Chapter 1: Through the Glass, Into the Fog
The music from the main midway was a distant, tinny hum now, swallowed by the thick silence of the Hall of Mirrors. Sally’s Chuck Taylors crunched on grit and broken glass. Her breath came out in little white puffs that hung in the chill air. She should never have ducked behind the corroded “MIRAGES & MARVELS” sign, should never have pushed past the chain that was clearly more warning than decoration.
But adventure, or maybe just morbid curiosity, had a way of overriding common sense.
The hallway stretched before her, a canyon of fractured silver. The mirrors weren’t just dirty; they were ruined. Crazed webs of cracks spiderwebbed across their surfaces, and some panes were nothing more than jagged teeth in a rusted frame. The few bulbs still functioning buzzed weakly, casting a sickly yellow light that made the fog coiling at her ankles look like swamp gas.
She caught her reflection in a sliver of intact glass. Petite, in her band shirt and balloon-print pants, her vibrant green hair the only color in this monochrome tomb. She grinned, a reflexive gesture. The mirror-Sally did not grin back. Instead, her image wavered, her body softening, her edges beginning to swell. Her reflection’s middle rounded, distending in a silent, smooth inflation.
Sally’s real smile froze. Her heart gave a hard, single thump.
“Okay, not funny,” she whispered to the empty air. Her voice didn’t echo. It was just absorbed.
She took a step back, but another mirror caught her. This one made her tall and thin as a stretched piece of taffy, her green hair a dripping tendril. The next one shattered her into a hundred Sallys, each one bloated and round, bouncing against the confines of their individual glass cells. A quiet, collective giggle seemed to sigh from the glass.
This wasn’t funhouse whimsy. This was an echo chamber of her own most private, bizarre daydream. The one she’d never whispered to a single soul. Heat flooded her cheeks, a mix of terror and profound embarrassment.
“Stop it,” she hissed at the mirrors.
The reflections obeyed, in a way. They stilled. Then, as one, they turned their heads—her head—to look at a large, oval mirror at the end of the corridor. Its surface was black and smooth, like obsidian.
Go, the silent reflections seemed to say.
She didn’t want to. Every cell in her body screamed to run back toward the distant carnival sounds. But her feet, traitors that they were, carried her forward. The cartoon balloons on her pants seemed to jiggle with each step, a mocking parody of her secret thoughts.
She stood before the dark mirror. She saw only the outline of herself, a shadow against deeper shadow. Leaning closer, she peered in.
The glass wasn’t reflective. It was a window.
And it gave way.
There was no violent shatter, just a sudden, cold liquidity as the surface swallowed her like a film of water. She gasped, the sound ripped from her throat as she tumbled forward into weightlessness and damp, frigid air.
She landed on her hands and knees on wet pavement, the impact jarring her teeth. The sound of the carnival was gone. Utterly. The air here was thicker, smelling of ozone, rust, and wet wool. A sluggish, luminescent fog clung to everything, painting the world in shades of bruise-purple and sickly green.
She was in an alley, but not one from any normal world. The walls were made of riveted, corroded metal, soaring up into the gloom. Twisted pipes ran along them, dripping condensation with a steady, rhythmic plink… plink… plink. Ahead, the alley opened into a decaying courtyard littered with the skeletons of forgotten carnival rides: the ribcage of a merry-go-round, the slumped spine of a roller coaster track.
“Lost, little dreamer?”
The voice was airy, slightly high-pitched, and seemed to come from all around her. Sally scrambled to her feet, spinning around.
Drifting down from the fog, tethered to nothing, was a balloon. But it was all wrong. It was shaped like a miniature hot air balloon, its basket a delicate weave of tarnished brass. Its envelope was a patchwork of faded, once-bright fabrics: scraps of striped circus tent, worn velvet the color of dried blood, panels of silk that might have been from a fortune teller’s gown. A face was embroidered on the side—two drooping, knowing button eyes and a stitched smile that was neither kind nor cruel.
“What… what are you?” Sally breathed, backing up until her spine hit the cold metal wall.
The balloon—Zephyr—drifted closer. He rotated slowly, as if considering her. “I am a vessel. A memory of lift. A sigh given form.” His voice rustled like wind through dry leaves. “The more pertinent question is: what are you doing here? The Path of Puffed-Up Pride isn’t for the faint of heart.”
“I took a wrong turn at the probably-haunted hall of mirrors,” Sally said, her own sarcasm a lifeline to normality. “My bad. Point me to the exit?”
Zephyr’s stitched smile seemed to twitch. “There is no exit. Only through. You were called. Your desire is a loud, bright, squeaky thing in this quiet, squeezed-out place. It drew the mirrors. It drew me.”
Sally’s stomach clenched. “I don’t have a desire.”
“Liar,” Zephyr sang softly. He bobbed closer, until she could see the intricate, fraying threads of his construction. “I can hear it humming in your bones. The fantasy of expansion. Of becoming light, and full, and perilously round. Of surrendering to the pump’s kiss and feeling your skin grow taut, a trembling globe.” He let out a knowing, papery chuckle. “You think it in your little bed at night, don’t you? A secret so silly it makes you bury your face in the pillow. But here, little dreamer, secrets are the only currency.”
Tears of humiliation stung Sally’s eyes. This was worse than any judgment. This was her innermost weirdness, spoken aloud by a sentient children’s toy in a nightmare alley. “Shut up,” she whispered, her voice trembling.
“Or what? You’ll pop me?” Zephyr drifted back, his tone shifting to a melancholy flatness. “I would not recommend it. The pop here is… final. And the things that float in from the edges to investigate the sound are hungrier than ghosts.”
He turned, his basket swaying, and began to drift down the alley toward the corpse of the carnival. “You wish to be a balloon? This is the place for it. But be careful which air you choose to fill you. Some winds are poison. Some promises are punctures waiting to happen.”
He was leaving. Panic, sharper than the embarrassment, lanced through her. He was the only thing here that talked, the only thing that wasn’t rust and fog.
“Wait!”
Zephyr paused, hanging in the murky air.
Sally pushed off the wall. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. The desire he named was twisting inside her, no longer a secret daydream but a palpable, terrifying hunger. “You said… you said there’s a way through.”
“For a price,” Zephyr said, without turning around.
“What price?”
“A story. A true one. The story of why a woman who walks in the waking world wishes to be unmade and remade as a toy.”
Sally hugged herself, the black cotton of her band shirt suddenly insubstantial. The plink… plink… plink of the pipes marked the seconds. She thought of her tidy, lonely apartment. The quiet pressure of being small, of being overlooked, of containing nothing but average air. The intense, visceral daydream of being filled, of becoming something entirely other—boundless, buoyant, noticeable.
It was the stupidest, most profound truth she had.
Zephyr slowly rotated to face her, his button eyes glinting in the sourceless light. The fog coiled around his patchwork body, beckoning.
Sally took a shaky breath. And began to talk.