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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Dave's starting to feel sobered up by the time he leaves the diner, hands deep in his pockets. He stayed there even longer than Grant, just zoning out, absently paging through the newspaper, trying to get his brain back on track. The air outside is crisp and cool but not enough to hurt his lungs. He inhales.

Well, he thinks. Well. He could go back to his apartment and get drunk again, or he could... he could find other distractions, better distractions that don't leave him with a headache in the morning. How could he have forgotten about the Machine? He remembers his mother bringing him here when he was just a child, cotton candy making his mouth and fingers sticky, illusions and magicians, roller-coasters he could raise his hands on. Happy memories.

He doesn't feel happy, though, as he approaches the entrance and heads inside, weaving through the crowds. He buys a cotton candy and tries to recreate the life of a ten year old, fails, and then starts to feel... good. There's a several minute delay between the rush of well-being and

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Johnny glances back at the other man, then back at the door. The other man looks like he's spent some time at the bottom of a bottle lately, but at least he seems to be a happy drunk.

Might as well goes in, Johnny figures. "Oh. Scary?" he asks, pulling the lever.

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"Umm," he says, because for the quickest moment, he can't even remember. It's not a concerned 'um,' though - merely a lazy consideration. He's still smiling.

"It's scary for kids," he says finally. Or at least that's what his brain fills in for him. Wonderful, wonderful confabulations. "I remember enjoying it, but that was a very long time ago." He runs his hand through his hair.

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The doorway swings open slowly, revealing a short, featureless hallway, exactly the width and height of the doorframe. A single light in the ceiling shines down on the black floor. At the end of the hall is a mirror. Johnny looks back at Dave, then at his own reflection, then up at the light. "Huh."

He steps inside. Music is coming from somewhere deeper in the House, a tune he's absolutely sure he knows but can't place. A few paces farther, the single light directly above him, he turns back to the other man. "You coming?"

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The tune that he knows but can't place... no, he hears it, too, and he tilts his head for a moment, listening, before Johnny's words register. He lets out something like a giggle (maybe drunk isn't such a good description - maybe he's high) before stepping forward and entering the house. "Of course," he says with a grin. "Obviously."

Mirrors. All of those mirrors. The one ahead of him must be dirty because his image is cloudy. Or maybe... or maybe his clothing is dirty? He's wearing clothing that doesn't belong to him in his reflection, covered in plaster and charred wood, but--

The image is gone.

His imagination. His imagination. The world is beautiful. Remember?

"Very nice," he says, a nervous edge to his voice, now, the smile wavering. "Very interesting. I'm sorry, I don't believe I caught your name?"

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Johnny turns, looks at the mirror, then at the man, then at the mirror again. There's Johnny, there's the door closing slowly behind them, and there's... no one else in the reflected image. "Huh."

One of the good things about Johnny, because not even he's wholly lacking in positive character traits, is that he doesn't panic. He's smoothly talked loaded guns out of his face before. A magic trick isn't going to send him over the edge, screaming and crying. He calmly walks back to the entrance, brushing past the other man, and checks the door. It's closed. And, predictably, there's no knob. A gentle shove makes it rattle slightly.

"O'Brian," he says, turning back. If there's one thing he doesn't want, it's for his chemically-altered companion to panic. Panicking is messy. So he smiles. "Johnny O'Brian. Nice to meet you, Mr....?"

He is completely and willfully ignoring the fact that his clothes in the mirror are wrong. And it doesn't matter, anyway, because now the mirror is swinging open. The only way out is further in.

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"Tillman." He watches Johnny rattle at the door, turns and looks at the mirror again, and sees himself as he should. Good. "David. Or Dave, whichever you'd prefer to..." His voice trails off. "It's very good to... to meet you, Mr. O'Brian. It's funny, you know, um, this isn't a feature I remember, this whole door business. But-- but that makes sense, doesn't it?" He visibly calms. "Wouldn't want to muck up the ride with people--" He laughs. "--entering through exit and vice-versa."

It's about then that he catches Johnny's reflection, also fundamentally different. What a clever ride! Obviously they have other bodies - you know, models - and somehow they're merging the two pictures together. Clever. Excellent.

He doesn't even hesitate before stepping into the next room. Whatever was in that cotton candy was obviously good stuff. There's still an edge to the world, though, dipping in and out of his consciousness. A general feeling of malaise he can't quite pin down.

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Johnny stares after Dave, wishing he could check his arms for trackmarks. Whatever he's on, it sounds excellent. Johnny follows Tillman into the other room, running a hand through his hair.

The next room is brightly lit, with colored lights flashing in time with the song. He cannot place that song, and it is going to drive him nuts, if the lights don't give him a fatal migraine first. And, he realizes after adjusting to the light, they've entered a mirror maze. Oh joy.

"Do you remember these, Dave?" he asks conversationally. "I haven't been in one of these things for... oh, it's probably thirty years now." Because they scared the bejeezus out of him, and still do. You can't talk your way out of a maze. His smile is fixed, but he's still smiling.

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"Of course," he says, absolutely certain in his euphoria. "It's a house of illusion, after all! I mean, there are always-- there are always mirrors and mazes. Mirror mazes." He reaches out to touch a mirror with the fingers on his left hand. "What you do, is, uh-- what you do... is you put your hand on the mirror like so, and you just sort of follow it until it leads somewhere that's not a dead end! So, it's very, very easy, and uh, really shouldn't take us all that--"

His wedding ring is missing.

It hits him like brick in a chest, air out of his lungs, oh no, oh god no no no no no and suddenly he feels his head spinning and a wild ocean inside his ears, swish swish, this can't be happening this can't--

No, no. It's still on his hand. It's not on his hand in the mirror, but it's on his real hand. (A tiny voice inside him asks, how real?)

"I-- I'm not feeling very well," he says.

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'Well, that was fast,' Johnny thinks. What he says is, "Oh," and he moves to put a hand on Tillman's shoulder.

There it is again. It's a different Tillman on the other side of the glass, and a different Johnny. It can't just be a trick, because Johnny may not be a magician but he knows about tricks. Nobody sets up something this elaborate for two men who doesn't even know each other, who were just as likely to go do something else this... What time of day is it, after all?

He looks around. No fire exit sign in sight, of course. He'd call the fire chief if he had his... What? He'd call the fire chief if there was a phone here. Get these people shut down. Or at least get them to shut the bloody music off.

"Listen, it looks like our only way out is through the maze. I'll go first, but can you make it?"

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For a moment he says nothing, only feels his wedding ring with his fingers, staring ahead at mirror before him. Why wouldn't it be there? Why wouldn't it-- would someone have done that intentionally? As a trick? Would they have-- why would they have-- would they know?

From how he stares, it's obvious he's either coming off his high or taking a different turn. Lovely. Wonderful.

(Why isn't it there?)

"I-- I, yes." He blinks, finally, and clears his throat. Again, he touches his fingers to the mirror. "I'm ready."

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"Good," Johnny says, and pats him on the back. "I don't want to spend the entire evening stuck in here. I've got things to do."

No no no he's not panicking, but he's not waiting around, either, and he sets off deeper into the maze, not looking too hard into the mirrors. The reflection seems all right, now - at least, his reflection does - but he doesn't want to think too hard about it, because it looks like there are shadows in the mirrors, shadows not cast by Johnny or David. And the shadows look like they just might be following them.

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Dave walks through with the same sort of tunnel vision, avoiding the mirrors at all cost, even raising his hand once or twice to better shield them from his view. He likes to tune out what he doesn't want to hear or see, like the way his wife looked at him in the weeks before she left, or the steady depletion of his liquor cabinet, or the obvious drugs in his cotton candy. He chalks up the shadows to his imagination. To his own shadow. To bugs. Bed sheets. House of Illusion, ha ha.

His legs are weak.

It isn't very long before they hit a dead end. The wall in front of them is covered with as many mirrors as the walls around them, and the entire room seems to bounce and echo off itself. From this angle, he can see at least eight copies of himself.

And all of them are different.

Covered in rubble like before. Labcoat. Suit and tie. Longer hair. Shorter hair. No rings. No bride. A half smirk with confidence he didn't think he had.

He stares ahead numbly.

Okay.

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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

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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

[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.