"It's as much fun to scare as to be scared. " – Vincent Price

Date: October 31st, 2017

Occasion: Halloween

Country: Worldwide

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XXXI | Hocus Pocus

"If we're going to die tonight, death by chainsaw is the way to go."

The words left my mouth in a mixture of fear and awe. I stared down the rotting wood of the haunted house before us, knowing I'd written my own death sentence by coming here. My sister, Holly and our friend, Lucas, nodded at my words, both gaping at the decrepit building in terrified silence.

Though crowds of people were pressing together to ride the luminous ferris wheel, and many were eager to hop into the spinning pastel teacups, the area surrounding the haunted house was so empty that my voice echoed for miles. Not that I could blame people for staying away. The house was adorned with cracked windows and gave off a distinct stench of rotting wood.

"I came to this theme park to ride the rollercoasters, Evan," Holly said, shooting me a vicious glare. It's not like I'd dragged her with me. She and Lucas insisted on tagging along to watch me flail and scream. "Since when was a haunted house a part of the deal?"

"You brought this on yourself, Hols," I snorted. "Besides, it's Halloween, and we're supposedly too old to go trick-or-treating so I thought we should celebrate it another way."

"I wish we were trick-or-treating," Lucas mumbled, staring longingly in the direction of the spinning teacups. The lights over there were casting a soft glow on the damp grass. He turned back around to see my raised eyebrow and said, "what? I want free candy."

"Well, since trick-or-treating is out of the question, should we find a way in?" I asked, jerking my head towards the house. It looked as though it had been attacked by a swarm of giant moths. The door was barely hanging on its hinges, and the walls looked so fragile that one touch could crumble them.

"I have a bad feeling about this." Holly was biting her lip so hard that she was beginning to draw blood. "Do you think this is safe? It seems far too creepy."

"This whole town is far too creepy," Lucas snorted. Holly and I shot quizzical looks at him, so he elaborated with a flurry of hand gestures. "I mean, look at the sky. Just look at it." We glanced up at the stars, which twinkled across the inky heavens. "You see? Stars everywhere. That means no pollution, no factories, and most importantly, no people. Super creepy."

Holly and I exchanged amused looks. I shrugged, drawing my jacket tighter around my shoulders as a chilly autumn breeze swept past. "He makes a fair point. But, come on, it's Halloween. We have to do something creepy to make the most of it."

"Alright," Holly grumbled in reluctant agreement. Lucas heaved a sigh and gave a curt nod. My lips twitched up with a smirk. I knew that Lucas would do whatever Holly agreed to, because he was whipped beyond belief. Granted, I was unsure about my sister and best friend dating at first, but there were surprising benefits on my end. "So, who do we show our tickets to?"

"Yeah, no one ever comes here because this place is terrifying as hell," added Lucas, putting an emphasis on the last three words as he shot me another glare.

I was about to suggest we split up and search around for any sign of life, when the front door of the haunted house slowly creaked open. The three of us fell quiet and instinctively huddled closer together. We had a good reason for it, since heavy breathing could be heard from the entrance. A second later, a mummy wrapped in decrepit bandages emerged from the house.

"When do we run?" Lucas whispered in my ear, fear lacing his tone. Holly made a faint whimpering noise behind me. The soft crunch of grass echoed through the air as they warily stepped backward. Those wimps were made for each other.

I ignored them and started forward despite their hissed protests, which sounded more like air being let out of a balloon than coherent sentences. As the mummy and I shuffled closer towards each other, I caught a whiff of old mothballs and held back a retch.

"So, uh," I said awkwardly as we faced each other, three feet apart. "Can we go in? Are you going to take our tickets?"

The mummy said nothing and continued to breathe heavily. I suppose whatever it said would probably be muffled by the bandages wrapped around its mouth. It tilted its head forwards to look at the three tickets I held out, their gold foil glinting in the moonlight. I was worried that its head would fall off, but then I remembered that this mummy was a human person.

It stretched out a bandaged hand and took the tickets from me. I heard a sharp intake of breath behind me and assumed Lucas was keeping himself rooted to the ground for my sake. If not for me, he would be sprinting for the hills. The mummy inspected our tickets and stuffed them in the folds of its bandages. Then, it jerked his head towards the house, before shuffling away.

I began to approach the house, excitement buzzing in my nerves. I'd already gone twenty paces before I realized the others hadn't moved. I spun around and stared expectantly at Holly and Lucas, both of whom appeared to be frozen. "Well? Are you guys coming?"

Holly was the first to unfreeze. She set her jaw in determination, before striding forward, dragging a reluctant Lucas by the hand. Once she reached me, she turned to face me with fire burning in her eyes. "Fine, but if I die in there, I'll come back to kill you as a ghost."

"What if I die in there?" I countered with a tiny smile.

Flames practically radiated from her eyes. "Then I'll make sure you rot in hell." Then she stalked off towards the house and stomped up the wooden stairs, which was probably not the best idea, since they looked as though they could fall apart at any moment.

Lucas flashed a knowing look at me. "You know she means that, right? We both know how capable she is at making our lives hell."

"Of course I know, she's my twin sister," I scoffed, carefully climbing the steps so I could walk beside him. Holly had already entered the house. Her fear had been replaced with adrenaline, so if we met a guy with a chainsaw, she would probably try and knock him out while Lucas and I ran for our lives. "Our banter always includes death threats."

Holly emerged from the shadows and looked at us suspiciously. "What are you two talking about?"

"Stranger Things theories," I replied without missing a beat. "Have you been spooked yet?"

"No, but the condition of this house freaks me out," she shuddered, tapping a floorboard with her foot, which creaked as though it was screaming in pain. "I feel like these boards are going to break at any given moment and we'll fall into a haunted basement. A haunted house is bad enough, but a haunted basement? Satan himself would be lurking down there."

"Well, what were you expecting? This house has probably been around for three or four centuries," Lucas said, pushing on one of the walls to test whether it would collapse. It shifted an inch and he stepped back warily. "Dracula probably lived here once upon–"

A sharp slam made the three of us flinch, and we spun around to see that the door had closed. The hallway we stood in was solely lit by flaming torches, which flickered in the cool air. The area was so dark that I could barely make out the outline of the door.

"Classic haunted house trick," I spoke into the silence. "Spooking us with sudden noises. Now, come on."

With a determined stride which gave off much more confidence than I felt, I made my way down the row of torches. Holly and Lucas followed in my wake, and the torchlight threw their pale faces into deeper relief. When I glanced back to see if they were there, I noticed their hands were entwined, knuckles as pearly white as a ghost.

Since nothing was popping out at us, our adrenalin was quickly fading. We were being lured into a false sense of security, and the house knew it. Even so, we tiptoed through the hall with caution. Holly squeaked every time the floorboards creaked. I had to bite back a shout when a torch flared inches from my face, nearly searing my eyebrows off, while Lucas stifled a snicker.

"I thought there'd be more jump scares," Lucas commented after we'd been walking down the hall for several minutes. "I mean, maybe they were going for a slow burn, but the scare factor usually comes with the element of sur– argh!"

As he spoke, he'd reached the end of the hallway and twisted a dusty door handle. When he pulled the door open, a skeleton had fallen from the other side. It'd presumably been propped against the door as a scare tactic. Lucas was struck by the full weight of the bones and toppled onto the floor, the skeleton pinning down his legs.

Holly rushed over to him and knelt down. "Are you okay?"

"I take back what I said about the jump scare thing," Lucas groaned, trying to shove the dense bones off him. Holly and I each grabbed one of the skeleton legs and dragged it away. It was much heavier than I expected, and its clatter against the wooden floor was deafening. I offered Lucas a hand and he took it, shakily standing up. "This house definitely has the scare factor."

"It's not as bad as most haunted houses," I said fairly.

Lucas shot daggers at me. "Why don't you try being the one who's crushed to death by a pile of bones? And besides," he added, brushing skeleton dust off his jeans. "I stand by my slow burn theory. We're basically being slow cooked over an open fire. Prolonged torture."

"Way to put a positive spin on it," Holly grumbled, casting a look at the room the skeleton fell out of. Her eyes merely skipped over it the first time, but she did a double take at the same time I noticed them.

The room was lined with mirrors on the circular walls, though the floor remained creaky wood. The ceiling was also covered in mirrors, but the most chilling part was that the mirrors all had the same crack in them. The shape of a pentagram. Cliché, but disturbing nonetheless.

A strange substance slowly dripped between two of the ceiling mirrors. My stomach lurched when I noticed the liquid was red. I dearly hoped it was just food dye and not blood. The three of us exchanged wary looks, but I took the plunge and stepped in.

I waited a few seconds to see whether anything would spring out at me. When nothing happened, I gestured for Holly and Lucas to come in. They tiptoed in and Lucas closed the door behind us, which effectively trapped us in here, but no one could sneak attack us.

"Lucas," Holly said sharply. We swung around to glance at her, and she pointed at the door that Lucas had just closed. With a sharp intake of breath, I noticed the identical mirror stuck on it. "We need to mark it," she voiced my thoughts, taking out a tube of nude lipstick from her pocket. "Otherwise we'd never be able to tell which way we came from."

She drew a large cross on the mirror. "Good call," I commented, but when I turned around, the cross was reflected in half the mirrors. "Well, not the perfect plan, but it'll work for now. So, how are we going to get out of here if the whole room is made up of mirrors?"

"If there's an entrance mirror, then there has to be an exit mirror," Lucas reasoned, checking the mirror nearest him for a doorway crack. "We just have the find the other door. This room is small, so between the three of us, we can find it quickly."

The three of us began to cover different areas of mirrors. I craned my neck to check for any doorway markings above, while Holly and Lucas were checking the bottom edges.

We'd been at it for a couple of minutes when I called out to the others. "Have either of you found anything yet?"

"If I'd found the door, I would've said something about it," Holly replied from the other side of the room, where she was trailing her fingers between the mirrors to feel any slits. "Do you think we should backtrack and see whether there are any alternate routes through the house?"

I was about to respond when a glimpse of movement flashed behind me. My eyes widened as I caught sight of a woman draped in a white nightdress. It billowed around her legs, even though there was no wind. She looked like she'd been drained of blood, she was so pale. The most disturbing part, however, was her eyes, or rather, the empty sockets of them.

"Holy shit!" I shouted, my heart threatening to burst out of my ribcage. Holly and Lucas whipped around, looking in my direction. When they saw the woman, Holly let out a bloodcurdling scream while Lucas pressed himself against a mirror, looking horrified.

The woman made no sound when we saw her, but she whipped around at once and opened the mirror door we were looking for. Shock had rooted me to the spot and rendered me unable to think. I had to remind myself that the eyes were special effects, just makeup. When I finally came back to my senses, the woman's nightgown whipped out of sight.

"The door!" Holly screeched beside my right ear, and she dived for it before it could close.

The three of us, numb from the jump scare, hurtled out of the mirror room and into another hallway. I skidded to a halt at the sight of corpses lining the walls. Each of their heads turned to face us in perfect sync.

"Nope," Lucas whispered. "Hell no. No way. Forget it, I'm out."

"Get back here," I said firmly, grabbing the back of his shirt as he made to spin around and re-enter the mirror room. He lurched backward and gave an indignant shout. "You're not going anywhere. The three of us stick together, you hear me?"

"Fine," Lucas huffed, elbowing me in the ribs and knocking the wind out of me. I had to bend over double to recover, but once I could breathe again, the first thing in my line of sight was Holly making funny faces at the corpses. "Uh, Hols, what are you doing?" Lucas asked.

"These guys are good actors," Holly observed, sticking her tongue out and widening her eyes at a corpse. His piercing green eyes stared back at her blankly.

"Unbelievable," Lucas muttered, taking her hand and dragging her away from them. "Not to be that guy or whatever, but I don't want to spend more time in a hallway with these fake, creepy corpses. Come on, let's get out of here. Their eyes are so glazed over, it's freaky."

We strode down the hallway as the corpses' heads turned to watch us leave. Like Lucas said, their eyes were so lifeless that I couldn't bring myself to make eye contact with them, but Holly kept trying to get reactions out of them. She had a weird sense of humor at the best of times.

As our footsteps approached the end of the hall, a metal hatch suddenly flipped open on our left and a sea of round objects poured out, spilling all over the floor. "Ahh!" Holly screamed as she skidded forwards and tumbled onto the floor. "What the hell?"

"Why are these things wet?" Lucas demanded, having fallen as well. His right arm had taken the brunt of the force, and a wince escaped his lips as he rubbed it. A giant purplish bruise was already starting to form, and a hiss escaped my teeth at the sight.

I picked one of the white balls up and realized what Lucas meant. They were covered in a strange slime which coated my palm. When I turned the ball over, I got a nasty shock. A blue iris stared up at me for a second, before I let out a horrified yell and threw it down the hallway. It hit one of the corpses, and I thought I saw the actor twitch in disgust.

"Ew!" Holly squealed, which meant she'd figured out what the balls were too. She scrambled up to her feet, wiped her slimy hands on the peeling wallpaper, and opened the door. "Let's get out of here," she suggested. Lucas and I were in no position to argue, so we kicked the nearest eyeballs away and forged our way out the door, which Holly shut behind us.

The moment the door snaps shut, a row of lamps flicker on to reveal another hallway. This time, paintings lined the wall. Most of them were from the Renaissance era, featuring gods and goddesses having lavish meals, women holding their children, fairytale landscapes and mighty castles. It was nowhere near as bad as the corpses.

Lucas's voice sliced through the silence. "This seems alright."

"Nothing can be worse than the eyeballs," I muttered, a shudder sweeping through my body.

We shrugged at each other and set off down the corridor. Though they were certainly less creepy than the corpses, a tingling down my spine told me the paintings were watching us. I caught the eye of a painted Aphrodite in a gigantic seashell. Her eyes trailed mine down the hall, and I walked faster in response. The goddess of love was not an enemy I wanted.

Holly suddenly stopped in her tracks, which made Lucas bump into her. She threw out an arm, which I plowed into due to my haste of getting away from Aphrodite. "Do you hear that weird groaning noise?" she asked suspiciously.

I had to strain my ears to hear it, but I noticed what she meant. A faint creaking noise emanated from our right side, like a robot moving for the first time in years. Then, with no warning, a massive ax swung from the right and cleaved the air in front of us.

"Holy crap!" Lucas leaped back as though he'd been electrocuted.

The ax slammed into the opposite wall, but for some reason, didn't stick. Instead, it simply bounced off and hung limply from the ceiling. I gingerly approached it, and upon closer inspection, realized it was made of plastic. A sigh of relief escaped out of my chest.

"It's not a real ax," I announced to the others. "Guys, this place is supposed to be a form of entertainment. It's not like they'd actually try and kill us."

The moment the last word left my lips, a loud rumbling cut the air, like the sound of an engine revving up. My heart began to slam against my chest again as I whirled around. There, at the end of the hall, stood a person wielding a gigantic chainsaw, a hockey mask covering his face. I inhaled sharply as he strode towards us, walking faster by the second.

"Oh god, it's Jason," Holly whispered. "That Friday the 13th movie has come true."

Lucas was more concerned with our escape. "Run!" he bellowed, and he took off down the corridor. Holly and I exchanged a panicked look before sprinting after him, the chainsaw guy hot on our heels.

I lost track of how many times we twisted and turned, but the chainsaw buzzed menacingly behind us the whole time. As our feet pounded on the floorboards, several panicked thoughts flitted through my brain. It was hard to remember that we weren't actually going to die when being chased by a guy with a chainsaw.

As we ran for our lives, I started to notice that the air began to smell less like old mothballs, but before I could huff out this observation to the others, Lucas burst through a door. We tumbled onto the damp grass in a heap, and I rolled off Lucas to flop on the ground. Fresh air had never smelled so sweet.

Holly and Lucas sat up, both looking disoriented. "What happened to the chainsaw guy?" Holly asked in alarm, scrambling to her feet.

At the mention of the chainsaw, I sat bolt upright and glanced in the direction of the house we just hurtled out of. The masked guy was leaning casually against the decrepit doorframe, the silent chainsaw hanging from one hand.

"You guys scare way too easily," a muffled, familiar voice chuckled from under the mask. My eyes widened to the size of galleons as he took off his mask, and Holly's jaw dropped.

"Nathan?" Lucas asked incredulously.

Nathan, who was one of our supposed friends, hopped down, offering a hand to help me up. I took it and got to my feet, my shock beginning to thaw. His lips were stretched into a broad smirk. He was clearly pleased with himself, but to be honest, his face had never looked more punchable. Despite my anger at scaring the hell out of us, I was also grudgingly impressed at how well he'd pulled it off.

"You were the one chasing us?" Holly gasped, pink in the face from sprinting. "I thought you were on a dinner date with Maddie!"

"We finished early," Nathan answered, brushing blades of grass off his jeans. "And we thought it'd be funny to scare the living daylights out of you. I know a guy here, so I called in a favour and asked to be the chainsaw man. It was a bonus that you guys are scared of everything."

"What do you mean, we?" I asked, knitting my eyebrows together.

The words had barely left my mouth when another voice spoke from behind me. "You didn't think I'd let Nathan have all the fun, did you?"

I spun around to face the eyeless woman from the mirror room. Upon closer inspection, she had the same facial features as Maddie, another friend of ours. She'd clearly wiped the special effects makeup off, since her bright green eyes were sparkling cheekily at me.

"Are you kidding me?" Holly shrieked, looking wildly from Nathan to Maddie and deciding which one to attack. Lucas quickly held her back by the waist, though his expression was also mutinous.

"You two are the worst," I grumbled, my lips twitching up into a smile. "But, kudos for making this such a terrifying experience."

"Ah, it was all you." Nathan waved a hand airily. "We were just the special effects. Speaking of which, my buddy said you guys can help us spook the next group. You in?"

My eyes flickered back to the decrepit house as I relived the best Halloween experience I'd ever had. When I turned back to Nathan, the obvious answer was on my lips. "Hell yes."