Come One, Come All Who: NPCs What: Fun Time In the City Where: Las Vegas Festival Grounds When: Present Ratings/Warnings: High, Death/Blood/Violence/Gore/Etc
Las Vegas still offered plenty of opportunities for fun and mischief for those who happened to be under the age of 21. Sammi Trevino was nineteen, a first-year student at the College of Southern Nevada. A petite young woman with mischievous features, she was popular among her class, well-liked, and outgoing. As soon as she had heard about the pop-up funhouse maze being held at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, she pushed to organize a trip in her group text. She stood outside the entrance, ticket in hand, phone pressed against her ear.
“What do you mean, you can’t make it?!” She bit off a large hunk of cotton candy from the stick in her free hand, letting the sugar dissolve on her tongue as she listened to her friend’s excuse. “Come on, two people have already bailed on me.” Sammi licked a sticky piece of spun sugar off her lip and rolled her green eyes. “Yeah, even Troy.” She ran her fingers through her dyed pink hair, which was a mistake. Some of the strands stuck to her fingers. “Good thing there isn’t a tunnel of love at this thing, I’d kick his ass out for ditching me.”
“Anyway, whatevs. I’m gonna do it alone, I guess. I already bought a ticket.” Sammi giggled at something said on the other end of the line. “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too. Bye.” She ended the call with a click and slid the phone into her jeans pocket, tossing the little bit of cotton candy left into an overflowing trash can and making her way to the end of the line. She people-watched as she waited, leaning against one of the temporary railings put in place to corral people. Zydeco music blared from a speaker overhead, and the intoxicating smell of cinnamon wafted from a booth selling warm, candied nuts.
The line moved steadily, and the anticipation began to build. Sammi could be like a little kid about things like this. Carnivals, circuses, whatever. It didn’t matter how lame they were. She liked the experience, the novelty, a little piece of magic in a mundane world. Not that living in Las Vegas provided a lot of mundane moments, but one got used to the lights and glimmer. It was a piece of small town in a big city, what she imagined it would be like growing up somewhere like Iowa. She wished there was a corn maze.
Finally, she was at the front of the line. She handed her ticket over to a surly-looking man perched on a stool. “How many in your party?” he asked, dull-eyed and bored, barely looking at her.
“Just one,” she chirped, bouncing on her heels a little. She could hear screams and whoops of laughter coming from inside the maze, and her skin tingled. It would have been better with her friends, but Sammi was determined to have a good time, regardless. The guy checked his watch, waiting for what, she wasn’t sure, but after a few moments he dropped a velvet rope and silently gestured for her to enter. He put a large hand up to stop a group of three teenage boys from following after her.
“We stagger the occupants in the maze for optimal enjoyment,” he stated flatly.
Sammi ventured forth into the maze, the music becoming louder, the lights almost dizzying. She stopped at one mirror that made her look long and thin, turning from side to side. “I wouldn’t look bad if I were eight feet tall,” she commented to nobody, then giggled before continuing. She entered a chamber where she was reflected in diamond-shaped mirrors, her features disjointed and split apart like a Picasso painting. One mirror held her eye, another her elbow. She reached forward to touch one and fell forward into nothingness, the room suddenly spinning. Sammi looked down and realized she was on a rotating turntable. Once it stopped, she faced the entrance to a pitch black hallway.
“Anybody here?” she called out in a sing-song voice. Her words came back to her in a warped echo. Dy-heeere...dy-heeere. She ventured down the hallway, waving a hand in front of her that she couldn’t even see. Her skin was met with a sharp, static shock and she let her arms fall to her sides. Sammi could swear she heard the group who had gone in ahead of her, but the further into the maze she traveled, the fainter the sounds of their laughter became. Soon, she was completely alone.
It took a moment to realize that the darkened hallway was becoming narrower and narrower, the velvety walls pressing against her body. Sammi turned sideways to get through, then crouched when the ceiling pressed against her pink hair. Finally, she was in a tight crawl, and she tried to ignore the small spark of claustrophobic panic that was beginning to grow inside her chest. With a huge sigh of relief, she was at the end, and she wriggled out of the hallway, and landed squarely in a plastic ball pit. The blueprint of the maze seemed much longer and elaborate than it had on the outside, she thought to herself, taking a moment to breathe and get her bearings.
Across the pit was a cardboard cutout of a cartoon-ish clown with a garish smile and bright, bulbous red nose. A yellow arrow pointed to the nose with the words “Honk Me!” in a cheerful font. Sammi waded through the plastic balls and reached the clown, pressing her palm against the nose. Loud sirens began to erupt, the lights flashed on and off, and colorful streams of confetti came falling from the ceiling as the floor rumbled beneath her feet. Slots opened up beneath her, and soon the orbs of plastic were gone, leaving her in an empty room. Beneath the clown, between its legs, was another trap door. She sighed to herself. More crawling.
This trap door was shorter and less claustrophobic, thankfully, but she was utterly confused when she realized it had led her back to the same mirrored room as before. Sammi got to her feet, looking around in case she had missed some other route or entrance. One of the mirrors had a painting -- was it a painting? -- that she hadn’t noticed before. It was a human-like figure, tall and wide, wearing a mismatched, tattered suit decorated with polka dots. Its skin was gray, and the sleeves of the suit ended in slender, almost elegant hands with long, sharp-looking nails. Its face was stark white in comparison, a wide, bloody grin the only color on the whole thing. Its eyes were black beads, and above that were scraggly, bushy dark eyebrows beneath a comically oversized tophat.
There was writing on the mirror next to it, and Sammi struggled to read it at first, since it was backwards. “Close your eyes...and count to ten,” she recited aloud, slowly, “or else the fun will never end.” She rolled her eyes and looked around, wondering when the next group would be showing up. Why hadn’t the next group shown up yet? She sighed and closed her green eyes, crossing her arms.
“One. Two. Three.”
Sammi thought she could hear the surly-voiced ticket taker.
“Four. Five.”
She licked her lips and tasted cotton candy. This was dumb.
“Six-seven-eight-nine. Ten.” Sammi cracked one eye open. The painting stared back at her. “Ten!” Nothing. She tapped her foot. “Hell-ooo? Has the fun ended yet? I’m having the time of my life here, whooo.” She waved her arms sarcastically, hoping she was being recorded so that whoever designed this dumb thing could see it. “Do you have a rhyme about getting a refund?”
At that, the lights and music suddenly shut off. There was no sound. She groped around blindly, her hands finding the cold glass of a mirror, another mirror, and then...a fistful of cloth. “Who’s there?” Suddenly, the wind was knocked out of her and Sammi could only gasp as her hands instinctively went to her stomach. She doubled over, nothing but a wheeze issuing from her throat. There was something hot and wet on her fingers. There was a gash in her flesh, she realized, horrified, as she fell to her knees.
Something strong grabbed her by her hair and dragged her. She tried to scream, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was a bloody bubble. The lights blinked on, and she looked up through the dark spots in her vision to see the top-hatted creature made flesh and bone, dragging her with his nails hooked into her back. Sammi could see them both in the many mirrors, a stream of red spilling from the corner of her mouth. The mirror that had held the painting was cracked, broken.
There was laughter and twinkling music as she was thrown through the broken mirror, back into blackness.