The Carnival

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" I say, hands shaking as I grip the steering wheel. "I don't know, Thomas, I feel like... this isn't gonna go well, you know...?"

"Don't be a wuss, Mariam," Thomas replies, casual and fearless. "It's gonna be just fine. You know there ain't gonna be anything but an empty carnival, I've been myself and there's nothin' to even worry about." He lets out a bark of a laugh. "Hell, it's really a good time, I took my first girlfriend there a couple years ago."

"Okay, but that was a couple of years ago, and I'm not your girlfriend." My fingers drum against the pink rubber that he'd added to most of his car.

"Well, obviously you aren't, considerin' I'm gay," he answers matter-of-factly. "Would it help if I told ya that I took my second boyfriend here too? And another buddy, too, we recently made up. You remember Danny? I forgave him and brought him here."

"Well, that doesn't make me feel any better, Thomas, you know my dad's the chief, and he told me that Danny went missing around two weeks ago, his mom sent him pictures of some place he went and some guy in a clown mask."

"Shut up, ya scaredy-cat." Thomas shifts around in his seat, and it's the only hint I get that he's nervous, too. "I'm sure she's just making that up. If there's any danger, we can just climb onto the ferris wheel to avoid it, yeah?"

"You asshole, I'm terrified of heights!" I cry, stepping on the gas again as the road becomes a little more straight. He laughs again, a teasing one this time, and I glare at him.

"Turn here," he says suddenly, and it's barely a warning as I swerve into a smaller side road. It's my turn to laugh as I watch him scramble to grab onto something that will keep him in the seat. His eyes are wide, but his butt stays on the bright pink pleather.

"This is why you wear a seat belt." I shake my head as I keep driving, and I can just barely see the outline of a small carnival. "Oh, shit, we're here."

It looks... creepy. Of course it does, it's ten o'clock at night and we're at a fucking carnival, but really, I don't know what I expected from Thomas. He's always been a lot braver than I have. Even still, as I slow to a stop and park right in the center of the dirt path, I'm not sure that this is a good idea, at all. A tent towers into the sky, somehow, even though the plot is so small, and there's a ferris wheel that sticks out behind it, barely lit by the moon. One of the cars is already swinging back and forth with a disconcerting creaking noise, and I have half a mind to just turn around and leave before I've even gotten out of the car.

The worst part is how familiar it is; this is the very place that Danny's mom had sent photos of and my father had shown me. He'd ridiculed her, but I understand why she seems so scared of this place. There's a large arching sign that reads "Eldercrest Extravaganza" in what looks like extremely messy Sharpie, and it almost makes me laugh, but then I see the hideous-looking creature right underneath it.

There's a rather large gargoyle that someone tried to make cute by replacing the standard eyes with wide, anime-style sparkling red ones, but it just makes it look more disgusting and scary. Its eyes seem to bore into me, following my every move as I reluctantly turn the engine off and open my car door. When I do, I'm immediately hit with the stench of death, rotting flesh at its prime.

"See? It ain't so bad," Thomas says, grinning lopsidedly at me. "Look at the cute little gargoyle they've got!" He walks right up to it and gives it a pat on the head, and I scoff at him, but really, I'm dead terrified.

"Do you even know who's touched that?" I ask, laughing nervously as I trudge past him into the very empty, dead-silent carnival. "But... Thomas, this is the place Danny's mom sent to my dad." He turns slowly to me, eyes wide and alarmed.

He steps in front of me almost immediately, fists up in front of him. "I'm gonna show ya around, but first and foremost, I'm gonna protect you." His Southern drawl echoes throughout the place, bouncing off the cracking pavement and empty booths on both sides of it. He gestures to them and says, "These are the prize booths, this one's the easiest... But honestly, we don't actually have to do any of them. You can just take what ya want to. No one's here to do anything about it, anyway."

Without missing a beat, Thomas walks up to a ring-toss booth and grabs one of the prizes hanging from the ceiling inside it. It's a plush version of the gargoyle mascot, and dust falls off of it as he hands it to me. "Here you go, Glenda the Gargoyle for my very best friend."

"Um, hell no," I say, pushing it back towards him. "You can go ahead and keep that hideous thing." He laughs as he puts it under his arm, then continues walking. I trail behind him, not wanting to get too close to the lead, and suddenly something about why this place is so familiar snaps into place.

"This here," he says pointing to the tent, "is the circus tent. I'm guessin' there used to be a whole act in here, but maybe not. Maybe it was for concerts or some shit, you never know."

Thomas peeks inside and screams, and I jump back. "Oh my god, Mariam, look!!!!" His voice is high and terrified, and he hides behind me and pushes me forward, forcing me to take a look. When I realize that there's a body in the center of the circus and a pungent smell along with it, I scream too, and he shines his phone flashlight into the center of the place. Danny is laying there, bones broken, and it looks like someone beat the shit out of him.

"What the fuck?" He whispers, frozen in place entirely. "He came home with me, I don't understand, I drove him home."

"He must have come back," I say back, and he finally moves, running towards the ferris wheel. "Holy shit, we're in danger. We're in danger, oh my god, Thomas, what do we do?"

"What did I suggest we do if we were in danger?" He says, voice panicked as he grabs onto the outer rim of the wheel and hoists himself up into a cart. When he gets on top of it and grips onto one of the spokes to move to the next one, I sigh and reluctantly follow him.

My legs are trembling as I follow Thomas's exact movements, except I'm not as fluid as he is. He's probably done this multiple times, and I don't even know why I'm surprised by that thought as I swing into the next car. I clamber on top of it, and we keep going like that, moving from spoke to car, spoke to car.

Finally, he moves into the car that I saw swinging when I was still outside the carnival, and I shout after him, "Of any you could have picked, did you really have to pick the one that was already moving?" He doesn't speak, just motions for me to hurry up, and, after a couple of minutes, I finally move to sit across from him.

"We have to be quiet, but take a look out," he whispers, and I turn to see the most beautiful display of the mountains that I had driven up. It's gorgeous, jaw-droppingly so, but I'm still shaking so hard that the glasses on my face threaten to fall off.

"God, you're so scared," Thomas chuckles, and then I watch him grip onto the seat as the cart swings far more aggressively than it was doing before. "What the hell?"

"It feels like this thing is going to fall," I say, my voice shaking as I hold onto the seat too. One moment it's nearly vertical, threatening to tip us out, and the next it goes back to normal, and then back to trying to send us to the earth.

"Thomas, please, please, help me!" I scream over the now-very-loud creaking noise of the car, and he yells something back, but I can't hear him. Then I lose my grip, and I'm hanging onto the open door of the car, hollering his name. He can't do anything but watch, or he'll fall, too.

As I look at him and as he stares back at me, his face stretches into a wide, ugly grin, and I know that there's something terribly wrong. I did before, of course, but this is a whole other monster.

The creaking stops as Thomas opens his mouth, still smiling, and he says, "Did you ever wonder why the people I brought here disappeared, Mariam?" And now that I think about it, they did all disappear, every single one of them. Thomas said that his first girlfriend moved away, told me that his second boyfriend had broken up with him and skipped town to avoid him, told me about how he'd made up with his childhood bully who had suddenly been reported missing around two weeks ago.

He must be able to see it dawning on me. "Yeah, and now you're going to be with them. Ya wanna see somethin'?" He reaches into his back pocket, pulling out a clown mask, and I let out a sob I didn't even know I was holding.

"Why are you doing this to me?" I ask, and Thomas snaps the mask into place around his face, standing up and moving himself to stand on one side of the door frame. The car is almost entirely vertical, and I try to push myself back in, but he steps on my hand.

"Do you know how much danger I could be in with you?" He says, his voice low and gravelly. "You're the only one who knows me, who can possibly figure this out, and your father is the chief of police. I can't risk going to jail, y'know."

He pushes my hand off of the metal with his shoe, and I can't see his face anymore besides his eyes. They don't even look like his anymore, dark and cruel and all sorts of off. "Are you ready to die, Mariam?"

I shake my head, but it's pointless as he moves to push my other hand off. "Wait, wait, Thomas, I have a question, how was this thing moving so much?"

He scoffs as he replies, "That was the wind. Happenstance. I got real lucky, these things are so old." And then he pushes me off, and I'm screaming so loud that it hurts.

When I hit the ground, I feel so many of my bones break, and I guess I didn't realize how far up we were, spurred on by adrenaline of danger. I didn't know the danger would be right in front of me, I didn't know I was following that danger into death.

The time that I'm alive blurs together, and I know that I'm going to die, because I know my spine is fractured at least twice, once in the neck. There's nothing I can do as I watch Thomas get down from the ferris wheel, and he doesn't even bother coming over to look at me; I see him walk away, and the only thing I can muster up the energy to do in my last moments is cry.