The lights were a violent, blinding assault.
A riot of fractured neon—electric blues, feverish reds, and sickly yellows—flashed and pulsed in the damp night air, painting the world in grotesque, oversaturated colours. The air was thick, almost suffocating.
Burnt sugar, rancid popcorn butter, and spilled beer tainted the air.
Sounds crashed in from every direction, a chaotic wave of human noise. The high, shrieking laughter of children, unnaturally sharp. The distorted, booming voice of a carnival barker, promising impossible prizes from a stall draped in shadows.
The distant, rhythmic roar of a rickety ride, grinding its metal gears in a percussion of terminal decay. And under it all, the ceaseless, shuffling chatter of the crowd.
Thousands of people. A sea of bodies, all laughing.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
The sound was desperate, out of sync with the world. It was the sound of worn boot soles hitting wet pavement, too fast, too frantic.
It was a rhythm of pure panic.
A man was running.
He was tall, with a lean frame that spoke of neglect rather than discipline. His dark, unkempt hair was plastered to his forehead, slick with a cold, greasy sweat. His clothes were functional, forgettable—a worn, dark jacket over a simple shirt, both clinging to his skin. His face, illuminated in the flashing, predatory neon, was a mask of sheer, animalistic panic. His brown eyes were wide, bloodshot, and darting, seeing everything and registering nothing.
He shot through the crowd like a projectile, ducking and weaving, his arms pumping as he pushed forward with single-minded desperation.
'Get out... get out of the way... move...'
He slammed into the crowd, his shoulder colliding with a broad, fleshy back.
A man grunted, turning to curse, his face a grotesque mask of melting laughter. The panicked figure was already gone, shoving past a woman who yelped and dropped her cone of pink-spun sugar.
He didn't look back or slow his pace. He drove forward, forcing himself through the tangle of bodies.
They were obstacles. A wall of slow, stupid, laughing meat. He pushed, he shoved, he clawed his way through, his breath tearing in his chest.
"Hey! Watch it, asshole!"
A thick, heavy hand grabbed his jacket. He ripped it free with a choked, desperate sound, nearly falling over a small child. The child didn't cry. It just stared up at him, its face painted like a grinning skull, its eyes wide and empty.
'Move... move... please, God, let me be in time... move!'
His lungs were on fire.
A sharp, acidic pain lanced up his side, a stitch from the desperate, untrained sprint. But the panic was a far more potent fuel than oxygen. It was a cold, liquid terror injected straight into his heart, pushing him forward when his body screamed to stop.
He stumbled out of the dense mass of people, sprawling onto the slick pavement of a quieter, darker midway.
The cacophony of the main carnival receded, replaced by the thudding of his own heart and the ragged, wet sound of his own breathing.
He looked up, and the fragile, burning ember of hope in his chest was instantly extinguished. Replaced by a cold, familiar dread.
'No... not here. Anywhere but here.'
It loomed before him, a derelict, forgotten attraction. The paint was peeling, the grinning clown face above the entrance warped by rot and damp, one eye socket a hollow, black pit.
The entrance was blocked. A single, cheap strand of yellow caution tape, sagging in the middle, declared it closed.
And from within, from the darkness behind the peeling paint, he heard it.
A sound that cut through his panic and solidified it into something sharp and cold. A muffled sob. A desperate, terrified, weeping.
He didn't hesitate. He lunged forward, his hands tearing through the flimsy plastic tape. The snap it made was pathetic, lost in the night. He plunged into the dark, narrow entrance, the smell of sawdust and old, damp wood immediately filling his nostrils.
The interior was a nightmare.
It was a claustrophobic, disorienting maze of glass and shadow.
The flashing, chaotic lights of the carnival outside were its only illumination, refracting through the angled panes of cheap mirror. They pulsed and danced, creating grotesque, elongated reflections of him that seemed to move independently.
One moment, he was a giant, his features warped in agony, the next a shrunken, twisted thing.
His own panicked face stared back at him from a dozen angles. Gaunt. Sweaty. Terrified.
'Where... where are you? Talk! Scream! Say something!'
The sobs were clearer now, but they were... wrong.
They echoed. They came from his left, his right, from in front and behind. The mirrors weren't just distorting his sight; they were distorting the sound, turning the small space into an auditory hell.
He ran, his hand outstretched, his palm smacking against the cold, hard glass.
Smack.
A dead end.
His own reflection, pale and desperate, slammed into him. He grunted, recoiling.
'Shit! Wrong turn!'
He spun, his head whipping around. The weeping was louder. More desperate. It was close. It had to be.
He took another turn, into a hallway that seemed to stretch into infinity, his own running form replicated over and over, a stampede of failing, terrified men.
He rounded one final corner, skidding on the wooden floor.
And stopped.
Dead.
The hallway ended.
And she was there.
She was just... standing. Perfectly still. Her tall, slender frame was poised with an impossible, theatrical grace. Long, dark red hair cascaded over the shoulders of an elegant, pristine black dress that seemed to drink the dim, pulsing light. Her cool-toned grey eyes were fixed on him, sparkling with a bright, clinical amusement.
He glanced to his left. A mirror. She was there, too, her reflection staring at him. He looked to his right. Another mirror. Another her. He looked all around.
She was everywhere.
Hundreds of her, all calm and still, surrounded him—his terrified face just a footnote in a sea of her composed features.
The sobbing had stopped.
The only sound was his own ragged breathing, echoing in the glass labyrinth.
Then, her voice. It didn't come from the woman in front of him. It came from all of them. From everywhere at once. A calm, articulate, elegant voice that cut through the air like a shard of ice.
"You're too late."
He flinched, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. He couldn't speak. He could only pant, staring at the multitude of smiling faces.
One of them—the one directly in front of him—gave a small, precise smile.
No... all of them did.
It was a smile of genuine, intellectual pleasure. The smile of a critic appreciating a fine performance.
"But congratulations on solving the puzzle," her voice echoed, intimate and condescending. "You're getting so good at it. Truly. I'm... impressed."
He stood frozen, panting heavily, darting frantic glances at the endless lines of mirrored faces.
He looked for the epicentre of this nightmare, attempting to find the real her, but instead found only an infinite, dizzying legion of identical reflections.
He couldn't distinguish the source from the echo.
He gripped his fists tighter, feeling rage ignite beneath the terror, his entire body tense.
It was the familiar, agonising rage of impotence. The fury of a rat that knows it's in a maze. Of being played with, observed, and graded.
"You... you bitch!" he spat, his voice a ragged gasp that was barely his own. The reflections all smiled, a synchronised, silent mockery of his outburst.
"Let them go!" he yelled, taking a clumsy, stumbling half-step forward. The movement felt sluggish, as if he were wading through water. "Just let them go! Whatever this is... whatever... whatever sick game you're playing... you can do it without them! Without... without an innocent!"
His hands were clenched so tightly, his nails were biting painfully sharp crescents into his sweaty palms. He was trembling, a deep, cellular vibration that started in his chest and radiated outward, making his vision swim.
"If you wanted me, I'm right here!" he shouted, the words tearing from his raw throat. He was begging, and he hated himself for it. "You hear me? I'm right here! So just... just end it! Let them go!"
It was a desperate, hollow plea. He knew, even as the words left his mouth, that it was the wrong move.
It was the exact, perfect, pathetic line she had been waiting for.
Her laughter was a chorus.
It wasn't a loud, maniacal sound. It was worse. It was a soft, musical, amused chiming. It came from all around him, a disorienting, maddening symphony of feminine mirth, echoing from every pane of glass until it felt like it was inside his very skull.
The woman in front smiled.
"You are right here, Thomas."
His name. Hearing his name, spoken by her, in this place... it felt like a physical blow. A violation.
"It would be so... exquisitely easy to kill you," she continued, her voice dropping to an intimate whisper, a lover's confidence.
It slithered into his ear, seeming to bypass the air itself. "To just... reach out and stop that frantic, terrified little heart of yours. To watch the light... your light... fade."
She took a slow, deliberate, gliding step toward him. He flinched, his body recoiling, taking a step back.
"But I don't want to," she purred, her reflections moving with her, a perfectly synchronised, advancing army. "Not yet."
"Where would the fun be in that?" Her voice swelled again, conversational, filling the labyrinth. "This... this is so much better. This... game."
Right on cue, as if she had conducted it with a flick of her wrist, the muffled sobbing started again. It was weaker now. A wet, hiccupping, gurgling sound.
And it was terrifyingly close.
"Our game," she clarified, her grey eyes glittering in the flashing, grotesque neon. "This lovely, perfect game of cat and mouse. Don't you agree?"
Her reflections seemed to lean in, a hundred of her, all whispering in perfect, terrible unison. The sound was a sibilant hiss that wrapped around him.
"Deep down... in that dark, analytical, broken little part of you... don't you feel the same way?"
The voice was seductive, a serpent's hiss designed to find the cracks in his mind and burrow deep. "Isn't this... thrilling? The chase? The puzzle? The stakes?"
'No. No. She's wrong. She's... she's insane. This isn't thrilling. This is... this is agony.'
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut for a second, trying to block her out, trying to find his own thoughts in the storm of her voice.
"No!" he yelled, the sound a raw, desperate bark of denial.
When he opened his eyes, all one hundred reflections were pouting.
"Oh, Thomas," she whispered, her voice dripping with a false, cloying pity. "You didn't mean that. You never do."
The reflection to his immediate right—cold, perfect, and identical—lifted a single, elegant finger. It pointed down a black, narrow corridor of mirrors he hadn't seen.
"He deserved it, you know," she said, her tone suddenly, jarringly conversational, as if discussing the weather.
A beat of silence. Then her voice filled with a sudden, dark excitement. The palpable, electric thrill of a performer urging on the final act.
"But..." she hissed. "You'd better hurry up. That way."
The wet, gurgling sob echoed from that exact direction.
Thomas didn't think. He just reacted.
He launched himself down the mirrored hall, his boots skidding on the floor. He stumbled, catching himself on a glass wall, his own sweaty, frantic reflection leaping out at him, its eyes wide with his own terror.
Her voice followed him, detached, echoing from every surface. She was narrating. She was enjoying this.
"He was a doctor, you know," the chorus of her voice chimed, keeping perfect, effortless pace with his frantic steps. "So respected. So... beloved by his community. All those little lives he 'saved'. All those grateful parents."
He crashed through another turn, the exit a pale, distant rectangle of grey light.
A beacon of false hope.
"Did you think so, too, Thomas?" she asked, her voice seeming to come from right behind him. "When you read his file? Did you see a good, noble man?"
He gasped for air, his lungs burning.
The painful stitch in his side, the one that had started at the carnival gates, suddenly deepened, twisting like a hot knife under his ribs. He couldn't reply. He couldn't spare the breath.
He just ran, his heart pounding a desperate, failing rhythm against his bones.
'Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Just... let me be in time...'
A collective, disappointed sigh echoed through the maze, a cold wind of sound.
"You're no fun when you're silent," she pouted, her voice now seeming to come from the exit itself, luring him forward. "That's the problem with men like him. With men like you. You never look deep enough. But I do."
"That's why you have to dig," she whispered, her voice conspiratorial, a dark secret shared between them. "Everyone has a secret, Thomas. A nasty, wet, wriggling little secret. You just... have to... find it."
He was almost there. Ten more feet. The rectangle of night air beckoned, a promise of escape.
"And I found his," she purred, her voice filled with the cold, orgasmic pride of discovery. "Just a... slight inclination. A 'preference' towards favouring individuals of a... younger age."
Thomas froze for a split second, his boot sliding on the wood.
'Oh... god. No.'
"A real monster," she whispered, her voice filled with a genuine, palpable, cold disgust. "Hiding right there, in plain sight. He disguised it so well. Honestly..."
Her voice became intimate again, a helpful critic leaning in. "...you should probably take some tips. On hiding the monster, that is."
That broke him. The insult. The... intimacy... the casual, horrifying connection she was drawing between them.
He lunged for the exit, his mind reeling, his entire body screaming in protest.
"I don't care, Lilith!" he screamed back into the glass maze, his voice a ragged howl of denial. "Taking a life... without proof... it's... it's wrong!"
He stumbled, crashing through the exit frame, his shoulder slamming hard into the wood. He fell from the darkness of the maze, out of her voice, and onto the damp, solid pavement of the midway.
He collapsed to his hands and knees, his body shaking, his lungs heaving as he gasped for the cool, free air of the night.
And then, the stench hit him.
It wasn't the carnival sugar. It wasn't the sawdust. It was a physical wall of scent.
An overwhelming, suffocating, all-encompassing wave of hot copper and iron. The unmistakable, nauseatingly sweet and thick smell of fresh, arterial blood.
It was so potent, so heavy in the air, that he gagged, his stomach lurching as hot bile rose in his throat.
It was the smell of the end.