Caught in the Carnival

You know, I never really cared for carnivals. Ever. Nothing about them has ever appealed to me. The crowds are annoying, and the noise is a headache. I don’t like the rides, and they feel like they are a loose bolt away from coming apart and killing all of the patrons within them. The food is deep fried nausea. Seriously, I feel like I’m going to get heartburn and some kind of communicable disease just looking at it.

And yet… here I am. A couple of my friends managed to drag me out here. Well, trick me out here is more like it. They know I dislike these carnie camps, so they told me we were going out to see a movie instead. By the time I figured out what was going on it was too late. Even if they would have pulled the car over to let me out, it’s too far to walk home, and I didn’t have money for a cab.

Once we arrived, off they went without a single care about me.

I would have left, but they didn’t leave the keys in the car. At this point I totally would have left them here without a ride.

I would have stayed in the car, but they left the windows up and it is too hot this evening to be trapped in a vehicle, and the only thing more distasteful than being in a carnival itself is staying in the parking lot where creeps and weirdoes hang out.

I would have called someone to come get me, but my two… friends… managed to find a carnival in a location that has absolutely no service.

So here I am, in a place I really don’t want to be, trying to find the two assholes that tricked me into coming and then promptly ditched me.

I haven’t been to one of these things since I was a little kid, and I didn’t care for them then either. As I walk through the mass of people and strobing colored lights on the attractions, I can hear the occasional sound of vomit followed by laughter. The smell is less appealing. The sickeningly sweet smell of hork is slightly sweeter than normal, probably because of all the cotton candy. The sweat that has long remained on the unwashed folk who attend, and run, these attractions, balances the sickeningly sweet smell in a horrendously unattractive manner.

The more time I spend here, the more the people here don’t seem quite right. I notice that people are laughing at things that don’t seem all that funny, or even all that pleasing. There are no upset children with a scraped knee, nobody in an argument with anyone else, even the people waiting in lines that seem to be going nowhere seem to have these smiles plastered on their faces.

At first it kind of seems like maybe I’m on something, like maybe my two friends slipped me something along the way, but that’s not quite right. It seems more like everyone else here is on something. They seem out of it somehow, like they are enjoying the experience of being at the carnival, but they aren’t really enjoying it. It is difficult to describe but it seems almost like they are forced to be enjoying themselves and they don’t even know it.

I avoid touching anyone as I mull my way through the crowd. It isn’t too difficult. Though there are a lot of people at the carnival, the place is hardly jam-packed. Finally I see the two friends who tricked me into coming here and then ditched me. They are at a ring toss game, grinning and laughing like everyone else.

“Very funny assholes,” I say as I walk up to them, “now give me the keys to the car or take me home.” They don’t look at me. They don’t even seem to acknowledge my presence. They just keep playing that stupid ring toss game. To say I’m flabbergasted is an understatement. I’ve seen both of these two drunk and stoned before, but they’ve never blown me off like this. “Hey,” I grab one of their shoulders and pull them to face me, “I’m talking to you assho…”

I stop mid sentence. Something is wrong. Something is dreadfully wrong. His face is contorted and pulled back in a twisted mockery of a grin. I look around and I begin to notice that everyone else has the same distorted expression on their faces. I just didn’t notice earlier because I was too busy looking for my friends.

A noise, like leather gloves brushing together, catches my attention. It’s from a bird that landed on a carnival booth near me. It is a pigeon, and it is staring at me with an intensity that no pigeon should be capable of.

“Why don’t you play some games?” my friends voice is raw and mechanical, and the words escape his lips between suppressed giggles.

“They are ever so much fun,” my other friend chimes in. Her face seems to be pulled back so much that her lips appear to be on the verge of splitting.

“Uh,” I take a step back trying to think. “I left my wallet in the car and locked it. Can I have the keys so I can pay for some of these games?”

“You don’t need to worry.”

“You don’t pay with money here.”

They don’t move towards me, but they don’t go back to their ring toss game either. “What DO you pay with?”

“Yourself,” they both echo.

It is not a stretch to say that I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. Fight or flight kicks in, and I lunge forward. My fist catches one in the chin and then the other under the ribs, right in the solar plexus. They both go down and in an instant I am searching through his pockets. It only takes a moment to find his keys, but the sight that greets me when I stand back up is not promising.

Every single distortedly smiling face is staring at me. Not a one is looking at anything else, and they all dead silent with the exception of an occasional chuckle that breaks the silence. It is a long moment before anything moves again. The first sound is that flapping of pigeon wings that is reminiscent of leather gloves rubbing together. It is quickly followed by the footfalls of a deranged carnival mob, and I run.

There is sort of an art to running through a mob that is trying to catch you. You’re always looking for the least amount of people so you can weave through and keep moving. It is not an easy art, and it is especially not easy to learn it off the cuff. But something about what is happening to these people seems to make them less coordinated than I think they would otherwise be, so I make do.

The crowd is thickest back towards the parking lot, so I’m not going there any time soon, but I can’t just keep running away farther into the carnival either. I need a place to hide, and is that a house of mirrors? Screw it, that’ll do. There aren’t very many people between me and this “fun” house, so that helps me make a quick decision. There’s a carnie with the same deformed grin on his face, I knock him down on my way in and scurry through the maze of reflective glass.

I stay moving through the maze, they always seem bigger than they are, but they really aren’t that large. I can hear the shuffling steps of the carnival patrons behind me, thankfully they seem to get farther and farther away the deeper I go into the mirrors. Eventually I stop hearing any other footsteps altogether, and I take this moment to catch my breath.

I wait, knowing that at some point they will start to catch up to me, and I will have to start running again. But the seconds pass by into minutes, and they never seem to come. It dawns upon me that at some point I will have to move. After all, I can’t stay here forever. I creep back the way I came, at least the way I think I came. I swear I can hear every one of my footsteps like the pounding of a hammer on the floor. It is taking longer to get out of this maze of mirrors than it took to get lost in it, but that seems normal. I finally manage to navigate my way out and peek into the carnival.

It is completely devoid of anyone.

I check my watch, and sure enough I haven’t been in there that long, maybe about twenty minutes at most. So where the hell did everyone go? I’m dumbfounded for a moment. It doesn’t make sense. I have no problem believing that they all eventually left. I just can’t believe that every single person in the carnival left in about twenty minutes.

I’m not going to perseverate on it. I’ve got the keys, just haul ass to the car and get the hell out of here.

The carnival was creepy before, but now there is something truly surreal about it’s atmosphere. All the rides and games are lit up and full of life like before, only now there’s nobody around playing the games or riding the rides. The only living creatures I see are an occasional pigeon, roosting and watching me as I sprint past to the parking lot.

Those birds can burn for all I care. Soon I’ll be in my friend’s car driving off to safety. Then a horrible thought crosses my mind… what if everyone just went to the parking lot and I’ll be assailed by a horde of crazy drones? I push the thought out of my head as quickly as it came to be. If they’re all there, I’m screwed anyways, so I might as well just do it. I pick up the pace, wanting to put this psychological shit show behind me. The parking lot is almost in sight.

What.

The.

Fuck.

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect this. There is nothing here. No parking lot. No field. The carnival grounds seem to evaporate into this viscous black mist that blends seamlessly into the night.

I’m staring off in disbelief when I hear a familiar sound, almost like leather gloves rubbing together. When I turn around I see a massive flock of pigeons, thousands, tens of thousands, strong. Each and every one is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen in the eyes of a pigeon before. It’s a look of predatory hunger.

I don’t bother to wait for them to act. I step back, and run into the mist… lost.