Full Tilt (11 page)

This time it was I who took a step closer to her. I’ve always suspected that my life—maybe everyone’s life—is like an hourglass, in which the past and the future converge on a single point in time, that narrow channel where the sands pass. A single event that defines who you are. Until now I had thought that the bus accident was that event for me; yet here was a moment not of blind helplessness, but of decision. Everything could rest in the balance of the choice I now made.

Without daring to think about it, I reached for Cassandra, pulled her toward me, and kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss of passion—well, maybe just a little. But more than anything it was a kiss of defiance. A fear-conquering, do-or-die act of affirmation. Of determination.

In the instant that our lips touched, I felt what she truly was. Intense heat encased in intense cold. Two opposing extremes. But I was neither seared nor frozen by her.

I will not die in this place. I refuse to be plunged from existence. I will no longer be at the mercy of these rides. They will be at
my
mercy. I will make it through all seven, and I will get out. I will be the one.

I pulled away, my fear gone. The strength of my resolve was like an engine inside of me.

Cassandra smiled. She knew what that kiss meant every bit as much as I did.

“I accept your challenge,” she said. “From this moment on, no more games. The next time you see me I’ll be coming in for the kill.”

Perhaps she couldn’t sense my feelings, but I could sense hers. Excitement—perhaps for the first time. I was the ticket to her own private thrill ride.

Another flash of yellow light. In the distance a ship appeared again—this time a Viking ship. I imagined it was about to sail off the edge of the earth or something equally unpleasant.

“I’m making it out of here before dawn,” I told Cassandra. “Me and anyone I can take with me.”

Again that sultry grin. “Knock yourself out.”

I turned my back on her and marched toward the wailing cave into which Quinn had hurled himself. But Cassandra took her first strike against me unexpectedly.

“You began riding young, didn’t you, Blake?”

I didn’t want to listen, but I couldn’t keep myself from hearing. I couldn’t keep her words from piercing my brain.

“And your bus never made it to school that day.”

It was a shot in the back—not a shot to kill me, but one to disable me. Her words sliced through my defenses like a hot blade, and I could feel it searing deep inside me. Was I that vulnerable? I winced, feeling the blow almost like a physical pain, but I found that I could tolerate it without falling apart. I was finding a whole lot of things I could tolerate more than I thought I could.

Before me was a cave that appeared to have no bottom. An abyss of darkness. But somehow that unknown
was less intimidating than it had been only a few moments before.

Three rides done. Four to go.

With my eyes open wide, I leaped into the cave.

The rides are different for everyone. I’m convinced of that now. I mean, sure, there are some we ride together. Either we find ourselves drawn to some common experience, or maybe we’re pulled in by the people we care about. Our friends, our families can drag us onto coasters and Tilt-A-Whirls that are really meant for them. But in the end, no matter whose rides we find ourselves on, the experience is all our own.

Out of the blackness of the pit I had leaped into came a flash of green. I hit ground suddenly, a bruising belly flop on hard-packed earth. In the outside world I would have been killed, but here, there were other things to kill you besides the drop. Here, it only stung for a few moments.

With the wind knocked out of me, I took a few seconds to catch my breath before sitting up to take in my surroundings. I was on a wasteland—a cracked, blistered salt flat, void of life. Bleak desolation spread out in all directions like a place God had leveled for construction and then abandoned.

The sky was a flat pea green and made my skin look pallid and sickly. Only one structure stood on the endless salt flat. It was a mile or so ahead, shimmering like a mirage in the misty air. I ran toward it, not wanting to waste any more of my precious time. According to my watch, it was already three thirty in real time. That gave me only two and a half hours to make it through four more rides.

As I neared the structure in the distance I could see others like myself running toward the building from all directions. More riders gathering for their next ride. One of them bumped past me as if I weren’t even there. He was in a trance. They were all like that. To these riders, the space between rides was just mental airspace, devoid of anything but the will to move through the next turnstile. I was different. Yes, I could feel the gravity of the ride pulling me toward it, but it didn’t capture me the way it captured the others.
Why not?
I wondered. What was it about me that made me able to resist? What was it about me that made Cassandra see me as a worthy adversary?

The building resolved out of the mist. It was a cathedral. Notre Dame, to be exact. I knew from my poster of France. I recognized its two great spires on either side of a circular stained-glass window. Only in
this
Notre Dame, the stained-glass window was all red and leered like a single Cyclops eye. As for the stonework of the cathedral, it wasn’t stone at all; it was reflective glass. A hall of mirrors.

Others kept pushing past me, the ride symbols on the backs of their hands glowing as they approached the turnstile.

A mirror maze,
I thought. How bad could it be? Then I laughed at the stupidity of my own question. Trapped in a maze of mirrors for eternity? Shredded by bits of broken glass? Yeah, it could be pretty bad.

I wondered if Quinn had passed this way or if his path had taken him to another ride. Regardless, the only way now was forward through the glass doors of the crystalline Notre Dame Cathedral, so I ran my hand over the scanner and pushed myself through the turnstile, into the maze of mirrors.

I once got lost in the mall when I was really little. It was before I could read, before I knew left from right, and my mother’s hand was the only thing that kept me safe from the big bad world. When you’re scared like that, all the stores and all the turns begin to look the same. You truly believe in the pit of your little-kid mind that you’re never going to be found. That’s exactly how it felt to face the maze of mirrors.

The halls were narrow, the turns unpredictable, and the dead ends demoralizing. I kept winding my way down paths, swearing I could see the reflection of an exit, only to have to turn around and try again.

That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was the clowns. I don’t know if everyone saw them as clowns, but I sure did. Big floppy feet, a rim of ridiculous red hair—oh, and battle camouflage. These were commando clowns. It was a recurring nightmare I’d had ever since I was little. Don’t ask.

But even worse than in my dreams, these clowns were
all armed with heavy artillery, and they fired huge mortar shells down the narrow glass corridors from bazookas on their shoulders. Those shells never shattered the glass, instead, they rebounded off, reflected like light, ricocheting in all directions until some poor slob got in the way and was blown to kingdom come. Never once did a mirror break from the explosions.

I crawled and rolled to keep out of their sight and out of the killing path of their weapons. Bones littered the ground of this awful place, crunching beneath me as I crawled. They were dry and blanched, like bones left under a hot desert sun. These were the kinds of bones you always saw on the ground in bad westerns, before the wagon train got attacked by Indians or the settlers had to start eating one another to stay alive. The thing was, these bones in the maze didn’t resemble anything I knew about. It wasn’t so much their size as their shape that was grotesque. I shuddered to think what kind of monsters might lie deeper in this mirror maze that could have given rise to such remains.

As I dodged and crawled through the reflective battle zone, I began to get an understanding of the mirrors themselves. Some appeared to be plain old fun-house mirrors, pulling and twisting your reflection into something barely recognizable. Other mirrors were far worse. When you looked in some of them, your reflection appeared exactly the same, but the way you
felt
about what you saw was warped and distorted. There was this one mirror that made me see myself as weak and cowardly and
another that made me feel so overwhelmingly inadequate, I felt I’d shrivel into nothingness if I looked too long. Another mirror made me feel as if I were intensely stupid, and another magnified the fear in my soul so much, I was afraid I might scream and never stop. No mirrors in the real world had the ability to reach inside you the way these did. You could tell yourself that the mirrors were simply telling lies, but you’d be wrong. They took tiny truths, swelling them out of proportion—and the fact that there was a kernel of truth in what they reflected made the effect devastating. Now I realized that all the wails I’d been hearing far off in the maze weren’t just from riders falling victim to the bozo brigade; they were the wails of riders torn apart by the twisted reflections of their own inner selves.

I did my best to keep from looking in any more mirrors, but it was harder than you might think. Once you started looking into those mirrors, it was next to impossible to look away. I guess we all can’t help peeking at our own imperfections, just like we can’t help scratching a scab that keeps itching. When those imperfections are pasted across your face like that, exaggerated and magnified, it’s hard to find all those good thoughts you have about yourself. If you believe those distorted reflections too deeply, you’ll never get out of the maze.

A mortar shell rocketed my way, and I hit the floor as it shot past, ricocheting deeper into the “fun” house. That’s when I came face-to-face with a skull. I yelped in surprise. Like the other bones in this place, it was far
from human. It was lopsided and gourd-shaped, with one eye socket the size of a baseball and the other the size of a marble. Its nasal cavity was as twisted as a snail shell, and its jaw was filled with mismatched teeth that would plague a dentist’s darkest dreams. Not human. Not even close. There was a thigh bone, too—at least I think it was a thigh bone—in the shape of an S
.
I tried to imagine the creature that would have bones like this, but I couldn’t fit it into my imagination. Turned out I didn’t have to, because I suddenly heard a sickly, raspy breathing behind me.

One of those things had found me.

I turned to see it lumbering toward me. It was no larger than I was, but its ugliness made it seem immense. To say the thing was hideous did not do it justice. It was an awful mockery of life: ragged, protruding ears, one higher than the other; shoulders set in an uneven slouch, like a living landslide; and a spine hunched in a roller-coaster curve that made my back hurt just looking at it. It had one huge elephant eye, a tiny shrunken one, and its arms were shriveled like the limbs of a T-Rex, ending in stubby, clawlike fingers. Have you ever seen the figures Picasso painted? Well, this thing was like a Picasso from hell. If I had one of those clown’s bazookas, I would have put it out of its misery right then and there.

It loped closer, and I took a healthy step away. “Back off, Quasimodo!”

It opened its swollen, crooked mouth and let loose a moan. Then it lunged for me, claws reaching for my throat. I swung the skull at it, hitting it on the shoulder,
and ran, making turn after turn in the narrow corridors of mirrors, until I found myself at yet another dead end. I pivoted, thinking the creature was still behind me, but I’d lost it, for now.

I was still holding the misshapen skull—a good thing too, because if I had dropped it on the way, I would never have made the connection. Now I happened to look at the mirror in front of me. It was your standard distorting mirror, stretching and distending my image, but the reflection of the skull didn’t quite look that way. In fact, the twisted skull, when reflected by the twisted mirror, was the perfect reflection of a
human
skull! I looked at the lopsided skull again and back at its perfect reflection. Then I reached out with my free hand and touched the surface of the mirror.

My hand passed through the glass as if there were no glass at all.

I could see my fingers on the other side of the mirror, and I almost screamed. They were short, stubby claws. I moved my fingers, feeling how my flesh had changed once they’d passed through the looking glass. I pulled my hand back quickly, and my fingers returned to normal, tingling from the change they had undergone when they had passed through.

Then I heard a sound behind me and turned to see the creature once more. It was breathing heavily, tears rolling down its stretched face, splashing onto its huge, bulging belly. It didn’t chase me, but loped toward me cautiously, and I grimaced.
Does your face hurt?
the old joke goes.
Because it’s killing me.

The creature got closer and looked at me for a long time. Then it looked down at its bloated belly and said in a wet, slippery voice, “Do I look fat to you?”

My knees buckled. I almost fell through one of the distorting mirrors but kept enough of my balance to stay on the right side of the glass.

“Maggie?
Is that you?”

And she sadly nodded her lopsided head.

“Crashed our bumper car,” Maggie said as we crouched at the dead end, listening to the distant wails and explosions echoing in the maze. At first I couldn’t understand her speech, filtered through that mess of a mouth. But after a while it was kind of like listening to Shakespeare: The more I listened, the more I could understand.

“Crashed our bumper car but couldn’t stop. Had to get another car. Had to ride. Don’t know why. Couldn’t stop.”