After I got back from the appointment with Dylan, I showered and thought about making something to eat for us. He was so nice with my brother and sister this morning.
I didn’t mean to find the phones. I just wanted to be somewhere he was. Look at his books. See what was happening around town on the screens. It was an accident.
“Aro?!” he yells.
“What’s Carnival Tower,” I ask instead.
He turns his head, looking straight at me through the camera posted to the air duct rising out of the roof like a chimney. I can tell by his silence that locking down the hideout might’ve been a good idea. He’s got a secret.
“How did…?” He breathes hard and then hardens his voice. “Open the door.”
“I found your phones.”
“You mean the ones as old as us?” he barks, yanking on the latch. “Open the door.”
“No.”
“Aro…”
“I like it here,” I tell him.
I’m surprised by how soft my voice is. It feels like I’m changing.
He goes quiet, unable to see me through the lens, but still, he tries.
“I feel safe,” I continue. “But it’s more than that. In a world full of people who prey and lie and stare and take—who force you to do things you don’t want to do—they don’t exist in here, do they?” I move toward the desk, looking at him and seeing the wind shake the trees behind him and the lights from below.
But it may as well be a million miles away. Nothing out there is real. At least not like it is in here.
“I can’t hear the traffic or their voices or their music,” I say. “I feel everything in here. It’s so quiet, Hawke.” I close my eyes, barely murmuring. “What is this place?”
He hesitates, but before I can open my eyes, he replies. “It’s Carnival Tower. I found the phones when I found it.”
As I thought. So the phones were left here. Did they succeed then? Was she here too? Whoever they were talking about in those texts…
“How did you find it?” I ask him, looking up.
He meets my eyes. “I looked for it.”
“Why?”
“Open the door, Aro.”
But I don’t. “What happened to her?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “She fell though the mirror,” he says.
The mirror. Carnival Tower.
Now I remember. Something about not leaning back into mirrors. A superstition in the area. They’re portals.
It’s bullshit. Mirrors aren’t dangerous. It’s nothing supernatural, like ghosts or parallel dimensions.
The phones exist. The texts are real.
This urban legend started with a true story.
“What happened to her?” I ask him again.
But he demands, “Open the door.”
Part of me is a little wary. None of this makes sense, and his part is unclear. What if that’s what Hawken Trent was after the whole time? Snatching me up to relive Carnival Tower.
Where did he go today? He’s been gone for hours.
“You’re not alone in there, you know?” he taunts. “You’ve felt it, haven’t you? Like you’re being watched and not by me?”
A smile pulls at my lips. Maybe.
But darkness does that to you.
“Open the door,” he whispers.
I reach up, my heart thundering inside my chest. I tap the screen, hearing the mirrors and the roof release their locks.
A moment later, the ceiling door slams to a close, and I know he’s inside.
“Where are you?” he asks in my ear.
I flip off all the monitors, killing the last remaining light in the place and shielding us in darkness.
“Somewhere,” I tell him.
He’s quiet, and I walk, turning left and up the short staircase to the great room and kitchen, but I don’t go there. I hear his footsteps on the iron grating as he descends from the roof, and I veer left, toward the mirror and Frosted. He doesn’t see me.
“The lights are off,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You want to hear a bedtime story, is that it?”
I hold back my smile; but excitement, anticipation, and a sliver of fear fills my lungs and heats my blood.
I back up toward the bakery, keeping an eye on the tunnel.
“It’s one of our urban legends,” he tells me. “But as with most stories, it’s rooted in fact. Something that really did happen once. I didn’t start researching it until I noticed the unaccounted for space on the bakery’s blueprints. Once I found my way in and found the phones, pieces started to come together.”
His voice is sonorous—calm, gentle, and steady—as it drifts into my ear and through my head, like he’s close. Like he’s behind me.
“But stories change and take on a life of their own over time,” he goes on. “And every version is different every time it’s repeated. I can’t be sure what’s true and what’s not.”
This story can’t be that old. They had cell phones at least.
“Tell me,” I beg.
“Are you sure?”
My whisper is barely audible. “Yes.”
The hideout is so quiet I hear the clock chime in the square. The hair on my neck rises.