by Simon Holt
“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?”
15
Reggie sat on Aaron’s bed while he knelt in front of her and bandaged her hands. Horror-movie posters covered the walls. All the mask-wearing slashers, bloodthirsty demons, and ravenous undead they depicted seemed more comforting than scary. They were familiar icons from the times when fear had been a game. Those times were over.
She felt as if she’d been mashed into scrap by an industrial crusher. She was coated with ash, and her burnt hair was a wild mess. The one thing she found pretty about herself she’d have to cut off. Aaron had given her a black knit hat to cover it up, at least. She’d told him the whole story of what had happened as he went about tending to her injuries. So far, he’d said nothing in response.
“Say something,” she said.
He raised his head, his look a mix of worry and anger.
“What do you want me to say, Reg? That I’m cool with the fact you went back without me? That you faced that thing alone?”
“Aaron, I —”
“You could have died in that fire,” Aaron taped the ends of the gauze on both hands and turned her palms upward tenderly. “You’re lucky the rest of your body isn’t like this.”
Reggie cradled her arms to her chest. “I know, but —”
“And eating that thing!” Aaron stood up and paced. “Do you have any idea what kind of toxin you might have ingested? Who knows what their physical composition is? Plus, the mental damage you could’ve —”
“Henry’s my brother, Aaron. You said we had to get braver. So I did.”
“Reg, I — I know I freaked out when we saw the Vour. But it won’t happen again. I won’t let you down a second time.”
Reggie rose from the bed and hugged him.
“I know. And that’s why I need you. You’ve got to help me figure this out.” She gestured at his computer workstation.
Aaron grinned. “Now that I can help with.”
He swept a pile of soda cans off his desk and sat down at his computer. Reggie took stock of Aaron’s bedroom. As usual, it was a mess: empty cans of hyper-caffeinated energy drinks littered the floor and adorned shelves, dressers, and speakers, surrounding his collection of plastic monster figures like strange aluminum idols. Reams of scribbled notebooks towered in a pile on his nightstand, and all three computer monitors displayed peculiar Web pages: the site for the Institute of Parapsychology in Boston, an amateurish alien abduction page complete with cheesy clip art of a flying saucer and animated tractor beam, and an intimidating federal government text file that nobody save Aaron would have the mental fortitude to read. In the middle of his workstation, under the light of a desk lamp, was the journal.
As Aaron worked, Reggie curled up on his bed and closed her eyes. She meant to doze for only a few minutes, but it was nearly dark when she awoke to the hissing of another can-tab snapping open.
“Thought I’d let you slee
p awhile.” Aaron took a sip of his drink. “I know you’re exhausted.”
“What happened to me, Aaron?” Reggie stood up and crossed to his desk. “Tell me you’ve found something to explain what’s going on.”
“For starters, I think eating the Vour altered your mind.” He picked up a pencil and tapped Reggie on the head. “You’re not a Vour in there, but you’re connected to them somehow. You can plug in to something or someplace. Don’t know what or where it is, but you went there when you latched on to Henry in the snow. So physical contact triggers it, or extreme cold, anger…”
“But how did I make it happen? I could feel the Vour pushing back against me. Fighting to tap into my fear.”
“The way it happened when Henry tried to drown me. Part of that monster entered my mind while it was touching me. It pushed part of itself into my brain and pulled my fears to the surface.”
“But —”
“But you pushed back.”
“Yeah.”
Aaron grabbed a piece of cookie dough from the snack bowl on the floor and popped it into his mouth.
“Listen to this.” He opened the journal to an earmarked page. “Macie wrote this passage decades after the Vours took Jeremiah, when he was dying of cancer. I never paid attention to it until today: Jeremiah talked in his sleep again last night. He’s been doing it since the cancer started, and it breaks my heart to hear it. He sounds just like the young boy I loved, and he’s crying out — ‘I’m so scared! Save me, Pa! Get me out of here!’”
“It sounds like he’s trapped in a nightmare,” Reggie murmured.
Aaron nodded.
“Suppose there’s a place inside our heads we don’t know is there. A place crammed full of such horrible stuff our mind won’t even let our subconscious know it exists. This domain that the thing threatened you about. It’s like a … a fearscape.”
Aaron turned to the Institute monitor where he pulled up a large, three-dimensional diagram of a brain. He clicked an icon on the screen and the diagram rotated, showcasing the numerous folds and intricate neural net of the model.
“You think they invade us through our brains?” asked Reggie.
“Why not? I mean, there are workings in the brain we don’t have a clue about. Dark, uncharted territory. But there’s something between Vours and humans, a synergy that allows Vours to access our fears, take over the mind, and rule the body.”
Aaron double-clicked the brain schematic, and the screen magnified a small nub near the base of the model.
“This little almond-shaped thing is called the ‘amygdala.’ Part of the brain scientists isolate as the core of emotional sensation, where we experience raw, unfiltered emotion. No thinking, no intellect, just the heavy-duty stuff. Euphoria. Rage. Panic.”
“And fear.”
“Exactly.” Aaron sat back and started gnawing on a pencil. “What if it’s a door for the Vours? What if they find a way in here and open somebody’s fearscape? Use it. Manipulate it. It’s made from our own fears, and I think you were in your own head when you connected with that monster, Reg.”
“No. I felt it pushing me away. Trying to keep me out of somewhere. And if the fearscape is made from my fears, why a carnival? And why was Henry there?”
“The carnival’s just a backdrop. Henry’s the key. Right now there’s nothing you’re more terrified about than that Vour taking Henry.”
“But it didn’t feel like my nightmare.” Reggie grabbed a piece of cookie dough. “A killer clown in an evil carnival? Come on.”
“Don’t get too concrete about this.” Aaron stood and paced his own trail. “The mind likes symbols. A clown could symbolize dozens of fears.”
“Yeah, well, it felt pretty concrete.”
“I’m sure it did, but we’re talking psychic trauma, not actual, physical danger.” Aaron massaged his temples. “How’d the clown try to kill you?”
“He tried to slice me in half with his cute little hatchet-hand. Who knew my deepest fears are so damn cliché?”
“A hatchet-handed clown?”
Aaron stood up and scanned a shelf of DVDs. He pulled one out and showed it to Reggie.
“This hatchet-handed clown?”
The psycho clown stared back at Reggie from the DVD cover.
“That’s … that’s him,” she said.
“Killer Karnival 2: The Return of Berzerko. Your memory of the movie triggered the sequence! Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“But I’ve never seen this movie.”
“You saw him in the original KK.”
Reggie shook her head.
“Never saw that one either.”
“Yes, you did. Henry took my copy a few months ago and said you wanted —” Aaron’s jaw slackened. “He never gave it to you.”
“No.”
“He watched it himself,” said Aaron.
Reggie sat down on the bed. “I wasn’t in my head, Aaron. I was in his.”
“Yeah, of course,” Aaron said slowly. Reggie could practically see the wheels turning in his head. “I’ve been looking at it backwards. It didn’t attack you. You attacked it.”
“I was mostly running in terror.”
“Maybe it felt that way. But they gain access through our minds, right? With the Vour essence inside you, you can do it, too. I’ll bet they were surprised as hell when you showed up. You’re a freaking super-shaman!”
“I’m not a super-anything, Aaron.” Reggie glared at him. “If I were, my brother wouldn’t be trapped in a killer carnival. And there’s something the Henry-Vour said that’s bothering me — just the way he said that I ‘should never have entered their domain.’”
“And?”
“What if the fearscape isn’t in Henry’s mind? What if it’s in another place entirely? An actual place, like another dimension or something?”
“Then you’re even more badass than I thought. You’re hitting them where they come from.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were excited about all this.”
“Damn right — don’t you see, Reg? Wherever it is that Henry’s at, you can reach him.”
Aaron clapped his hands on Reggie’s shoulders. She howled in pain.
“What’d I do?” Aaron jumped back. “More burns?”
Reggie gingerly touched her right arm.
“My shoulder…” She unbuttoned the top of her shirt.
Aaron moved behind her as she pulled her shirt off her shoulder. He couldn’t stifle a gasp.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “What the hell is that?”
Reggie looked at the wound in the mirror on the closet door. Aaron came to her side. They stared at a lesion running ten inches down her back. It looked like a wound carved from inside her skin.
“That’s where the hatchet slashed me, in the fun house,” Reggie whispered.
“I’m going to touch it, okay?” Aaron said.
“Gentle.”
Aaron put a fingertip on the wound. “I can feel it. It’s real —”
A noxiouswisp of smoke seeped out of it.
“Oh, God, what’s happening to me?” Reggie looked stricken.
“Wait — look!”
Slowly, the wound closed from the center out toward the ends. Her flesh rippled beneath. The wound had healed from underneath.
“Unreal.”
Only the faintest black scar remained, thin as a thread, almost invisible.
“Psychic trauma, my ass. What the hell do you call that?”
The phone rang, making them both jump. Aaron checked the caller ID.
“Your house. Must be your dad wondering what happened. Want me to —”
“No. Let me get it.” Reggie picked up the receiver but did not speak. She could hear the boy’s raspy breathing.
“Come home, Reggie.” Henry’s voice sounded calm and sweet. “I don’t want to fight anymore. Don’t you love me?”
“You’re not Henry.”
“Of course I am. I remember everything, Reggie
. I remember all the times you read to me, all the scary stories —”
“You have my brother’s memory, but you’re not him.”
“Dad thinks so. He loves me just the way I am,” Henry said.
“I’ll take you out.” Reggie’s voice was low and grim. “I swear on my life I will take you out.”
“Nah. You just caught me unprepared today.” Henry’s sugary tone vanished. “It won’t happen again. Besides, I hate to see you upsetting Dad. You know he’s a wreck since Mom left. And he looks so fragile when he’s sleeping.”
Reggie went cold. “Stay away from him.”
“Then be a good sister and come home. I’ll let you read me a story. One with a happy ending.” The line clicked off, and there was only silence.
Reggie hung up the phone. She buried her face in her burnt, trembling hands.
“He’s going to hurt Dad if I don’t go home.”
She walked to the window and stared out. Flecks of snow whipped in the air.
“I found him, Aaron. I found him in there. The real Henry. Now I need to find a way to get him out.”
“We will. You get some sleep and then —”
“Tonight. I’m going back into the fearscape tonight,” she said. “I can’t leave him in there, now that I know.”
“But look at you. I’m worried. You’re a wreck.”
“Henry — the real Henry — has been living out his worst nightmares ever since Sorry Night.” Reggie held up her bandaged hands. “This is nothing compared to that. We have to figure out how to beat this thing.”
Aaron nodded. “It hates the cold. You got inside when you had it pinned in the snow. Maybe that’s when their grip on the mind is weakest. We need to get it outside. Somewhere no one can see us.”
“The snow was enough to weaken it, but I got pushed out before I could find Henry. We need a real deep freeze. Like Cutter’s Lake,” Reggie said. “The water below the ice.”
“That might kill him, Reggie.”