The Girl in the Funhouse Mirror

The Girl in the Funhouse Mirror

They never recovered her phone, but the images lingered on Jesse’s screen like ghosts he couldn’t swipe away. In the dead hours—when the world softened to a hush—he’d scroll through them, compulsively, as if proof might undo the nightmare.

There she was: Darla McKinney, legs bare in ragged cutoff shorts, cocooned in a stolen varsity hoodie, clutching a bottle of peach schnapps like a talisman, grinning as if nothing in the universe could touch her.

That night was billed as a victory lap: junior year done, summer spread out before them. Caleb had filched keys to his uncle’s boat. Madison smuggled in the booze. Jesse curated a playlist of heat-throbbing anthems. And Darla… she carried the storm.

The lake was alive with darkness, ink-black and mirror-still, swallowing moonlight and sound. They waded in, voices pitched too loud, water tugging at thighs like an unseen current. A challenge flew: skinny dip. A dare soared back: “Bet you won’t.” And Darla—bombshell of thrill—climbed the dock’s railing, silhouetted against a void. She tossed hair from her face, blew them a mocking kiss.

“Catch me if you can,” she crooned, then launched herself into the ether.

Expectation cracked like applause ready to erupt. Instead, there was only the hush of water sealing itself over her body. A single splash, then an unholy quiet.

They shouted her name once—voice cracking—then again, hysteria threading through the syllables. Caleb plunged in, arms hacking at liquid nothing. The rest stood paralyzed, horror blooming on their faces. All but Jesse, who watched as Darla’s slick hair vanished beneath the surface, saw Madison’s eyes flick to Caleb… and recoil. Fear smothered hope.

They might have saved her—maybe—but terror had snapped their spines. By the time someone remembered to call 911, the lake had swallowed every echo of her.

Every June for ten years the Magnolia Festival bloomed out of that tragedy: rust-streaked trucks disgorging rides, a ferris wheel creaking like an old man’s bones, tents thrown up in fevered circles. The air swelled with grease, popcorn, fried dough and heat, a sticky balm for small-town longing. Each Friday at sunset, lights flickered on like clockwork.

But this June, someone else returned too.

No one saw her at first: just another girl in a faded denim jacket, cherry lipstick gleaming under neon, sipping something red and cold from a waxy paper cup. She melted into the crowd, too sweet, too familiar to ring alarm bells. Yet the town remembered—its streets and souls humming with buried truths. When she slipped through the gates, the music hiccuped, as if the world took a shuddering breath.

Only the old woman at the ring-toss stall was certain. She blinked through rheumy eyes at the newcomer.

“Darla?” she rasped, voice brittle as dried leaves.

The girl’s smile was a blade.

“Not Darla,” she whispered, voice low and rippling. “She drowned.”

The old woman recoiled, kicking over a bucket of plastic rings. They skittered across the asphalt with a dry, rattling clatter—like bones over stone. And when she dared to look again, the girl had vanished into the crowd’s pulsing heart.

The Magnolia Festival still reeked of grease, sugar, and late-summer desperation—but now every flavor was tainted.

Caleb Dane leaned against the dunk tank trailer, squinting at teenagers flinging beanbags at the volunteer math teacher’s soggy silhouette. He laughed, but it came out hollow, echoing in his skull. His beer, untouched, warmed in his hand. He felt her before he saw her: a sudden tilt of the crowd, a glitch in reality. A fleeting reflection in the vendor’s mirrored sunglasses—dark hair plastered to a pale face, eyes that burned.

He spun. Nothing.

In the beer tent, Madison gripped her cup like a lifeline. Her friends chattered about talent-show winners, but their words drifted away, drowned in the pounding of her pulse. She scanned every neon-lit alley of the festival, hunting that impossible face and its cruel, perfect mouth.

Later, she slipped into the portable toilet behind the funnel-cake stand—to cry, to hide mascara-streaked cheeks—and froze when her heel hit wet paint on the floor. A single, damp footprint: too small, bare, saturated with the stench of murky lakewater. She bolted out of the stall so fast she nearly knocked the mayor’s wife flat. Now her hands trembled so violently she could barely lift her drink. She wouldn’t tell her husband—he never believed her then, and he wouldn’t believe her now.

They’d always called Darla a firecracker—bright, reckless, impossible to cage. But they never spoke the truth: she was terrified. Terrified of being trapped, terrified of turning into her mother, terrified of that dark plunge into black water. They’d drowned her fear in laughter—and ignored her screams.

Now, she was screaming back.

At the edge of the fairgrounds, Caleb froze before an abandoned picnic table. On it sat a goldfish bowl—no note, no carnival prize attendant in sight—only a clear plastic bag knotted with a ribbon. Inside the water churned like a rotting pond. The fish floated on its side, one eye gouged out, a ragged hole where flesh and horror met. The stench of algae and decay filled Caleb’s lungs. He let the bowl clatter to the ground and stumbled backward, every nerve on fire.

Behind him, somewhere in the flickering lights and cotton-candy haze, a soft, sinister giggle drifted on the summer air.

Jesse huddled in the Funhouse’s yawning shadow, thumb striking a lighter until the flame trembled into life. He held the cigarette at arm’s length, as though its ember might sear out the memory. He hadn’t faced Darla McKinney since that summer night when they watched her sink beneath the lake’s black glass—and shoved her deeper. They’d called it an accident. Everyone agreed. Darla, wild and fearless, always first to cannonball into anything—even the dead-of-night water. No one blinked when she slipped under. Grief made them lazy, forgetful. But Jesse remembered. So did the others. Five of them. Now four.

He drew in smoke and swept the fairgrounds with haunted eyes. She couldn’t be here—he’d seen the body, felt the cold slack of her skin when they pulled her up. Still, he felt her gaze.

Stalls flickered into one another in the gloom: toss the ring, win a tarnished prize. Pop the balloon, watch a pistol cross your palm. Lure the fool, win a sin. The crowd pulsed with laughter and metal-on-metal screams of rides. He counted heartbeats.

Madison Price—now Thompson—sauntered through the food court with a third White Claw shaking in her hand. Her high-school sweetheart-turned-husband hovered like a wilted corsage. She laughed, but the sound cracked. Across the greasy folding tables, she froze. Darla’s ghost stood there, half-hidden by the neon glow. Madison’s smile collapsed; her lips formed a name no one dared speak.

The girl tilted her head, lips tracing an obscene curve. She dragged the straw from her can, red beads clinging to its tip like fresh blood. Madison’s drink slid from her fingers, smashing on the tile.

Nearby, Caleb sat shotgun to a corn dog, stomach twisting into knots tighter than barbed wire. He knew what he’d done. What they all had done. Ghosts were fairy tales—until his phone buzzed with a message in jagged text: “Let’s go for a swim. Like old times.” His fingers froze around the fuzzy plastic.

The Funhouse door creaked open, a mournful sigh. Dust motes danced in the floodlight. Jesse stepped inside, drawn by a force he couldn’t name—something tethered to his guilt, cursed to haunt him.

Inside, the air dropped ten degrees. Mirrors warped his reflection: cheeks hollow, guilt carved into his skin, trembling hands stained with the memory of her drowning. He edged forward on shifting floors that groaned underfoot. Every laugh echoed wrong.

At the curve of a warped hallway, she waited. Darla’s hair plastered her face, soaked and clinging. Water still dripped from her sleeves onto the dusty planks. Her eyes were cavernous and dark, her smile vast as a grave.

“You left me,” she whispered, voice rippling like a drowned echo. Jesse backed up until his shoulder slammed into glass and splintered it.

“No—no, I—” he stammered. “We thought you were gone.”

“You knew,” she said, stepping closer. Her hand, ice-cold and damp, brushed his cheek. Her lips pressed against his, tasting of cherries and rot. Then she wrenched him into the mirror’s fractured prism. He screamed—a raw, ragged sound that tore from his lungs—and vanished into the fractured glass.

At midnight every light in the carnival shuddered out, rides grinding to a halt. Silence fell. Then power surged back in a single stab of glare. No one noticed Jesse’s absence at the beer tent, or Madison weeping into a funnel cake, or Caleb’s abandoned truck idling by the exit. Only old Mrs. Larkin at the ring-toss saw the denim-jacket girl slip away from the Funhouse.

“She drowned,” Mrs. Larkin muttered, fingers perched over her bucket of rings.

The girl looked back, eyes gleaming with carousel lights. “She did,” she said, voice low as a warning. “But only once.”

By dawn the carnival had vanished—no trucks, no tents, just muddy tire tracks fading into the grass. Sheriff Daniels sipped lukewarm coffee as he took statements: no one had seen Jesse leave, though his car still idled in the lot, engine cooled, phone unlocked on the front seat. Madison sat on the curb, mascara streaked, silent as a gravestone. Caleb never returned.

They scoured the lake again. Weeks later, they dragged up a single shoe. Rumor whispered that the Funhouse mirrors had changed: if you stared too long, you’d catch a glimpse of someone wet, someone smiling behind you. No one believed it—except Mrs. Larkin, who kept her ring-toss stall open and her eyes on every newcomer.

Because the Magnolia Festival always came back. And sometimes, the dead returned right along with it.