Page 40 of These Unhallowed Halls (Equinox Seasons Duet #2)

Twenty-Five- Illusion Stands In The Mind, A Twisted Thread You Must Unwind

Temps

I had heard the voice outside the tent while Caleb was dealing with the dean.

Lizzie and I had looked at each other, eyes wide in the dark as the panic choked me, for what felt like eons, before a faint light at the seam got our attention.

I took off for it, wanting to get to Caleb, and felt Lizzie hot on my heels.

I remembered how this place had acted before, and I held my hand out behind me, seizing her hand so that I didn’t lose her.

But we couldn’t find Caleb.

As soon as we got to the flap where he’d come in, he was gone. Nothing but blackness lingered around us. The tent, this fucking cult, had set up traps so that they’d be ready for us again, or anyone else, for that matter.

“Dammit, I’m sorry. I couldn’t get to him.” I shook my head, my voice a whisper, and I turned to face Lizzie as tiny circles of light began to blink on behind her.

“It’s alright. I know you tried. It’s this fucking place.” Music started to play behind us, sweet and tinkling noises that felt plucked by the tiny metal fittings inside a music box. “Ugh, what now?”

She turned around as a shape took form, this constellation of lights making sense as a hazy red glow filtered out from behind it. It moved, circling over and over, a familiar sight from memories of my childhood. But I dreaded what I might see now inside this cursed carnival tent.

A carousel.

“We need to keep moving forward. You remember what Caleb said. He’ll do the same. He’ll keep moving, and we’ll find him where the paths converge.”

Lizzie raised a brow at me, her mouth in a straight line. “You sure about that?”

Sucking in a deep breath, I grabbed her hand and nodded once. “Yes. I have to be. I choose to be. We’re magic, too, Lizzie. We can fight back against this.”

With a smile, she pulled me over for a quick kiss. “Damn skippy, babe. Let’s go.”

The dim red glow behind the carousel brightened with each step we took closer, the music that played from it an odd juxtaposition compared to the sinister vibes it gave off.

The top of the carousel was lit with those little lights, revealing the shapes carved into the worn wood at the top.

They were depictions of little scenes, like you might see on the typical ride, but these weren’t cute.

Bodies being torn apart, fingers deep inside skulls, the silhouettes were all violent and wrong.

In some, I thought I saw the pieces of people being eaten, and my stomach flip-flopped.

Things lingered in the shadows around us, unwilling to come into the light, and it flickered, revealing dozens of pairs of eyes.

“Keep it lit.” I held up a hand, conjuring a bit of light in my palm—one of the first tricks I learned when I was studying this stuff on my own. “They won’t come toward the light.”

Lizzie held up a hand, closing her eyes briefly as she forced herself to conjure up the glow. She didn’t do this type of magic as much as me, and I focused with her, calling up more of my own inner power to help her get a ball of illumination floating above her palm.

The creeping sounds in the dark corners stayed put, and we both silently agreed to hurry up and get onto the carousel to come out the other side.

“What the fuck?”

As we got closer, Lizzie was the first to notice the horses. These weren’t the pretty ponies and occasional “circus” animals that we’d expect. The black stallions’ eyes all glowed an eerie yellow, their bodies purposefully missing chunks, rib cages, and bones exposed.

“Fucking zombie horses? Are you serious?” Lizzie squished me against her as we stepped up onto the revolving platform, keeping me close to her.

“I’m going to assume we should steer clear of the mouths.”

“Smart.”

It hadn’t looked that big when we were walking up to it.

Hell, the carousel looked like it had a whopping three horses on it when we stepped on.

But now, the spinning ride picked up speed, and with each revolution, more horses and odd creatures appeared on new poles, which seemed to genuinely stab through their bodies.

The machine whizzed faster, and Lizzie and I had to walk against the rotation to attempt reaching the other side of the thing.

That’s where the back of the room was, where the exit would be on a non-haunted ride.

However, with it moving this fast and new animals popping up, all missing skin and eyes, it was getting almost impossible to navigate without bumping into one of them.

“Fucking—Ugh. Try to step inward over here.” Lizzie pointed to her right, closer to the central mechanism of the ride.

Angling that way, I held tight to her hand as we slipped between two horses. They didn’t move, but it was like their stares tracked us, and the one to our left, the one whose mouth was way too close for comfort, seemed to stretch just a hair, like it was inching its teeth forward.

“Lizzie, I don’t—Ah!”

I yelped as just in front of us, an elephant appeared on the carousel, popping up from the floor with a shiny gold pole sticking out of it.

The thing looked worse than the horses, its trunk hanging half cut off, and its ears ragged and torn.

One chunk in particular looked like it might have been a bite mark, and the ribs showed too, intestines still coiled inside it and held in place by the bewitched wood and lacquer construction.

My foot slipped, and I pitched backward as Lizzie got around it. Her shoulder yanked as I stumbled, and for a moment, I didn’t know if I should let go or not. She gripped me tighter, though, keeping me from twisting to the left, my face inches from the horse’s open mouth.

Its teeth snapped down, chomping at me. “Fuck! Lizzie, go!”

All around us, mouths clacked down, wooden teeth crunching together as the inanimate animals surged to life, a freakish showing of impaled creatures, decaying and baying loudly, trying ceaselessly to devour us.

Lizzie took off, keeping her fingers laced through mine, and I ran with her, doing everything I could to fling us toward the back half of this carousel. We were so close, and my thighs burned as we started to gain ground on the speeding ride.

Whinnying rang out near me, and I stopped short as one of the horses closed its teeth down on my skirt.

I pulled against it, the fabric loudly tearing, and then another animal, a peacock, burst through the floor.

It sent me flying forward as I did my best to tumble out of the way, the wooden platform unforgiving as I rolled, smashing my knees and elbows into it.

“Temps!”

I turned over my shoulder to see Lizzie with her braid in the grip of a zombified monkey, my stomach dropping through the earth.

Oh fuck.

Standing, I took off for her, looking for anything that I could use to whack the damn thing and get it to let her go. That elephant was close, trumpeting its broken horn in this horrible sound.

The trunk. Oh, dammit, gross.

I got to it, careful to keep my fingers and appendages out of mouth range, and I grabbed hold of the trunk, wrenching it hard in one direction.

The wood snapped, making the animal go silent, and I ran to Lizzie, swinging as hard as I could into the monkey’s head.

It smashed clean off, splinters flying, and I dropped the trunk to grab her hand.

We ran for the back of the ride, not looking behind us but only forward as we rushed for the way off.

Reality seemed to stretch and thin, and the sounds of laughter from the sides of the ride crescendoed.

The shadows were closing in, the lights on the top of the carousel blinking out one after the other.

“The light! We need to conjure it again!”

Holding out my hand with Lizzie’s fingers knotted in mine, I forced the magic there, calling on hers too.

We screamed as we both pushed the ball of light to appear and grow, swallowing up the area around it.

That pull on reality lessened, and we used everything we had to leap off the carousel and into the dimly lit doorway, the red glow behind it faint and pulsing.

U nsure how much time had passed, I came back to myself, lifting my head off the floor, Lizzie on the checkered tiles next to me. Everything ached, and as I looked around, trying to get my bearings, all I could do was groan.

“A funhouse. Amazing.”

Lizzie stood up, pulling herself off the floor with a low moan of pain, and held a hand out to me, helping me up.

Her braid had come free in several places, and she was sporting a bleeding lip.

It probably happened from hitting the ground when we jumped, and I looked down to see that my knees were bleeding too.

“We get through it. Just like the last time.”

I nodded back at her. “Right. Okay, don’t let go. I…I hate these things.”

“I know, babe. I got you.”

We looked down the narrow hall ahead of us. It was dark in her, only enough light to just make out the walls and floor. Things on the walls glowed, little figurines and dolls, their empty eyes watching us as we slowly crept down the first passageway.

“Hehehehe!” A clown figure jumped out from the corner, snarling through his laugh as he held a massive, round saw blade up, the thing secured to a baseball bat. “Come and play, girlies!”

“Run.”

Lizzie switched hands with me, getting me in front of her as we dashed past the clown. His faded outfits were torn and stained—brown and red splatter covering him from head to toe—and his makeup was streaky and splotched from being worn for who knew how long.

We took off down the only option forward, rushing down another hall as the sound of a chainsaw screamed from just the other side of the wall.

There was only the single path onward, and Lizzie and I didn’t take any chances with slowing down, sprinting through the twists and turns and running into the sides more times than I could count.

Light appeared as we rounded a corner, and my heart surged in my chest. “Lizzie! Look!”

“Don’t stop for anything, Temps! Go for it!”

Powering toward the exit, my lungs screamed, more animatronics popping out from corners as we zig-zagged through a section of oddly angled pony walls.

A Jack-In-The-Box opened, screaming as it leaped out and drove a knife downward.

I stumbled back, but the point of the blade caught my shirt, tearing down from my collarbone to my already injured knee.

“Temps!”

I kicked wildly as Lizzie tried to run up to me, looking back for her just in time to see another clown appear from below a section of the short wall.

He stood up, wielding a massive meat cleaver with jagged edges.

Blood coated the blade, which was spray-painted with red stripes; the handle featured a swirling red and black pattern, reminiscent of a lollipop.

“No!”

I rolled as the Jack-In-The-Box swung forward again, grabbing hold of the knife in its hand and using all my strength to break it free.

The thing was so much bigger in my much smaller hands, a white painted blade with a smiling clown face drawn on in Sharpie.

The eyes were Xs, and the red smile was finger-painted on with what had to be blood.

My skin burned where the long cut traced down my skin. Each step to Lizzie was so fucking painful that I nearly fell to the ground. But that godsdamn clown held her shoved against the wall, his cleaver at her throat, the points of the broken metal pressing into her skin.

As I dragged myself closer, I forced down the pain and realized that the clown asshole wasn’t right. His exceedingly pale skin was stretched too tight, and even from the side, I could tell that his hair was made of ropes, rough jute that frayed this way and that.

It also covered his eyes and mouth, sewn into the skin in Xs.

“Holy fuck.” I reeled.

This thing was dead. This wasn’t a human in costume, either. It was too real. The Xs on his mouth when all the way back to his ears, but he was somehow still talking.

“Come on, pretty little thing. Don’t you know you’re prettier when you smile?” He lifted the cleaver to Lizzie’s mouth, angling one of the points at her cheek. “I’m just going to make it easier for ya. And you’re gonna scream all pretty for me.”

“Fuck off!” Lizzie kicked at the clown’s crotch, making contact.

He lurched, pulling himself in, but as she tried to run for me, he snagged her by the braid. She halted, the clown yanking her to his chest. I needed to move quicker, but my vision was going hazy as I leaked red all over the damn floor.

“Now, now, little slut. You know you want it. Why else would you dress this way?”

I shook my head, trying to focus while this undead creep reached around to Lizzie’s front and groped her breast. His bony, blood-stained fingers wormed down her stomach, balling up her skirt and stuffing between her legs even as she squeezed her thighs together.

“Oh, fuck no. You get your hands off her.”

I used everything I had to run forward, and the asshole didn’t even seem to notice me until I was pulling Lizzie out of his grip and throwing her behind me.

I didn’t hesitate, jamming the blade in my hand up into his stomach.

He dropped to the floor, the knife in his guts, and I turned to run back to my girl.

“Go!” I pointed behind her. “The exit!”

A low growl reverberated through the air from the shadows. This fucking place wouldn’t quit, and I just focused on sprinting straight ahead, zeroed in on the way out. Lizzie stood at the threshold, waving her arm frantically like it was actually going to get me moving faster. Then, her eyes flared.

“Behind you!”

Squish.

I heard it before I felt the pain. The sound of my skin tearing and the wet slice as my blood bubbled up around the wound. The knife I’d used stuck out of the spot below my collarbone, my nerves screaming as the injury registered. I gasped, unable to keep moving forward.

“No!” Lizzie took off from the doorway, running toward me in slow motion.

Or was that just me slowing down? Everything felt so far away.

And then that feral growl was everywhere around me, so loud and menacing and omnipresent. I could feel it in my bones, and then a hard yank, making my skin burn again. A massive black shape, furred and snarling, stood over me where I slumped to the floor.

But it faced the clown, two clawed hands moving like lightning, they tore into its body until it was in little pieces on the floor. It was disgusting, but I couldn’t find it in me to be nauseated.

“ Don’t fucking touch what’s mine. ”

Two voices speaking as one. I knew that sound. Then a bunch of scuffling sounds as the world went dark, my eyelids too heavy to keep open.