by Evelyn Avery
Puck pulled a pair of daggers out of his pants that must have been in a hidden sheathe and spun them in his hands. “He’s right, just get out of here. Now.”
Even though I hesitated, Chloe made the decision for me. Grabbing my arm, she half-pulled and half-yanked on it until we were both moving again. I heard the impact of battle, but I forced myself not to turn back around. Whatever the outcome, I didn’t need to see it. Grunts of pain met the whistle of honed steel through the air. I heard the whimper of a wolf and a heavy thump as it fell to the ground. In response, I pressed my hands over my ears to dull the sound so I wouldn’t hear anymore.
The village abruptly came to an end at the crest of the hill, and we stumbled through the darkness. Moonlight still shone bright overhead, but whatever was in the valley below remained shrouded in the shadows of nearby trees.
Chloe’s hand stayed gripped hard around mine even as the sounds of the battle faded into eerie silence. I didn’t want to think about what that might mean, holding out hope that Puck and Tamlin survived their encounter and would catch up with us.
We reached the bottom of the hill, and I could finally see what hadn’t been visible from further away. A chain-link fence greeted us, with just enough in the broken metal loops for us to fit through. We passed a hand-written sign, and I stopped so suddenly that Chloe ran right into me.
Pomona Valley Carnival.
She had stopped too and regarded the sign with a sound of alarm. “That can’t be what I think it is.”
“The fairgrounds,” I whispered, feeling suddenly faint. Growing up, I’d always been terrified of carnivals. Everything about them seemed creepy, from the grizzled ride operators to the grown men dressed as clowns who always made you wonder what they were hiding under all that face paint. “Greta used to bring me here every summer when I was a kid.”
“Is this the place where you got lost in the—”
I cut her off before she could finish that sentence, because it wasn’t a memory that I wanted to think about ever again. “Let’s just get through here as quickly as possible.”
“But it’s weird, right?” she asked, falling into step beside me. “Why would this place have a village that looks like something I just saw in a movie or the fairgrounds you used to visit as a kid?”
Thinking about it made my head hurt. “The Erlking created all of this to challenge us. Maybe he can see our memories.”
“Or maybe we’re doing it ourselves. When we were walking through the garbage dump, I was thinking about how I need to stop watching so much TV. And then that made me think about the last thing that I saw, which was that horror movie with the werewolves.” She took a deep breath and exhaled, sounding both excited and scared. “Do you think I made the wolves happen?”
Any answer to that question was terrifying. Either this place was random and unpredictable, or somehow our deepest fears were being manifested in physical form.
But while we were running from the wolves, I’d been thinking about the last time I was this terrified. It had been my last visit to the fairgrounds when I’d been chased into the mirror maze by a clown who either wanted to eat me or hand me a balloon. My twelve-year-old brain had been convinced either of those things was equally likely. I’d run without waiting to figure it out.
How easily could a realm of dreams become the stuff of nightmares?
“I have no idea, but it’s definitely possible.”
It was obvious that she felt bad about it. “I hope the guys are okay.”
“God, me too.”
But the path led us through the fairgrounds, past displays and rides that had all gone dark. Wind whistled through twisted metal and rattled dilapidated wood in a way that raised the tiny hairs on the back of my arms.
We passed all the mainstays of the county fair, from the creaking Tilt-a-Whirl to a Ferris wheel that rose so high above our heads that it blocked out the moon overhead. Nothing moved in the darkness, and we had no reason to interact with any of the rides or abandoned games. Everything was silent and abandoned.
But I had a sinking suspicion that I already knew where this path would lead.
We navigated around the Ferris wheel, and that was when I saw it. Brightly-colored lights spelled out its name across the front, and I heard the faint sounds of 80s music that I knew would be blasting once we stepped inside. The path led straight to it with no other way around.
We had to enter the Mirror Maze.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Chloe murmured from beside me. “The one you’re afraid of.”
“No, this was always my favorite attraction. I wonder how this place figured that out.”
She sighed and pulled me forward. “There’s something terrible waiting for us inside there, right?”
“The Erlking wouldn’t have it any other way.”
When she gripped my hand, I held onto it so tightly that she winced but didn’t try to pull away. I didn’t have to know what awaited inside that brightly colored building to understand that it wouldn’t be good. The innocent appearance was intended to lull me into a false sense of security so that I would make a mistake. I had already lost Puck and Tamlin, although I hoped they survived even if I never got to see them again. The next challenge might be the one that finally ends this journey entirely.
I squeezed Chloe’s hand before letting go, fear wasn’t going to get me anywhere. “Let’s just get it over with. The damned Erlking won’t know what hit him.”
The Mirror Maze mocked me, so cheerful and bright that I knew a horrible darkness had to be waiting inside. My memory of it was one of the worst in my young life, not necessarily because of what happened but because of how it had made me feel. I never wanted to experience that feeling of loneliness and isolation again.
Finally, I mounted the steps of the Mirror Maze, where the path ended as Chloe trailed after me. I didn’t have to go through this alone, not this time.
And if we found any clowns inside, I was ready to go Old Testament on their asses.
“This is your worst nightmare, huh?”
I waved Chloe’s gentle mockery away with the hand not holding a large rock, ready to bash in the heads of any errant clowns. The hall of mirrors was precisely as I remembered it, relentlessly hokey and old-fashioned. As a child, I’d been convinced that one wrong turn would leave me trapped inside of the maze forever, regardless of how ridiculous that might sound to an adult. It took me years to figure out that it was only a trick, and eventually, I would find my way like everyone did. In the real world, children don’t get trapped inside of mirrored mazes and end up lost forever.
But we weren’t in the real world anymore. I couldn’t assume the same rules applied.
Creepy lights flashed across our faces from a strobe light mounted on the ceiling, reflected dozens of times in the mirrors surrounding us. I had never understood how people could enjoy the thought of getting lost with a bunch of reflections of themselves, but there had to be fans of this nonsense somewhere.
I held my free hand out in front of me so I wouldn’t collide with the mirrored surfaces that only seemed to reflect the strobe light after I’d run into them. Most of the mirrors were angled so that you wouldn’t see yourself reflected until it was too late.
“I’ve always heard that you can solve these things by only going right when the path forks,” Chloe murmurs from behind me. “But I have no idea if that’s right.”
“I don’t see any forks. The path seems to be leading us right through the center.”
We were being led like lambs to the slaughter.
Mostly I was on the lookout for clowns, because I wasn’t about to take any chances with that shit.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move in the mirror ahead that wasn’t us. I froze, pulling Chloe back with me. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
I waited a beat, but I didn’t notice any more movement. When I took another step forward, a third figure moved across the mirror without reflections.
“There’s something there.”
“I don’t see it.”
But as I drew closer to the mirrored reflection, I definitely saw something in there. More accurately, I saw someone else reflected there. Two someones. And both of them were me.
Except I didn’t see myself as I currently was, instead it was a version of me that was barely five or six years old. I stood outside a large building that had to be my old elementary school. My hair was done up in high pigtail braids that draped neatly over my shoulders with bows tied on each end. When I reached out to touch the back of my own head, my hands only met glass.
“Wait, I saw that,” Chloe exclaimed. “When you touched the mirror, it was like the picture cleared up. Was that your first day of school?”
I placed my palm back on the glass, watching as the smaller version of me slowly mounted the stairs. “I think so, but I barely remember it.”
“How are we seeing it now in the mirror?”
“The same way that had you believing that a bowl of maggots was edible.” I sighed, not tearing my gaze away from the slowly unfolding scene. “Because anything is possible in the Underground, and the Erlking is an asshole.”
But as I watched, the memory of that first day of kindergarten started to come back. I remembered going into the classroom and being told with the rest of the class to draw a picture of what we had done over the summer. Instead of drawing about the beach vacation that Greta had taken me on, I drew a picture of a party in the Underground full of dancing hobgoblins and twirling fairies.
The teacher had gently asked if I was supposed to be in the “special” class down the hall, and the entire class made fun of me for weeks, even though I’d insisted it really happened. I’d become so overwrought that they had to send me to the school nurse and have Greta come pick me up early.
Taking my hand away from the mirror, I turned away moments before my tiny face started to fall as the teacher scolded me for not completing the assignment. “Let’s keep going.”
Chloe motioned me forward. “After you.”
But when I turned back, the mirror that had held the tiny kindergarten version of me had disappeared, leaving another pathway open. Where the previous opening had been, a mirror blocked the way.
The maze had changed.
Shaking off a sudden sense of foreboding, I gestured down the now open hallway. “I guess we’re going this way.”
“Freaky. Do you think every one of these mirrors contains a memory?” Chloe asked as she pressed close behind me.
“Maybe, although I sure as hell hope not.”
I remembered what the Erlking had said about reflective surfaces, that you could see much more than just yourself if you looked in them the right way.
But there was a lot of my own past that I didn’t want to remember. I was an orphan, but my parents died when I was young enough that I never knew them. I mourned their loss, but it was more the idea of them I grieved than anything else. It made those feelings distant and more manageable than if I had lost them when I was old enough to remember it.
The doctors had made it clear to Greta that I likely used my imagination to subsume what had to be some terrible trauma in my past. That could be more modern-day Freudian quackery, but it was impossible to know for sure. Perhaps I had watched my parents burn to death in that fire, or maybe something had happened to me with the temporary caregivers I’d been placed with before Greta came along.
Of course, if the Underground and the other things I imagined were actually real, then my strangeness might not have anything to do with trauma at all. But that wouldn’t explain why I remembered so very little from my past, even when I was well into the age when some memories should have formed.
Perhaps there was something there that needed to stay forgotten.
I made a point of not looking too closely at the mirrors we passed, convinced that I didn’t want to see anything that might be found there. We followed the turns of the mirror maze, but after a while, it started to feel like we were going around in circles.
“I think we’re lost,” Chloe said with a sigh.
“You can’t get lost in these things,” I reminded her, trying to convince myself to believe the same thing. “Eventually, you always find your way out. We just have to keep moving.”
But she grabbed my arm, stopping me. “Maybe seeing memories is the point. Touch the mirror to see if one appears because a new hallway might open up with it.”
“If you’re so convinced, why don’t you try it yourself?”
She pressed her hand against a nearby mirror and gave me a droll look when absolutely nothing happened. “This place clearly wasn’t meant for me.”
The last thing I wanted to do was see whatever memory the maze wanted to show me next. But I also had no doubts that we would spend our remaining hours wandering through mirrored hallways if we didn’t find a way out soon.
Taking a deep breath, I touched the nearest mirrored wall. Chloe stood to the side, so my pale face was the only thing reflected in its surface.
But nothing happened. “I don’t think this is going to work.”
Chloe grabbed my arm and gestured behind us. “Look over there.”
The mirror on the wall behind us had grown cloudy, the same way mirrors in the bathroom looked right after you step out of the shower. When I stepped forward and held my hand against it, the surface cleared.
The mirror clouded just as it had before, and we waited only a beat before it cleared. I held my breath as my own reflection reappeared, but then nothing else changed. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I would get off this easily, the mirror was about to show me something that I really didn’t want to see.
Then I saw my bedroom in our apartment on campus. This memory had to be something more recent because we’d only been living there for a few years. I watched a second version of me come into the room and close the door behind her. She stripped off the simple dress she was wearing and tossed it to the floor, leaving her in only a bra and underwear.
“Oh, crap,” Chloe said from behind me, her breath hitching slightly when the other version of me laid down on the bed, almost bare curves highlighted as I arched my back and sighed. “Do you normally hang around your room half-naked?”
Not that I could remember, but apparently there was a lot that I couldn’t remember. “Uh, no, not really.”
I watched myself pick up a book, and I didn’t have to look closely to know which one it was. The Tale of the Erlking. My favorite book and one that I’d read over and over again, so many times that I had it memorized.
My body stretched out in the bed as I flipped open the book, and I rolled onto my back. As we watched, my hand slid down my belly and disappeared under the band of my underwear.
“Jesus.” I ripped my hand off the mirror and turned away.
“Don’t stop just when it’s getting good,” Chloe chortled, obviously trying not to laugh when I turned to glare at her. “Most girls would have their laptops out and a dozen tabs of videos pulled up, but jerking off while reading a book is a very you thing to do. Keep going; you know we have to watch this.”
“I hate you so much right now.” If it were possible to die of embarrassment, then I would already be a code blue. There were certain things that everybody knows that everybody else does, like masturbate, but seeing it in high definition and right in front of your face was still too embarrassing for words.
“I’m really looking forward to meeting this Erlking guy,” Chloe mused, laughter still in her voice even as she managed to maintain a perfectly neutral facial expression. “I need to know what the fuss is all about.”
But I just shook my head, embarrassed enough that being trapped in a mirror maze for the rest of my natural life seemed like a more attractive option than letting this particular memory play out. “This is not happening right now.”
“C’mon.” She nudged me gently with her shoulder. “It’s not anything that I haven’t seen before. And judging from this, you ar
e definitely ready for bikini season.”
I knew that I didn’t have a choice, even as I really wanted to melt into a puddle of embarrassment and ooze away through the cracks in the floor. My reflected face burned a bright red as I placed my hand back on the mirror. “I don’t want to hear about any of this after today. You take it to your grave.”
Chloe bit her lip to keep herself from laughing. “Agreed.”
Luckily, the mirror maze didn’t torture me for as long as it could have. The scene ended abruptly a few minutes later, and the mirror disappeared.
“So tell me about this book,” Chloe said as we walked down the hallway. “It sounds like it was pretty hot.”
I didn’t specifically remember ever jerking off to it, but I couldn’t exactly pretend that would be completely out of character. “It’s an old fairy tale, that’s all.”
“Like the erotic ones that Anne Rice wrote under a pen name, all heaving bosoms and kinky sex?” At my narrow-eyed look, she shrugged. “I do occasionally read books, you know.”
“Only the trashy kind apparently.”
She nodded in agreement. “Yeah, pretty much.”
Even I could see the humor in the situation. “Then I guess you should consider this one a must-read. It definitely trends toward the erotic. And if you’d asked me at any point before today, the Erlking was definitely finger blasting material.”
“So, he’s beautiful then.”
“That word doesn’t even do him justice.” I shook my head, chasing away the tantalizing images infiltrating my mind. “But it’s a trick, a lie. He’s as ugly on the inside as he is beautiful on the outside.”
Chloe sighed, all humor gone from her expression. “This place really isn’t how you imagined it, is it?”
In my mind and before I was forced to come here, the Erlking had been the dark and consuming force, who represented every bad thing that good girls secretly hoped would come for them in the night. His presence was terrifying and all-consuming, but only when I thought he was simply a figment of my imagination. “It’s like he created it for the sole purpose of torturing me.”
