The sign outside said ENTER IF YOU DARE in dripping red letters that were obviously paint and obviously fake and obviously designed to make you feel like you were about to experience something worth the twelve dollar entry fee.
Matthew Grader read it twice.
"I'm not going in," he said.
"You literally just said you would," Hannah said.
"I said I'd think about it."
"You said and I quote — yeah alright fine I'll do it."
"That's not a legally binding agreement."
Hannah looked at him the way she looked at him when he was being difficult which was a look he had extensive personal experience with and had never once successfully argued his way out of. It was the look that meant she'd already decided the outcome of this conversation and was just waiting for him to catch up.
They were standing outside Fright Fest — the seasonal horror attraction that appeared every October in the old warehouse on the edge of Millhaven, the small town that sat seven miles from Vicrock and had spent the better part of five years trying to decide whether being adjacent to the Kill Count case was something to be ashamed of or something to capitalise on. The warehouse had gone with capitalise on. There was a cardboard cutout of a masked figure by the entrance that was supposed to be generic but bore a suspicious resemblance to photographs that had circulated online of the real thing.
Matthew had pointed this out on the way in and Hannah had told him to stop being weird about it.
"It's a maze," Hannah said now. "You go in, you walk around, fake things jump out at you, you come out the other side. Maximum fifteen minutes."
"You come out the other side," Matthew said. "That's an assumption."
"Matthew."
"What if the other side is a second maze."
"Then you walk through the second maze."
"What if—"
"Matthew." She put both hands on his arms and looked at him directly. She was wearing the jacket he'd bought her for her birthday — dark green, slightly too big, she'd pushed the sleeves up. She looked the way she always looked which was like someone he'd chosen specifically and would choose again. "It's fake. It's all fake. There are seventeen year olds in there getting paid minimum wage to jump out at people. You're going to be fine."
"You could come with me."
"I'm not going in there."
"That seems—"
"I'll be right here when you come out," she said. "Fifteen minutes maximum. I'll time it." She held up her phone.
Matthew looked at the entrance. The dripping red letters. The cardboard masked figure. The sound of something — recorded, obviously recorded, just a speaker somewhere — that was supposed to be a scream but had the particular tinny quality of something that had been played on loop for too long.
"Fifteen minutes," he said.
"Fifteen minutes," she confirmed.
He looked at her one more time. She gave him the smile that meant she knew she'd won and was gracious enough not to say so out loud.
He went in.
The entrance was a corridor of black painted plywood, narrow enough that his shoulders almost touched both sides. The lighting was red and low and flickering in the way of something that wanted you to feel like you were somewhere dangerous. He wasn't. He was in a converted warehouse in a small town in upstate New York on a Friday night in October and there were people ahead of him he could hear laughing and someone behind him he could hear breathing too loud because they were already scared and hadn't even reached the first room yet.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked.
The first room was a surgery theme. A figure in a bloody doctor's coat stood over a table with something rubber and unconvincing on it. The figure turned toward Matthew as he entered and made a sound that was supposed to be menacing and mostly just sounded like someone doing an impression of menacing. Matthew gave it a polite nod and walked through.
The second room was a graveyard. Tombstones made of polystyrene, fake cobwebs, a fog machine working overtime. Someone in a skeleton costume jumped out from behind a tombstone and Matthew stepped sideways without breaking stride and the skeleton said "oh come on" quietly to itself as he passed.
He checked his phone. Four minutes in.
He was thinking about telling Hannah about the skeleton's reaction when the corridor narrowed again and the lighting changed.
Not the red flickering of the earlier rooms. Something else. A strobe — the particular stuttering white light that turned movement into a series of still images, that made the world into something jerky and disconnected and wrong. He slowed slightly. The strobe had a way of making his eyes work harder than they wanted to and the corridor was narrow enough that the walls seemed closer in it and further out of it alternately.
He kept moving.
The corridor opened into a room.
Larger than the others. The strobe was in here too, mounted somewhere above, throwing its stuttering light across a space that was fuller than the previous rooms — more props, more figures, a dense arrangement of shapes in the flickering dark that his eyes kept trying to resolve into something coherent and kept failing.
He stopped in the entrance to the room and let his eyes adjust.
Figures. Six, maybe seven of them, arranged around the room in various poses — some standing, some crouched, all in costume. A vampire. Something in a cloak. A creature that was vaguely werewolf shaped. And in the far corner, half turned away, a large figure in a dark jacket with a hood.
Matthew looked at the hooded figure for a moment.
Something about it was different to the others. He couldn't place exactly what. The costume was less theatrical — less obviously constructed, less deliberately creepy in the way the others were. Where the vampire had a cape and the werewolf had visible prosthetics this one just had a jacket. Heavy canvas, dark, a pale trim on the hood. And a mask — rough fabric, not the smooth plastic of a Halloween store purchase. Something that looked handmade.
He stood there and looked at it and the strobe made it hard to keep a consistent image of it and he told himself it was just a better costume than the others, just someone who'd put more effort in, just an actor doing their job in a dimly lit room.
He started walking again.
He was halfway across the room when he heard it.
Not the recorded screams from the speakers. Not the fog machine or the mechanism that made one of the figures' arms move on a timer. Something else. Something that came from inside the room rather than from the speakers, that had the particular quality of a sound made by something physical rather than played through a recording.
Kuh.
He stopped.
Kuh.
He looked around the room. The strobe made everything difficult. The figures stood in their positions. The hooded one in the far corner hadn't moved.
Kuh.
Then a long slow scrape. Metal on concrete. The sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor with deliberate patience.
Shhhk.
Then one more.
Kuh.
Matthew stood in the middle of the room in the stuttering strobe light and felt something he hadn't felt in the first two rooms which was actual fear. Not the performed fear of someone going through a haunted attraction, the social fear of pretending to be more scared than you are for the entertainment of whoever you're with. Something older than that. Something that didn't have anything to do with the twelve dollar entry fee or the minimum wage actors or the recorded screams on loop.
Something that said pay attention.
He turned toward the hooded figure in the corner.
It had moved.
Not much. Just enough. It was facing him now. The mask — the rough handmade fabric of it, the two dark gaps where eyes should be — was pointed directly at him and the strobe light caught it and lost it and caught it again and in each flash it was closer than it had been in the last one.
Not running. Not rushing. Just moving with the steady patient certainty of something that didn't need to hurry.
Matthew opened his mouth.
The figure's hand came up and Matthew saw what was in it — not the rubber prop weapons of the first rooms, not the theatrical accessories of a haunted attraction — and his mouth closed again because what was in the figure's hand was real and heavy and the light caught the blade of it in one strobing flash and that was enough.
He ran.
He went left, away from the figure, toward what he thought was the exit corridor — the plywood walls, the narrow passage, the way out. He hit the wall and it gave slightly under his hands and he followed it, running, the strobe behind him turning the room into a series of frozen images he couldn't look at.
He found the corridor. Narrow, dark, the red lighting. He ran down it and his shoulder hit the wall and he bounced off and kept going.
He came out into a room he hadn't seen before.
Not the surgery room. Not the graveyard. Something different — a large space, the lighting different here, steadier, a single source somewhere above that threw a harsh downward light onto the centre of the room and left the edges in shadow.
In the centre of the room, on a plinth, was a statue.
Life sized. Dark, moulded plastic. A figure in a jumpsuit and a white mask, one hand raised, the classic pose of the shape — Michael Myers, unmistakeable, the most famous silhouette in horror. Someone had spent money on this one. It was well made. The mask had the particular blank quality of the original, the slightly wrong proportions that made it more unsettling than something that was just ugly.
Matthew stopped in front of it and breathed.
He looked behind him. The corridor was empty. Whatever had been in the strobe room hadn't followed him here, or if it had it wasn't visible yet.
He put his hand on his chest and felt his heart going very fast.
He almost laughed. Almost. The particular release of someone who has been properly scared and come through the other side of it and can start the process of converting the experience into a story they'll tell later. He was going to tell Hannah about the strobe room and she was going to say she told him it was fine and he was going to say it wasn't fine actually and they were going to argue about it affectionately for approximately four minutes and then he was going to buy her something from the concession stand outside.
He breathed.
Kuh.
The laugh died.
Kuh.
He turned around very slowly.
The figure was in the doorway of the corridor behind him. The dark jacket. The pale fur trim on the hood. The mask. Standing in the entrance to the room with the same stillness it had had in the strobe room, the same patient quality, the axe loose in one hand.
Matthew looked at the Michael Myers statue in front of him.
He looked at the figure in the doorway behind him.
He looked at the statue again.
He ran.
Not toward the doorway — toward the only other exit he could see, a gap in the far wall, a corridor he hadn't been down. He ran and the room was small enough that he crossed it in four steps and he was almost at the gap when something hit him from behind.
Not the figure — it hadn't moved that fast, it hadn't moved at all. Something else. A mechanism, a prop, something triggered by his weight on a pressure pad or a motion sensor, something that swung out from the wall and caught him across the shoulders and sent him sideways.
Into the statue.
He hit the Michael Myers figure with his full weight and the plinth rocked and the statue tipped and came down with him and the plastic head — heavier than it looked, weighted, a full display piece not a cheap prop — connected with the side of his skull as they went down together.
The floor came up.
He lay on the ground beside the toppled statue and the world did something complicated for a moment. His vision went strange — not dark, just wrong, the room tilting and the light coming from the wrong direction and a sound in his ears that was his own pulse going very fast.
He tried to get up.
His arms didn't cooperate immediately. He got one hand under him and pushed and managed to get to his side and that was as far as he got before he heard the footsteps.
Slow. Even. Unhurried.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
He looked up.
The figure was standing over him. Looking down at him with those two dark eye gaps that gave nothing back. The axe in one hand. Not raised. Just there. Patient.
Matthew looked at it.
He tried to say something. He wasn't sure what. Something that would explain that this wasn't supposed to happen, that he'd paid twelve dollars, that Hannah was outside with her phone timing fifteen minutes and would come looking when he didn't come out.
He didn't get the words out.
The figure reached down with one hand and grabbed the front of his jacket and Matthew was lifted off the ground with the ease of something that had never considered the weight of another person as a meaningful obstacle.
The corridor. The narrow plywood walls. He was being dragged and the walls went past on either side and the lighting changed and changed again and then cold air hit him and he understood they were outside.
The night. The parking lot at the side of the warehouse. The sounds of Millhaven at ten pm on a Friday — distant music, a car somewhere, the ordinary world going on twenty meters away and completely unreachable.
He was put down on the ground. The asphalt was cold and wet through his jacket.
He could hear the figure moving around him. Deliberate. Taking its time. The sound of the axe somewhere — not the Kuh Kuh sound now, something else, a different kind of presence.
He thought about Hannah outside the front of the building with her phone timing fifteen minutes.
He thought about the green jacket. The pushed-up sleeves.
He thought about choosing her and choosing her again.
He closed his eyes.
The Woodsman crouched down beside him and began.
What came afterward was not for the parking lot or the cold October air or anything that had agreed to witness it.
What came afterward was between the Woodsman and Matthew Grader and the dark.
When it was finished the Woodsman stood up. He looked at what was on the ground. He looked at the warehouse wall beside him — the emergency exit, the faded paint, the drain that ran along the base of the building.
He reached into his jacket. He produced an envelope. Plain, white, the kind you could buy in any stationery section of any supermarket in any town.
He placed what he'd taken from Matthew Grader into the envelope with the patience and care of someone completing a task that required precision.
He sealed it.
He looked at the envelope for a moment.
Then he looked at the town beyond the parking lot. At the streets of Millhaven going about their Friday evening. At the bookstore on the main street — he could see its sign from here, the display in the window that he'd walked past twice in the last two days, the stacked copies of the book with the author's photograph on the back cover.
He started walking.
The axe dragged behind him on the asphalt.
Kuh. Kuh. Kuh. Shhk. Kuh.
Hannah checked her phone at fourteen minutes and fifty seconds.
She looked at the entrance to Fright Fest. The dripping red letters. The cardboard figure. A group of college-aged people coming out laughing, one of them still with their hands over their face, another one saying okay that was actually pretty good.
Fifteen minutes.
She looked at her phone again. Looked at the entrance.
She gave it another two minutes because Matthew always took longer than he said he would and she had factored this in.
At seventeen minutes she sent him a text. You die in there?
She watched the message deliver. Watched it show as read.
She waited for the three dots that would mean he was typing a response.
The three dots didn't appear.
She looked at the entrance. She looked at her phone. She looked at the entrance.
She sent another text. Matthew.
Delivered. Read.
No response.
She stood outside Fright Fest on a Friday night in October in Millhaven, seven miles from Vicrock Forest, and felt something she couldn't name — not quite fear, not yet, just a wrongness, a small persistent wrongness that sat in her chest and wouldn't explain itself.
She called him.
It rang five times and went to voicemail.
She stood there for a moment.
Then she went in.
She found the maze empty in the way that mazes are empty when something has gone wrong with the evening — the actors in their costumes standing around looking at phones, the fog machine still running pointlessly, the recorded screams still playing from the speakers to nobody.
She found the room with the toppled Michael Myers statue.
She found the emergency exit at the back of the building.
She pushed it open and stepped out into the parking lot and the cold October air hit her and she stood there for a moment.
The parking lot was mostly empty. A few cars. The warehouse wall. The drain along the base of the building.
No Matthew.
She stood there and looked at the empty parking lot and the cold night and the ordinary sounds of Millhaven on a Friday going on beyond it.
Her phone was in her hand. She looked at it. She looked at the parking lot.
She called him again.
Somewhere in the parking lot, from somewhere she couldn't immediately locate, she heard a phone ring. Once. Twice. The ringtone she'd set for herself on his phone eighteen months ago — something she'd thought was funny at the time.
She walked toward the sound.
She found his phone face down on the asphalt near the drain.
She picked it up.
She looked at the screen. Her own name and number showing as a missed call. The cracked corner of the case from when he'd dropped it in September and refused to get it fixed because it still worked fine.
She stood in the parking lot with his phone in her hand and looked at the drain and the wet asphalt and the empty night around her and felt the wrongness in her chest become something else entirely.
Something with weight to it. Something that was going to be there for a very long time.
She looked at the entrance to the parking lot. At the street beyond it. At the sign for the bookstore on the main street that she could just make out from here — the display in the window, the stacked books, the author photograph.
She stood there for a long time.
Then she called the police.
Two days later, on a Sunday morning, Indigo Derby walked to the bookstore on the main street of Millhaven for her nine o'clock signing and stopped on the pavement outside it and looked at the window.
She stood there for a long time.
The envelope was taped to the glass from the inside. Wet at the edges. Dark in the middle in a way that wasn't the paper.
The book in the window display — her book, Survivors Guide, thirty two copies stacked in a careful pyramid that the bookstore owner had clearly spent time on — looked back at her with her own face on the cover.
She looked at the envelope.
She looked at her face on the cover of the book.
She took her phone out and called the detective whose number she'd kept in her phone for seven years under the name don't let it be him.
He picked up on the second ring.
"It's me," she said. Her voice came out completely flat. Completely level. "I'm in Millhaven. I need you to listen to me."
A pause on the other end of the line.
"Ms Derby," the detective said carefully. "Are you safe."
She looked at the window. At the envelope. At her own face looking back at her from thirty two copies of a book she'd written about surviving something that apparently wasn't finished with her yet.
"No," she said.
She hadn't been safe for a very long time.