by Brian Harmon
Eric cursed.
The clown had an axe.
Why? It was already a goddamn clown. That was freaky enough. And it was a shape-shifting, rat-summoning, reality-bending, trans-dimensional, monster clown, at that. Why the hell did it need an axe?
That awful giggle filled the room again. It didn’t seem to be coming from the clown, itself, but rather projected telepathically across the room, like when it taunted him in laser tag hell. It came from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
For a few seconds, they both just stood there, staring at each other.
Then the clown lifted the axe and ran at him.
Eric turned and ran the other way, still cursing.
He jumped up onto the number six kart as it veered to hit him and launched himself over the top of it. Overall, it was a pretty good move. Thrilling. Very action hero. Except for the landing. He missed that entirely. He rolled across the floor, dropping his phone.
When he looked up, number eight was barreling toward him.
He rolled out of the way, scrambled to his feet and looked up in time to see the glint of the axe blade slicing through the air.
With a terrified yelp, Eric jumped backward, twisting his body out of the way so that it passed just inches from his belly, barely missing him.
The clown swung again, higher this time.
He ducked and backed away, but number seven rammed into his heels, knocking his feet out from under him and sending him backward, onto the top of the kart.
The clown was there in an instant, the axe raised high over its head.
With a startled cry, he threw himself off the kart and onto the concrete a bare instant before the axe blade punched through the plastic frame.
As it struggled to pull the axe free, Eric snatched his phone off the floor, jumped to his feet and then hurdled over the next row of tires, away from the psychotic, axe-wielding clown.
He managed in the midst of all this to appreciate that this was the man Delphinium and her coven insisted on calling their hero. This was the man who supposedly had some great destiny thrust upon him. This was what he did. He ran away, cursing and screaming, gasping for breath because he was never going to really get into shape, no matter how many times he swore he would.
He dodged two more speeding karts and then risked a look back to see how close the clown was. But it was gone. He turned all the way around, scanning the room, searching, but it had vanished again. He was alone with the haunted karts.
THE CHILDREN, texted Isabelle.
Turning around again, still not convinced that the axe-wielding clown was really gone, he cocked his head and listened for the children.
But he couldn’t hear them anymore…
Cursing again, he turned around once more, scanning the room, looking for something out of place this time.
Everything still looked normal. But if he’d lost the children, then he could already be on the other side. And he didn’t have time for this.
FOCUS
But it was so hard to focus. The clown could still be in here somewhere, still clutching its axe, just waiting for him to drop his guard.
THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT
He supposed it was. But that didn’t make it any easier. Nor was it going to get any easier. As he stood there, searching for any faint sign of either the clown or the children, the lights went back out.
Eric cursed again and began swiping at the screen, trying to find the flashlight. For a moment, he couldn’t seem to make the menu come up. Seconds ticked by as he struggled with it, and his horrid imagination was more than happy to spend that time convincing him that the clown and its axe were standing right in front of him, just waiting for the light to come on before lopping off his head.
When it finally came on and he was able to shine it around, he found that his imagination, as usual, was lying. The clown was nowhere to be seen. But that left him little comfort.
Where was it?
The karts were still cruising around him, but like the clown, he couldn’t see them. He could only hear the soft hum of their engines.
The children. He focused on the children. Their screaming voices.
But he still couldn’t hear them.
Instead, he heard the karts. They seemed to be getting louder. Suddenly, they sounded less like electric go karts than motorcycles.
He was sure they weren’t that noisy before the lights went out.
THEY’RE STILL THERE, said Isabelle. YOU JUST HAVE TO MAKE YOURSELF HEAR THEM
But he didn’t hear them. How could he? Those engines were getting louder and louder with each passing second.
They were moving faster, too. Much faster.
There was something sinister about the sound. It sent an icy chill down his spine and made him wonder… What did go karts look like in hell?
YOU HAVE TO TRY!
She was right. Judith said it was all about focus. He couldn’t be dragged away if he didn’t let it happen. All he had to do was find the children.
He closed his eyes and listened.
The go karts didn’t sound at all like go karts anymore. They didn’t sound like motorcycles either. Suddenly, they sounded like chainsaws.
And they were getting closer…
The children.
Focus on the children.
Concentrate on the children.
They were there. He just needed to make himself hear them again. But all he could hear was the roar of the chainsaws as they closed in around him.
He could even smell the exhaust fumes. They smelled just like the one his father owned.
He supposed he was asking for it. Suddenly, one clown with an axe didn’t seem quite so terrifying anymore. It was considerably better than lots of clowns with chainsaws.
If he opened his eyes now, he’d see them. They were definitely within range of his light. But that wasn’t going to help him. It was like the wardrobe. Looking at the horrors closing in around him was only going to make them more real. He needed to focus on finding the children.
They were there somewhere.
He just had to get past what wasn’t real.
As the chainsaws converged on him, their engines revving, only seconds from shredding his flesh, he heard something. A faint, high-pitched squeal.
He cocked his head to one side, listening.
Another sound. A screech. A yell. A scream.
The children.
Suddenly, the chainsaws didn’t seem so close. In fact, they sounded as if they were in another room.
But he didn’t dare open his eyes. Not yet. He concentrated on the sound of the children.
It was always there. It had always been there. The clown’s power was purely distraction. That was why the injuries caused by the rats always vanished. It was all in his head.
Except it wasn’t entirely in his head. These dark variations of the world were real. The displacement was real. The clown, itself, was real. It was only the journey there that took place within his head.
It didn’t make sense, of course. These things never did. But he thought he understood it, at least.
The sound of the chainsaws slowly dwindled into silence until all that was left was the children. Only then did he dare to open his eyes.
The clown was standing right in front of him.
Not the one with the axe. The other one. The fat one.
Eric staggered backward, startled, and fell off the tires, onto his butt.
The fat clown didn’t move. It just stood there, like it always did, staring back at him and breathing in those long, labored gasps.
And he didn’t wait around for it to move, either. He turned and ran for the door.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The fat clown didn’t try to stop him from leaving. Eric reached the door without any further distractions and slammed it shut behind him.
He wasn’t sure what the deal was with that one. It only seemed to show up around the times when he was in the most trouble.
Looking
around, he found that he was back in the basement hallway. Ultimately, this was where he wanted to be. But not yet. First, he needed to find Paul. Time was growing short, but he wasn’t confident he could do it himself. If he was going to stay out of Bellylaugh Hell, he was going to need someone to help him stay focused.
He set off for the stairwell, glancing back only once to make sure the fat clown still wasn’t following him, and then looked down at his phone, which immediately began ringing. Speed dial had nothing on Isabelle. When he wanted to talk to her, she was already on the phone.
“So what do you know about fairies?” he asked.
“About as much as I know about demons. I didn’t believe in either of them before today.”
“We learn something new every time.”
“We do, don’t we? I do know that a lot of cultures believe fairies to be powerful and mischievous nature spirits.”
Eric nodded. Powerful and mischievous seemed to describe them pretty well.
“And I know they’re generally believed to be neutral. They could be good or troublesome, depending on their mood and opinion of you.”
That, too, seemed to describe them pretty well. They weren’t even that concerned with saving the children. Judith said the only reason they were helping him was because they’d made a promise to someone.
Eric paused at the stairwell doors and looked back and forth down the long hallway. If Judith was telling him the truth, there was a hidden door down here somewhere. And now that he knew how to keep from being sucked into Bellylaugh Hell, he could concentrate on finding that door. (Theoretically, at least.) But where did he even start? The basement was a big place. And the clowns weren’t just going to stand back and let him search. They were going to be doing everything in their power to stop him.
Even with Paul’s help, he wasn’t sure how he was going to pull this one off in time.
Especially with so little time remaining…
“It’s good though, right?” she said as he started up the steps. “I mean they’re not ghosts, which means they weren’t children who died young. So that’s a yay, right?”
“Yeah. Big yay. I don’t have to feel so bad about how much I want to kick that Eliot kid’s ass.”
“Judith said fairies exist all over the world and are called many names. I’ll bet she means things like sprites, pixies, elves and brownies. Maybe even leprechauns.”
“Maybe,” agreed Eric. Or maybe next week he’d get to find out that leprechauns were real, too, and five times more dangerous than jinn.
“I did run across this one guy once,” recalled Isabelle. “He was fascinated with fairy rings and convinced they were portals to another world if he could just figure out how to activate them. I guess he wasn’t entirely wrong about at least one of them…”
“Careful what you wish for.”
“I know, right? I thought all that stuff was superstition.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He reached the top of the stairs and cut through the playland, hoping to find Paul waiting for him in the same place again.
The children were completely out of control now. Four hours of partying had left almost all of them wound up and overtired. Most of them were running around and screaming and throwing balls at each other. Several were crying. Somewhere above him, one of them was howling like a werewolf.
As he stepped out of the playland, through the faux circus tent entrance, the first thing he saw was a little boy playing with an untied balloon. He was repeatedly blowing it up and then letting the air back out of it so that it made long, wet farting sounds that he apparently found utterly hilarious, because each time he did it he loudly laughed himself into hysterics.
“He’s been doing that the whole time you’ve been gone,” said Paul, who was leaning against a support post. “Annoying as hell, isn’t it?”
It was. The kid was obnoxiously loud.
“Everything normal up here?” he asked.
Paul shrugged. “If you call a bunch of half-crazed kids pretending to be ninja turtles and jedi ‘normal’, then yeah.”
The little girl who was pretending to be a cat crawled up to Paul and rubbed her shoulder against his leg before moving on.
“Perfectly normal,” he reiterated. “What about you? Did you catch the little dead shit?”
“I did. Turns out he’s not dead after all. They’re fairies.”
Paul shook his head. “I’m not going to even try to process that right now.”
An older boy ran out of the playland and began shouting for someone named Levi at the top of his lungs. When no one answered, he turned and ran for the arcade.
“So what’s going on?” asked Paul after the boy was gone.
Eric retrieved his shoes from the circus train cubby and began putting them back on his feet. There shouldn’t be any more reason for him to go into the playland. Hopefully, he was done with Eliot and his stupid games. “We’re dealing with some kind of rat demon,” he explained.
“Is that better or worse than a ghost clown?”
“A lot worse.”
“Great. And these, um…fairies… Jesus, I can’t even take myself seriously saying that… They told you this?”
“Holly’s sisters confirmed it. It’s definitely a demon. And it’s seriously bad news. I’ve never heard Delphinium sound so scared before.
“Del…whatever her name is…”
“Delphinium,” said Eric.
“Whatever. She’s the boss witch, isn’t she? The most powerful one?”
“That’s her. She sounded really rattled.”
Paul nodded. “Yeah… That can’t be good.”
“It’s not.”
Out in the playland, the little girl stood up on her chair and yelled out, “Mom! Caleb says I look like a frog!”
“So the clown’s really some kind of demon from hell,” said Paul.
“The clown’s just some kind of…minion, I guess. The demon’s the real problem.”
“Okay… So how the hell do we—” A ball struck him in the face. He closed his eyes for a moment, willing himself to not curse at the crazed children, then recomposed himself and started over. “So how the hell do we fight something like that? We’re not exorcists.”
“I don’t know yet. But I know where it is. It’s behind some kind of hidden door in the basement.”
Paul scratched at his beard. “The basement again?” He sounded uncertain, and Eric could barely blame him. Last time he went down there, he was trapped in laser tag hell alone for an unnervingly long time. He wasn’t eager to go back down there.
A little girl ran out of the playland and then stopped and looked back in. In a sing-song voice, she shouted, “Tris-tan and Sky-lar sittin’ in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Then she turned and ran away.
“First thing we have to do,” continued Eric as he finished tying his shoes and rose to his feet, “is find that door.”
“I don’t know, man,” said Paul, looking back at the playland. “Sounds like shit’s getting real between Tristan and Skylar. Maybe I should stick around and see how that turns out.”
But Eric was already walking away. “Let’s go.”
Paul sighed. “Fine. But if I die here today, I’m haunting your ass.”
“Noted.”
They circled around the playland and descended the stairs again. Along the way, Eric shared the rest of what he’d learned from Judith, about the hell world and how to keep themselves grounded in this world.
“So is this hidden door unseen, then?” asked Paul. “Like in Creek Bend?”
Eric shrugged. “No idea. Maybe.”
“Because those can take a while to locate and we don’t have a lot of time to dick around.”
“Believe me, I know.”
The basement door was locked again. Eric used the key. As soon as he opened the door, a wall of icy air poured out, washing over them and instantly chilling them.
“That’s probably not good…” groaned Paul.
The inside of the doo
r was covered in frost. Ice crystals glistened around the door frame. Inside, the hallway floor was covered in a cold fog. But it wasn’t the cold itself that sent a chill all the way to Eric’s soul. The temperature had dropped each time he was displaced by the dark energy, but it had never turned the hallway into a freezer. What did it mean? Was the temperature proportional to the peril that awaited them?
Cautiously, he stepped through the door and let the cold envelop him. Then he pulled out his phone and looked at the screen.
THE DARK ENERGY IS STRONG THERE, confirmed Isabelle.
The dark energy. Demonic energy, according to the fairy Judith. He wondered if it was a natural side-effect of that kind of energy to pull the heat out of a place.
OR MAYBE IT’S FROZEN BECAUSE THE DEMON WANTS IT TO BE FROZEN
Or that… Or maybe the cold was only another illusion. He saw the frost. He felt the cold upon his skin. But maybe it was just another trick, like in the midway or the storage room.
The lights were off again. He tried the switch, but nothing happened. They were going to have to do this in the dark again.
“Do we really have to do this?” asked Paul.
“Can’t handle a little cold?”
“It’s not the cold that bothers me. It’s the fucking rat monster controlling the air conditioning.”
Eric started forward. He didn’t blame Paul for being anxious. He was plenty anxious, himself. It was hard not to be after what they’d both been through. “Remember, stay focused. Don’t fall for any tricks. As long as you can still hear the kids upstairs, you’re still in the real world and nothing can hurt you.
It wasn’t exactly the truth. There were still plenty of things in this world that could hurt you. But they couldn’t afford to spend any more time in that other Bellylaugh Playland.
“No matter what happens down here, you have to stay focused on the real world,” said Eric.
“Stay focused,” affirmed Paul. “Concentrate. Listen to the kids. I got it already.”
“Don’t get overconfident. It’s harder than it sounds.”
“I never said it sounded easy. Let’s just get this over with before we freeze.”
Eric scanned the hallway as he walked. They were moving away from the go kart track. Up ahead was the storage room. As he took in his surroundings, it occurred to him that those were the only rooms he’d seen so far. He had no idea what else was down here.
