He leans forward, the “Joker” grin slowly returning to his face, jagged and beautiful and wrong.
“Home,” he whispers. “We’re going to a place where the world can’t hear you scream. Not because the walls are padded… but because everyone else is screaming louder.”
I close my eyes as the van hits a bump, the darkness of the road swallowing us whole. I don’t know his name. I don’t know these people. But as the asylum explodes in the distance, a dull thud that I feel in my teeth, I realise I don’t care.
The cage is gone. The circus has begun.
Chapter
Eighteen
HALLOW
The first thing I find isn’t the light; it’s the smell.
It’s not the sharp, sterile bite of bleach that has lived in my sinuses for two hundred days. It’s the smell of a rotting carnival—spun sugar, rusted iron, damp wood, and a heavy, cloying perfume of old grease.
I open my eyes, and the world doesn’t make sense.
I’m lying on a bed that feels like it’s made of velvet and hay. Above me, a giant, cracked fibreglass face stares down with a hollow, frozen grin. One of its eyes is missing, replaced by a flickering red bulb that casts long, rhythmic shadows across the ceiling. It looks like the god of a very small, very angry world.
I try to sit up, and the memory of the asylum hits me like a physical blow to the stomach.
The heat. The green gas. The wet squelch of Aris’s organs between my fingers.
My breath hitches, catching on a sob. I look down at my hands. They’re clean. Someone has scrubbed the blood from under my fingernails, but I can still feel it. I can still feel the warmth of his life draining over my skin. I can still feel the way his pulse thudded against my palm before it stopped.
“No,” I whisper.
I scramble off the bed, my legs Tangled in a heavy, moth-eaten quilt. I hit the floor—hard. The boards under me are warped, sighing with a metallic groan. I’m not in a room. I’m in a nightmare made of wood and glass.
I look around, and the walls start to scream.
Everywhere I turn, I see myself. The room is lined with distorted mirrors—the kind that stretch your neck and melt your waist. In one, I am a towering, skeletal wraith. In another, I’m a squat, bloated thing with eyes the size of dinner plates.
“Stop it,” I gasp, my hands flying to my face.
But I can’t stop it. The silence of the asylum has been replaced by a cacophony of ghosts. I see Aris in the corner of every mirror, his chest flayed open, his mouth stuffed with cards. I see the guards with their melting skin. I see the leather straps, still reaching for my wrists from the shadows.
It’s too much. The walls are closing in, the giant clown head is lowering its jaw to swallow me whole, and the peppermint smell is back, stinging my eyes.
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” I scream.
I grab a heavy, brass-based lamp from a nearby crate and hurl it at the nearest mirror. The glass shatters with asound like a lightning strike, a thousand jagged shards of me exploding across the floor.
I don’t stop. I grab a chair—a spindly, gilded thing that looks like it belonged to a dead queen—and swing it into the next one. CRASH.
“You’re not real! None of you are real!”
I’m sobbing now, the rage turning into a blind, frantic panic. I’m destroying the world because if I don’t, it’s going to finish what Aris started. I’m breathing so hard my chest feels like it’s going to crack open, the air coming in jagged, desperate gulps.
“Hallow.”
The voice cuts through the sound of breaking glass like a blade.
I spin around, a shard of mirror clutched in my hand so tight the edges are biting into my palm. He’s standing in the doorway, framed by the darkness of the funhouse. He’s not wearing the purple coat anymore. He’s in a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with tension and old scars.
He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t try to comfort me. He just stands there, watching the carnage with those emerald eyes, his mouth a thin, hard line.
