As the captivating boy guided me across the carnival, I was bewitched, stripped of any voluntary movement. Whatever spell he’d put on me dulled my will to fight him. My mind was no longer my own.
We approached the entrance to a fun house the size of three large trailers, containing whimsical colors, textures, and quirky, motorized animals. Colorfully painted cartoons with exaggerated expressions covered the exterior walls, and by the entrance stood a creepy motorized clown. It shifted side to side, waving.
The boy stopped, eerily facing the shadowy doorway. He turned faintly in my direction and scrutinized me with those hypnotic mismatched green eyes. His cold features sharpened into a callous, almost hostile expression that slanted his lips into a cruel grin, before he withdrew into the darkness of the building.
Come to me.
Helpless to resist, I followed. I stepped through the threshold and let the darkness consume me.
A door slammed and the spell shattered. The awareness of where I was threw me into a panic. Grappling for the door, I couldn’t regulate my breathing. There were no handles on the shadowy metal walls. No escape.
My thoughts crowded together into a hectic tangle. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been to enter this fun house alone. No. The boy. The boy compelled me to this point. I needed to find a way out and get far, far away from that hypnotic creature.
The sensation of being watched pricked the back of my neck. I moved too quickly, too fearfully, stumbling over the uneven floor.
My hands desperately traced the sides of a hallway as guidance. The loud, quirky music playing stuttered, then shut off completely. I could now only hear the sound of my heavy breathing and the faint buzz and clicking of mechanics.
Menacing laughter thundered through the silence. Startled, I flattened myself against a wall and held my breath. That laugh was far too husky and masculine to be the boy’s. Boots lumbered closer.
The relentless sensation of fear settled deep into my gut, threatening to hurl up my dinner.
Pushing off the wall, I tumbled into another room that was so humid and dusty, it was hard to get enough oxygen. A single lightbulb swung from the ceiling, forming the ominous shadow of the boy along the wall. I watched in horror as he morphed from darkness to corporeal, shadows peeling away from his young yet eerie, sinister face.
I was held motionless.
A distant memory unfurled itself from a cobwebbed corner of my subconscious. It was then that I looked at the boy differently.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The boy tilted his head up. A gloved hand darted out from the darkness to snatch the chain attached to the lightbulb and yank it down with a click. My eyes widened as light slanted over a bone-chilling clown standing behind the little boy. Soulless obsidian eyes bore into mine, heavy layers of makeup exaggerating a vile smirk, as its lips slowly stretched upward.
“Let’s play,” the clown hissed.
An enormous force pitched into my body, knocking me backward. I lost my footing, stumbled into thick curtains, and fell a great distance. My head hit the ground. Hard.
I wrenched awake in an awkward position on the floor, having evidently lost consciousness. As my vision swam, a room with crooked floors and buzzing, flickering neon lights spread out before me. The room was freezing. Each breath smoked the air; my skin burst into gooseflesh. Disoriented, I peered at the mirrored walls, which were rotating slowly, like a carousel.
What is happening?
I couldn’t remember how I’d entered this room or how much time had passed. My thoughts jumped to the boy first as I hurried myself up to my feet in a dizzy panic. Where was he?
David. I recalled him sitting at the picnic table, unable to move.
Was he okay? I remembered falling and tilted my head up at the closed ceiling above me. Had I hurt myself and dreamt it all? My hand pressed against the back of my head and there was no trace of blood.
Whimsical music erupted in crackles from cheap speakers and the tilted, crooked floor violently shook. As I fell into a wider stance, I glanced up at a piece of metal in front of me. There, in the reflective surface, the clown stood over my shoulder.
A grin stretched across his mouth, baring a mouthful of bloody fangs.
My heart exploded in my chest.
I took off, hurtling through rockets of compressed air into another disorienting room. Everything was black and white; strobe lights flashed across the walls and floor.
Suddenly the clown appeared out of nowhere and leapt into my space. I shrieked. The frightening figure towered over me, backing me into a wall. He wore a black-and-white checkered outfit with a bell dangling around his neck.
As I stood frozen, trembling, trapped, taking in the dreadful sight of one of my worst fears, a snakelike tongue lolled out of the clown’s wicked mouth, grazing at my cheek. “I can taste your fear,” he whispered.
This time, when he grinned, I noticed how all his teeth were sharp, and how his black-and-white makeup altered, lining up differently, like a skeleton.
Death.
A moment of bravery overcame my body as I shoved him away and hightailed it toward an exit. Entering a hallway with optical illusions on the floor, the walls grew tighter, closing in as adrenaline propelled me faster. I came to an impossibly small opening at the end and panicked. I was terrified of tight spaces, to the point where I always kept my bedroom door cracked open at night. With no other way out, I stole a look over my shoulder. The wicked clown stood at the end of the hallway with outstretched arms, white-gloved hands pressed against either wall, watching his prey with no escape.
I turned sideways and shuffled against the tightening space ahead, casting one last look over my shoulder. The clown was rapidly approaching now, his gloved fingers dragging against the walls, his feet no longer touching the ground. His head tilted down with a menacing grin, humming like a psychopath to the screwy carnival music.
“Don’t you want to play, Faith?” the clown purred.
“Stay away from me!” I stumbled back as his hand reached out, my back hitting the end of the hall. This was it. With no way out, I closed my eyes tight and pushed my back against the wall, which gave way behind me. A small dark opening had appeared in the wall, too small for the huge clown to follow. I dove into it and crawled fast against polished hardwood, the ground growing slick with some sort of warm liquid. I lost my grip as the ground tilted forward.
My throat unleashed a shriek. Rapidly sliding face-first down a long tunnel, my limbs crashed and slammed into crooked turns before I was dumped into a ball pit.
I clutched my head as I rose from the rainbow assortment of plastic balls, the room dizzying with flashing lights. When I looked down at my hands, they were stained red with blood. Before I could register if it was mine or someone else’s, something touched my ankle in the ball pit. Screaming and sobbing at this point, I hurried from the ball pit and hoisted myself onto a ledge, stumbling toward a neon-red sign over a door that read exit.
Bursting through the doorway, a labyrinth of mirrors stretched out and the whimsical music intensified. The sound of feet pounding against the ground reverberated off the walls, as if I was being pursued from all directions, forcing me through a certain route with more constricted passageways and distorted mirrors. After what seemed like an eternity of cruel pandemonium, I came to a dead end.
I turned my head and caught my reflection in multiple glass panes.
There was no visible pathway, and the way I came from had closed up as if it were never there. I frantically paced the perimeter of the room, feeling around for another hidden door. My fingers climbed up to my throat as I backpedaled to the center of the room.
“Wake up,” I pleaded. “Please, wake up. Just wake up!”
“Happy belated.”
I whirled around and there he was. Death. Fear trapped me in a little cage. He wore the same obsidian riding cloak with a draping hood concealing his features. He was much larger than I remembered—if that was even possible—built like a linebacker. I was left with no room to run. No room to scream. No room to breathe.
“I said I would deal with you later.” The deep rumble of his voice was as silky as luxurious velveteen, lilted with that rich, unmarked accent. “It’s later.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You’re not that bright, are you?” He loomed over me, as if he were about to whoosh me away. The faint smell of cherries fanned my face. “I’m here to collect.”
Swallowing hard, I shrank back, which drew my attention to the cold silver chain that shifted at my throat. My cross.
“Burn, asshole!” I unclasped my necklace and held it out between us. “The power of Christ compels you!”
Death’s hooded head dipped down to my hand. The tiny space between us shrank down to nothing. “The power of Christ bores me.”
In one last attempt at freedom, I threw the cross at him. It anti-climactically smacked against his broad chest and clattered to the ground. Cringe.
“Oh,” the words came out flat, “the agony.” He cut his concealed glare to me and kicked the cross to the side. “That was pathetic.”
“Not as pathetic as your cliché Grim Reaper costume,” I snapped, before I could stop myself.
He moved in an instant, pinning me against a mirror with a single gloved finger. I knew he could have easily drilled that finger straight through my flesh and bone.
“Even when Faith was scared shitless, she still had a mouth on her.” Death snickered in a low, sinister way. “Sounds like a great obituary.”
“If you were going to kill me,” I said, deliberately echoing his words, “you would have done it already.”
He tilted his head to one side. “Accidents happen.”
Terror swirled sickly in my stomach as he bent closer, but I wouldn’t allow any fear to show on my face. As long as he didn’t get the pleasure of seeing my fear, I didn’t feel so helpless. His veiled features lingered right in front of me like an infinite black hole. As I fell into his mesmerizing darkness, I knew I was staring into the masked eyes of a creature several levels above me on the food chain.
Which made me wonder what he ate.
“You won’t like the answer,” Death said.
He drew away from me, circling the small space of mirrors. His frame was crammed with layers of thick, bulging muscle, which shifted beneath his cloak. Nevertheless, he carried himself gracefully, gliding across the floor like a jaguar. His hooded head angled in my direction as the gloved fingers of his right hand dragged along the glass surfaces of the mirrors. The reflective faces stirred, transforming into some sort of metallic liquid that rippled to life.
“My purpose here is to jog your memory.” His voice boomed off the walls of the tiny reflective room. “Only then can we discuss your future.”
“Why is she screaming like that?”
My eyes cut to the mirror next to me. My image dissolved as the scene spread along the reflective surface like a television screen.
A masked man held a little girl tightly by the arms. As she thrashed around, I recognized the blond girl as my younger self, and I recognized the market too. Pressure pinched at the front of my skull, but I couldn’t tear myself away from this.
“How about a front-row seat?” Death rasped at my ear, and then shoved me forward. I fell through the mirror as if it were a silver pool.
My back hit cold tile. Terror struck. I was now in the food market, witnessing firsthand what had been in the mirror.
Little Faith ran toward me, her golden-blond hair tossing in waves over her tiny shoulders. Unease shimmied down my spine as I watched my mother grapple for the gunman’s weapon while another masked robber slinked out of a checkout aisle to block Little Faith’s path. He raised his gun. The crack of a bullet rang through my ears, an explosion of pain ensuing in my stomach. I staggered a little in shock, before falling to my knees. As I hit the ground, Little Faith did too.
Heat seared through my abdomen like a branding iron. With a sharp intake of breath, I tilted my head down and pressed my hand against my belly. There was no wound. The pain dissipated. What the . . . Tilting my head up, I watched as my younger self bled out on the floor. Time stopped within the store, just like it had stopped in the carnival.
Little Faith and I were now alone in the market. Everything changed. Color drained from the darkening store as if we were in an alternate reality. The temperature plummeted to the raw, arctic chill of a meat locker.
“You must be Faith.”
My eyes darted to the voice. The boy with the mismatched eyes.
He was here, bewitching my younger self. The more I analyzed him, the more he became distorted, as if he were a trick, an illusion. He kept his hands clasped casually behind his back. To hide his hands, I concluded, since his fingers ended in black talons at the fingertips.
When he moved closer to Little Faith, he had the stride of a predator.
A shadow stretched out on the wall behind him, revealing a full-grown man instead of a boy.
“When you are eighteen, I will return to collect your soul,” the boy said. “Ten years is a long time from now. Would you not agree?”
“No.” I stepped back from the scene, shaking my head. “No . . . ”
He grasped her delicate hand with his deadly one. Instantaneously, the boy transformed. His facial features sharpened into something exotic, animalistic. Intricate markings emerged from beneath his skin. Little Faith’s eyes rolled back into her head, and her golden hair altered into a midnight shade, matching his. I touched my own dark hair with a tremulous hand.
“You’ll remember me one day, Faith Williams.”
When your luck runs out. The scene cleared in a whirl of colors.
And once again, I stood in the room of mirrors.
Death was no longer here. Stifling a sob, I stared wide-eyed at my petrified reflection. A chill ripped through me as more fragments of my lost memory collided with my conscious and stained my vision.
I’d lived my life with blinders, unable to see anything else but the false safety of what I thought my life would be. Now the lost parts of my memory were back, and reality cracked its heartless whip across my face. My life was an out-of-control roller coaster without a lap bar and it was only going downhill from here.
I remembered the day I struck the deal with the boy with mismatched green eyes. But he wasn’t a boy. He was a trick, a façade the real monster wore that fateful day. He was Death. And he was real.
God help me, he was real.
The Grim Reaper had spared my life because of his cryptic interest in my soul. Which only begged the question: What would happen to me if I didn’t go with him?
“Take a wild guess,” Death hissed down the back of my neck,
“cupcake.”
There was a loud rushing in my ears, the roar of a storm.
Consciousness was gradual at first with the uncertainty of awakening from a deep sleep. Voices entered my ears like distant radio signals.
My eyes flipped open.
Stunned, my reality slowly sank in. I was now standing by the picnic tables in front of the food vendors, where I’d been earlier when everything had frozen around me. My attention slid to a man who had his back to me. He wore a worn-out baseball cap and held out a cell phone with a glittery purple case. Tapping the screen, he snapped a flash-on selfie with four giggling girls.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” the one girl gushed. She happened to be wearing a T-shirt with David’s face on it, which explained how she was able to see through his poor camouflage of sunglasses and a hat. “I love you, I love you, I love you!”
I cautiously rounded the crowded table.
“David?”
He looked up from signing the fan’s T-shirt, and his eyebrows scrunched together for a second. “Back already? Was the line too long for fried Oreos?”
A lump wedged in my throat.
This could not be happening. I’d been in the fun house. I knew I’d been in the fun house. It’d been too real. The boy. The demonic clown. Death. When I reached back and touched the back of my skull, I winced. It was slightly tender from where I fell.
For the umpteenth time, I contemplated whether or not I was losing my freaking mind. At this point, it was a hard pill to swallow.
I need to get out of here. I snatched my cell phone off the table and—
A hand touched my arm.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Easy,” David said, showing his palms. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Shaking, I started to walk away. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, wait!” With Maddox the Penguin tucked under his arm, David caught up with me and blocked my way. “What do you mean, you have to go? I thought we were having a good time.”
“It’s a personal issue,” I said, desperately trying to calm myself.
He took a cautious step closer. “Want me to drive you home?”
“I’ll walk. I live right around the corner.”
David’s posture fell a little in defeat, and his lips pressed tight.
He handed me Maddox.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, not at all.” I’m such a piece of crap for leaving him like this.
“You’re not being shot down, I swear. I just don’t feel well. It must be something I ate.”
“Maybe it’s that stomach bug going around.”
I managed a small laugh, recalling his dramatic stomach bug excuse for canceling the rest of his interviewees the day before.
“Thank you, David. I had a lot of fun.”
“So did I.” He smiled. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. I could tell he was hurt by my quick retreat. Without another word, I maneuvered around him and headed home.
