Book Five, Chapter 60: Carousel Family Video
Carousel Family Video, despite purporting to be a family store, was huge, but it never lost its charm.
As I walked inside, I was struck by an invisible wall of nostalgia that didn’t belong to me. For as much as I liked watching vintage horror movies growing up, I missed the age of the video rental store by a few years.
Sure, when I was a kid, my grandpa would pick up some movies for me to watch, often sneaking them into my backpack when my parents weren’t watching. But by the time I was living with my grandparents, most of my movies were bought online in big boxes of assorted VHSs and DVDs and then doled out one at a time every week or so as a reward for doing my homework, completing chores, or maybe just when I looked sad.
But here was a huge store, the size of a grocery market, with two stories—an upstairs and a downstairs—all devoted to movies, specifically VHS. There were no DVDs to be found.
That had to be a stylistic choice.
Customers and employees filled the place, just browsing, occasionally checking out a film. As the Atlas had led me to expect, there were no omens in the store and no trope items, either. Whatever danger was here truly was unknown.
As we filed into the store, Antoine held the crybaby high, like it was some sort of talisman of religious significance, pointing it in different directions, expecting it to start crying, but its little robotic cry never sounded.
We must have looked like goofballs.
We had a plan for how we were going to do things, and that plan involved visiting a local hardware store—one of the old ones from the 1920s, where you told a guy behind a counter what you wanted, and he went and got it for you—to buy a length of rope.