by JL Bryan
The door gave a rusty squeak as she nudged it open and slipped inside the concrete dome that housed the scrambler ride. It squeaked again as she pushed it back into place.
The interior was silent and dark, so she used the light on her phone. The little corridor was strewn with rubble, and deep cracks ran across the floor and up the walls, through the faded mural of test tubes and a scientist’s lab filled with caged alien creatures. The place had a mildew smell. The exterior of the Brain-Scrambler might have been restored, but the inside still looked wrecked.
She stepped carefully over the broken floor, past an EMPLOYEES ONLY door and into the big domed space that held the ride itself.
The Scrambler ride had three big metal arms radiating from the center, all of them sagging and off-balance. From each arm hung a clump of the suspended cars, which had deteriorated over the years until they looked like giant, rusty dead spiders. Two had broken loose and lay on their backs on the floor, their passengers seats jutting up into the air.
An array of funhouse mirrors had lined the interior of the dome, but several of those had shattered, raining long slivers of glass all over the green concrete floor. Elissa stepped carefully, hearing glass crunching beneath her sneakers.
She shivered and wondered how long she should wait, and who the man was, and why he’d killed Tamara, and why everyone else had disappeared.
They’re dead, she thought. He’s killed everyone else, and now I’m the last.
And then she thought: I deserve it. It was her fault Tamara was dead, her own selfish, hateful wish.
She looked at herself, her face stretched tall and thin in a funhouse mirror.
The rusty squeal of the door sounded, and the colored lights and fast-paced electronic music of Space City spilled into the dome, illuminating one rack of dangling Scrambler cars.
Elissa ducked behind one of the two fallen Scrambler cars on the floor, her heart racing like a rabbit’s.
She saw him outlined against the lights, recognizing him mostly by his striped hat. He stepped out of the corridor and into the dome.
“You can’t hide from me, Elissa.” His dead-flat voice echoed off the slanted funhouse mirrors. He paused in front of the old broken-down ride with his hands clasped, not actively searching for her. “I know all about you. I know about the twelve dollars you stole from your mother’s purse last week. I know what you did with Zach Napier behind the gym during the eight-grade dance. I know about Squeakums, the poor hamster who died of thirst when you failed to realize his water bottle was boiling hot from sitting in the sun all day.”
Elissa shivered, more scared now than she’d ever been.
“You may as well come out from behind that fallen seat,” he said. “Come out, and we’ll both have a look at you.”
Elissa didn’t see much point in resisting. He would probably just get angry if she tried to stay hidden, and he obviously knew where she was.
She stood up, keeping the broken seat between them.
“Good. Cooperative. Not as cooperative as Tamara, of course, but she was unmatched in that department, wasn’t she?” He walked along the perimeter of the domed room, approaching her but taking his time about it. “When you suggested the two of you swipe her mother’s car for the evening, she hardly put up a fight.”
“What do you want?” Elissa asked. She looked around for a weapon and found a long sliver of broken funhouse mirror about the size of a butter knife. She held it lightly in her fingers, trying not to cut herself.
He now stood less than three feet away, watching her over the fallen seat, his carnival barker outfit as crisp and spotless as ever.
“The root of envy is self-loathing. You envied Tamara—stupid, flighty, marginally pretty Tamara—because of what you feel about yourself. What you know about yourself. Isn’t that true?”
Elissa shuddered, thoroughly creeped out by his questions and his impossibly detailed and intimate knowledge about her. Even more than that, it was simply his cold, heavy presence and the relentlessly blank look in his no-color gray eyes that frightened her.
“Have a look.” He gestured to a large mirror on the wall. “And be honest about how you see yourself.”
She saw herself there, her body distorted so she looked even wider and squattier than usual, as though she needed that. Her face already looked like the full moon, and her ass and stomach were both too puffy, especially compared to Tamara.
But you’re prettier than her now, a vicious voice whispered inside her mind. Just like you wished.
“That’s hardly scratching the surface,” the man said in his unwavering monotone. “Let’s see how you really feel, Elissa.”
The flesh of her reflection turned sickly gray. Its eyes became narrow and beady, spaced too close together on her head, and her nose became a bulbous mush, one nostril much larger than the other. Her lips grew rubbery and stretched from ear to ear like a frog’s maw. Her slight double chin turned into a definite triple one, piling up on her chest. Her torso swelled to disgusting proportions, and her legs grew wide and stumpy.
What she faced was a barely human thing, an ugly, squat, misshapen alien no one would ever love or ever even want to touch. It was a hideous beast, and it was how she truly saw herself, all the way down inside, during her most miserable moments.
“Do you hate it?” he whispered.
“I hate it,” she told him. “I hate it so much. How do you know? How do you know everything?”
“If you hate what you see, act on it,” he whispered. “Kill what you hate.”
Elissa stared at the disgusting image in the mirror. It was everything she knew about herself, all that she pathetically tried to conceal with extreme makeup and clothes, with attitude and alcohol. Her disgusting true self stood before her, and she couldn’t deny the truth.
She gripped the long sliver of glass tighter in her hand, heedless of how the sharp edges cut her fingers. All her self-hate surged inside her. She was sick of being who she was. She was sick of being the thing in the mirror, so inferior to everyone else.
Elissa stepped forward and swung the sliver of glass. It passed right through where the glass should have been and stabbed the disgusting gray thing in the chest. She stabbed it again and again, shrieking her hatred.
Then she gasped and staggered back. The long piece of broken glass was embedded in her own chest. She hadn’t been stabbing an image. She’d been stabbing herself in the heart.
She stumbled, then fell to her knees, surrounded by the broken glass all over the floor. Blood soaked the front of her purple tank top, darkening the zombie Hello Kitty on the front. She gasped for air, and each breath hurt.
“Good,” the man said, leaning over her. He twirled his candy-striped hat on one finger, as though bored. “Very good, Elissa. For once, you’ve done something honest and pure, something completely true to yourself. How does it feel?”
She collapsed to the floor, seeing herself from more than a dozen angles in the mirrors above.
“You need not fear death,” he said, replacing the hat on his head. “We will find a place for you here, along with the others. You won’t be alone.”
Blood welled up over her lips. Her dying thought was that, while more than a dozen funhouse mirrors reflected her from every side, the man standing over her didn’t show up in a single one of them. He cast no reflection, as though he were not really there at all.
Chapter Twenty
Jared and Becca entered the first room of Dark Mansion. The front door creaked shut behind them and closed with an exaggerated recorded boom, as it always had in the days when the park was open. Maniacal laughter followed, and the leather screeching of bats from somewhere above the ceiling.
The first room was dim and looked decayed, the eaves thick with spider webs. If the amusement park’s haunted house had suffered from years of neglect, it would be nearly impossible to tell, since it had been designed to look derelict in the first place.
“Are you scared yet?” Jared whispered.
“Shut up.” Becca rolled her eyes. “Let’s see if Statler and Waldorf are still here.”
They leaned through the open half of a Dutch door on their right, through which visitors could see (but not touch) two bearded skeletons in 19th-century hats and coats. They faced each other across a chess board. One skeleton’s mechanized hand repeatedly stroked at its beard while its other hand hovered over the chess board, as if he were indecisive about his next move. The other skeleton slumped with his chin in one hand, his fingers constantly drumming the table. Spiderwebs had grown among the chess pieces and over the skeletons themselves, the obvious joke being that both men had grown old and died while waiting for the first one to make up his mind.
“They look as healthy as ever,” Jared said.
“I’m so happy this old park is being restored.”
“I’m happy to finally be alone with you.” Jared pulled her close and kissed her. Her hands curled behind his head, keeping him close to her face. This lasted a long, delicious minute before she pulled away.
“Let’s go further,” she said.
“Right here?” Jared started to take off his shirt, and she laughed.
“I meant exploring the house.” Becca slapped his chest. “I want to see the torture room. I always loved it.”
The only obvious way out of the room was a staircase that curved up and out of sight behind a partial wall, but they both knew that was a gag. It went right up to the ceiling, where there was no opening or even a trap door, just a message in ghostly green letters: DEAD END! GO BACK!
The real way out was to push aside the grandfather clock ticking away on the back wall, which looked like a massive antique but weighed no more than five or ten pounds. It moved on little rolling racks mounted on the wall beside it, painted to blend with the wall but obvious on closer inspection.
“Open the secret door for me,” Becca said, standing beside the grandfather clock.
Jared rolled the tall clock aside, revealing a narrow, cobwebbed hallway painted to look like stone, dimly lit by red bulbs set into the eyes of animal skulls along the ceiling.
Doors ran along both sides of the long hall, each door a different design—one a rotten green rectangle, another a low medieval arched door made of planks, another door tall and skinny and painted black.
Two figures approached from the darkness ahead. They were Jared and Becca’s reflections in the black mirrored wall at the end. The mirror made the corridor seem even longer than it was.
“Remember this?” Jared opened the first door on the right, which opened inward into a very narrow passage. “It just connects through a little side hallway to another door up there. You would go in one door and then jump out the other to scare the tourists.”
“We called it the Scooby-Doo hallway,” Becca said.
“This was so much fun.” Jared closed the door and reached for the one across from it.
“Not that one.” Becca curled her lip and shuddered a little.
“Are you scared?”
“It just creeps me out.”
Jared opened the door anyway. In a room the size of a tiny closet, a baby doll sat at a high chair, its face and bib smeared with dark blood and entrails. One of its little hands pawed at a heap of rotten guts on its tray. Little baby-sized bloody handprints stained the wall beside it. The baby’s bib read MOMMY’S LITTLE ANGEL.
A pane of clear plastic prevented visitors from actually reaching in and touching the sick little diorama.
“Next,” Becca said, walking on while he closed the door.
She opened the next one, which opened into what looked like a coat closet hung with dusty garments. Closer inspection revealed a grinning skeleton hiding behind the coats.
“Oh, yeah, the skeleton in the closet.” Jared rolled his eyes and closed the door.
Another door opened onto a lattice of mismatched board and wood scraps that looked hastily nailed together to block off the doorway, painted with the words KEEP OUT and LEAVE US ALONE. A woman’s voice sobbed somewhere in the darkness beyond the barrier, and whispered the words “Help me, help me...” Then she screamed.
A second voice, rough and monstrous, shouted, “Close that door!”
“Which way do you want to go?” Jared pointed to the last door on the left, then the last door on the right. “Over to the funeral parlor and the taxidermy room, or upstairs to the torture chamber and voodoo temple?”
“The torture chamber.” Becca gave him a wide smile. “Definitely.”
Jared opened a door onto a steep staircase so narrow they had to walk single file. The wooden stairs didn’t quite line up, always jutting an inch or so to the left or right of each other, giving it a ramshackle, dangerous appearance, but the handrail was sound. The walls were painted to look like stone, with ornate little bat lanterns for light.
“I’m doing it!” Becca said.
“No, I want to do it!” They wrestled for the privilege of going first. Jared won, squeezed past her, and dashed up the stairs.
“I’m going to kill you!” she shouted, running close behind him and tickling his ribs.
About two-thirds of the way up, Jared stomped on the magic stair.
The sound of snapping wood filled his ears, followed by the sound of heavy debris crashing to the floor and a high-pitched scream. The middle third of the stairway slid to the right, then the left. It moved back and forth on hidden wheels, only a few inches in each direction, but the sound effects helped create the impression that the stairs were actually breaking away beneath their feet.
“I wanted to do that, Jared!” Becca shoved him up the stairs.
They reached a landing with warped floorboards, where another steep flight of stairs continued up under a hand-painted wooden sign that read TO THE ATTIC with an arrow pointing up.
The landing was like a tiny room with doors that were always locked, possibly not even real, and a curtained window painted solid black. A portrait of Captain James Dark, the fictional pirate who’d allegedly built the mansion, hung on the wall. He wore an eyepatch and a black tricorner hat, and an enormous black beard concealed most of his face. One hand was a hook, naturally. A bloodstained saber hung in a display case beside him, along with a tattered Jolly Roger flag.
“I get this one!” Becca elbowed past him to the next set of old wooden stairs and stomped on the first one.
“Stay out of my attic!” Ghostly green lights illuminated the portrait of Captain Dark, and his eyes glowed a solid green as he shouted at them. Becca’s step had activated the recorded warning. “Get out of my house!”
Becca laughed as they took off up the stairs, crammed side by side on the narrow steps. As they reached the top, she rammed her elbow into his stomach, causing some genuine pain as she bolted ahead to stomp the top stair.
“I told you to stay out of my attic!” the portrait shouted below.
Jared rubbed his stomach as they entered a narrow, crooked corridor paneled in rough planks of wood. Small windows were cut into walls.
The first window looked into the voodoo room, which some people called the “voodoo lounge,” crammed full of weird little gruesome statues, bones, candles, cloth dolls stuck with clumps of long pins, and a birdcage whose resident had been to cut to pieces, its dark feathers dripping out the bottom of the cage. A drum soundtrack echoed in the room.
They followed the back-and-forth crooks of the hallway toward the sound of screaming. The next group of windows looked into the torture room, with flails and whips on the back wall, a bed of nails and an iron maiden—fresh blood dripped from all of these, trickling into a metal grate on the floor. A couple of corpse-like shapes hung from chains in the shadowy back corner of the room, near a jail-cell door where a bloody arm waved. The loud screams echoed from the dark space behind the barred door.
“Isn’t it great?” Becca asked, her eyes shining like a kid on Christmas morning as she looked over the torture devices.
“Having Dark Mansion all to ourselves?” Jared a
sked, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her close.
“You know what we should do? Kidnap Mitzi Traynor and bring her here. We wear scary masks and torture her.” Becca crossed her arms. “She deserves it, after she spread that rumor about me last year.”
“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Jared said. “I see no flaws in your plan at all.”
“But, seriously, would you help me do that, if I asked you?” Becca placed her hands behind his neck, looking up at him.
“Kidnap and torture Mitzi Traynor?”
“Yeah. Bring her here, tie her to the bed of nails. Smack her big, ugly ass with that whip. You would do that, wouldn’t you?” Becca pressed herself against him.
“You’ve got anger issues,” Jared said. “Kind of sexy anger issues, but still...”
“I know we won’t really do it,” she whispered. “Just say you would if I asked you.”
“Okay. I would help you kidnap and torture Mitzi if you wanted me to. Which you don’t.”
Becca kissed him, and her entire body felt feverish in his arms. She wore a thin mesh shirt over a black bra and amazingly skimpy shorts, and he could feel her skin beneath his hands. She kissed him aggressively, her tongue prying into his mouth.
This is it, Jared thought. Here’s where it happens. He’d brought condoms in his pocket just in case.
“Wait.” Becca pulled back from him and turned to look into the torture room again. “I want to go in there.”
“You don’t go in there. You just look into it through these little windows.”
“These little windows don’t have any glass. I can fit through this one.” Becca traced the edges of the wall cutout with her fingertips.
“You can’t.”
“Are you saying I’m fat?” She gave him a mock scowl.
“No, but—”
“Then give me a boost.” She leaned forward against the window, wiggling her hips, and he couldn’t resist her. He took her by the hips and hoisted her up.
