Carnival on High

Content Warning: Drug use

Hawson Creek’s summer carnival opens on a Friday night in early August. The night is mild as I stand in line at the admissions gate with Michael, Jake, and Chris, each of us trying to look inconspicuous as we pass a flask between ourselves. I’m supposed to be at work, but my boss has been giving me too many double shifts at the bar lately so I’m playing hooky tonight. The carnival has drawn half the town anyway, and I can’t imagine Pete’s Barhouse will be anywhere near as crowded as here.

There are approximately four families and three couples ahead of us in line when Chris pulls out a little plastic bag from his cargo shorts. He waves it from side to side, shaking the contents as he does so. “Anyone want an edible?”

Michael and Jake put out their hands immediately to accept the offer.

“Why are they in a Ziploc bag like that?” I ask, holding out my hand nonetheless.

“Homemade. Got them from Margie’s brother.”

I nod, taking a nibble out of my given gummy square. It tastes like lemonade and I finish the thing quickly. Probably not the best idea, considering I have no idea the dosing of a homemade edible, but I don’t really care.

Our group reaches the front of the line and the lights on the entryway arch are glowing the same butter yellow as my gummy. It’s $2 for entry and $10 for 10 tickets to use on the rides and games. Sure, the tickets are a little pricey considering a ride takes 2-3 tickets, but that’s pretty much what you’re going to get at any carnival.  At least here the entry fee is cheaper than the big city fairs and the security here is way more relaxed.

We pass under the big lighted archway into the carnival proper. On either side of us are all the food stalls forming a neat, fragrant line along the carnival entrance. I know it’s too early to have the munchies, but my mouth still waters at the smell of kettle corn and roasting meat so I bolt to the nearest booth. Four wrinkled dollar bills later and I have an entire turkey leg in one hand, my other hand busy pushing Jake away from sneaking a bite.

As I enjoy my slab of meat, my friends and I take a brief tour of the nearby games and attractions to decide what to spend our tickets on. We’re also, of course, waiting for our buzzes to kick in. This can take anywhere from half an hour to almost two hours, so we move slowly. After some deliberation, my friends decide they want to ride the Tilt-o-Whirl as many times as they can in a row. I look up at the ride, the machine attempting to entice me in with colorful blinking lights and upbeat music, but shake my head. I’m not really vibing with experiencing that much motion, especially after eating so much turkey. My friends pout but wave me off and I wander to find my own fun.

The fun house looks, well, fun. It’s 2 tickets to enter so I absently tear the fee from my ticket roll and head inside. A large vibrant green arrow on the floor points into the entrance which is a large archway decorated to look like a clown’s gaping mouth. Once I’m inside, the colors look absolutely vibrant: neon pinks, glowing purples, and yellows that seem like they’re popping off the walls. I smile.

The house starts with a hallway filled with spinning pinstriped barber shop poles. I stumble through, a little dizzy, and look behind me. Strangely, I can’t see the entrance anymore.

The house snakes 180 degrees to the left into a parallel hallway. Here, the floor is rocking slowly up and down in different panels. Bizarrely though, through the gaps in between the panels, I can see what look like gears and sharp pieces of metal. It seems like one wrong step can trip my foot into one of the gaps and potentially crush it. Sweating, I keep a hand on the wall and very slowly shimmy across the panels, making little calculated hops to jump the gaps and reach the end of this hallway.

Rounding the corner to the right this time puts me at the entrance to a maze of mirrors. The lights are blinding in the reflections and all I can hear is the buzzing of halogen bulbs. I’m starting to feel a little nauseous and I wonder if the turkey leg wasn’t a good idea after all.

My progress in the maze is incredibly slow. I look at my feet to move forward after bumping face first into a mirror one too many times. I remember hearing about this trick before; you can’t always tell the walls apart in a maze of mirrors, but the floor will look different. I must have shuffled a quarter of the way through the maze when I look up and see a clown.

The first time it seems to be a cardboard cutout of a clown, hidden down one of these maze passages and reflecting back to me. But then I round another bend in the maze and it’s an actual man wearing a suit so bright it’s practically strobing. His face is painted into a messy red grin and when I squint, I can see the man is flashing a set of big yellowed teeth. He waves at me with two comically large white gloves.

The maze is sweltering hot as I double back the way I came, away from the clown and his creepy face. Only the clown doesn’t disappear—it is a maze of mirrors after all—and this time the messy grin looks less like lipstick and more like blood.

Heart pounding, I slam into every mirror imaginable to escape this maze—and that clown—but can’t find the exit. I’m lost in here. Lost with a clown that’s holding something now. A balloon? An ice cream? A knife?

I trip and fall onto the ground, my mirror-self spinning dizzyingly around me, and I remember my tactic of looking at the floor once more. I can’t stand up, so I crawl on my hands and knees. Sweat drips down my nose and I watch the way the floor bends and turns until I finally poke my head past the last mirror and into the next hallway. I almost collapse again in relief.

Panting heavily, stomach roiling, I look up and see yet another smirking clown standing ten feet down the hall. We stare at each other, neither of us moving in a silence so severe I can feel my ears beginning to pop. I blink and the clown is walking speedily towards me, hands reaching out to grab my neck. Whimpering, I heave myself forward, dodge past the clown, and book it in the only direction I can see—up the stairs.  I’m running as fast as my legs will take me, my lungs aching from the strain I’m putting on them. Despite all this, it feels like hours have passed before I make it to the second floor. Once or twice I even found himself running back down the stairs and had to turn around again.

The second floor is not as large as the first. When I do make my way inside, leaning on a wall for support, I’m greeted to the sight of a room filled with punching bags hanging from the ceiling. I’m exhausted from running but I know I need to get out of this house somehow. Reluctantly, I peel myself off the wall and push through the bags.

I hate that I can’t see anything in front of me or behind me. A bag I knock aside swings right back to me with equal force, knocking me to my knees. Suddenly I feel hands everywhere, touching my shoulders, touching my hair, but I still only see the bead-filled bags around me. I shriek and practically somersault through the remaining bags.

My vision is blurry, and I have to wipe my eyes to see the next attraction properly. It’s one of those slowly rotating barrels in a tunnel. Black and white strips are painted along the inside, giving it the illusion of a hypnotic wheel from this angle.

Gasping and shaking, I scoot towards the tunnel, out of reach from whatever grabbed me in the hall of punching bags. The tunnel is steadily rotating in front of me and I toe the line between solid ground and moving floor a few times. I’m not confident in being able to walk across this obstacle and look around helplessly for another path. Nothing. There’s only forward and backwards, no going around.

It’s as I’m looking behind me that I notice the forest of bags begins to shake. Something is coming.

I bolt into the spinning tunnel and immediately trip, slamming to the floor like a bag of bricks. The whole fun house shakes, making me wonder if it will collapse underneath me. Laughter echoes behind me and I vividly picture the clowns hiding in the shadows, delighted at my vulnerable state.

I drag my body forward, slowly sliding off the edges of the tunnel as it rotates. When I glance down at my hands, they’re coated in blood. It’s smearing along the walls, leaving red streaks in bright contrast to the black and white hypnotic pattern.

“What’s black and white and red all over?” I giggle, then choke back a need to vomit.

The laughter from the shadows gets louder and I get faster. They’ve cut me once. They’ll do it again.

In one last heave, the tunnel ends and I’m rolling out into fresh air. I pull myself upright using the fence surrounding the second story catwalk and look out across the whole carnival. Everything seems so small out there. So far away from where I am now.

How am I supposed to get down? Everyone is too far away to help me and I have no idea how I’m supposed to leave this place now that I’m way up here.

The sound of footsteps behind me startles me into quickly shuffling down the catwalk and past the illuminated sign of the fun house. I’m breathing in like I’m chugging water, taking big gulping breathes and looking over the railing for a way out.

I’m so busy searching for an exit that I don’t notice until it’s too late.

At the end of the catwalk is another clown, bigger than the other two combined. His eyes are bloodshot and bulging obscenely out of his skull. Sharp teeth are stained yellow and black with pieces of...something wrong stuck between them. The hair is a matted dull red, the suit a dingy blue and white checker print, and in each enormous hand it clutches a dagger the size of my forearm.

Each time I blink he flashes forward several feet closer to me, even as I backpedal along the catwalk.

A low laughter permeates the air, rumbling in my chest and I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

All the air has left my lungs and I realize it is because I am screaming and I cannot stop screaming and I need to find a way out right now.

Gripping the catwalk railing I heave my legs over and jump out into the night sky, the clown’s laughter trailing behind me as I plummet to the ground.

I wake up in the hospital a day later with a broken arm, a sprained ankle, and abrasions covering both my hands and knees.

My friends have just arrived to visit after being released from overnight police custody. After the Tilt-o-Whirl marathon, they had gone on to harass several guests and dump over every trash can in sight looking for “buried treasure.” Apparently, the gummies we had been given courteously of Chris’s friend’s brother hadn’t just been THC gummies. They had also been laced with LSD.

After another day at the hospital and receiving instructions to care for my newly acquired cast, I am allowed to return home. Chris helps drive me, apologizing profusely for not warning us all about the potential sketchiness of his source. He doesn’t take his eyes off my cast as he talks.

My surroundings appear much more muted compared to that night. No more neon pinks. No more floating yellows or highlighter purples. Daily life returns, if a little more difficult with the cast. I do my job. I do my chores. I go to bed. Doctors say I can come back in six weeks to get the cast off and things will be perfect again.

I just wish the clown would stop watching me from my closet every night.