His eyes weren’t sky blue anymore. They weren’t right. They weren’t right at all. The pupils weren’t black like they should be—they were white. The irises were bright red, and the sclera—the part of the eye that should be white, were jet black.
Like someone had inverted the color of his eyes.
He reached out his hand to her, stained red with the oozing ichor. “Your favorite color was red. Mine, too, cupcake.”
She screamed and jumped back from him. She tripped and landed in the grass, hitting it hard with a pained unf.
Something underneath her squished. The ground hadn’t been wet a moment ago. But now it felt like she was in the grass next to a pond. It was saturated and thick with mud and packed strands.
She didn’t want to look.
She knew what it was.
She knew what she had landed in.
It was warm.
But, like being told not to look down, she did it anyway.
Blood. Inches of it. Thick and old, like mud. But it was unmistakable. She wailed.
He laughed.
He cackled like a madman, and his strange, bizarre, and horrifying eyes lit up in joy. He was standing at her feet and held his hand down to her again, as if to help her up. But it was still covered in the same mess she had landed in.
“I can make all this go away,” he cooed. “Take my hand.”
It was him. She recognized the voice now. More than that, she recognized the laugh. It was the man from the darkness of that weird labyrinth she had gone through at the Faire. The man from “the Dark Path.”
She screamed.
And the dream shattered.
She was sitting up in bed before she realized she was even awake. She was shaking, and the sheets were sticking to her from the sweat that was beading on her skin. “Oh, fuck.” She put her head in her hands and tried to take a deep breath.
Now she really understood what the fortune teller had meant. Damn it! It was that old woman’s fault. She’d only had the nightmare because the stupid old lady had put the thought into her head. Pushing out of bed, she decided she needed to take a shower. Glancing at the clock, she discovered that it was four in the morning. She grunted. Late enough that it probably wasn’t worth trying to get to sleep, but early enough that it was going to ruin her day.
It usually took her a few hours to fall asleep. She’d lie there, tossing and turning, trying to find the right position that didn’t hurt badly enough to keep her awake. Then she’d try that for a bit, only to have it ache after twenty minutes, and have to try to find another.
Shitty sleep was a super fun side effect to chronic pain. It was like insult to injury. It wasn’t bad enough that she went through every day in pain, she had to be groggy and exhausted on top of it.
Resigning herself to the fact that she was just going to be awake now, she took a shower and changed, rubbing a towel through her hair. Then she checked her phone. She had a few spam emails and a new text notification. Checking her text, she rolled her eyes.
Trent had launched off a text to her, Lisa, and Emily at two in the morning. “We’re so going back tonight!” It was followed by a bunch of hearts in a string, then the emoji of an arm flexing.
He really was an idiot. An adorable idiot, but an idiot nonetheless. He still made her smile. He always did. Trent was her best friend. They had been inseparable as children, and although they didn’t hang out as much as they used to now that they were adults, he was still the person she considered herself closest to in the world. Especially since the issue with Duncan.
That made her sadder than it should.
Once she made it to work, she sat at her spot at the counter and tapped her pencil on the pad of stationery she kept in front of her. She was doodling her coffee mug. It read “Another Day, Another Dollar.”
Her boss let her keep it at her desk because he thought it was a reference to her job at the bank. It was, but he entirely and utterly missed the sarcastic statement behind it. Oh, well. She kept doodling. She was a terrible artist. But it never stopped her from trying.
The perspective was all wrong. The handle was dinky, and the font didn’t wrap right. Stick to photography, loser. Not like she could even do much of that anymore. Before heading to work, she had dug out her Nikon and some of her smaller gear out of her closet to take to Harrow Faire tonight. Trent and Emily didn’t have an event to run, so they could all meet up as soon as Cora got out of work just after five.
And it seemed Lisa was actually coming for a change! She was bringing Robert, her husband, and her two kids, Jane and Tom. Trent sent her a private text complaining about the presence of the kids, but she reminded him that carnivals were pretty much designed for children, so he could deal. Besides, he wasn’t going to be hanging out with them for long. He was going with one thing in mind. Ludwig the Strongman.
Trent’s snarky reply had simply been “Yeah, and?”
She shook her head with a laugh. Whatever. The day came and went like all her days at the bank came and went. Boring. She cashed some checks, counted some coins, validated a few bills that somebody had thought were counterfeit, then balanced her drawer at the end of the day.
As creepy as last night had been at the Faire, she was honestly a little excited to go back. It was something unique and interesting. A blip in the stream of events of her life that all seemed to blur together into one endless stream of meh.
When she got to the packed parking lot, she slung her camera over her shoulder and tucked a few lenses into her bag. She figured that once Trent ditched them all to go hang out with his latest fling, they’d take Lisa’s kids around to see all the sights. She could take photos while they were on the kiddie rides.
Checking her phone, the rest of them were already inside. Walking up to the counter to buy her ticket, she reached the ticket booth. And groaned.
“Well, hello!” The sleazebag. The carnival Barker, or whoever he was, was sitting across from her, leaning his elbow on the counter, his chin in his palm, smiling at her. “Welcome back.”
She hated his mustache. Nobody should wear a pencil mustache anymore. She wondered if it was glued on. She wanted to yank on it to find out. She shot him a dry expression. “Hi.” She wasn’t sure she liked him very much. She reached for her money clip to pull out a twenty to pay for her admission.
“Want to go back through the Dark Path instead?” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the skull-faced interior. “You still have so much more seity we could steal.”
“No, thanks.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in my silly nonsense?” He smiled.
“I don’t like getting chased around in the darkness, manhandled by some tall-ass laughing weirdo, and end up limping the rest of the night because of it.” She put the money on the counter. “But thanks anyway.”
He shrugged and took the twenty and started getting her change. “Suit yourself.”
The ticket entrance fee was only ten dollars. The rides and the tent shows were all free, but the food and the games weren’t. She figured that was where they made most of their money. And the food, while it was definitely from a carnival, hadn’t been that bad. “Quality carnival food” wasn’t really a thing, but they were trying.
“My name’s Aaron, by the way,” he said to her as he passed a ten-dollar bill back to her. It was an old one. Looking down at it, the date was from the forties. Huh. They were usually taken out of circulation. She’d have to change it out for a new one at the bank if she didn’t spend it at the Faire tonight.