughed, but then he continued.

“You gotta search deep to the part of you that survived the savanna and the jungle. Our instincts are an instruction manual written in a language you can't read in a book.”

“If it's Spanish, I could help,” Oscar said, laughing at his own joke as he sprawled out on the white fluffy rug.

Ramona didn't say much. She almost forgot that she was supposed to. It wasn't in her nature to interrupt people, especially not when she was busy interpreting every word and action, looking for clues.

But she did need to give Carousel something.

She got up from her pallet, walked over to the queen bed where Sidney was lying down, and picked up the edge of the book gently so that she could read the cover aloud: “Phantasmagoria Egregorica.” Then she paused when she saw the author: Peter Dragomir. In a story with so many paragons, was it possible that this Peter was Peter Who Knocked on the Door, the Eldritch Conduit paragon?

“What kind of doctor is Dr. Bob that he's recommending a book like that?” Oscar asked.

The book certainly had a name that demanded leather binding, but it was a paperback, well-made and well-used. Even as she touched it, she felt that underneath, it was something ancient.

“Well, as much as I would love for you to read us esoteric bedtime theories, I think we should get some sleep,” Tommy said from his place on the top bunk.

“I thought you were asleep,” Ramona said.

“I've been in and out,” he responded.

Sidney was reluctant to put the book down and turn the gas lantern off, but she eventually did, and they all settled in under their various sleeping setups for a night of difficult slumber.

Ramona didn't like the silence or the darkness that would overtake the room when the moon went behind a cloud. All she could do was wait for the moment that the scene ended and she would meet an ugly fate.

She didn't even remember falling asleep. Maybe Carousel got tired of waiting and just sent her there on its own. Whatever it was that caused her to fall asleep, this time, it really did feel like falling.