welcome to the house of fun [01]

[sees_lies]

Johnny wakes in the well-worn armchair in one corner of his apartment and rises immediately-a mistake. Vertigo overtakes him and he has to sit back down until the world stops spinning. In those few, disorienting seconds, he forgets something, something he's sure was important. Damn. He plucks his keys from the mantle without noticing the fireplace

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[sees_lies]

Johnny turns back. His reflections are making faces at him. There's no possible way he can think of that whatever drugs Tillman's had have gotten to him, as well, unless it's something in the air, but this can't possibly be happening. This isn't how reality works.

"There wasn't another turn back there, was there?" he asks. But there wasn't. This maze is decidedly single-pathed. None of the previous dead ends lead any distance from the main path, and he's nearly positive that this is the only place they could have ended up. (That's nearly positive because it's hard to be certain of anything when your own reflection is flashing faces at you: disgust, contempt, anger, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, one right after the other. He's got his hand on his own face, just to make sure he's not the one doing that.) And the god damned music is still playing.

There's something behind them in the mirrors, too. He's checked behind them multiple times, but although there's nothing there in the corridors of the maze, there's definitely a pale figure in dark clothes - or maybe a lot of them, or just copies of the one, or something - in the mirrors as well.

'This must be what going mad feels like,' he thinks.

"When I get out of here, I'm coming back with a baseball bat," he groans.

[instrument_of]

It's a children's game, his brain screams at him. It's okay. It's okay. And yet he can't shake the feeling that it's not okay, that this is highly unnatural, that this "trick" (if you could call it that) requires more than the usual smoke and mirrors. The shadowy figure (figures?) in the mirror send cold chills down his neck and spine. His heart is pounding in his chest.

He lets out a nervous titter with Johnny's words, as if he had just told a joke, and then pushes his palm against one of the mirrors.

And pushes. And pushes.

"M-Maybe there's a secret door," he says, doing little to hide the building hysteria in his voice. "Maybe if you... if you..." And again to next mirror. More pushing. Now shoving. Now--

The mirror disconnects from the wall, drops to the ground, cracks, and then spills over onto its side. Through the cracks in the mirror, another room is visible. White. Sterile. A hallway.

The mirror is still on its side. It's only partially propped up against the wall. It's barely even touching it. It's not a trap door.

The room is in the mirror.

[sees_lies]

"That's..." Johnny swears. There are shards of glass on the floor now, nasty ones, which he carefully avoids as he crouches to look inside, then around the frame, then inside again. He cautiously waves a hand through the frame and swears again. "That's definitely a hallway."

Something moves across the shards of of the broken mirror, something like a shadow. Johnny glances into one, against his better judgment, and his reflection is gone.

"That's our only way out," he says, swallowing, and knocks the remaining glass out of the frame with the side of his fist. Mirror fragments scatter onto the tile floor of the hallway.

[instrument_of]

"But that doesn't even make sense," he says, staring down at the mirror. His hands are trembling. "Logically. Physically."

For the first time, Dave wonders if he's dreaming. He pinches himself, twisting the skin on his lower arm. Nothing. So is he crazy? Or is he already dead, floating in a funhouse shaped limbo, waiting to cross over? Or is this place really, genuinely supernatural?

"None of that matters," he says aloud, to himself. (Funny, has he always talked to himself?) But not now. Johnny's right - that's their only way out. That's the only way they can go. And, therefore, Dave has only one question:

"Who's going first?"

[sees_lies]

He takes a deep breath. He'd like to be out of this place as fast as he can, although the hallway doesn't exactly look hospitable, either. "I will," he says.

It's not really a squeeze, but it feels claustrophobic, there on his hands and knees, trying to avoid putting his palms on broken glass. Going through is oddly anticlimactic, though. It's not like stepping through a magical gateway to another world, just like... crawling through a space that shouldn't be there.

In the hallway, he straightens up, gingerly brushing glass from his hands as he looks around. His right palm is cut, but not very deep; he barely notices, because he's busy looking around for, oh, aliens or something.

"Come on in," he says, through the gap in the wall that somehow looks equally wrong from this direction. "The water's fine."

[instrument_of]

Dave laughs uneasily. Ha ha.

He tucks his hands in the sleeves of his jacket before getting down on his hands and knees and crawling through, inch by inch, waiting for the world to fall down around him. It doesn't, though - like with Johnny, it feels anticlimatic. It's less jarring, in any case, from the initial appearance of the portal and the many versions of him in the mirror.

When he gets in, he stumbles up to his feet and knocks a few shards of glass of his pants. No cuts, thankfully. It's only then that he looks around at this new world surrounding him. A hospital. Is it?