The question hung in the attic air like a held breath: "Do you believe in ghosts?"
Chris stared at the glowing screen, his hand hovering inches from the black phone. The crude doll he'd made for his mother twenty years ago lay forgotten in the trunk behind him, but he could feel its button eyes on his back. The temperature had dropped another five degrees in the last thirty seconds—his breath came out in small puffs of vapor that shouldn't exist in October.
"We should answer it," Sarah said, her voice cutting through the thick silence. She stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and he could feel her trembling despite her steady tone. "What's the worst that could happen?"
"In a horror movie?" Chris asked. "Everything."
But his fingers were already reaching for the phone. The moment his skin made contact with the smooth surface, a jolt of cold shot up his arm—not painful, exactly, but wrong, like touching something that existed in a different set of physical laws. The screen responded immediately, the text dissolving and reforming.
**WELCOME, INHERITOR**
**INITIALIZING CURSE HUB PROTOCOL**
**FIRST TASK LOADING...**
"Inheritor?" Sarah read over his shoulder. "Chris, this has to be connected to your parents. They must have—"
The phone vibrated so violently it nearly jumped out of his hand. The screen went black, then blazed to life with crimson text that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat:
**ZOMBIE NIGHT: SURVIVE AND SECURE**
**OBJECTIVE: SECURE THE PERIMETER**
**TIME LIMIT: 30:00**
**FAILURE CONSEQUENCE: PERMANENT**
**ACCEPT? Y/N**
Chris's finger hesitated over the screen. Every rational part of his brain screamed at him to put the phone down, to walk away, to call the police or a priest or someone who dealt with things that shouldn't exist. But the irrational part—the part that had watched his parents vanish without explanation, that had seen the skeleton move on its own, that felt the haunted house dying around him—that part was already decided.
He pressed Y.
The attic door slammed shut with enough force to shake dust from the rafters. Sarah yelped, grabbing his arm as the single bulb overhead flickered and died. The phone's screen became their only light source, casting their faces in hellish red.
**29:47**
**BREACH DETECTED: ROOM 3**
**HOSTILES: ACTIVE**
**SURVIVE**
"We need to move," Chris said, his voice steadier than he felt. He grabbed a crowbar from a pile of old tools—his father had taught him to always have something solid in your hand when things went wrong. The weight of it was reassuring, real in a way nothing else felt right now.
Sarah pulled out her phone, activating its flashlight. "Room 3 is Zombie Outbreak. The one that's depressing without actors."
"Maybe it's not so depressing anymore."
They descended the stairs two at a time, the countdown on the black phone burning in Chris's peripheral vision. 28:32. 28:31. The haunted house felt different now—alive in a way it hadn't been in years. The fake cobwebs swayed without any breeze. The mannequins' eyes seemed to track their movement. And from somewhere deeper in the building came a sound that made Chris's skin crawl: a wet, shuffling noise, like something dragging itself across the floor.
Room 3's door was ajar, a sickly green light spilling from within. The normal lighting was just colored bulbs and gels, but this was different—organic somehow, pulsing like bioluminescence. Chris pushed the door open with the crowbar, and immediately wished he hadn't.
The zombie mannequin that usually stood in the corner, dressed in tattered hospital scrubs and sporting unconvincing latex wounds, was moving. Not the jerky, mechanical movement of an animatronic, but fluid, purposeful motion. It turned toward them, and black liquid oozed from its mouth, splattering on the floor with a hiss that left smoking holes in the cheap carpet.
"That's not supposed to—" Sarah's observation was cut short as the thing lunged.
Chris reacted on instinct, swinging the crowbar in a wide arc that connected with the zombie's head. The impact should have knocked the lightweight mannequin across the room. Instead, it felt like hitting a tree trunk. The crowbar vibrated painfully in his hands, and the zombie barely staggered.
It grabbed for Sarah with hands that had sprouted actual fingernails—yellow, cracked things that looked like they'd been growing in a grave. She ducked, surprisingly agile, and Chris brought the crowbar down again, this time aiming for the knee joint. The mannequin's leg buckled, sending it toppling, but even on the ground it kept crawling toward them, that black ooze leaving a trail of dissolved carpet.
"The mirror!" Sarah shouted, pointing to the far wall.
Chris saw it immediately—a crack in the antique mirror that hadn't been there this morning, spreading like a spider web from a central point that seemed to pulse with that same sick green light. Something was pushing through from the other side, something that had too many angles and moved in ways that hurt to watch.
**25:17**
**SEAL THE BREACH**
**TOOL REQUIRED: REFLECTIVE SURFACE DESTRUCTION**
The message flashed on the phone's screen just as Sarah grabbed a metal folding chair and hurled it at the mirror. The glass shattered in a cascade of silver, and the green light winked out like a blown candle. The zombie mannequin went rigid, then collapsed into its component parts—plastic limbs, foam latex, and wires. The black ooze evaporated, leaving only the burned carpet as evidence it had ever existed.
But in the darkness behind where the mirror had been, something whispered Chris's name. Not his full name, not the "Chris" everyone called him, but "Christopher Allen Gale," pronounced with the exact inflection his mother used when she was worried about him.
He stepped closer, crowbar raised, and saw it—a shadow that was darker than the darkness around it, human-shaped but wrong, like someone had tried to draw a person from memory and gotten the proportions slightly off. It reached for him with fingers that were too long, and when they passed through the wall, frost spread from the contact point.
"Christopher," it whispered again, and this time it sounded hungry. "You found it. You found the phone. Just like they knew you would."
"Who?" Chris demanded. "Who knew? Where are my parents?"
The shadow laughed, a sound like glass breaking in reverse, and suddenly surged forward. Chris swung the crowbar through it, accomplishing nothing except coating the tool in a thin layer of ice. The shadow's fingers were inches from his face when Sarah appeared beside him, holding something that gleamed in the phone's light.
"Get back!" she shouted, and threw what she was holding—a compact mirror from her purse, the kind with two sides that folded together. It spun through the air, opened, and when the shadow's reflection appeared in both mirrors simultaneously, it screamed.
The sound was beyond human hearing but not beyond human feeling. Chris's bones ached with it, his teeth felt like they were going to crack, and every piece of glass in Room 3 shattered simultaneously. The shadow writhed, twisted, and then collapsed in on itself like a black hole in reverse, leaving only a small object on the floor where it had been.
A key. Old-fashioned, brass, with initials engraved on the head: T.M.G.
Thomas Matthew Gale. His father.
"How did you know that would work?" Chris asked Sarah, his voice shaking.
She was pale, swaying slightly on her feet. "I didn't. I just... it felt right. Like something was telling me what to do." She looked at the black phone in his hand, and for just a moment, the screen flickered. Her name appeared—SARAH WREN—followed by a string of numbers that might have been coordinates or code, then vanished before Chris could fully process it.
**20:41**
**BREACH SEALED**
**BONUS OBJECTIVE COMPLETED**
**CALCULATING REWARDS...**
"We need to keep moving," Sarah said, but her voice was distant, distracted. She kept touching her temples like she had a headache. "The phone said secure the perimeter, right? There might be more breaches."
They swept through the haunted house like a demented security patrol, Chris with his frozen crowbar and Sarah with her phone's flashlight. They found two more breaches—one in Room 7 where a possessed schoolgirl mannequin was writing "HELP ME" on the walls in what looked disturbingly like blood, and another in Room 11 where all the doll heads were singing a children's song in harmony. Each time, breaking something reflective seemed to seal the breach, though the whispers got louder, more insistent.
By the time they returned to the lobby, the countdown showed 00:47. Chris's arm was bleeding from a gash he didn't remember getting, three parallel lines that looked like claw marks. Sarah sat him down on the torn vinyl bench by the entrance and produced a first aid kit from behind the counter.
"Let me see," she said, her hands gentle as she cleaned the wound. The antiseptic stung, but her touch was warm, grounding him in reality after thirty minutes of impossibility.
"This is insane," Chris said, watching her work. Her face was focused, a small crease between her eyebrows that he found inexplicably endearing. "Ghosts are real. My haunted house is actually haunted. And this phone—"
"Is connected to your parents somehow," Sarah finished, tying off the bandage with practiced efficiency. "That key, the way the shadow said 'they knew you would find it.' Chris, I don't think your parents abandoned the business. I think they were trying to protect you from this."
She was still holding his arm, her thumb absently stroking the skin above the bandage. Their eyes met, and Chris felt something shift between them, a recognition of shared trauma, shared survival. He thought about all the employees who had quit, all the people who had walked away when things got tough. But Sarah was still here, had thrown herself into danger without hesitation.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
"Terrified," she admitted, then gave him a crooked smile. "I've been afraid of the dark since I was five. Pathetic for someone who works in a haunted house, right? But this..." She gestured at the phone, the key, the burn marks on the carpet. "This feels important. Like we're supposed to be doing this."
"We?"
"You don't think I'm letting you face whatever this is alone, do you? Someone needs to keep you from getting killed by zombie mannequins."
**00:00**
**TASK COMPLETE**
**EVALUATING PERFORMANCE...**
The phone's screen shifted, displaying what looked like a stat sheet from a video game:
**CURSE HUB: LEVEL 1 ACHIEVED**
**BREACHES SEALED: 4/3 (BONUS)**
**DAMAGE SUSTAINED: MINIMAL**
**SYNCHRONIZATION: 12%**
**ALLY DETECTED: SARAH WREN [CLASSIFICATION PENDING]**
**NIGHTMARE MODE: UNLOCKED**
**NEXT TASK AVAILABLE IN: 11:57:33**
"Synchronization?" Chris read. "Ally detected? What does that mean?"
Sarah had gone very still beside him. When he looked at her, she was staring at the phone with an expression he couldn't read. "I don't know," she said, but something in her voice suggested otherwise. "Chris, I need to tell you something—"
A knock at the front door cut her off. Three slow, deliberate knocks that echoed through the empty lobby. They both turned to look, but through the glass door, Main Street was empty. The streetlight directly outside had gone out, creating a pool of darkness that seemed to swallow light.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Louder this time. More insistent.
The phone in Chris's hand vibrated. New text scrolled across the screen in that same pulsing red:
**WARNING: EXTERNAL INTEREST DETECTED**
**THEY KNOW YOU'VE STARTED**
**THEY'RE COMING**
**PREPARE**
"Who's they?" Sarah whispered.
Before Chris could answer, every light in Gale's Haunted House went out simultaneously, plunging them into complete darkness except for the phone's screen. And in that darkness, from every room they'd just secured, came the sound of things breaking free.
The Zombie Night task was complete, but something told Chris the real nightmare was just beginning. He gripped the key his father had somehow left behind, felt Sarah's hand find his in the darkness, and wondered if his parents had faced this same terror six months ago.
And if they had survived it.
The phone's screen flickered one last time before going dark:
**WELCOME TO THE GAME**
**THERE IS NO ESCAPE**
**ONLY DEEPER**
Outside, the knocking stopped. But Chris could hear breathing on the other side of the door—slow, patient, and definitely not human.