Reflection of The Senses

It didn’t look fun. It looked like quite the opposite. Standing in front of me was a large funhouse. Chipped and faded paint coloured it’s exterior. I had lost my friends in the endless stream of people walking around the Halloween festival. The smell of candy corn and other sweets wafted through the air. It was currently around 11 pm, jack o’lanterns and cheap decorations were littered all around the festival as people in costumes walked around laughing, talking and once in a while, screaming. It was Halloween after all.

Despite all the festivities and scary atmosphere that was in the air, this “fun” house seemed largely out of place. Sure, chipped and faded paint look was seen on nearly every haunted house in the vicinity, but this place looked…..abandoned. This wasn’t the only thing about this attraction that stood out. Its placement was off. All the attractions and stands were in the park in the middle of town. The park had three entrances. This attraction was outside of the parks west entrance, across the road a little to the right, nestled in an abandoned parking lot. It was odd, putting your business so far away from the rush of possible customers. Maybe it was closed. Then again, it wasn’t here yesterday.

I turned heel and started to make my way back to the festival. Curiosity killed the cat. This applied especially well, considering that I was currently wearing cat ears and a tail. The rusty creak of a door swinging open and a raspy voice filling the air behind me sent shivers down my spine. The hair on my arms stood as a gust of autumn wind swept down the road. The wind seemed like a warning.

“Ah, does miss wish to visit my house of wonders?”

I turned back against my better judgement and what greeted me was a man in an extremely well-tailored suit. I was expecting a clown but somehow this was more unsettling. I looked up at the man. He had a white blindfold around his eyes. His lips were black, curving slowly when he spoke.
“My name is Pr-”

A car revved by, causing me to miss his name. I was too paralyzed to ask him to clarify. There was music spilling out of the now open door behind him. It was your run of the mill circus music. Except the music would pause abruptly, certain notes going too high then dropping several octaves. The music …it was as if someone was using their fingernails on a gramophone instead of the needle. Scraping. Stop. Scraping harder. Stops again. The rhythm was jumpy, unpredictable and once again the word fun seemed ironic. This music wasn’t a scary track put on to scare people. It was simply music. In that “fun” house, the music was part of the house. I didn’t want to find out who was playing it.

“Uh, I think I’ll p..p-ass, I don’t have any, any money”

The man’s black lips curved upward. He stepped completely out of the doorway.

“You’re our first customer of the night. You may go in for free.”

Free. The perfect, low low price of zero dollars. If the attraction sucked, it’s not like I would have lost anything by trying it. It was unsettling, for sure, but on the other hand, the other haunted attractions were boring. I had yet to find one that made me squirm. One that made scream. This, this might be it. I felt my lips turn up in a grin that matched the man in the suit.

“Sure.”

Stepping into the funhouse, I was greeted by a myriad of marionettes lining the walls, dancing as I walked along a corridor. The smell that greeted me was nauseating, like rotting flesh. The marionettes were moving around, dressed as little ballerinas, their movements jerky. The sound of clinking china could be heard faintly, overshadowed by the music. The strings causing them to move were greyish green as if covered with mildew. Some of their strings were severed, half of their body dancing and twirling vividly while the other half remained limp. Lifeless. They had no eyes. The empty sockets where their eyes should have been were dripping with the same red liquid as the lighting in the corridor. Red. Like blood. Probably fake. I gripped my chest, almost tripping over my feet as I sped up my pace. That’s when it hit me. Their movements were jerky. They were dancing along to the music. When the music stopped, they all paused. When it started up again, they unpaused, falling back into their dance. I stopped, wide-eyed. Petrified.

The shivers down my spine caused me to physically tremble. I took a few shaking steps back, and as regret washed over me, I fell on my rear end. This wasn’t possible. The laws of physics didn’t work that way. When the music paused, the marionettes stopped but didn’t carry through with the momentum of their dance, swinging like they were supposed to, before falling still. They stopped. Completely. They were frozen, unbelievably still. One of them that was swinging through the air, stopped mid-swing. Its head was turned towards me, the fake blood oozing out of its sockets, smelling metallic and dripping to form a puddle on the floor. It was the only sound in that one moment before it’s head turned and it started to move. The music was back.

I would like to say that my experience in the “fun” house ended there, but in a fit of panicked screaming, I got up and ran straight FORWARD. My footsteps echoed loudly as I practically flew out of the corridor, into another room. I hunched over, cold sweat dripping down the nape of my neck. My heart was pounding in my ears. Like a hummingbird trying to escape from my chest. My breath came out laboured, slowing with the tempo of my heart. I looked around, the music now replaced by deafening silence. A single stage stood in front of me, the spotlight trained on a single full-length mirror. The curtains framing the stage were heavy, wine red, velvety curtains, far too long for the stage, spilling onto the ground. The mirror was simple enough, it’s frame dark mahogany in the shape of a rectangle. I could see the top of my head in the mirror, as the elevated stage had a set of stairs, the same wood as the mirror frame. This room was by far better than the marionette corridor, but with such an empty room, one couldn’t but expect a jump scare to pop out. Perhaps from behind the curtains.

Walking up the steps that creaked as I went along, I braced myself for whatever horror this new room would present. Perhaps the music was off here, not just because it was meant for the marionettes, but due to the fact that no music would make it easier to hear me scream.
A few seconds passed. Then a minute. One minute turned to five. As I stood there, eyes closed, fists raised, bracing myself, I had a realization. There was nothing coming. I felt the heat rising in my cheeks. I felt awkward, yet no one was here. I looked into the mirror, the one object in the room. A funhouse usually had multiple funky mirrors in a maze design. This funhouse only had one. I glared at my reflection. Not a thing out of place. It had one mirror. A boring one at that. As if hearing my thoughts, the reflection in the mirror started to change. My reflection started to fade, the same happening to the reflection of the room. The mirror was now made of brilliant bright light, making my eyes feel like someone had just poured bleach into them. It was like that for a few seconds, then the light faded, a new reflection appearing on the mirror’s surface. Except it wasn’t a reflection. It was like the mirror was a TV. I was seeing from a person’s perspective. Out of their eyes.

The person walked across a zebra crossing. They were wearing bright blue converse, a stark contrast to the cracked and old zebra crossing. I recognized the road. The autumn leaves were scattered along the sides walks, the sky a dark overcast and the sun hiding behind its dark veil. It was the zebra crossway that leads to my favourite cafe. I could hear what the person was hearing. The lyrics of a dreary song blared through in their ears.

“You can’t stop it-”

There was a deafening honk, followed by the screech of rubber on asphalt. It drowned out the music. The smell of burned rubber wafted through their nostrils. The person’s head whipped to the direction of the noise. The truck barreled into them. Blood. Sharp pain, cracking of bones. Then darkness.

I stepped back from the mirror. I had just seen this play out in a matter of seconds. Their death. A flash and then darkness. The smells, the feeling, the …sight. I hunched over, retching any candy I had eaten that night. A puddle of rainbow sludge. I looked up at the mirror, about to look away in disgust, when I saw him. The man in the tailored suit.

“How do you like my mirror?”

I wanted to respond, but the bile rising in my throat stopped me from doing so. All I could do was look at him and try not to pass out.

“My mirror is my eyes. It shows those who look in it…..the truth.”

He reached behind his head, undoing the blindfold. The white blindfold fell to the ground, revealing what was underneath. There was nothing underneath. The two black sockets oozed blood. Unlike the marionettes, his blood was real. The smell was even worse now. A single black spider crawled out of the abyss that was his eye socket, crawling into his ear. It was getting harder to keep the bile down. His black lips curved up into a smile once again. With one fluid motion, he pushed me into the mirror. Instead of the mirror shattering, I just passed through. I read his black lips as he disappeared along with the room.
“See you…later”

What greeted my face was the cold pavement of the road outside the fun house. The autumn wind swept down the road and only then did I realize how suffocating the inside of the attraction actually had been. The cold air filled my nostrils as a sigh of relief escaped my trembling lips. I stood up and spotted a familiar group of people standing across the road. They waved at me and I rushed forward. My friends. Thank goodness.

They told me how they had been searching for me all this time. They also said how freaked they were when they saw me talking to myself in an empty parking lot. How scared they were when I started screaming and sprinting around. I thought they were joking. That was until I looked back at where the funhouse only to find a single, empty parking lot.

The funhouse was gone.

I walked down the pavement, trying to clear my head. My headphones fit snugly on top of my beanie. The lyrics of a song that popped randomly in my playlist thumped in my ears. I glanced down at the artists’ name. Prognosis. Huh. I’ve never heard this song before.

“Blue morphs to black..”

The sky was a dark overcast, autumn leaves billowing in the wind. I shivered despite my large coat. The spider came to mind. I could practically feel it’s little legs on my skin but I tried to shake the thought away. That was the least disturbing thing that happened last night. The urge to visit my favourite cafe, the Black Cat, had been nagging me all morning and so I decided to act upon it. Pastries and possibly hot chocolate filled my thoughts, chasing away any aforementioned spiders. Besides my stomach had been empty since last night. The light turned red and the cars stopped. I made my way across the zebra crossing. I looked down at my shoes.

“Careful now, Careful how-”

I haven’t worn these shoes in a while. Since when have I had blue shoes? They must have been sitting in the back of my closet for a while.

“You can’t stop it-”
Time seemed to slow. Deja vu and dread filled my mind. That word.The band. What was the man’s name? The honk, deafening my ears. The smell of burning rubber filling my nostrils and finally, my head whipping towards the commotion as the truck came barreling into me.

Blood.

Sharp pain, cracking bones. It was done in a flash. Then darkness. Prognosis. Of course.

A voice rang through the darkness, carrying the same tone as the song.

“What did I say about later?”

Credit: Soso Atypical