Squeaking Shoes

“Where’d Paul go?”

Tina looked at Sam, who himself was looking away, turning in a circle, his shoes skidding audibly against the polished floor. Paul was a hard man to miss, being as tall as he was wide and just as prone to loud exclamations. He still wasn’t there.

Tina looked around behind herself, turning in a circle herself, finding nothing but herself in the mirrors next to her and ahead of her. No Paul.

“Paul!.” She called out. “Where are you?” No answer. When Tina looks at Sam, he’s got that look on his face, the one she hates. The one where his lips pursed and his eyebrow cocks. “He probably just got turned around.” He says, and his voice drips with a condescension that raises the hair on her arms like pricking needles. “He’ll be fine, it’s just a funhouse.”

“No, it’s a house of mirrors.”

”Same difference let’s go.”

The pricking needles feel like they’re cutting now. It is not the same difference. The funhouse had a variety of stuff going on, not just the mirrors. The house of mirrors, admittedly, was less of a houseand more of a maze of picture perfect duplicates all looping back on each other. A sterile environment that Tina found unnerving. She suspected Sam feels similarly; like he believed out of that endless loop of reflections something might started sprinting at them.

That was probably why he was walking so fast now.

“Sam can you wait up a bit? You said it wasn’t an emergency.”

“I’m not rushing, you have short legs.” She just groans at that. She shouldn’t have come along with him and his brother. Should’ve just broke up with him like she planned. Now she can enjoy fumbling around in a fully lit room. Sam seemed at home here, like it was an environment he was intimate with, and that doesn’t surprise her. He was a tall, thin young man. Thin enough he might be suited for a freakshow if he painted bones over his skin. She smirks to herself at the thought, that Sam might stay in this stupid room,

A room that was rather noticeably quiet, save the squeaking of shoes. It’s all she can listen too at the moment, so she does. She hears her steps. She hears Sam, who is clearly all but running out of the place at this point. She can hear a third set right behind her. Less like footsteps and more like shuffling.

She turns around. “Paul?” She says.

Nothing is behind her but her own reflection. And her reflections own reflection. And so on ad infinitum. Needles pricks turn into ice picks, and she’s suppressing a slight trembling as she turns back around.

Sam is not in front of her. She is in front of herself. Along the sides and at the far end. “Damnit Sam!” Her voice comes out more forceful then she would have liked, but there was hardly anything to like about this. She can’t even hear him walking anymore.

“Bullshit.”

She’s off on her own now, and the squeaking shoes continue. It’s like sandpaper in her ears. The glass she uses to steady herself, to feel which way is open, is warm. It strikes her as odd -mirrors like this are typically cold, right?- but she doesn’t stop using it as a guide. There’s another reason too. Narcissistic it may sound, the idea of her reflection touching hands with her was of greater comfort than Sam or Paul could be, or wanted to be.

She rounded a corner to her right and spots something in the mirrors at the very far end. A lump of… something sitting on the floor. Curious, she walks toward it, paying no further mind to her own footsteps, but now hearing something new, something a bit stranger. Is that banging? She thinks, and as she gets closer, she finds that it is. What sounds like a fist banging against the mirrors. What is the cause for that? Someone wanting out that bad? Sam? Paul? A dozen or so questions are travelling through her head as she approached the lump on the floor, and she can see clearly now exactly what it is.

A lone shoe.

Is this why she wasn’t hearing anyone else? Confusion quickly graduates to anger at her next line of think.

She’d been ditched.

“Those assholes.” She mutters to herself. She’s less than halfway to the shoe, and when she gets her hands on it she’s going to smash every mirror in this goddamn.

WHACK!

She’d been running. Now she was on her ass, holding her aching forehead. The shoe wasn’t on the ground here, that was a reflection. She looks right and sees herself, baggy eyed and lined with indignation at her state, but she sees something behind her reflection as well. She sees the shoe. Looking behind herself, she sees it again, much more clearly than she had in the mirrors, so she was able to see now how oddly moist it looked. How it seemed more ragged than a prissy son of a bitch like Sam would allow.

The smell was more concerning, and more gut wrenching. It was the smell of wet garbage and it made Tina want to get the fuck out of there right that instant. She stood up. She dusts herself off. She feels something plop onto her shoulder.

Her hand shoots to it and it feels sticky and thick and she wants to puke it stinks so bad. Stinks like wet garbage again. Where did this come from? This carnival can’t have plumbing in this place, the layout won’t allow it. Looking up, she expects to be met with grey ceiling panelling again. She is met with something else. Something that drips with thick drool.

Something lined with teeth.

She can’t even begin to scream before she’s gone, and the roof panelling is replaced. There is no more sound in the house of mirrors.

No sound, except for the squeaking of shoes.