The Submission:
As I approached the rundown carnival, my nerves started acting up. A strange vapour hung in the air, clouding the slides, the merry-go-rounds, the swinging pirate ship, making the plastic boat loom like some monstrous whale.

I wanted very much to turn and run but I knew I couldn’t. I’d lost the wager, my luck had run out, and now it was my turn to brave the once-bustling carnival, now the subject of ghost stories.

Would zombies burst from the doors of the arcade? Perhaps a giant squid lurked in the rancid river, or maybe something as simple as desperate vagrants willing to kill for some loose change.

I could hear my friends jeering as kids do, egging me on, calling me a chicken as I ventured deeper into the fog. Trash was littered everywhere; dead birds lay in the sand pit, swings creaked lazily, as I stepped into the Hall of Mirrors, where it was said no one returned.

It was too dark to see anything, even with my lighter casting an ominous orange glow. All they wanted was some proof, a token or a banner or a flyer… something to prove I’d gotten this far, but I quickly found myself lost, reflected endlessly in cracked, wared mirrors.

Panic rose from my stomach as I failed, bumping into mirror after mirror and dropping my lighter, hopelessly lost in the dark. Behind me, a shuffling… slow and lumbering. The faintest jingle of a bell… a child-like titter…

A hand, gnarled and thick and bursting from a rotting glove that had once been white, gripped my ankle and wrenched me back, screaming. The face that filled my watery eyes was that of a ghoulish, greasepaint grin; fangs salivated at my terror and eyes, black and glinted in the darkness, swallowing me whole.

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