CREEPYPASTA VOL 2

Never Accept An Invitation To Labyrinth

My inaugural trip to a haunted attraction as a boy was to a farm-themed hay maze, with all the scarecrows and old barns and cheap animatronic crows with red eyes you might expect. At the end of it a theater kid dressed as a hillbilly farmer would chase you to the exit with a cap-shotgun. ”Git outta here, ya dang kids!” he’d say, in an Appalachian drawl that was hysterically overdone. ”I’m comin’ for ya! Y’all better run!” The place was cheap and low budget and entirely ridiculous, and I fell in love with it all the same. So a year later we visited another place - Miss Wretched’s House of Horrors, it was called, I think, down on Gardersdale - and that was an equally cheesy haunted mansion with pop-out skeletons and suits of armor that dropped their rubber axes near your feet, which would trigger an often off-time CLANG! sound from poorly hidden speakers. I loved that experience too, so at my insistence we got fake IDs the year after that and with those gained admittance to the ‘big-kid’ haunt that was all the rage at the time. It was called ‘DarkHouse’ - I remember the blood-red vampiric font above the door quite clearly - and it was my first run in with ‘professional’ actors, and dirty words, and pitch black halls and chainsaws. Upon completion fifteen year old me felt like he’d become a man.

But as the years wore on attractions like these lost their edge. And I tried to up the ante a bit. Truly I did - I went on out of town on road trips to all the spookiest places in the state and beyond as soon as I was old enough. Among the locales checked off in this period were various ‘real’ haunted houses in which nothing happened, several of those ‘win-a-prize-if-you-last-the-night’ spooks in which I won simply by falling asleep, and two of those infamous ‘adult’ haunted houses in Vegas, where you have to sign a waiver and be okay with extensive (but not really extensive) physical contact. Those were effective, to be sure, but after my second visit to one of those places even those lost their merit in my eyes.

I was starving for a legitimate scare by age twenty seven. And that’s when, on a deep web forum for like-minded adrenaline junkies, I first heard about an attraction known as ‘Labyrinth.’ It was mentioned almost passively by another user, and when I pressed them for further information the response was frustratingly vague. ’Can’t tell too much,’ they’d said. ’They contact u if u want in.’

Whatever.

In my experience there was rarely ever a payoff frightening enough to justify that type of gimmicky cloak-and-dagger nonsense. I closed the forum and forgot about it entirely by the end of the week.

And then came the black envelope. Inside that was a black letter, appropriately enough, and typed tastefully on its inner sleeve it said the word Labyrinth, and beneath this it provided an address, and a date and time.

Given its name I’d expected Labyrinth to be a maze of sorts, or one of those escape rooms with a horror bent. But instead I found myself staring up at a palatial, chateauesque estate of impossible size, with spires and towers and wings and various other gratuitous additions to structure. It was truly magnificent; I’d visited North Carolina’s Biltmore once and that estate wasn’t any more impressive than the one before me.

On the door to the place was a second Black Letter that read simply, ‘Labyrinth. Find the heart to escape.’ And despite my initial jaded skepticism, I now found myself quite intrigued; in the context of the location I now found these vague letters more tasteful and reserved than gimmicky. So it was with a strange optimism that I entered the place, and shut the door behind me; it locked on its own with a faint click. There was no mechanism on its interior to unfasten it from what I could see. The interior of the place was every inch as magnificently constructed and furnished as the outside would suggest. It was regal, and immaculately clean.

And it was empty.

“Hello?” I said. An echo responded, I waited a bit before I spoke again. “I’m Andrew Owens. Got a letter in the mail yesterday; said to come here today at three, so… here I am!”