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“Is it supposed to look like this here?” Martin asked, looking around.
Jon’s head ached behind his eyes and everything was giving him signals that no, no in fact, this wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Martin picked his way over a glob of burned plastic that looked like it might have once been a contorted face. Jon saw what it had looked like when intact and he thought he preferred the burned one.
“It’s supposed to be a stranger domain.” Jon said, looking around again at the wasteland around them. “It’s- it’s supposed to be a bunch of mirrors.” He saw what he was supposed to be looking at. “Funhouse mirrors. They, they like-”
“He is walking through the funhouse and he thought this would be a good idea. No, he didn’t, that’s what his friends told him and he liked them too much to disagree. Maybe if they were here with him now, but they seemed to have abandoned him. Have they forgotten he’s there? Or are they just watching him, watching him walk through the mirrors with his eyes on the ground. But the ground is a mirror here, everywhere he looks he can catch a glimpse of himself and he looks wrong.
It starts somewhere back in his eyes, the curvature of the glass twisting his pupils into something that’s more lost than he feels. He turns another corner, wonders if he could break the glass, but that would be overreacting, right? He doesn’t think he was this short before he came in the maze, maybe it’s just the distortion of his image or maybe he’s shrinking under the weight of it all.
He remembers the look of the big tent as the crowd and his peers pushed him forwards and he was taken inside in the thrall and everybody told him to go one at a time, wait his turn but he was somehow first. He doesn’t see his friends and he doesn’t see his eyes anymore. He must have had them at some point, right?
His face grows wavy and soon he isn’t looking for his friends, he is looking for himself. Running at full speed, slipping on the mirrors, searching desperately for a mirror that will just reflect how he looks, or at least two that will reflect him the same way. His face is gone and he wonders if he had one in the first place.
He is not in the funhouse and he does not know who he is. He-”
Jon stumbled back, feeling like a fireball had hit him squarely on the temples and burned his brain. He yelped and fell against Martin, who caught him easily.
“What is it?” Martin asked.
“I… I don’t.” Jon said. A face came through the fire in his head and he felt his bones grow weak for another reason. “No. It can’t be.”
The crunching of footsteps greeted them, a different pair they could both notice now that they were no longer walking over the melted and bloated remains themselves.
“Jon, what’s happening, who is that?” Martin asked and Jon couldn’t answer and anyways, he was coming up now with a slow meandering pace that he usually used to walk across the office and into Jon’s desk when he had particularly unsatisfactory news to share.
“Hey, Jon. Hey Martin. Nice to see you again.”
In front of them, hands scorched and face unfocused, stood Timothy Stoker.
His eyes were gone. Smoked and popped and sizzling, gone wasn’t the right word. Warped and pitmarked like his face.Tim’s clothes were singed and missing in patches and his hair was all but gone. He walked with a slight slouch to the side but it was him, Jon knew, it was him and had he been alive this whole time?
“Tim!” Martin said, talking a step forwards. “But I thought you were!” He fell silent. “You weren’t…”
“Dead? No.” Tim laughed. The sound reverberated around the smoking ruins oh so nicely, the discordant melody skipping like a stone over burnt plastic.
“I didn’t know.” Jon said, voice raspy. He felt the presence of the Eye in his mind humming. He had already been marked with the Desolation, of course, no need for him to know about another avatar, and he hadn’t even questioned it because he thought surviving that blast was impossible.
Tim looked at him. Jon could tell his expression though his face barely changed. It was the same one he gave Jon at work when he wasn’t filled to the brim with rage. It was an expression that spoke of old wounds and dried blood and the chance to maybe do better denied. It was blank and empty and filled with pain and sat like a rock in Jon’s stomach, signed and dated with all of his past mistakes.
“I’m not surprised.” Tim said slowly. He extended his hand. “Best get on with it, then. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”
Jon paused, confused.
“He means the tape.” Martin said, barely looking away from Tim’s eyes and Jon startled, fumbling in his bag for the tape recorder that he saw had already clicked to start another statement. Tim took it out of his hands and the plastic warped in his fingers. A nail brushed against Jon and he resisted wincing as he felt pain flash through him like fire.
“Statement of Timothy Stoker.” Jon said, hesitating as he did because it felt wrong in his mouth, the words something that he never thought he’d say again. Tim’s face turned up into a smile that smoked gently. “Recorded, uh, during the apocalypse by The Archivist. Statement begins.”
They all listened to the sizzling remains of the rest of the domain as Tim cleared his throat, sounding like he had a clump of coal stuck in it, before starting to speak. His voice sounded earilyfamiliar, if a little bit raspy.
“I thought that was the end for me. I wasn’t being melodramatic. I thought that I would go out with a bang, and then there ends Timothy Stoker. It wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. Take out a few clowns, save the world.”
Tim cleared his throat again.
“It didn’t happen like that.” He said, smiling but with nothing behind his features. “I was back in the stage where Danny died and it was thick with the scent of fear and I thought to myself, so this is hell.” His smile contorted into an equally featureless laugh. “So this is what I deserve. I tried so hard to be a good person, and this is what some god or entity or dead power beyond my comprehension decided for me.”
Tim began pacing. The flesh seemed to waver on his bones with every step.
“Every day and every night since then I wished I had done something different. I played countless different scenarios out in my head of what I could say to him, how I could save him, but when I saw him on that stage after everything, something in me snapped. I started tearing up the stage, punching holes in it and lighting it on fire until it was nothing and I had nothing carrying me anymore. And when I looked into that thing’s face and realized I didn’t recognize it, I woke up and I was in the real world again, like hell decided I wasn’t good enough for it and spat me out changed.”
“And you didn’t come back? Didn’t tell us?” Martin asked.
Tim laughed again. “Would you?”
Martin fell silent. Jon couldn’t speak in the first place. He hated how the story scratched that eldritch itch for knowledge and misery. He hated that he was enjoying this.
“My life was gone, and so I made a new one. I found every single stranger monster that I could remember from the statements and I burned them to the ground. Every circus. Every clown. Every thing that pretended to be something it wasn’t. I tormented it until it was nothing, until everything was unrecognizable. Until I was unrecognizable.” He dragged his palm against his face. “And then you set off the actual literal fucking apocalypse.”
Jon nodded.
“And everything just got a whole lot better. And that’s when I knew I was irreparably and soundly fucked up.” This time when he smiled it was like a dancing shadow of his old self, but twisted beyond recognision. He spread his arms like a ringmaster. “I think they’re all dead, Jon.”
“Dead?” Martin asked, “What does he mean?”
Jon didn’t reply and Martin grew more insistant. Tim just laughed as steam rose out of his eye sockets.
“Jon!”
“Everyone here is dead. Including the avatars.” Jon said tiredly, too empty to feel. “Including the people.”
The truth crackled and hissed in the air.
“So smite me down if you dare.” Tim said finally. His voice had notes of melancholy, like an old joke between friends that had long since burned bridges. “Do me a favour.”
The ground smoked with fires that smelled like hate and tasted like acid in the back of Jon’s throat. The melted remnants of mirrors seemed to reflect everything in a dizzying array of colours and a unique display of misery.
“Come on, Martin.” Jon said, finally. He left the tape recorder and put his head down, walking towards the panopticon and staring directly ahead.
“Aren’t you gonna.” Martin paused, and then Jon could hear footsteps behind him because Martin had come to the same conclusion as him and it hurt like knives and fire because he knew he could never do it.
Tim’s laughter rang out behind them as the world caved in.