It was the same dread she’d felt entering a fake haunted house for Halloween. She expected to be entertained, yet there was a foreboding sense in the background. Lara nodded and handed the larger clown the ticket and watched as it melted into his hand. As she stepped onto the carpet, it rolled up behind her, giving her the sinking feeling that perhaps the ticket was one-way. She gulped, regretting she’d been so impulsive. She should have told Gaston. But what would he and Barrow have done? This building wasn’t real—or at least wasn’t real in this dimension. And they hadn’t been invited.

Entering through the giant mouth, she then stepped through a set of ten-foot-tall arched doors that snapped shut tightly behind her. Unfurling in front of her was a hallway—not any old mundane hallway, but a corridor lined with windows, light shining in brightly through them. Which was an impossibility, because it was now night in Paris. For a moment, Lara wasn’t sure if this was a circus or Versailles, as the walls were adorned with gold reliefs. As she continued through the hallways, she found a series of adjoining rooms with doors positioned in the center of each room. In front of her were nine more sets of matching white lacquered arched doors, all open; their elaborate gold-leaf inlay and handles looked like something out of a rococo dream—the colors like a macaron shop window. Below her, the floor was a black-and-white harlequin pattern, followed by a dizzying beige spiral floor past the next doorway. The walls of the arcade were painted white, gold, and aqua. White and gold reliefs adorned the walls, and heavy crystal chandeliers dripped from the ceiling—she tried counting and there had to be a hundred of them, reflecting light and making the place drip and sparkle.

It was then that she noticed it. The colors were like a 1960s Technicolor film—the blues and golds more pronounced and everything bathed in a kind of glow, almost a soft focus. This world didn’t look real, as if she’d stepped into a Claymation puppet show. Perhaps Giroux had tried to mimic it with his dripping technique. In each room she saw a different attraction: a fortune-teller, shooting games, cakes and food trays, even the smell of popcorn. While elegant, the gauges and machinery were old, like they’d been installed during the Belle Époque period, causing her to feel like she was walking through a time capsule. The place also smelled like a stale house that had been shut up for the winter before enduring a furious spit-and-polish attempt at freshening.

Each room was painted in hues like macarons. As they entered the next room, another scent greeted them at the doors. It was sweet. “What is that smell?” She looked down at the small puppet for an answer.

“Melting chocolate, I’d say, although I cannot smell.”