Dark Perceptions (Mystic's Carnival Collective) (5 page)

Move. Motivate. Make haste.

“I should get you home.” Matt’s gaze was now on mine, suddenly alert and with me, his hand stilling mine with his touch.

I nodded. It was a good idea. Home was ideal.
 

Matt tapped the first person to walk by, asked them which way to the exit, or the parking lot, but they kept moving straight past as if Matt were an annoyance or distraction. He looked at me, mouthed the word
rude
, and moved toward the next group coming our way. He didn’t have the chance to ask the question again.
 

A hand dropped on his shoulder. The painted fortuneteller, Sebastian, stood beside us. “There you are. Thought I’d lost you.” He glanced between us and a funny look took root on his face. I wasn’t sure what it meant. “We need to get you two moving toward Big Eli.” He gestured behind him to the array of blinking and thrumming rides.
 

There it was again, the mention of Big Eli. Not a person, but a thing. I looked to where he was pointing. The Zipper? Hell no. Framed by the lights of the Ferris wheel, it looked extra demented. I didn’t want to go, especially with someone I’d never met before, who looked like a sociopath and made me uncomfortable. Faces and places around us meshed into a meld of noise and visual pollution. Instead of stepping into a funhouse, it had come to us and dosed us with magic mushrooms.
 

Am I losing my mind? I don’t like this druggy aftereffect.
 

I looked down at my hand and the hand clasped to mine. It wasn’t Matt’s.
 

It was
his
.
 

That Sebastian man. The strange one fancying himself a dead prophet. He held me firm, something solid between our flesh. Uncomfortable and ungiving, it bit into my skin like a long, unwanted paper cut. Yanking away hard, I found a tarot card staring up at me, and not just any tarot card. One that looked like him
―
a skeleton.
 

I shook it free, watched it flutter to the sawdust ground of the midway.
 

“How did you…?” He looked at me, a dark cloud dropping over his brow, then something else moving across it
―
understanding? “Never mind,” he said, looking perplexed, then shook the expression from his face. He pulled Matt forward by the elbow and reached for me. I wasn’t going to let him play tricks on me again. I backed away. “Come on, Sara. I want to get you guys to the safety of Big Eli.” Again he pointed, only this time it was clear he meant the immense circle of lights towering over the carnival tents. Not the Zipper.

The Ferris wheel? My mind reeled and my body jerked.
It’s so high! Especially this one. Although, I do relish the idea of a kiss at the top. Carnival magic below, starlight above, and bliss at my lips.
 

“Whatcha doing, lover boy?” Viola, the snake whisper, suddenly stood amongst us. Like her reptile, she was clearly practiced in stealthy approach. She flaunted her sexual charms in front of Sebastian. Most men would fall at her feet. Even I wanted to, but Sebastian looked bored, and that appeared to irritate her tremendously. Her voice rose and her gestures grew increasingly sharp. “These kids don’t want your silly, light-and-fancy flight ride. They only want the parking lot.” She made eye contact with me, then slowly glanced over to Matt. “Which is that way.” Her hand extended, pointing down the tight pocket of space between the booths next to us. Barely visible at the end of the long, deep, expanding squeeze we could see it
―
a gloomy view of the parking lot. Row after row of parked cars on packed dirt.
 

That’s all it took. Hunger and need filled Matt’s eyes and he tore himself free from Sebastian’s grip. It was a moment of chaos and confusion, but it was all we needed. Matt grabbed me and pulled us free. I didn’t question anything, I simply moved. With Matt pushing from behind, we ran between the tented booths, jumping over anchor lines and questionable bundles of litter.
 

“What did you do that for?” Sebastian demanded. I heard him so clearly, even with the distance we were putting between him and us. I knew who he was talking to, and it wasn’t us.
 

I could almost picture Viola slithering all over him, all over the surrounding tents, making her way after us. She had managed to make such an impression. “Come on, honey. It was fun,” she chortled. “Admit it.”
 

My heart accelerated and my legs cranked faster. Were they toying with us?

I almost didn’t see the man. Almost plowed into him, or tripped over his outstretched feet. I screamed, leaped up and to the side, but kept moving forward. My heart hammered an unsteady beat.
 

“Okay?” I heard Matt asking from behind. Breathlessly, I assured him I was.
 

There had been a man, tall in his stretched posture, and so formal dressed in a suit and tie. He’d been tucked between the adjoining corners of the tents, almost invisible, and when I’d screamed he’d tipped his hat. My entire gut turned ice cold. I wanted to be home.

Only a few more feet.

“We’re almost there,” Matt said at my back.

The opening widened with each elongated step. I couldn’t pop free of this bottleneck fast enough.
 

Eight more strides.

Seven more.

I began to count. Maybe it made the time move slower, I don’t know, but the counting was a subconscious choice, not something to be helped. Then it happened. I was free. Free of the cramped space and finally standing out in the open before a sea of parked cars. An endless choice of possibilities.
 

No clue where to find the one we wanted.

With hands linked and scanning side to side,
we took to the task, overwhelming as it seemed. Something beeped, chirped two times off to our left. Far to our left.
 

Matt’s hands clenched and pulled into a victory hurrah. Within his clamped fist he held the remote key alarm. The sliver keys dangled over the top of his hand. “Come on,” he said and took off between the rows of dusty cars, making for the one chirping like a homing beacon.
 

We slipped around the front edge of an old Ford, layers upon layers of grime wiping across the side of my skirt. Something wasn’t right. The parking lot was too quiet, too desolate, too abandoned in feel for a working carnival. And worse yet, no one followed us. It was all too easy. My glance danced from vehicle to vehicle. They were all the same. Filth-covered metal cans lining our paths. Orphans waiting to be found. How long had they been sitting here? It looked like years, not hours.
 

Chirp went Matt’s alarm one last time and he threw himself against the door, yanked on the handle, and pulled it open. I scrambled quick as I could, not wanting to spend another minute in the hell zone.
 

I plopped in the passenger’s seat, buckled my seatbelt, and chucked my fear over my shoulder. We were out of here!
 

Matt shoved the key in the ignition, firing the motor to life, and looked at me with a success-achieved grin on his lips.
 

Should have known better. Had we paid attention to the storyline of any horror movie we’d ever watched, we would have realized this was the calm before the kill. We jinxed ourselves by letting our guard down, thinking we were cool with the getaway. How could we be so dumb?

There he was, standing right in front of the car in his blue checkered pants and orange suspenders. Scary as any Bozo or Blinko after a zombie apocalypse. He had followed us from the big show, and now I was freaked
―
but why? It’s not like he held a weapon of any sort. No. It was the oversized red shoes, the too-fluffy hair sticking out in peaks, the ridiculous bouquet of balloons he held in his left hand. It was everything clown, draped in the morose manner he held himself. That and the fact he’d followed us all the way from the Big Top, the damn
clownville
I thought we’d escaped.
 

The paint on his face cracked as his lips widened, spreading a wickedly suspicious smile from ear to ear, the gesture enlarged by the crazed theatrical makeup. He didn’t say a word, simply stood there staring and holding those ridiculous balloons. All of them a shiny Mylar black. They bounced off one another as the breeze continuously rearranged them. My mind was trapped by the motion. A hypnotic weapon. That’s what the balloons were. A weapon. Taunting me with reflected imagery. A glowing symbol, a melting clown face, a shadowy man tipping a fedora.
 

Matt threw the car in reverse and
―
thud
! We hit the vehicle parked behind us. That left only one option. Try to go around the clown standing at our front. A shift and slam into gear, a thrust of Matt’s foot, and the car lurched. My fingers tightened around the door handle and buckle. And I squinted my eyes, not wanting to see, but afraid to look away. The car catapulted forward, then swung right, narrowly missing the striped suspenders and oversized bowtie.
 

Balloons bounced everywhere, off every window, blocking our view and leaving only the smallest squares of sight. Images flickered across their surfaces
―
a wink, a glow, a come-hither flip of a finger. Horrid screeches of metal tore down the driver’s side and Matt twisted the wheel to the right. The balloons started to lift and float away, as they should have from the start. Where they had been, bumping against the window, remained faint smudge lines. Lines that appeared to spell a word:
stay
. My heart hopped into my throat.
 

We’d hit the cars on the left line and Matt adjusted, not stopping or looking back. He kept driving down the dirt path, frantically looking in his rearview mirror, sweat dripping from his temple.

Flipping in the seat, I peered out the back window and watched the clown recede from sight. It gave me no ease of mind to watch him disappear behind us, my gut in constant agitation.
 

The engine revved, sounding like laughter. Not any laughter. Her laughter
―
Viola the snake lady’s.
 

Matt drove faster. The faster the car moved, the more the aisle appeared to extend, go on for infinity. Dirt kicked up from the tires, hit the underside of the frame. It made a hell of a racket. Not louder than her laughter, though. The cackle grew more intense with each drawn-out moment. I pulled my knees into my chest and clutched my hands over my ears. I wanted to be strong for Matt, wanted to be strong for me, but needed this nightmare to stop!
 

It wasn’t just her laughter anymore. I saw her face. She was at the side of the car, time and time again, her face right up in mine. She was staring at me through the front window, laughing uncontrollably. She was everywhere.
 

My fingernails dug into my scalp, pulled at my hair. I turned to Matt. “Get us out of here!”

Ashen face aglow, Matt’s eyes were glued to the road in front of us. “That’s what I’m trying to do!” The car torqued to the right and we swung around the corner. “Finally. That’s got to be the exit up ahead.” His voice wrenched into a high pitch at the end.
 

Alarm bells went off through my entire body. Muscles locked up and my feet slammed against the floorboards, preparing for impact. What I saw instead was the black, slithery beastie with his eyes glistening like wet bloodstones. No longer was he a serpent to wrap around the vixen’s neck, smothering her, strangling her. Now he could crush her, swallow her whole. He was as large as a small house. And he was blocking our path.
 

The car swerved left, just missing the curve beneath the snake’s head. The snake stretched its head high and looked down on us. I yelped, and the car maneuvered again. This time to the right, avoiding the parked cars to the side of us. The long tail laid out before us moved, swayed, forcing us into an abrupt, sharp left down a new aisle, accelerating in our escape.
 

The ground shook and rumbled, and in the rearview mirror I saw the body of the snake loop and spin. The tail slapped down behind us and the car bounced. I screamed. Matt made a hard right, seeking passage in an open gap between parked vehicles. The ground dropped out from beneath us. The car hopped and skittered to the lower parking level, right into the mouth of the waiting snake
―
and utter darkness.
 

Fear-frozen, unable to move, my insides screamed in sheer panic. This was not how I’d pictured my death. I was supposed to grow old. Maybe stay with Matt
―
maybe forever. Have kids. Grandkids.
 

I reached over and squeezed Matt’s shoulder.
 

Everything shifted and my body was thrown to the left. Then we were falling. Diving. A hard bar dug into my waist, wind whipped through my hair, and people screamed, a mingled terror and delight. Then we hurtled out of a tunnel.
 

Clickity clack.