Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
HALLOW
The first thing I find isn’t the light; it’s the smell.
It’s not the sharp, sterile bite of bleach that has lived in my sinuses for two hundred days. It’s the smell of a rotting carnival—spun sugar, rusted iron, damp wood, and a heavy, cloying perfume of old grease.
I open my eyes, and the world doesn’t make sense.
I’m lying on a bed that feels like it’s made of velvet and hay.
Above me, a giant, cracked fibreglass face stares down with a hollow, frozen grin.
One of its eyes is missing, replaced by a flickering red bulb that casts long, rhythmic shadows across the ceiling.
It looks like the god of a very small, very angry world.
I try to sit up, and the memory of the asylum hits me like a physical blow to the stomach.
The heat. The green gas. The wet squelch of Aris’s organs between my fingers.
My breath hitches, catching on a sob. I look down at my hands.
They’re clean. Someone has scrubbed the blood from under my fingernails, but I can still feel it.
I can still feel the warmth of his life draining over my skin.
I can still feel the way his pulse thudded against my palm before it stopped.
“No,” I whisper.
I scramble off the bed, my legs Tangled in a heavy, moth-eaten quilt. I hit the floor—hard. The boards under me are warped, sighing with a metallic groan. I’m not in a room. I’m in a nightmare made of wood and glass.
I look around, and the walls start to scream.
Everywhere I turn, I see myself. The room is lined with distorted mirrors—the kind that stretch your neck and melt your waist. In one, I am a towering, skeletal wraith. In another, I’m a squat, bloated thing with eyes the size of dinner plates.
“Stop it,” I gasp, my hands flying to my face.
But I can’t stop it. The silence of the asylum has been replaced by a cacophony of ghosts.
I see Aris in the corner of every mirror, his chest flayed open, his mouth stuffed with cards.
I see the guards with their melting skin.
I see the leather straps, still reaching for my wrists from the shadows.
It’s too much. The walls are closing in, the giant clown head is lowering its jaw to swallow me whole, and the peppermint smell is back, stinging my eyes.
“GET AWAY FROM ME!” I scream.
I grab a heavy, brass-based lamp from a nearby crate and hurl it at the nearest mirror. The glass shatters with a sound like a lightning strike, a thousand jagged shards of me exploding across the floor.
I don’t stop. I grab a chair—a spindly, gilded thing that looks like it belonged to a dead queen—and swing it into the next one. CRASH.
“You’re not real! None of you are real!”
I’m sobbing now, the rage turning into a blind, frantic panic. I’m destroying the world because if I don’t, it’s going to finish what Aris started. I’m breathing so hard my chest feels like it’s going to crack open, the air coming in jagged, desperate gulps.
“Hallow.”
The voice cuts through the sound of breaking glass like a blade.
I spin around, a shard of mirror clutched in my hand so tight the edges are biting into my palm.
He’s standing in the doorway, framed by the darkness of the funhouse.
He’s not wearing the purple coat anymore.
He’s in a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with tension and old scars.
He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t try to comfort me. He just stands there, watching the carnage with those emerald eyes, his mouth a thin, hard line.
“Is that it?” he asks, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. “Are you done breaking the reflections? Or do you want to start on the walls?”
“You brought me here,” I choke out, my voice trembling with a terrifying, wild energy. “You took me out of one cage and put me in another. You’re just like him. You just want to watch the show.”
I lunge at him, the glass shard raised, my vision blurred by tears and madness. I want to hurt him. I want to see if he bleeds the same way the doctor did.
He moves with a fluid, terrifying speed, catching my wrist in a grip that feels like a vice. He yanks me forward, slamming my back against the one mirror I haven’t broken yet. My breath leaves me in a sharp unh.
He pins me there, his body a wall of heat and muscle, his face inches from mine. I can see the sweat on his brow, the stubble on his jaw, the raw, unpolished hunger in his eyes.
“Look at yourself,” he snarls, his voice dropping into a register that makes my skin crawl.
“No!”
“LOOK!”
He grabs my hair, forcing my head toward the glass. I see myself. I’m covered in dust and sweat, my gown torn, my eyes wide and bloodshot. But I also see the blood on my hands—the fresh blood from the glass. I see the fire. I see the monster.
“You’re not a victim anymore, Hallow,” he whispers, his breath hot against my ear. “You’re a riot. You’re the beautiful, bloody mess the world tried to hide. You can break every mirror in this house, but you can’t break what you’ve become.”
I stop fighting. I sag against him, the glass shard falling from my numb fingers and clattering to the floor. The rage is still there, but it’s changing, turning into a heavy, suffocating weight.
“I don’t even know who I am,” I whisper into his chest.
He reaches down, his hand cupping my jaw, forcing me to look up at him. His expression is a terrifying mixture of obsession and something that might be tenderness, if tenderness were a weapon.
“You’re the punchline, sweetheart,” he says, his thumb tracing the curve of my lip. “And I’m the only one who knows how to tell the joke.”
He doesn’t kiss me. He just holds me there in the middle of the wreckage, two broken things in a house of mirrors, while the distant sound of the tide slams against the pier like a heartbeat.
I pull away from him, my chest heaving, the jagged air of the funhouse tasting like salt and stale popcorn. The adrenaline is curdling into something darker, something heavier. I look at him—really look at him—standing there in the wreckage of my reflection.
“You keep talking about the joke,” I rasp, wiping a streak of dust and sweat across my forehead. “But I don’t see anyone laughing. I see a girl who’s lost her mind and a man who thinks he’s a god because he has a bag of cards and a crate of gas.”
His jaw tightens, a small muscle jumping in his cheek. The “Dealer” mask flickers, and for a second, the green light in his eyes dims into something human. Something tired.
“You want to see the punchline, Hallow? You want to know why I pulled you out of that hole?”
He grabs my hand—his grip isn’t a caress, it’s a tether—and drags me out of the mirror-lined room. We stumble through the dark, past the skeletal remains of a merry-go-round and the gaping, hollow eyes of wooden horses. The funhouse isn’t just a home; it’s a monument to everything the world forgot.
We reach the back of the pier, where the warped wood gives way to a heavy, rusted steel door. He pulls a ring of keys from his belt, the metal chiming like a funeral bell, and throws the bolt.
“Go on,” he says, his voice flat. “Look.”
I step into the room. It’s cold. Colder than the asylum. It’s filled with rows of filing cabinets, their drawers hanging open like tongues. On the walls, there are photos. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
Girls. All of them young. All of them pale. All of them with the same look of vacant, lobotomised terror in their eyes.
I walk toward the centre of the room, where a single, oversized map of the city is pinned to the wall. It’s covered in red string, all of it leading back to one location: Hillside. But that’s not what makes my heart stop.
There’s a desk in the corner. On it sits a single, leather-bound journal. It’s open to the middle. I recognise the handwriting. It’s Aris’s precise, clinical script.
I lean down, my breath hitching as I read the entry dated six months ago.
Subject: Hallow. The integration was successful. The trauma-induced amnesia is holding. She truly believes she was a dancer. She has no memory of the Bureau, no memory of the Project, and most importantly, no memory of her brother.
I freeze. My blood turns to slush in my veins.
“Brother?” I whisper.
I turn the page. Taped to the back is a photo. It’s old, the edges curled and yellowed. It shows two children standing in front of a fountain. A girl with platinum blonde hair and a boy with a wide, gap-toothed grin. He’s wearing a tattered purple shirt.
I look at the boy’s eyes. They’re emerald green. Even through the grain of the old film, they burn with a manic, obsessive light.
I look back at the man standing in the doorway. He’s leaning against the frame, his arms crossed, watching me with a look of agonising, twisted satisfaction.
“You said you didn’t know who you were,” he says, his voice dropping into a soft, terrifying lullaby. “But I never forgot. I spent ten years in the dark of this city looking for the girl Aris stole from me.”
I look at the photo, then back at him. My vision swims. The room feels like it’s spinning, the walls closing in.
“Jex?” I breathe, the name finally surfacing from the black sludge of my memory like a corpse in a river.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He just tilts his head, the red light from the funhouse casting a long, jagged shadow across his face.
“Not exactly, sister,” he whispers. “Jex was the one who tried to save you. He’s the one who went to the cops. He’s the one they broke.”
He steps into the light, and I see the scars on his temples—the deep, puckered divots where the electrodes sat for weeks. The same scars I have.
“Jex died in that chair,” he says, his eyes wide and shimmering with a beautiful, catastrophic madness. “I’m just the part of him that was left over after they finished the edit.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a final card. It’s not a Joker. It’s the King of Hearts. He drops it on the desk, right over the photo of the two children.
“Welcome home, Hallow. Now… do you want to know who really sold us to the Doctor?”
I can’t breathe. I can’t move. The world isn’t just a joke anymore. It’s a goddamn massacre.
“It wasn’t Aris,” he says, his voice a cold, sharp blade. “It was our father. And he’s the one running for Mayor on Tuesday.”