My Latest Novel, INFINITE DRIFT, Is Out Today!

It's a page-turning mind-bender with a bonkers bisexual love triangle.

I have a new book out today, and I’d love it if you bought a copy. But rather than try to convince you by saying I think it’s great, I figured I’d just send the first chapter, which is below.

Buy Infinite Drift here or here, and there’s more info here.

And if you like it, I’d really appreciate a review on Amazon and GoodReads. It’s impossible to overstate how important those are!

CHAPTER ONE

I’m surrounded by an infinite number of me’s. They’re all around me, rows of them, some facing forward, some back, even above me, all stretching off into eternity.

They’re reflections in the mirrors on the walls and ceiling of the funhouse maze. Everything has a pale green tint from the track LED lighting framing each mirror.

It’s strange to see myself from behind and above. I’m even skinnier than I thought, tall and bony. Paler too. And do I always slouch this bad? I lift my shoulders, standing taller.

The reflections around me stand taller too, all in sync. It’s intimidating, which is stupid, because they’re just reflections. But they’re all breathing like me too, mimicking the quick rise and fall in my chest. It’s like they’re mocking me.

I hear the ragged wheeze of my breath, even over the sound of the carnival outside, the music from the organ grinder, and the screaming of kids on the thrill rides.

Weirdly, that focuses me, calms me down a bit. The images around me look like they’re breathing, but they’re all completely silent. They really are just reflections. There’s an infinite number of them, but still only one me.

I take a step forward, and all the images step forward too, in all different directions. Stupidly, I still didn’t expect any of this, and it makes me dizzy.

But now I see something I didn’t notice before. The images get progressively darker the deeper you go into infinity.

It must have something to do with the light. That’s what these images are — reflections of light bouncing back and forth, and also into my eyes, wavelengths registering in my brain. But there’s only so much light to go around, and before long, it runs out. Infinity mirrors don’t really stretch into infinity.

The darkness at the end of each row is so dark. It gives me the chills. And now it makes the silence of the reflections seem creepy.

Even in a funhouse full of mirrors, I feel completely alone.

Why did I come in here anyway? I can’t believe people think stuff like this is fun.

Something moves in the mirrors — not me, not any of my reflections. There’s someone in this maze with me. A man. Which is no big deal. Of course, there are other people in a funhouse at a carnival. And I just said I didn’t want to be alone.

Except he has a knife. Or does he? I just caught a peek of it, something in his hand, something long and pointed and sharp. He was also pretty far away. Or maybe he was right next to me — it’s impossible to tell the way these mirrors work. I couldn’t see his face. That was dark too, like the end of each of these rows of images. That’s part of what made him look so creepy.

“Ollie?” a voice says, and I jump.

Images flutter all around me, and my best friend, Alex, is standing next to me.

“Whoa,” he says, grinning, surprised I’m so surprised. “Sorry.”

I shrug it off, but I still feel jumpy.

It’s funny, Alex is shorter and smaller than me, but somehow, he still takes up more space — “Asian swole,” he always jokes about himself. At the same time, he’s weightless, impervious to gravity. He’s like light, clean and pure, shining down from above. Everyone loves Alex. Why wouldn’t they? He’s handsome but approachable, a guy’s guy with a sensitive side, confident without being a dick.

“There’s someone else in here,” I say.

“Meaning?”

“There’s someone…” What do I mean? That we’re in some kind of teen slasher flick? Trapped in a mirror maze with a knife-wielding killer? That’s just stupid. “Nothing, never mind.”

I feel his eyes on me. “You okay? This is a funhouse, remember? Fun house?” he adds, emphasizing both words. “As in, a place where you’re supposed to have fun?”

A girl screams, louder than before. It’s too close to be a scream from the thrill rides, but it can’t be what it sounds like, some girl the killer just stabbed.

Alex reacts, rolling his eyes a little. He heard it too, knows that it’s someone with us in the maze. But he didn’t see the guy with the knife, and I didn’t tell him what I saw.

“There you guys are,” another voice says, and I jump again.

More images flicker all around us, and I’m standing next to my other best friend, Raina.

“Oh, sorry,” she says. My surprise has surprised her too.

Raina isn’t light like Alex, but you’d also never mistake her for a reflection in a mirror. She’s too solid. She doesn’t shine down on the world from above, she punches her way forward, right through anything. She calls it Brown Girl Passion, but unlike a lot of people, she’s not all doom-and-gloom and negative about everything. She’s still convinced we can save the world.

“Ollie’s a little jumpier than usual because…” Alex looks at me again. “Well, I’m not really sure why.”

I know I’m totally letting my imagination get away with me. So I shake my head and say, “It’s nothing. I thought I saw—”

I see him in the mirrors again, the man with the knife.

“A knife!” I say, pointing.

Alex and Raina turn, but he’s already gone again. It was just another flash, a couple of long rows of dark killers come and gone.

“There’s someone in here with us,” I say. “And he has a knife.”

Alex and Raina turn back, staring at me now. Their eyes narrow. They’re not looking around for the man with the knife. They don’t even believe he’s here.

“I’m serious!” I say. “I saw him.”

Raina looks at Alex, and some kind of understanding passes between them. They nod, one after the other.

“Okay,” she says. “Why don’t we just go?”

“I know it sounds crazy,” I say. “But I saw him.” I see him again, an image of a man jumping from one mirror to the next. His reflection is bigger now. “Look! Please?”

They turn, and they finally do see him. I can see his face now too. Older but not old, with a salt-and-pepper beard. But I don’t see the knife anymore, and he’s not even looking our way. He looks more like someone’s friendly uncle than a killer, and I can tell Alex and Raina aren’t impressed. They think he’s just a guy.

“Fine,” I say quickly. “Let’s go.” I pull Alex and Raina after me, away from the man.

Except the maze is doing that thing with the mirrors where directions aren’t what they seem. Objects may be closer than they appear.

I turn a corner, and the man with the beard is in front of us, not even fifteen feet away. At least he’s still looking away.

“This way!” I say, pulling Alex and Raina back again, around a different corner in the maze.

He’s in front of us again, now barely ten feet away. How is this even possible?

He’s staring right at us too. At me. He knows I know.

Is this even him or is it just another reflection? At this point, I’m not sure. My whole body is sweating, sticky. I feel like a trap designed to catch flies — except I’m the one who’s stuck. If we go back, I might lead us right smack into him. On the other hand, we can’t stay where we are.

I see the knife again, metal and pointed, rising upward. It glints in the green of the LED lights.

“Oh, my God!” I say, breathless.

I turn, yanking on both Alex and Raina. “We have to go!”

But now I feel them grabbing me, holding me back.

“Ollie, no…” Alex says. “It’s okay.”

I struggle to get away. What are they doing? Can’t they see we’re in danger? I fight them with all my strength.

But Alex and Raina try hard to hold me back.

“Alex, stop!” Raina commands, so firmly that I finally do.

The man in the mirror hasn’t noticed us, isn’t even really looking my way. I think he’s a reflection after all. He’s talking to some little girl in pink rubber boots. His daughter? He turns and reaches down to grab her hand, and in his other hand, he’s holding an umbrella.

Umbrella?

He’s holding it in the middle, so the pointed metal tip sticks out like, well, a knife. Is this what I saw before, what I thought was a knife?

“It’s no big deal,” Alex says gently. “It does look a lot like a knife. Anyone could have made the same mistake.”

* * *

I’m burning with shame. I really thought an umbrella was a knife?

We leave the maze. It’s three turns and we’re out, now not confusing at all. We walk away in silence, Alex and Raina leading me to the park exit. They seem to know there’s no chance of my being amused in this amusement park tonight.

As we pass through the exit gate, a woman presses a hand-stamp onto the back of my left hand, a sign I already paid if I want to come back in again.

“No, it’s okay!” Raina says quickly. “We won’t be—”

Too late, I’ve already been branded. The woman doesn’t bother stamping Raina or Alex.

We walk on, silent again. The carnival is one of those traveling ones, only in town for a few days, and they set it up in a big vacant lot along the river. There wasn’t any parking on the street near the park, and we didn’t want to pay ten bucks at the makeshift carnival lot, so we parked farther away, somewhere ahead of us in the empty downtown.

The streets and sidewalks are mostly deserted, and it’s dark out, but I’m fine with this because I can’t deal with Alex and Raina looking at me right now.

“That was fun,” Alex says.

“It was,” Raina agrees.

They mean the carnival, and they’re not being sarcastic. They’re pretending like I didn’t just freak out in the mirror maze, and I know the reason why. Eight months ago, my little brother Dylan died in a skateboarding accident. I was the only other person there, the only person who saw what happened. I haven’t really been the same ever since.

“But carnivals are never as great as they look on TV or in the movies,” Alex goes on.

“Well, it’s good there are no more freak shows or caged animals,” Raina says.

“Oh, sure,” Alex says. “But there are also none of those colorful old tents, or those big paper-mâché sculptures of, like, jesters and clowns. Then again, maybe there never were. That’s probably just Hollywood.”

My friends are trying to cheer me up, distract me, and I know I should be grateful. The three of us have a long history. Alex and I met in the third grade, and we immediately became best buds. Then in the eighth grade, he started dating Raina, and the three of us began hanging out together, which I kind of resented at first, maybe because I had a little crush on Alex, and it wasn’t just me and him anymore. But I ended up liking Raina more than I expected, and I guess she liked me too, because when she and Alex broke up, I’m pretty sure it was because she had a crush on me, except I was seeing this other girl at the time, and I thought of Raina as more of a friend anyway. In the end, we all got over it, and the three of us ended up being super tight. And since then, we’ve never been anything more than friends.

But we’re not so super tight now. These last eight months, I haven’t really been myself. That thing that happened tonight in the mirror maze? It’s maybe sort of happened before. It’s not like I see knife-wielding killers everywhere, but there was that one time I thought someone was trying to set a bomb off in the bowling alley. And that time in that restaurant where I got it in my head the chef had put broken glass in our calzones. They were just onions.

Thing is, they never really seem like panic attacks at the time. They always seem real, different from anything that came before.

“I bet the food was better too,” Alex is saying. “Does anyone really like corn dogs? And crazy-salted popcorn? I do like cotton candy though.”

It’s all about Dylan’s death. I can’t seem to move on, and I’m not sure why. And Raina and Alex know that, so they treat me differently now. Like they have to watch out for me, almost like they’re my parents, and I’m the kid. They keep doing it because we’re best friends. Or were best friends. These days, they’re doing it out of some kind of weird sense of obligation.

“Where’s the car?” Raina says. “I didn’t think we were this far.” Now she’s trying to change the subject, which is probably just as well. I’m happy to forget the carnival altogether.

“It’s this way,” Alex says, but he sounds unsure.

We’re in the oldest part of downtown, walking along a street lined with old brick buildings that have been turned into restaurants and art galleries. It’s after nine on Saturday night, and everything is closed, except for one place across the street. There’s a blue neon sign in the window that says, “Open.”

I wonder if they left the light on by accident, but no, there are lights on inside too. Soft ones.

It’s a spa of some kind. There’s another sign in the window, also neon but with stylized lettering. It says, “A new kind of relaxation.” And the sign above the storefront reads, “Infinite Drift.”

Infinity isn’t real. Sure, it goes on for a while, but then it ends in darkness. I know that now.

“We didn’t walk this far to the carnival,” Raina says. “Did we?”

The carnival again. I thought we’d moved on from that.

“What’s that?” I ask, meaning the open shop across the street.

“Huh?” Raina looks. “Oh, sensory deprivation tanks. They’re filled with warm water, and you get inside, and it’s really dark.”

“Yeah, my dad did that once,” Alex says. “Not here, but another place. He said it was cool. Not what he expected.”

I look down at the hand-stamp from the carnival. I think it’s a word inside of a circle, but it smeared when they stamped it, and I can’t read what it says. I touch it, but now it’s dried that way. I’ve never seen it in full light, so I’m not even sure what color it is. Green, I think.

I look up and say, “We should do it.”

“Do what?” Alex says, puzzled.

“Those tanks,” I say. “Sounds like fun.”

“You mean tonight?” Raina says, also confused.

“Why not?”

Raina and Alex don’t say anything, but I can tell they’re looking at each other in the dark.

“Are you sure?” Raina says at last.

I kind of spoke without thinking, but suddenly, I am sure we should do it. I’m tired of Raina and Alex thinking of me as this pathetic guy they need to coddle and distract — a little kid they have to take care of. I want the three of us to be super tight again. I know it’s going to take more than our doing this one thing to get Alex and Raina to trust me, to think of me as normal again, but I have to start somewhere. I don’t want this night to be about what happened back in the funhouse.

“Of course, I’m sure,” I say. “Come on, let’s just do it.”

I start across the street, and I’m worried Alex and Raina won’t follow, but they do, and I’m already excited.

We’ll do these stupid sensory deprivation tanks, and everything will be fine, and I won’t freak out at all, and Raina and Alex will realize my panic attacks are finally over. And before I know it, everything will go back to exactly the way it was before.

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Buy Infinite Drift here or here, and there’s more info here.

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.