Monsterland: A Salem's Point Novella by Rivera Ash

Author:Rivera, Ash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Fourth House

The Ringmaster

Sabrina kept running. Her heels clacking against the road, her fingers in the skirt of her gown. She headed for the fourth house. She slowed as she reached the entrance, her eyes drifting up over the large circus tent before dropping to the sign out front: Carnival of Carnage.

Taking a deep breath through her nose, she briefly glanced over her shoulder to see if the Pumpkin Lord was still watching, but he was gone. The midway had returned to normal. Only the imps were out playing. She turned back to the haunt and grasped the gate to step inside. The music faded briefly before starting up again. The calliope music was slow and distorted. A carnival barker on a loudspeaker announced that the show would be starting soon.

Sabrina curled her fingers in the end of her skirt, lifting it up to step out of her heels, and start forward, the pathway cool beneath her bare feet. She ducked beneath a curtained entrance and into the tent. The scent of buttered popcorn and hay filled her nose. Everything she associated with these kinds of circuses. She straightened, her gaze skirting over the audience propped shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip in the wooden stands set up on either side of the ring.

They were mannequins in various stages of rotting. She remembered watching them in her first walkthrough of the haunt, looking for movement. Looking for the scare actors hiding among the plastic, ready to leap out at any moment, and scare the living daylights out of her. She remembered the screams that had echoed through the tent, her own included.

Sabrina stepped further inside, dragging her eyes away from the audience to the center ring. She blinked, squinting her eyes as the bright fluorescent lights came up. A ruckus of stampeding applause filled the stands as the Ringmaster stepped into the light. “Come one, come all, to the Carnival of Carnage!”

While the plastic audience remained utterly still, the sound of applause grew thunderous. So loud, it filled her up and echoed the throbbing of her own heart. She squinted into the light, taking another step forward until the Ringmaster came into view. He stood on a raised platform, dressed in the typical black trousers, white dress shirt, and deep red and gold embroidered tailcoat. His head was lowered so that all she could see beneath the brim of his top hat was his wide, smiling mouth.

She started to take another step forward when a loud honk startled her back. Imps piled into a small, red fire truck came zipping through the aisle, passing so close, it stirred the hair around her face. They had donned colorful wigs, slathered their ugly, little faces in grease paint, and perched red balls on the end of their noises.

A half-hysterical giggle escaped her as her eyes tracked them around the circus tent. They drove around the far end of the tent, the front of the fire truck slamming into a pole and upending the little clowns like bowling pins after a strike.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.