The Funhouse

28 Oct 2020

Today’s prompt: “Put yourself or your character in a place where you feel vulnerable and uneasy”

You weren’t sure what you expected when you entered the funhouse. Maybe some pop-up plastic skeletons, some obviously fake giant spiders. Maybe having to go through the open, sharp-toothed mouth of a laughing clown head.

This isn’t that. No neon lights highlighting cheap animated props in an otherwise dark room. No soundtrack of eerie organ music or eerie creaks or eerie screams and moans and growls. The funhouse is surprisingly well-lit, silent, and spare.

You’re in what looks like a nursery. There’s a crib with a pastel pink quilt snuggled around a plush elephant, and a mobile above it with little ducks and sheep and kittens. There’s a bookshelf full of Dr. Seuss and Little Golden Books. Sunlight streams through the open blinds. Wholesomeness reigns supreme.

And then there’s the doll. One of those dolls with moveable eyelids, where the left one is stuck permanently open and the right eyelid dully covers half the pupil. The doll had dark brown hair, but it’s been cut off unevenly with scissors. The doll sits on the toy chest and seems to be looking right at you. She wears a pale blue, stiff cotton dress with lace trim.

There’s another door on the opposite side of the room you entered from. You make your way toward it, eager to explore the rest of the funhouse.

You stop when you hear a sound like the rustling of lace.

You turn back to the doll. You’re pretty sure it had been sitting in the center of the toy chest. Now it’s sitting on the edge closest to you. And the head is turned so once again, it faces you.

You look for the wires. You don’t see any. Maybe it’s battery operated? These guys are good.

You’re a little unsettled. When you leave the room, you make sure the door closes securely behind you.

You’re in a hallway. An ordinary hallway, with white walls. There’s nothing to your left as you come into the hallway, but as you turn right, you see six doors, including the one you just came out of. You cross the hall and enter the first door on the left side of the hall.

It’s dark in this room. You fumble for the light switch, and jolt as something that feels like an insect runs beneath your fingers. You switch on the light, and recoil in horror. Every square inch of the windowless room – ceiling, walls, rugs, floor lamps – is crawling with centipedes.

You duck back into the hallway and slam the door behind you. You stare at the hallway. There’s a water spot forming on the ceiling that you hadn’t noticed before. It’s more red than brown.

You cross the hall again and open the middle door on the right, next door to the first door you came out of. The doll is there. Standing. Looking right up at you. You close the door.

You open the middle door on the left, the one next to the centipede room. The lights are on. The walls are painted white, and bare, save for one landscape painting on the wall on the left. There’s no blood, no insects, no creepy dolls, no monsters, nothing going bump in the night. It’s … normal? Only not really. The proportions of the room are all off, like the perspective is overly forced. The wall on the other side or the room looks tiny. And that landscape painting. The edge closest to you is way taller than the edge farthest from you. Maybe this room’s just that much bigger than it seems? And the painting, too?

You stride into the room. You cross it in six paces, and your head is nearly bumping the ceiling. Okay. So this room’s just built really weird. It really is smaller at this end.

You turn around to go back, since there’s no door out here. To your surprise, the wall opposite you is now as tiny as this wall appeared to be when you first entered the room. You look at the painting. The edge closest to you is now taller than the edge farthest from you.

You walk back toward the door. After two paces, you have to duck. After a couple more steps, you have to crawl. When you reach the door, you have to lie down to get through it. You can’t fit both your shoulders in at the same time – you have to offset them. Your hips are a tight squeeze.

You pry yourself back out into the hallway. You shut the door, which you see is now much tinier than all the other doors in the hallway.

You glance upward. The red stain is spreading. It looks like blood is leaking down the walls near the ceiling.

Maybe it’s time to go back out the way you came. After all, the creepy doll left that room, right? You cross the hall and open the first door on the right. Five pairs of glassy eyes stare back at you, and even more faces – there’s an American Girl doll, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a rag doll, a Betsy Wetsy with plastic hair and missing eyes…. Every doll’s head is turned directly toward you. The American Girl doll holds a knife in her tiny hand. You shut the door.

You walk two doors down to the last door on the right. You open it and a sound like a thousand circular saws erupts into your ears. Blades whir past you too quickly to comprehend. One nicks your index finger, and you yelp and jump back. Then you notice the massive, spike-studded steamroller-style cylinders, each the length and height of the room, begin rolling toward the center of the room from either wall. There’s no escape here. You leave the room.

You squeeze your finger, and a droplet of your blood falls into the hall carpet.

You cross the hall to open the only door you haven’t opened yet, and it’s the nursery again. You could swear you were keeping track of which side of the hall you were on, but there it is, same pink quilt, same mobile, same Little Golden Books, only this time there’s a dozen creepy dolls. One of them is holding a straight razor. One has a hacksaw. A third appears to have a bear trap sewn into its mouth.

If this is the same room you came in, maybe you can rush through the dolls and go out the door you first came in. But the door is gone. There’s no way out through here.

Maybe the opposite door? The one you thought you came in? You turn around. The original doll with the lacy dress and the hair cut by children’s scissors is standing in the hall. So is the ventriloquist’s dummy. The ventriloquist’s dummy sniffs the droplet of blood you left on the carpet, then turns his head up and looks at you. The original doll holds a tranquilizer dart gun pointed at you. She fires.

You fall to the floor. Dolls with sharp implements surround you. As they cut into you, you can only imagine your blood seeping into the floor, leaving a stain that matches the ceiling.