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Nausea, it brought them to their knees, honestly he couldn't remember feeling anything like it in his life, but knowing he wasn't alone in that apparently feeling well. Somehow he thought it should have helped... it really didn't though. This is where they were meant to be, this is where they had to go, that strange assurance that Ashdown-Other was want to provide seemed to apply here too.

“… Fun house or…” he shook his head thoughtful. Or evil queen and the mirrors? Misleading mirrors he rather thought.

“I’m um… I’m grabbing the lantern.” He warned the others.
Yeah there would be some added benefit. It was an awful awful time to be distracted by a surprisingly well formed posterior but… maybe he just -needed- something a little more positive than ‘my friend is a ghost and I don’t know or sure if I can get her back.’

He reached up to take the lantern, eyeing the leaver as he did so. If they needed to move that leaver he didn’t want to loose the lantern at the same time.

It was the second time in so many weeks that something supernatural was dragging him to his knees and Thorne was not having it.

His face contorted in pain and disgust, but he wasn't on the ground long before he was struggling to his feet again, overwhelmed by the sudden knowledge that this was where they were supposed to be.

"Careful," he said, his voice a sharp crackle of sound, when Zac told them what he was going to do. His body moved thoughtlessly after the other man, but he kept close to Leila. Instinct and bone deep terror and a need to save them if it came to that kept his thoughts surface-level, away from the night terrors that had hung in his peripheral all week. He didn't look at the mirrors, because every shadow that flickered made a voice scream and shout in his head. His fathers voice.

And he couldn't handle that now.

But they couldn't stop moving. Thorne walked up to the very last mirror and pressed both of his hands to it. His reflection stared back at him, sadly, and he couldn't help the low utterance of, "Stop." But it didn't. And he was left with the reflection of himself, only altered. Changed.

He found the lever with his hand and forced himself to wrench his focus back to the group behind him.

"Down the rabbit hole?" He said, his voice low and rolling with tease that hid every fear needling in his veins.

His smile was wry and dangerous and his eyes seemed animal, wild.

And then he pulled.

Thorne tugs on the lever. It bobs, hangs by the ground… and absolutely nothing happens. The hallway is entirely silent. Contrary to what video games might’ve lead the group to believe, there is no magical chime signaling a door switching open or a panel shifting. Seems like the lever is a dud.

…Only, the lever keeps moving. It slides up the mirror in front of Thorne then slips into the metallic surface. Thorne reflection is gone. In its place, beady eyes stare back, the light of the lever glinting in all eight of them.

As unsettling as the eyes may be, the jagged hungry teeth beneath are worse. It turns out? The lever wasn’t a lever at all. The lever was a lure, and Thorne and Zac are just where the beast wanted them to be.

To Zac's right, a gargantuan claw strikes out from the mirror, dragging along the ground and ripping up tile. Strangely enough, for an otherwise organic creature, the leg is made of what seems to be plastic. Another appears to Thorne’s left, barely missing hi arm. With its feet anchored, the monster pulls itself upward and outward- and its appearance in the dim lights is even more gruesome than its reflection.

The teeth sit irregularly in its mouth, drool dripping onto the floor beneath it. Above its head, amongst the rows of scales, the lure bobs almost pleasantly. Mockingly. And yet, the beast does not scream. It makes no noise as a second set of arms grabs for Zac's middle, just barely missing when they duck.

Eight eyes shift around the room as its horrific head turns, assessing the group. Thinking. Before any of them can react further, it whispers in a voice not its own- a voice Thorne and Zac might recognize as Lucas.

"Mongrel, mongrel. What are you doing here? Filthy, filthy." The plastic arm, so unlike the disgusting hairy one, rises to strike Thorne in the chest. If it contacts, it is enough to throw him across the room. The beast zips backwards into the mirror behind it.

They were never mirror reflections. They were web, endless web, woven into the darkness. All of the mirrors begin vibrating, and in the rightmost path, the monster appears. Quick on its claws, it draws closer and closer to the others.

It might be a good idea to run.

As soon as the spider appeared (and spoke, and had a prosthetic -- it's absolutely some sort of twisted reflection of someone real, as opposed to this whole not-real not-right place) -- Alexis pulled the knife out of their back pocket and held it like a lifeline, hissing "Get up!" at Thorne with a sort of ugly twist to it.

Fear, maybe.

...Probably not.

Alexis, as always, quickly realized that their worst and only and best option was the stupid route -- heading further into the hallway and cutting at the webs in their way, trying to circle around behind the spider.

Thorne had witnessed a lot of s**t in his life. He had been in the military, he had climbed out of the hell that had been the front, and he'd survived.

And that was saying something.

But this. Was something else. This was -

The spider whispered.

"Filthy mongrel."

Mongrel. Mongrel. And it wasn't the hall of mirrors anymore but a goddamn bedroom and the window that he couldn't reach and the hands holding him down and down and down.

Only it had the wrong voice.

Thorne looked up, and the image of his father splintered in two, and someone else smiled at him instead. This is wrong, his mind shouted. This is wrong, this isn't right! You're dreaming! He wasn't fast enough. The pain of contact throttled him, chasing the breath from his lungs in a violent go. He wasn't sure where he landed or how he landed, only the sickening crunch of muscle and bone against floor, light and shadow fracturing behind his eyelids in a starburst of pain.

Someone started screaming. Someone shouted "run!"

Thorne looked up and saw spiderwebs and bedroom lights, bursts of static images - his father and Lucas and a world turned on its head. "Filthy mongrel," the voice was singing now - in his head? - "What are you doing here?"

And that was enough - it should have been enough to destroy him, to render him useless. His mind was breaking, everything he saw when he looked was broken between reality and somewhere else.

"--Get up---!"

Thorne threw himself after the voice. Instinct, pure, ugly instinct that made him want to protect the people he said he would, even if he could barely see them - even if he was blinking his father, Lucas, debilitating fear from his eyes every agonizing movement of the way.

He bolted after Alexis and the others, slamming to a stop just short of them and turning to look at the spider-monster. And a sickening thought twisted into his mind. Let it end. Maybe - if there was a distraction - maybe the others could escape.

"Think it will play fetch if we try and distract it?" Thorne heard himself say, his voice breaking and terrible and broken. And then he snarled at the beast with Lucas's voice, the way he'd snarled back at his father the first time he'd been beaten so badly his ribs had cracked, so badly that the bruises hadn't gone for weeks, "Keep going and tell me what I am."

Because he'd survived a lot, but maybe not this. But he would save the others he'd dragged down into this hell. He'd be damned if he didn't at least give them the chance to get out.

There was a giant, "******** you!" snarled at the spider when it turned and lunged for Zac and it came straight out of Thorne's furious mouth. He might have been struggling straight out of an episode of PTSD that was going to get worse in the event that he didn't kill himself (actively or by complete coincidence) but he was sane enough to see the attempt at a killing blow.

Thorne bolted for the boy before he could even see whether or not the spider had been successful in its attempt. Every bone in his body screamed, and he was distantly aware that he'd probably cracked a rib - two, maybe - but that didn't stop him.

Even Lucas in his head, whispering, "Mongrel," wouldn't stop him until this was over.

Thorne was on Zac in seconds, his arms catching around the boys middle and physically, aggressively hauling him backwards into him. "Don't listen to it," he snarled into Zac's ear, not knowing the context of the words, not caring, only knowing that these were mind games - and he'd been the first victim to it, "Don't."

So it had a taste for all of them. <******** hauled Zac backwards off of his feet and caught his legs under one of his arms, bridal style. And then - because he really wanted to say <******** YOU in a way this creature would understand - he lashed out and kicked the mirror it had vanished into as hard as he could, as if that would do anything. "We're going - now - " he panted, and turned to sprint.

But then -

"Filthy dog."

Thorne stumbled, his mouth opening into the jagged edge of a snarl of sound - a shout - a cry. He bit down on it though, hard enough to draw blood from his ruined lip, and burst forward again towards Alexis and Leila.

"Know your place."

The young adult was about to throw themself shoulder-first into the mirror the spider-thing had just disappeared into until Thorne got to it first. "We can't go anywhere, the hell're we supposed to run to? It can go for me, I don't care." They took a short second to breathe, fists clenched, voice hoarse -- "I can't tell what the skin's like. But I can get the eyes, if I get close. Try for the mirror shards - they might work for blades. Hell if I know."

Then, after giving that bracing peptalk, Alexis kicked another mirror about as hard as they could. (Given their leg strength, that was rather hard.) If they could just -- lower the number of things it could emerge from, then maybe -- maybe --

It doesn't speak with anyone's voice they know. They don't know what they'd do if they did.

The same thing, likely. Nobody's close, in this town. And they can't say they'd throw themself in harm's way to save any of these people.