Most of the audience are people in sheets with eyeholes cut out. This is what the majority came up with for their spooky costume, which wasn’t a requirement. But this is The Funhouse, and costumes are common amongst staff and customers.
Ambrose moves around the bar, refilling glasses, avoiding the rims stained with lipsticks of different colors, sticking to the stems of each glass.
Twisting away, I give my attention back to the big table we sit at. Annabelle and Nyx aren’t in costume, either, but we keep drawing the attention of the locals.
The majority of people have realized who I am, and that’s why so many are gawking over here, rather than watching what they paid for.
Facing ahead and ignoring them all, I watch as the lady directly opposite us is gets a reading from the woman standing in front of our giant rectangular table.
“Do you accept what they’re saying?” she, the spiritualist in the purple dress and a pair of ankle booties that I love, asks.
And the lady, someone considerably older than me, nods.
“Okay, they want you to know they’re with you. And I’m gonna say goodnight to them here because I feel like they could talk all night.”
“Thank you.” The woman smiles over the message from her late partner and his sister, who both died in a car accident last year.
“Goodnight and bless them. Bless you.” The spiritualist moves from one side of the table, returning to us in the center, then moving left again when I dip my head, avoiding her gaze.
Why did I agree to this?
I don’t need messages from beyond, not now that I can finally keep the spirits at bay.
“You got a message for me, hot stuff?” shouts a man, who’s been eyeing the psychic since my arrival, from the far end of thetable. He looks like an older version of a boy I remember called Lincoln, and if this is who he grew up to be, he’s always been a little brass.
His eyes linger on her long legs, peeping through the thigh-high slit in her dress, and there’s a hunger in them that makes me feel uncomfortable for her.
“Not you.” The Great Natalia walks, unfazed, halfway back to us. Then back again. “God, I feel like I’m being pulled in half here.”
Valaria looks on, hanging near our table, watching the woman she hired intensely.
“You, guy with all the glasses,” Natalia says, her long, pointed nail aimed at Ambrose. “Set them down and come over here, please.”
Freezing with two hands full of glasses, he eyes me, then Valaria, who shrugs. She nods, her curled hair falling into big brown eyes, encouraging him to accept the reading.
He sets the glasses on the bar, and she moves to take them, handing them to another bartender with loud instructions to place them into the dishwasher below.
She heads back to her spot, and Ambrose heads to me. The seat at my side is no longer empty, occupied by a young lady with huge glasses on the end of her pointy little nose.
Lifting me, he scoots onto my chair and slides me into his lap.
The room fills with loud and unkind whispers, and Lincoln, it is definitely Lincoln, laughs.“This should be fun.”
“Oh, shut up!” Annabelle snaps, her eyes in his direction.
“Are you comfortable like that?” The Great Natalia asks. “You have a bad leg.”
Did she notice that, or did someone on the other side tell her?
Eyes stay on us, the weird, inseparable siblings who haven’t been seen together in ten years.
“Your mother doesn’t want you aching.”
“She probably doesn’t want him fucking his sister either, but does he listen?”
“Linc!” Nyx is the one to scold him. “Leave it alone. You’re interrupting their reading.”
“Yeah, and the whole town wants to hear this one,” another voice says from the crowd.
