Darkness receded from the edges of her vision like a slow tide.
She lay in a thick, wet fog. Through the mist she heard laughter, the grinding of calliope music, and the ding-ding-dings of carnival games. She perceived the faint aromas of caramel and buttered popcorn. Confused, she stumbled toward the sounds and smells. She had just been out on her frozen lawn fighting with the monster inside Henry. Where was she now?
The fog parted, and the mud beneath Reggie’s feet gave way to sawdust. Game booths, candy vendors, and balloon-toting clowns filled a crowded midway. A roller-coaster, a log ride, a fun house, and an enormous Ferris wheel punctuated the dark sky. Reggie pushed through a red turnstile and walked into a dreamlike version of the Bottle Hill fairgrounds.
Gaggles of happy children ran from one booth to the next, carrying funnel cakes and stems of cotton candy, and one tiny girl skipped by with a bear almost twice her size. As she passed Reggie, the girl tripped and fell on her plushy prize. Reggie reached down to help her, but the girl popped up on her own and raced after her friends, laughing.
Since she was four, Reggie and her parents had driven each summer to the town of Bottle Hill for its annual four-day carnival. The first three years it had just been Reggie. The summer after Henry was born, Reggie and Dad rode the Ferris wheel again and again, waving down from the top at Mom and the blue stroller far below.
The carnival, more than any other place, reminded Reggie of the happy times her family once shared. Even when she had outgrown the joys of roller-coasters and bumper cars, Reggie took vicarious delight in watching Henry. He loved the Bottle Hill Festival as much as she had.
Until Mom left. They had not been back since.
With every passing moment, the scents grew richer, the noises louder, the colors brighter. The memory of the fight with Henry pulsed like a failing heartbeat in the back of her mind. She tried to revive it, to resuscitate the details — the snow, the cold, the smoke in the boy’s eyes. But the memory faded beneath the sounds, smells, and sights of the carnival.
She stood in front of the Ferris wheel and looked up. The red, yellow, and white carriages swung in the breeze as the ride slowed and stopped. A freckled red-haired boy and an apple-cheeked blond girl hopped out of a carriage and scampered down the ramp, clutching strips of pink ride tickets and ice cream cones. The little girl dragged a teddy bear behind her.
“Hey!” Reggie shouted. Her voice sounded paper-thin.
The boy stopped and gave her a puzzled look.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Reggie moved toward him, but the boy stepped back.
“You’re a stranger here,” he said.
“A stranger where? What is this place? It looks like the Bottle Hill carnival, but —”
The boy took a nervous lick of chocolate chip ice cream. “Did he invite you?”
“Did who invite me?”
The boy leaned in close and sniffed. His eyes grew wide.
“You’re an intruder.” Ice cream dripped from the boy’s chin as he spoke. “You weren’t invited. You should go.” He pointed into the fog, his pudgy finger shaking.
“An intruder where?” Reggie clutched the boy’s shoulders. “Where are we?”
The blond girl glared at her. She whispered in her teddy bear’s ear and then held it up in front of Reggie. It looked mangy and dirty, and its eyes were missing.
“I can see you,” said the girl, wagging the bear at Reggie.
Black smoke poured from the bear’s eye sockets. A glistening tongue shot out of its mouth and waggled at Reggie. She stumbled backward and let out a startled cry. The girl giggled and raced off.
“Where am I?”
The boy opened his mouth to speak, but he only made guttural clacking sounds.
His tongue had been sliced off.
Blood oozed from the stump and coated his teeth. He dropped his cone and ran after the girl. Reggie stood there, shocked. The ice cream pulsated and oozed in the sawdust at her feet. It formed a crude face, the cone sitting atop its head like a crooked dunce cap. The face gurgled at her in a high voice:
You’ve been devoured by his fear,
And he will spend forever here!
Reggie picked up the cone.
“Whose fear? Devoured by whose fear?”
The ice cream dripped from her hand to the dirt.
A wave of children ran past Reggie toward a bustling game stall, and Reggie followed, peering over the dozen little bobbing heads. Three water guns were bolted to the middle of a splintery wooden counter, and ratty stuffed animals hung from rusted nails around the booth.
Reggie knew the game well. Be the fastest kid to shoot water into your plastic clown’s mouth, pop the balloon behind its head, and win a prize. This was how Henry had won Kappy, his beloved koala bear. Mom had been so proud.
“Where are the heads?” asked a curly-haired boy, hopping up and down.
“Here they come!” shouted a boy with thick glasses and a baseball cap. “Look! Here come the heads! Here come the heads!” He pointed to a tall, thin clown in a brown-stained polka-dot jumpsuit who had stepped out from behind a curtain.
The clown had one hand tucked inside his suit, and the other held the decapitated heads of three children by the hair. Their expressions were a mix of shock and fright. The scene was like something torn from a B-horror movie, but that did not reassure Reggie. Beneath the scent of butter and cotton candy lay the rankness of death and decay.
The clown put the severed heads in a row on a table, and two girls stepped onto the rickety milk crates set in front of the counter. The excited crowd pushed a little boy up onto a third crate between them. Both girls turned to the boy and giggled, wispy black smoke curling out of their eye sockets. They pressed their smoky eyes against the scopes and wrapped their fingers around the triggers. The boy tried to step down, but the throng forced him back up.
“Get up and play, wimp!” yelled one kid.
“Better not lose!” warned another.
The boy turned his head. The curly hair, the round face, the wide and terrified eyes . . .
“Henry!” Reggie screamed, but her voice was drowned by the loud blare of the clown’s air horn. “Henry, it’s me!” Reggie pushed forward, but the cheering kids blocked her. Dozens of black eyes oozed smoke as the crowd’s excitement grew.
“Stay away from him!” she yelled.
“No,” a pug-nosed boy warned, “you stay away from him. Unless you want your head on that board.”
He punched her in the gut. Reggie choked at the blow and hunched over her stomach, coughing and gasping for breath. She crawled through the sawdust, the demented children kicking and shoving her down every time she tried to rise to her feet.
“Please ... ,” Reggie burbled. “Don’t hurt my brother . . .”
She looked over the crowd to see the girls firing bursts of red fluid from their pistols. The brains expanded out from the top of the heads like balloons.
“You’re gonna lose!” teased the boy in glasses, smoke filling his thick lenses.
“He’s too scared to play!” the little blond girl spat. “Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!”
The crowd joined the chant and pumped their small fists in the air. Henry placed his trembling hands on the pistol in front of him and squeezed. The red stream shot into the air and drenched a prize, a one-eyed toy monkey, dangling from a beam.
The crowd erupted in laughter.
Reggie staggered to her feet, her legs still shaking from the blow. She pushed a little girl aside and attempted to reach Henry again. The girl snapped her head toward Reggie.
“Look! I got my face painted!” Her cheeks morphed into a squirming palette of bugs and slimy larvae, hanging raggedly from her jaws. “Do you like it?” Thick segmented worms writhed out from her face and crawled onto Reggie’s arms. “Want me to paint yours?”
Reggie recoiled and slapped at the worms. They turned to black smoke and left a powdery residue on her skin.
Henry slipped from his crate and fell backward into the sawdust. His gun spurted into the tattered awning of the booth. Laughter boomed again and one of the kids kicked the fallen boy.
The brains of the girls’ targets stretched to maximum capacity, quavered for a moment from the pressure, and then exploded simultaneously with sickening pops, splattering the clown’s costume. He sounded the air horn several times, then turned his eyes on Henry. The ghoulish children backed away and taunted the boy as he scrambled to his feet.
“You lost, scaredy cat!”
“Better run!”
“Better hide!”
“Better keep your brains inside!”
Reggie called out to her brother, but he couldn’t hear her over the jeers. The crowd held her back with chilled hands as the clown hopped onto the booth counter. Smiling madly, he pulled his hidden arm from inside his costume. Fused to his wrist where his hand should have been was a rusty, bloodstained hatchet.
“Henry!” Reggie cried. “Run!”
Her brother’s screams echoed through the carnival. He scampered toward the midway, the clown skipping behind him in his floppy shoes, honking his air horn and swinging his ax hand.
Reggie wrenched free of the laughing children and ran after her brother and the killer clown, but lost track of them near the Ferris wheel. Close by, a rusty dunk tank brimmed with churning red gore. Submerged in that sludge of entrails, a vaguely human shape writhed. Reggie backed away.
She circled the roller-coaster tracks and raced past the concession stands. Human torsos, headless and limbless, lay on the food counters. They’d been gutted with ribs splayed wide. Chest cavities had been filled with crushed ice and chilled bottles of dark liquid. Unspeakable dismemberments sizzled on greasy grills, emitting a fleshy burning scent that soured in her mouth. Plastic log cars whooshed down the flume ride, splashing into a pool choked with bloated corpses.
There was no trace of her brother or the clown.
She raced by a whirling carousel. Gone were the white horses and unicorns from childhood memory, replaced by black-horned demons and gray sharp-winged gargoyles. Reggie looked around in desperation.
“Henry!” she screamed. “Henry, where are you?”
The clown’s air horn blared in the distance. Reggie jumped aboard the carousel and raced across to the other side just in time to see the clown disappear through the swirling, striped cylinder at the fun house entrance.
She followed, tripping and stumbling through the spinning tube, and finally fell into the Hall of Mirrors. Here she was surrounded by distortions of her own reflection: short and squashed; tall, rail thin, and pointy-headed; a wavy corkscrew; puckered eyes, lips, and ears. The floor and ceiling were mirrored, too. Everything moved, twisted, and undulated. Bile crept up Reggie’s throat, but she continued to stumble through the maze, bumping into the walls, calling for Henry.
But as she progressed through the labyrinth, her reflections turned into Henry in different stages of life. Here, he was a boy of five, crying for the loss of his grandmother; there, an old man, cancerous and brittle, as their grandfather had been for months before he died.
She whirled around and saw the reflection of a small skel-eton.
“Not real, Reggie. None of this can be real.” The visions melted away and Reggie’s image now stared back at her. She leaned against a mirror and closed her eyes, listening. The maze was silent save the sound of her ragged breathing.
“Please, Henry,” she whispered. “Answer me.”
Something shuffled across the floor. In the mirrors, clown shoes spread out in both directions, splattered with blood. Reggie looked up to see an infinite line of rusty ax blades raised above her head. She ducked as the hatchets fell.
One sliced into her right shoulder.
The blade tore through her shirt and into her flesh. Reggie screamed as blood spattered onto the mirrored glass wall. She scrambled deeper into the labyrinth, smacking into mirrors and staggering down the corridors. Soon her legs became leaden and her motions slow, as if all of time was grinding to a halt around her. Sound and color faded from the world.
Her surroundings became translucent, like glass sculptures set against churning darkness, and then they faded away. Paralyzed, she tumbled through a void, helpless and without light, warmth, or hope . . .
Something cool touched Reggie’s skin. She opened her eyes; snow-flakes fell on her nose and lashes. The carnival was gone — the ghastly children, the mirrors, the clown. Gone.
She was on her lawn again. Next to her lay Henry, only semi-conscious. He moaned and gasped with his eyes closed.
“Out,” he whispered. “Get out!”
Then the boy bolted upright in the snow, his eyes wide in fright. He ran his trembling fingers over his face as if to make sure he was alive. Then he pounced like a feral cat on Reggie, who was too confused to react, too weak to fight him off.
“How did you do that?” the boy spat. His fingers tightened around her throat. “I’ll rip your head off for that!”
A snow shovel slammed across Henry’s back and knocked him to the ground.
“You touch her again and I’ll rip your head off.” Aaron pulled Reggie to her feet. “Get out of here, you evil little bastard.”
“You’ll pay,” said Henry, rising to his feet. Smoke wisped around his cold eyes. “You should never have entered our domain. We’ll come for you now. Both of you.”
The boy stumbled inside and slammed the front door. The deadbolt clicked.
“Domain?” Aaron asked as he helped his weakened friend to her feet. “Reggie, just where the hell did you go?”