The carnival was not what Janice had expected.

She had imagined sunshine, brightly colored tents, and carnival barkers offering to guess her weight. Instead, the four children walked into a dark, misty labyrinth of canvas and plywood that smelled like a mixture of Zack’s gym socks and a rotting pumpkin.

“I thought this was a happy place,” commented Alexa.

“I think it’s safe to say this memory has spoiled,” answered Zack. “We should get out of here as quickly as possible. Look around for any doorways a young Aunt Gladys wouldn’t have walked through.”

They inched their way through the ominous maze of carnival trappings. Janice’s sense of neatness rebelled at the truly haphazard way the canvas flats bordering the lane hung just slightly off-kilter, and she found herself itching to straighten them as she crept along, the way twisting and turning back on itself like a confused snake. A number of tent flaps beckoned, but none presented the telltale blankness signaling a way out of this oppressive memory. It seemed as though Aunt Gladys had ducked into every tent she came across all those years ago.

“Is anyone else thoroughly disgusted by how squishy this ground feels?” asked Sydney.

Janice yanked her attention away from the uneven walls to look down at her feet. Her sister was right—the ground seemed to almost swallow up the soles of their shoes. Yet it was not muddy. Rather, the dewy grass seemed to wrap itself around their feet as they walked, each step causing them to sink just a little bit farther into the earth.

The children continued their search until the narrow track spat them out onto the larger, main thoroughfare of the carnival. Suddenly, the unending and unyielding walls of canvas and plywood gave way to a horrific vision of pure circus evil. Patrons lurched along like eager zombies, even emitting a subconscious moan or two as they walked. Large tents that might once have been brilliantly colored punctured the landscape, the faded browns and greens and purples of their former glory bleeding down their sides. Vendors cackled from behind moldy, fungus-encrusted carts offering who-knew-what.

In the midst of it all, a loudly dressed man wearing a huge bow tie stood in a large wooden tub of water, calling out to anyone and everyone. “Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Let your dreams become reality! Be ye young or old, short or tall, fat or thin, living or dead or in between, your destiny awaits!”

“Why are you standing in a tub of water?” asked Janice, whose eyelid twitched at the very thought.

“A better question,” said the man, flashing a toothy smile at her, “is why aren’t you?”

Janice didn’t think that was a better question at all. “Which way?” she asked her siblings, glancing up and down the fairway and trying to ignore the man’s shiny, overly energetic smile.

“Should we split up?” asked Sydney.

“Absolutely not,” answered Zack.

“That way looks more kid-friendly,” said Janice, pointing toward the sound of what could only be a merry-go-round, though its song was slightly slurred, as if it was playing just a bit too slowly.

“Right,” said Zack. “Then that’s not the way we want to go.”

The others agreed and shuffled away from the siren call of the demented merry-go-round. Behind them, the man in the tub of water called out, “Venture forth, young ones! The carnival awaits! I can already tell you will make excellent additions to the gallery!”

Janice stopped and turned around. “What does that mean?” she asked. Something in the way the man stood in his tub of water smiling at them sent a shiver down her spine. “What gallery?”

“The Glorious Gallery of the Grotesque!” replied the man with a flourish, his hands rolling and waving in the air. “Where all the carnival’s oddities are stored! In my experience, there is little in this most marvelous world more gloriously odd than four miserable orphans! I can’t wait to see you on display!”

“Wait. What?” asked Janice.

The odd man made a motion as if tipping his hat toward them—though he wasn’t wearing one—then sank down into the tub with a small splash. Janice blinked, quite certain she hadn’t just seen what she had, in fact, just seen.

“Uhhh…guys?” she warned.

The others turned around. “Where’d the circus dork go?” asked Sydney.

Janice didn’t trust herself to answer that particular question, so she stuck to what she felt was even more disturbing. “He said something about putting us all on display.”

“Display? What, like an attraction?” asked Zack, confused.

“A permanent attraction!” yelped a frizzy-haired guy popping up from behind a garbage can directly in front of them.

“Folks will line up for miles to see ya!” sneered an old woman who suddenly appeared behind a small cart to their left selling something called a Fro-Yo-Blo.

“You’ll be famous!” cackled an impossibly flexible woman hanging upside down from the branches of a tree on their right.

Alexa, who had backed toward the tree when the Fro-Yo-Blo crone had appeared, gave a yelp and dashed away just as the freaky upside-down lady made a swipe for her hair.

“Alexa!” yelled Zack, grabbing her and sweeping her up into his arms.

“Awwww,” purred the voice of the man in the tub of water. “Is someone being bashful? This is your big break!”

Janice spun around, searching for the source of his voice, then stopped and stared in abject horror as he slowly rose up from the ground directly behind them, like some Greek god rising out of the ocean. Except he was rising out of the disturbingly squishy grass, which should not have been possible.

“You were born to die here,” he said, the toothy smile never wavering from his newly formed face.

Janice screamed.

“Run!” yelled Zack.

The Rothbaum children ran.

With fully grown carnival freaks on either side and in front of them, the children chose the path of least resistance and ran back the way they’d come while the loudly dressed carnival barker was still only a head and torso. The man/creature/nightmare snapped at them with his teeth as they passed but was easily avoided. Sydney even went out of her way to step on the top of his head as she ran.

“Gumph!” he complained. “How rude!”

The children ran past the labyrinth from which they’d come and hurtled toward the ominous sound of the lethargic merry-go-round. Around them, the carnival came alive, snarling and growling at them. Arms rose up from the grass to grab at their ankles. Faces formed just long enough to stick out their tongues and blow raspberries at them. Legs popped up and sort of flailed uselessly in the air.

Still the children ran.

“Look for doors!” cried Zack. “Anything we can attach the knob to! We have to get out of here!”

Though she couldn’t argue with his logic, Janice worried that if they left the MemorySphere now, they’d never get a chance to come back. Miss Guacaladilla would be waiting for them on the other side, and they’d be trucked off to the four corners of the earth.

There had to be a better way.

Think, Janice, she implored herself, easily dodging a hand rising up from the grass, hoping to snatch her heels. Where would little Aunt Gladys not go?

Her attention was diverted when Sydney gave a sudden yelp, her foot having crashed into a half-formed forehead in her path. Janice’s usually graceful little sister gyrated her arms wildly in an attempt to keep her balance while stumbling forward. (The forehead she’d kicked was left behind to quietly develop a serious lump, not yet having formed a mouth with which to cry out in pain.)

The others could only watch in horror as Sydney awkwardly lost the battle with gravity and slid face-first into the grass, skidding forward a foot or two until yanked to a stop by dozens of hands suddenly growing out of the earth. “Sydney!” Zack yelled, doubling back.

Janice joined her brother, and they began stomping on an unending supply of fingers (and, here and there, the odd toe), trying to give Sydney a chance to get back to her feet. But for every thumb they squashed, two more sprang up around their prone sister.

“Looks like we have our first specimen!” cheered a set of lips off to the side in what sounded like the voice of the guy in the tub of water.

“Let my sister go!” snarled Alexa, stomping on the lips with all her might.

As satisfying as it was to see her little sister squash those lips (they very quickly swelled from the blow), Janice was growing desperate. Despite all that she and Zack were doing, more and more hands and arms, a couple of legs, and, for some reason, one pair of buttocks were yanking Sydney down into the grass. Her arms pinned to her sides, Sydney could only cry out in a muffled scream of RAGE, which unfortunately wasn’t helping to set her free.

Suddenly, Janice looked up, eyes alight with inspiration. “Keep stomping!” she ordered.

Before Zack could ask what she was doing, Janice dropped to her knees, grabbed one of the feet sticking out of the ground, and began tickling the bottom.

The reaction was instantaneous.

“Oooh! Ha-ha! Stop! Ooooh, stop! Gaaa!”

A number of different mouths sputtered and laughed, and the leg in her hands spasmed, kicking out.

“Brilliant, Janice!” cheered Zack. “Keep going!”

Janice held on and grimly continued tickling with a fevered intensity. One by one, the hands let go of Sydney and flailed about in response to Janice’s tickling.

“Gah! Stop! Oooh! No fair! Gee-hee!”

Zack grabbed Sydney by the arm and dragged her out of the grasp of the few fingers still holding her. “Got her!” he cried.

“Go!” yelled Janice, dropping the foot. All four ran with a renewed urgency, while the twitching hands and fingers sank into the earth behind them.

“That was not nice!” crooned the creepy tub man, popping up from behind a clump of balloons, his voice far more menacing than before. “We were hoping you’d join us willingly, but if you’re gonna be nasty, two can play at that game!”

A massive wall of grotesque, half-formed people rose out of the grass as the children reached a central courtyard. Four lanes dumped into the circle, and the sickly, demented merry-go-round sat in the middle, its haunting melody getting under their skin and giving each child a serious case of the willies. The grass-formed creatures cut off all avenues of escape, and slowly but surely closed in on the Rothbaums. Not having any other choice, the children hopped up onto the disturbing merry-go-round.

“What do we do?” asked Alexa.

Zack opened his mouth to answer, but one of the horses on the merry-go-round bent its head and snapped its jaws at him. Everyone screamed as more and more of the supposedly inanimate animals came to life around them. Janice ducked as a unicorn whipped its horn above her head, then she rolled under a newly animated ostrich and found herself staring at the center of the ride.

And she got an idea.

“Guys! Over here!” Janice hopped into the center of the ride and out of reach of the various merry-go-round animals, which, amazingly, remained locked in place by the poles attaching them to the ride. Seeing this, her siblings quickly joined her in the center. “There’s always a room in the middle! Aunt Gladys couldn’t have gone in there!”

Without a word, the others quickly scoured the central base of the ride, running their hands along the walls in search of a hidden door. Finally, Zack shoved on a painted tiger and a section of the inner wall swung inward, revealing black nothing beyond.

“Here!” he cried.

With the merry-go-round animals’ snarls and growls echoing in their ears, the four Rothbaums squeezed through the narrow opening and escaped the cacophonous carnival once and for all.

High atop the tallest tent of the carnival, someone watched them disappear.