i want a pony [01]
It’s well past the time when Chantal should be home, tucked safely in her four-poster bed, even by her own standards, so she’s not entirely surprised when she falls asleep on the walk home. Right after the clock chimes, she collapses softly in a doorway, her handbag in her lap, and doesn’t move as the world churns around her. Buildings shift,
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He sets out to return home, but the streets have changed, and without meaning to, he gets lost. He frowns at he sight of the carnival -- who has time for such frivolities -- but perhaps someone there can tell him how to get back to his neighborhood.
He spots Chantal as she goes around the carousel. Isn't that the Von Krumrhein girl? "Uh... Miss? Pardon me, Miss?" He calls out as her horse comes around.
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--and into a face full of fake cobweb. It's the price of being tall. "Bleah." He brushes it aside, and then looks around. The first room is fairly mild. There are more of the bats, but they don't look as happy. It's dark, and a faint mist appears from a door at the other end.
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Trailing after him, Chantal manages to dodge the cobweb with a giggle. "Ooh, I never have liked spiders. Nothing should have that many legs."
She sobers as she looks around the room, however. It's awfully dark, and while the frownier bats don't bother her, there's something a little unsettling about the mist. She's not about to turn chicken now, however, so she moves on ahead.
"Um. Well..." she begins, then stops as they arrive in the next room. The walls are painted to look like a dark, skeletal forest, shrouded in the mist, and points of yellow and green light flash out here and there, twinned like eyes. There is a soundtrack of soft growling and snuffling sounds. Unconsciously, she moves closer to Caspar.
At the opposite end of the room, something silvery shines, like a pool of water on the ground of the faux wood. It's a mirror, set into the floor.
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He looks around, not particularly bothered by the next room. "It's like a fairy tale forest..." he says quietly. "But... not the ones with talking animals. It's more like... the Brothers Grimm, perhaps?"
The shimmer catches his eye and he approaches it, looking down curiously. He can see himself and Chantal in its reflection --
Except that isn't Chantal. She's blonde, and the same age, but her face is different, and for some reason his heart races when he sees her. He does a double-take.
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She follows him toward the mirror and peers around him into it, leaning over a little so that the torn hem of her skirt brushes the edge of the silver.
She sees him, and she sees herself, but her reflection looks different, dressed in black, with unruly straight hair, the white lock shining out in the gloom of the misty room. Her reflection is scowling. It's a defiant expression. Fascinated, Chantal reaches a delicate hand toward the mirror, slowly and hesitantly.
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"Don't touch it!" he cries out, his voice cracking with terror.
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"What--oh, I! I didn't mean!" Chantal gasps, stepping back, and then the world churns around them. Walls seems to expand and grow larger and the eye-lights turn into sickly green coils, then fade. Swellings form along the floor, looming up around them, over them, and Chantal shrieks as one nearly knocks her over. When the tuning is done, they are in a dimly-lit labyrinth of indescribably complex machinery, all of it clicking along quietly, all of it some kind of dark metal, clean and shiny like polished obsidian.
The only familiar thing that remains is the pile of mirror shards, and they are beginning to stir.
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He almost doesn't notice that their environment has changed, at first. The moving shards, though, that catches his eye. He grabs the woman's hand -- he can't tell if she's Chantal or the one from the mirror, but it doesn't matter. "They... they know we're here. We have to move." He starts to drag her in the opposite direction of the broken mirror.
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She goes unprotesting as he drags her away from the mirror, but some of the larger shards make a soft, singing sound in the darkness and actually rise in the air, sailing toward them. The girl cries out as one sinks into the back of her unprotected calf, and stumbles. Others pelt the floor around them, exploding in a shower of gritty, silver dust. Caspar may also get cut as a sharp piece darts past his shoulder.
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Chantal's cry cuts through his terror. He catches her when she stumbles, and wraps an arm around her to hurry her along. If she can't walk, he'll try to pick her up. "I... I don't know," he admits. "But I don't want to stay to find out!" He attempts to turn the corner, put some of this bizarre machinery between them and the flying glass.
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A pendulum swings at them as they duck around the corner, whistling past their ears and smashing another flying shard of glass. As they are forced to lunge forward to duck the backswing of the pendulum, something springs out at them from between two piles of shiny black gears. It's man-sized, dressed in black with a pale face and...it cackles at them.
It's a mannequin, dressed as a vampire, on a spring. Apparently, weirdness notwithstanding, they're still in the haunted house.
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Oh. It's a dummy. Which, coincidentally, is what Caspar feels like. It takes the edge off his fear at least, enough that he walks Chantal around the mannequin and behind a pile of gears. "Are you hurt?" he asks worried, looking her over. "Oh, your leg!"
There's a thin line of blood on his cheek.
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The glass isn't embedded very deeply into her calf, but her stocking is torn and there's significant bleeding. She bites her lip and tries not to look at it, feeling a little sick and sitting down on the gears. Noticing the blood on his face, she shakily gets her handkerchief out of her purse and dabs at his cheek. "You've got a cut, too..."
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"I am?" He blinks, then gently waves her hand away. "That's not important. I... I think we should take that glass out of your leg and bandage it up proper. That can't be sanitary."
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"I...er...yes. I'm afraid I wasn't quite prepared for this," she says vaguely, then what he's said about the glass in her leg penetrates her consciousness and she swallows hard. She doesn't even want to look at the wound, let alone pull out the glass.
After a moment, she forces herself to peer at the reddened mirror shard. Splinters. It's just like a splinter. Surely she's had a splinter before? She can't remember.
...come to think of it, she can't remember ever having any injury before. But that doesn't make any sense. No one goes through life without at least a papercut, a skinned knee. And she climbs trees every night. Why hasn't she ever fallen, twisted an ankle, sprained a wrist ( ... )
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He still can't shake the feeling of foreboding, and he looks around again anxiously. "When you're ready, we should find a way out."
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