Jonah and Dice

Fucking yes.  We have found the wine cellar.

It’s all bottles in wooden diamond shelves.  Dust is everywhere, and there are candles throwing up a million shadows.  I make my hand look like a bunny, until another shadow swoops from the ceiling and obliterates it.  My fingers goes numb.

I grab one of the bottles and look at the label, but I don’t know wine.  The label’s faded, anyway, and coated with grime.  Old’s good, I understand, so I go for the cork.

Jonah slaps the bottle out of my hand and it lands standing straight up on its neck.

Dice and Jonah

I’m leaning on the slime-slick walls for balance, and I swear that something just crawled over my hand. Dice thinks I’ve been making shit up this whole time. I almost didn’t want to follow him down the stairs, but then I’d be stuck by myself, with whatever’s behind us gaining ground.

This is the worst five tickets I’ve ever spent.

Dice pulls out his flask and takes a swig by torchlight. I don’t know where he got the torch. Probably neither does he.

“Something just crawled over my hand, man,” I tell him.

“Dude, stop making this shit up.”

See?

Jonah and Dice

Jonah’s being kind of a dick. I get it, his hands are bloody or something, he’s going crazy but so’s everybody, right?

I’m trying to show him this bird bath. There’s a statue of a raven on the edge, surrounded by a silver cage like a shell.

“That looks familiar,” says Jonah, pointing to this stone girl screaming.

Whatever. He thinks someone’s been following us since the ballroom.

Something hisses in a bush, but I get that itch that I get, so I push down on the raven’s head. The stones around the birdbath descend and become a stairwell.

Awesome.

Dice and Jonah

There’s blood on my hands again and blood on the floor, but when I turn on the tap it fades, like disappearing ink. Dice keeps laughing at me. I want to punch him in the fucking mouth, but I can’t find him. There are too many goddamn mirrors. We need to get out of this kitchen.

Dice is drunk. “This is the best funhouse ever, man.” I find him, but he’s already found the next door (it was in the dishwasher) and he’s crawling through.

We come out in a garden, full of statues in cages. A bird cries, distantly.