How was I ever going to find Nyssa and Tegan when anywhere I landed, Circe could find and breach the TARDIS? "Stupid chameleon circuit," I choked. Then I thought of the perfect place to hide: La Maison Hantée! She would never think to look there. I would have to be extremely accurate in my calculations or my coordinates would be off, and even an inch's error might draw a curious glance that could turn into a whisper that reached Circe. Now I wished I knew what Sylvia and Alain had wanted to tell me. How far did her power extend?
I don't know how I did it but at two-fifteen in the morning, after the last ride ended, I landed the TARDIS exactly where she needed to be, in a small closet behind an even smaller one from which one of the "monsters" would jump out at ticket-holders. The door faced the wrong way but I squeezed around and slipped out onto the track, following it past all the inanimate horrors that would elicit screams during business hours and emerging into a still well lit fairground full of operators and underlings packing up, cleaning up, clearing out. I picked up a piece of wood, carried it as far as the exit, dropped it and strolled out through the gate, attracting no attention whatsoever.
My intention had been to wait in the shadows, provided I could find any shadows, until everyone had left the Toit Volant, then find my way back in and see if my friends were hiding there. However, the gate was not just locked but chained shut, "Here we go again," I grumbled, starting to explore the perimeter of the cheerfully painted surrounding wall, searching for a hole, a gap, anything to crawl through, as if I hadn't done enough crawling for a lifetime. What I found surprised me: a nice, tall door, open, with a dozen or so patrons entering the fun fair after hours and at least as many ride operators waiting for them with open palms.
I decided to wait outside. If my friends were hiding in the fun fair, they'd be discovered and ousted, and I'd be there to whisk them to safety. If they were not hiding there, entering now would involve real risk, for nothing. I turned away and wandered in the darkness to the observation point. I couldn't see much; if Nyssa and Tegan were crossing the river and the land beyond, headed for Cosham, they were invisible to me. I went back to the door, which was closing, and was spotted by the person closing it. "Hey," he called out. "Last chance!" I approached slowly, looking around for a place to run, and, not finding one, and upon his urging, "Get a move on!" I let him usher me into Toit Volant… and immediately back into La Maison Hantée, where my credit pass was charged. I wondered whether Circe had prepaid or would be billed.
"You've signed the release, right?" a small round woman asked me, and I nodded. She didn't ask to see any papers so I was settled and strapped into a car like the one I'd ridden with stuffies as companions. This time I was alone. I noticed that many others were also alone, although there were some couples as well. I also noticed that the lighting, previously low, was now almost nil. Something struck me as very wrong indeed, but I was strapped in and, deciding that the difference was simply the hour (and the illicit presence of all of us after hours), I resigned myself to a boring several minutes rolling past the same ersatz monsters jumping out at me.
The first change I noticed was the track itself. It looped off in directions it had eschewed before, and my car passed close enough to the exhibits to feel feathers, silk, straw, bursts of air, a disturbing hint of orange, all touching my face and hands as I passed, as well as the breath of each entity who popped out. Wait… mechanical monsters don't breathe! The twists and turns were decidedly more violent than they had been, and one of the roller-coaster-like segments shuttled me at top speed into the arms of a humanoid with an awfully familiar face. These were not mechanical arms; this person caught my car and stopped it, then clutched at my hands, swiped gently at my face, turned my car to the right and pushed it ahead on the track. He had been breathing all right; I wasn't. There was no time to process any of this: every enemy I had ever fought or escaped stopped me along the way to touch me in some way and redirect my car to the next encounter. One pulled my hair. Another just laughed in my face. Yet another shook my hand and left sticky residue on it. Two slapped me in the face, one gently, the other quite hard. I did yell when what turned out to be a rubber ax came down on my wrist. The hand wielding the ax was not rubber.
The ride was full; there were no empty cars. (I was in the one at the very end; no one was behind me.) Was everyone experiencing the same assaults, simulated and real, that I was? Most of the others were screaming. My "monsters" were personal to me; they couldn't possibly be personal to anyone else in the house. How could they be? I decided that I was hallucinating and tried to relax, but somehow the idea that something, someone, was deliberately causing me to hallucinate was not exactly relaxing. Before I could process that further, my car was stopped by two huge fellows in masks. I waited for them to assault me in some disconcerting but ultimately harmless manner but instead they unbuckled my safety belt, pulled me out of the car, pushed me so violently against a wall that it wobbled as if it would collapse, blindfolded me, spun me around several times and walked me between them away from the track. We passed through hanging curtains, beads, even into a shallow stream and through a waterfall. At one point they let me sink mid-calf deep in something gooey, force-fed me a glop of it and laughed as they pulled me free and dragged me on to the next presumed thrill. I rather wished they'd reversed the order and walked me through the waterfall after the goo, but they'd thought of that: my next stop was a neck-deep dip in a pool of cold water in which they also briefly dunked me, catching me on the inhale.
I was hauled up a ladder, dropped into a haystack, bitten on the hand by one of my guides, then suddenly deposited and strapped back into a car, had my blindfold removed and given a push to start me rolling again behind a line of other patrons being shunted out of the house into the wee-hour darkness. When it was my turn to be ejected, my car turned left, away from the exit, and stopped at Circe's feet.
"Were you scared?"
Something had been pumped into the Maison's air that caused the patrons, myself included, to hallucinate, but I hadn't hallucinated my treatment while blindfolded. The others had all been released. I was the only detainee and this really was Circe, her eyes both hot and cold, the delighted predator smiling down at the exhausted prey strapped into her trap.
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