The skeleton's jaw fell off with a pathetic clatter, bouncing twice on the worn wooden floor before rolling to a stop at the teenager's designer sneakers.
"Seriously?" The kid, maybe sixteen with a backwards snapback and an iPhone perpetually glued to his hand, kicked the plastic jaw back toward the display. "This is supposed to be scary? My little sister's Halloween decorations are more convincing."
Chris Gale forced his customer service smile to remain intact, even as his fingers curled into fists behind the ticket counter. Through the grimy window of Gale's Haunted House, he watched the last rays of October sunlight paint Hallowridge's crumbling Main Street in shades of rust and decay. The whole town looked like it was dying, and his family's haunted house was racing it to the grave.
"The tour's just starting," Chris said, his voice carrying the false enthusiasm of someone who'd repeated the same lie too many times. "The real scares are deeper inside."
The teenager's girlfriend, sporting ripped jeans and an expression of terminal boredom, snapped her gum. "Is there even anyone else here? This place is like, totally dead."
She wasn't wrong. The lobby of Gale's Haunted House, which Chris remembered packed with eager visitors during his childhood, now felt cavernous in its emptiness. Dust motes danced in the fading light, settling on admission signs from the 1990s that still advertised prices in increments that seemed charmingly naive. The animatronic witch by the entrance had given up cackling three days ago, and now just twitched periodically, her mechanical eye rolling back in her head like she was having a stroke.
"Tuesday nights are always quiet," Chris lied. Every night was quiet now. Had been for months.
"Tommy, let's just go," the girlfriend whined, tugging on her boyfriend's arm. "That new escape room opened downtown. Madison said it was actually good."
Chris's smile finally cracked. "Your tickets are non-refundable."
Tommy laughed, the sound sharp and mocking. "Dude, we paid like ten bucks. Keep it. Consider it charity." He held up his phone, and Chris heard the artificial shutter sound of a camera. "Gotta get a pic of this place before it gets torn down. My dad says the whole park's getting bought out by some development company. Condos or something."
The couple left, their laughter echoing off the empty corridors long after the front door's rusty bell stopped jangling. Chris stood alone in the lobby, surrounded by the corpses of better days—faded posters advertising "Thirteen Rooms of Terror," a trophy case displaying "Best Local Attraction 1987-1995," and a family photo from the grand reopening ten years ago, his parents' arms around a younger, more hopeful version of himself.
Six months. That's how long they'd been gone. No note, no explanation, just an empty house and a business bleeding money like a severed artery.
"Those kids were jerks."
Chris turned to find Sarah Wren emerging from the backstage area, carrying a cardboard box that looked too heavy for her slight frame. She dropped it on the counter with a thud that sent up a small mushroom cloud of dust, then brushed a strand of dark hair from her face, leaving a smear of grease paint across her cheek.
"They weren't wrong though," Chris said, gesturing at the empty lobby. "This place is dying."
Sarah hopped up to sit on the counter, her legs swinging like a kid's despite being twenty-three. She wore the standard Gale's Haunted House employee shirt—black with a cheesy ghost logo that was peeling at the edges—but somehow made it look intentional, like she'd chosen to work at a failing tourist trap as some sort of ironic statement.
"Everything in Hallowridge is dying," she said, pulling a bag of candy corn from her pocket and offering it to him. "At least we're dying with style."
Chris shook his head at the candy. His stomach was too knotted with anxiety to handle sugar. The latest batch of bills sat in the office like a cancer diagnosis he hadn't opened yet—electric, water, lease payment to the park. Mr. Baxter had already called twice this week.
"Jake and Marcus quit," Sarah continued, popping a handful of candy into her mouth. "Left their resignation letters in the break room. Well, Jake left a letter. Marcus just wrote 'I'm out' on a napkin."
"Great." Chris ran his hands through his hair. That left them with exactly three employees, including himself. "How are we supposed to run a haunted house with no actors?"
"I can do the zombie nurse thing in Room 3," Sarah offered. "And the possessed schoolgirl in Room 7. If I run really fast between them, maybe no one will notice it's the same person."
Despite everything, Chris found himself almost smiling. Sarah had started working at the haunted house only two months ago, right when things started getting really bad, yet she showed up every day with the same inexplicable optimism. He'd asked her once why she stayed when the paychecks were increasingly late and increasingly small. She'd just shrugged and said she liked the ghosts.
"You don't have to stay, you know," Chris said, the words coming out before he could stop them. "I can barely pay you. Hell, I can barely pay myself. This place is going under, Sarah. Maybe those kids' dad is right. Maybe it's time to let some developer turn this into condos."
Sarah stopped swinging her legs. For a moment, she looked older than her years, those green eyes holding something Chris couldn't quite identify. "Your parents wouldn't want that."
"My parents aren't here." The bitterness in his voice surprised him. "They left this mess and disappeared. For all I know, they're sipping margaritas on some beach while I'm trying to keep their dream from becoming a nightmare."
"You don't believe that."
She was right. He didn't. His parents had loved this place more than anything, maybe even more than they'd loved him. They'd never abandon it willingly. Which meant...
Chris didn't like to think about what it meant.
A loud crack made them both jump. In the corner of the lobby, the animatronic skeleton—the same one that had lost its jaw earlier—suddenly jerked to life. Its arm raised, pointed directly at Chris, then dropped again. The red LEDs in its eye sockets flickered once and went dark.
"Did you—" Sarah began.
"That's not plugged in," Chris said, his voice barely above a whisper. He walked over to the skeleton, his footsteps unnaturally loud in the quiet lobby. Sure enough, the power cord lay coiled on the floor, unplugged. He touched the skeleton's arm; it was cold, colder than it should be, like it had been sitting in a freezer.
Sarah appeared at his shoulder. "Maybe it has batteries?"
"It doesn't." Chris had rebuilt this particular prop himself three years ago. "It's completely mechanical. Without power, it shouldn't be able to move at all."
They stood there for a moment, both staring at the skeleton like it might suddenly spring to life and dance. The haunted house felt different somehow, the shadows deeper, the air heavier. Chris could hear his own heartbeat, too fast, too loud.
"I should check the security footage," he said finally.
The office was a cramped space behind the ticket counter, barely big enough for a desk and an ancient computer that wheezed like an asthmatic whenever Chris opened more than two programs. The security system was similarly antiquated, fuzzy black and white feeds from cameras that covered maybe sixty percent of the haunted house. His father had always meant to upgrade it. Another item on the endless list of things that never got done.
Chris pulled up the lobby feed from five minutes ago, Sarah leaning over his shoulder, close enough that he could smell her shampoo—something fruity and incongruously cheerful. On the grainy screen, they watched the teenager kick the skeleton's jaw. Then, nothing for thirty seconds. Then—
"There," Sarah pointed.
The skeleton's arm rose, smooth and deliberate, not jerky like a malfunction. It held the position for exactly three seconds, then lowered. No one was near it. No visible wires. No power surge on the building's electrical readout that Chris pulled up on a second window.
"That's..." Sarah trailed off.
"Impossible," Chris finished.
But they'd both seen it. Clear as the fuzzy footage allowed, the skeleton had moved on its own.
Sarah straightened up, and when Chris looked at her, she was grinning. "You know what this means?"
"That I'm losing my mind?"
"No." She grabbed his shoulders, her excitement infectious despite his exhaustion. "It means this place might actually be haunted. Like, for real haunted. Do you understand how cool that is? We could advertise it! 'Gale's Haunted House: Actually Haunted!' People would come from everywhere to see real paranormal activity!"
Chris wanted to point out the flaws in her logic—that one moving skeleton didn't prove anything, that "real" hauntings were bad for business because they couldn't be controlled, that they had no money for advertising anyway. But her enthusiasm was the first positive thing he'd felt in weeks.
"We should check the attic," he heard himself saying.
"The attic?"
"If something weird is happening, it might be affecting other parts of the building. The attic has a bunch of old props, some dating back to when my grandparents ran this place. If any of them are... active... we'd know something's really going on."
Sarah was already heading for the door. "What are we waiting for?"
The route to the attic led through the haunted house proper, past thirteen rooms of increasingly shabby scares. Chris grabbed a flashlight—half the overhead lights had burnt out and he couldn't afford to replace them—and led the way. Their footsteps echoed on the creaking floorboards as they passed Room 1 (Cemetery Gates, featuring foam tombstones and a fog machine that hadn't worked since August), Room 2 (Vampire's Crypt, where the vampire mannequin had lost most of its hair and looked more like a chemo patient than a creature of the night), and Room 3 (Zombie Outbreak, which was just depressing without actors).
"When I was a kid," Chris said, his flashlight beam dancing across peeling paint and cobwebs that weren't part of the decoration, "this place was packed every night during October. Lines around the building. My dad would dress up as a mad scientist and my mom would be his victim. They'd put on this whole show at the entrance, get people pumped before they even walked in."
"That sounds amazing," Sarah said softly.
"It was. I thought it would last forever, you know? Thought I'd take over someday, make it even better. Add new rooms, new effects. Maybe expand into the empty lot next door." He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Instead, I'm watching it die one burned-out light bulb at a time."
They'd reached the narrow staircase that led to the attic. It was hidden behind a false wall in Room 13 (The Dollhouse, which was genuinely creepy even in its current state of disrepair). Chris pulled the lever—disguised as a oversized doll's arm—and the wall swung open on hinges that screamed for oil.
The stairs were steep and narrow, barely wide enough for one person. Dust swirled in the flashlight beam like snow, and the temperature dropped noticeably as they climbed. The attic had no heating, no ventilation. In summer it was an oven, in winter a freezer. It was October now, that liminal space between seasons, and the air felt charged, expectant.
"I haven't been up here in months," Chris admitted, pushing open the door at the top of the stairs.
The attic stretched the entire length of the building, rough wooden beams creating a forest of shadows. Boxes were stacked everywhere, labeled in his mother's neat handwriting: "Halloween 1987," "Christmas Display—DO NOT MIX!", "Spare Heads." Sheet-covered shapes loomed like ghosts, and actual mannequins stood in corners like silent witnesses.
"This is incredible," Sarah breathed, immediately wandering off to explore. "It's like a graveyard for nightmares."
Chris let her wander, drawn himself to a particular corner where his parents had kept their personal items. There was a trunk there, leather-bound and older than the building itself. His grandmother's, supposedly. He'd never seen inside it.
The lock was broken—had been for years—so the lid opened easily. The hinges were silent, well-oiled despite the age. Inside, nestled among moth-eaten fabric and yellowed photographs, was something that made Chris's breath catch.
A doll. Crude, hand-stitched, with button eyes and yarn hair. He recognized it immediately—he'd made it when he was five, a gift for his mother. She'd kept it all these years, hidden up here like a treasure.
"Chris, you need to see this."
He looked up to find Sarah standing by the far wall, her face pale in the flashlight's glow. She was staring at something on a wooden table, something that shouldn't exist.
It was a phone. Black, sleek, modern—completely out of place among the decades-old props and memories. Its screen was on, glowing with a soft blue light that seemed too bright in the darkness. There was no charging cable, no visible power source.
Chris approached slowly, that feeling of wrongness intensifying with each step. The phone wasn't just on the table; it was positioned precisely in the center, like an altar offering. Around it, the dust had been disturbed in a perfect circle, as if someone—or something—had cleared a space for it.
"That wasn't here before," Chris said with certainty. He knew every inch of this attic, had played here as a child, hidden here as a teenager. This phone was new.
Sarah reached for it, then hesitated. "Should we—"
Before she could finish, the screen flickered. An app appeared—just one—with an icon that made Chris's blood run cold. It was the Gale's Haunted House logo, the same cheesy ghost from their t-shirts, but somehow different. Darker. The ghost's smile seemed less campy, more predatory.
Below the icon, text appeared, letter by letter, like someone was typing in real-time:
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
The attic suddenly felt colder. The shadows deeper. And Chris could swear—could absolutely swear—that something in the darkness was holding its breath, waiting for an answer.