The wall glitched, so did everything else. Then, her surroundings changed completely. The darkness lifted. The walls became open air. The floor, a gravel lot. She was surrounded by cars. Someone was holding her hand. Her hand felt smaller than it should've been. She was smaller than she should've been, the ground seeming a lot closer than normal. Up ahead, a sign hung on an arched gate. It read Wild Time Adventure Land in big, bright orange letters.
While she took everything in, the song, presumably "Exit Through the Freakshow," played, amplified through the air around her by an unseen sound system. Its pulsating rhythm vibrated the ground. It thrummed across the skin of her arms, raising hair and gooseflesh alike.
She looked to see who held her. The hand had pronounced veins and a thin covering of hair. A scar gleamed pink over the middle knuckle. She knew this wiry but strong hand well, having held it for nearly two decades.
No, not two decades. She wasn't yet that old, was she?
She thought, but those thoughts melted away like an ice cube beside a space heater.
Her father met her gaze when she looked up at him.
She felt a vague pang of grief and a melancholic notion that she hadn't seen his face in so long, but that wasn't right.
She was here with him now, still a little girl. Nothing had changed.
Memories of his death and Mom's depression and waking up in a place like this only abandoned began to fade like afterimages from a bad dream. He smiled at her; she smiled at him and nestled herself against his side, not like old times, like now times. This was now.
The amusement park entrance got closer. It loomed over them, welcoming, and a flurry of butterflies carried away the last of the nightmare memories.
The song whose title she thought she should know but she no longer knew continued. A series of stretched brass notes joined the pulsing rhythm. It sounded like elevator music played in a black hole. It gave her a lonely feeling, a sadness whose source she couldn't explain, its nature only identifiable by its profundity.
Others walked the gravel lot, headed toward the park entrance. A middle-aged blonde-haired woman wearing workout gear. A professorial man wearing glasses and a sportscoat. A police officer and a teenage boy with face tattoos. An Asian woman in a loud-colored dress. The vaporous notion that she knew these people from somewhere passed through her mind's eye like a dead leaf floating downstream.
They walked so slow it was almost painful to watch. It reminded her of her first-and-only time attending mass, observing people who seemed so old line up for communion and shuffle side to side so as not to move forward too quickly. These people moved like that, in time with the sluggish music.
From beyond the fence, smells of cotton candy and funnel cake drifted to Vanessa's nostrils. She felt warm inside and her mouth watered at the prospect of sugary bliss.
When she reached the gate, a man in a rat costume stepped from behind the fence, casting a long shadow over her. The sight of him gave her an uneasy feeling in her core, but she didn't turn and run.
His saucer-sized eyes, plastic but for black screens to allow for seeing with his real eyes, locked onto her. He lowered himself to her height, breath husky through the mouth screen. Even through the mask, his breath smelled like stale beer.
Her father released her hand, and all the moisture in her mouth dried up. Behind her, the others had formed a line and stared blankly ahead. The rat-masked man took Vanessa's hand with his furry mitt. Her father gazed into the park beyond, his jaw slack, his eyes glazed. The rat man pulled her inside, into a hot, mildewy embrace.
"Welcome back, Vanessa," he said in a voice she thought she recognized.
Uncle Phil, she thought, and she nearly screamed.
Before she could expel the cry, the world glitched again. She stumbled through the torso of the rat-costumed man. The damp smell lifted, giving way to something earthy. Her distorted surroundings, the living amusement park, faded, and she continued pitching forward. The ground became rockier. In place of the previous world, she found herself in a dark wood.
Confused, she looked behind her. More woods stretched for immeasurable acres. No sign of any force field or amusement park, living or dead. The sky was dusky purple and orange. The air had cooled. She was a grown woman again, with all the scars that entailed. Most of them she'd accumulated over the course of the day.
The dreamy, distorted song played on. The same four or five saxophone notes looped backwards and forwards. It sounded muted now, as if coming from far away. She remembered the song's name.
A trail stretched before her. Behind her, it terminated in a thicket she could not have possibly walked through. Yet, she had to have come from somewhere. Kayson's words echoed from somewhere inside.
Not gonna be a way out if we no-clipped.
The crazy kid was right after all. The place she'd come from, where they'd been trapped and most of them had died, was not somewhere in her world.
So, where was she now? Had she clipped back into her world?
Do I even have a world?
Crazy thoughts. And not the least bit conducive to figuring this out.
There had to be something out here. Someone who could help her.
She followed the trail. It was the only logical way forward, she just hoped it wasn't another game or test. She took the fact that the song faded the farther she went as a good sign.
As she walked, the sky grew darker. The crescent moon was a scar on the sky's navy-colored flesh. The stars shone like iridescent needle holes.
She moved at an easy pace, comfortable enough not to run but vigilant enough to scan her surroundings at every snap of a twig or rustling of leaves. No one came to meet her on the path, though. The crickets and occasional cicadas vibrated the night with their songs, drowning out the last of "Exit Through the Freakshow." Anything larger hid from her, as afraid of her as she'd be of them.
She remembered getting lost with her father and brothers in the Big Bend wilderness. How scared she'd been then. How good her father had been at comforting her and her brothers, who seemed even more afraid than she. She'd suspected then and knew with little doubt now that he had also been frightened. Grownups were never less afraid. They just had different fears, or the same fears differently embodied. Fearsome beasts in the woods became starvation or dehydration. Both amounted to certain death.
Of course, after her misadventure in that amusement park, she no longer thought her childish fears of monsters as bringers of death were at all unfounded.
She lifted the player and pressed the home button. The screen wouldn't light up. It must've run out of batteries, she thought and pocketed the device.
Exhaustion slowed her, but the need to not be lost in the woods on top of everything else propelled her. At some moments, she nearly trotted. At others, she dragged her feet. Between more abrupt noises, she thought she'd pass out on her feet. To any observers, she must have looked like a zombie.
Probably have the wounds for it too, she thought, still tasting the blood from her nose.
The trail led to a break in the woods. A road, a God-blessed, freshly paved road lay at the end of the path. Civilization couldn't be too far off.
She rushed to the end of the trail but hesitated at the threshold, that old feeling of bursting into flames threatening to rise within her. But she didn't stop for long. She gave one final lunge forward and stumbled onto the road's shoulder. Then, she collapsed to the pavement.
She lay there on the side of the road, unmoving save for her breath and watching for cars. She could've been there a few minutes or nearly an hour before she saw the headlights. The car approached at death-defying speed. It would surely pass her by. She nearly got up to flag it down but couldn't bring herself to stand. Maybe she'd stop the next one. For now, she just needed to rest.
She started to close her eyes, but then the hum of the car's engine slowed. The headlights washed over her, and she couldn't make out the type of vehicle or who might be driving it. She breathed deep, too exhausted to get up and run if the driver proved hostile. The car had pulled to the side of the road, and it stopped about twenty feet from where Vanessa lay. The driver didn't switch off the lights before swinging the door open. The black outline of a man's body got out of the car and stood for a beat, presumably watching her, likely checking for signs of life. She moved her mouth to say something, but only a dry croak emerged.
The shape approached with slow, purposeful strides. The grit of the pavement against his soles was steady and torturously sluggish. With him backlit, she couldn't make out his face or any other features aside from his height and build. He looked like he could dole out whatever fate to her that he wished, even if she weren't completely spent.
"Please," she managed to say when the man came within earshot.
He didn't respond. Perhaps he couldn't hear her over his idling engine.
He knelt beside her, and then she saw his face. Her whole body knotted up again. Her breath caught in her throat. She could only muster one word:
"Dad?"