The light wasn’t there before.
It was an alluring sight within the darkness of the apartment—the rest of the room felt dim in comparison as my eyes locked onto it. It wasn’t there before. The alarm bells were leaving my heart pounding faster, and I felt myself taking slow steps toward it. The voices behind me got quieter. The bickering and discussions of the other two people with me sort of faded out as I approached it slowly. “There’s a light here,” I called out back to them. No response. I continued approaching it, slowly shutting the closet I had hidden in just moments ago. Those thoughts were almost already forgotten—Curled up in the small enclosure, desperately holding onto the fabric of its door as I felt someone attempting to open it. The loud pounding of the bass accompanying the nightmarish pounding along the closet the others were hiding within. The unsure feelings of safety as the last of the pounding ceased…None of that was fresh enough in my mind to pull me away. Especially as I stepped right to where the light was shining, and facing the surgical table with a space underneath it.
I took a deep breath, slowly falling to my knees and crawling inside the space.
The next thing the others heard from me was a scream.
-/-
I slowly got up from the floor, leaving the plug by the socket and looking toward the dark haired girl with me. “Alright, what else?”
She led me through the well lit rooms, past rubber props of body parts and creaky chairs while she showed me the ins and outs of the room. The time was close to 12:30am, and the brightly lit ceiling lights contrasted with the darkness held just outside the walls. We slowly unplugged various speakers and secondary lights as we began the process of closing up. It had been a white since I was first trapped inside the horror room and forced to solve its puzzles and escape in order to learn it for my job. Now, the dark haired employee I met just moments ago was leading me through the steps of shutting it down so we could both clock out and head back home.
Despite the lights illuminating each corner of the room I could never explore before, I could feel a bit of the fear of my previous experience. The fears of each dark corner and every closed door. I could sense something similar from my coworker—she continued to stick by me as if leaving me outside her view would cause me to be taken away and trapped in a further room. I made sure to keep talking or calling out to her so she knew I was still behind her, as well as making sure she would keep responding. It was a soft sort of comfort as we both began shutting the closets and securing them with the heavy duty locks.
It was then that I heard something that made me freeze. A soft rumbling, before a shattering scream rang out that echoed through the apartment. I turned around, looking for my coworker. “What the fuck?” I yelled out, my voice drowned out by the screeching. I saw my coworker turn away, quickly leaving to the door as she shared a similar sentiment. “No, lowkey I’m out. I’m not dealing with that.” I quickly followed her, almost forgetting to shut the door behind me as the scream faded out into silence. It finally registered in my mind as I stepped into the brightly lit hallway. Final Jumpscare.mp3. The exact audio file we play when we have the scare actor jump out from behind the chair and chase them out of the apartment. The dark haired employee had also realized it, and despite us both being clearly shaken up we quickly walked back to the main office to check the phones we played all the sound for the room out of.
Except nobody was there.
The office was empty, and both she and I knew that the only two people in the building that late at night were each other. “Buggy phone,” we said, “A quirk with the system.” We never really figured out what happened that night. We found more evidence that the phone would sometimes play the audio file unprompted, but never confirmation that it happened that night. It became a story we’d share with some various guests as we talked about the room being potentially haunted. The world’s greatest jumpscare became a tale nobody but us two could really believe, other than the coworkers who shared similar stories of their cleaning being interrupted by various horror stings.
That coworker and I just both vowed to stay right next to each other as we finished shutting the room down before leaving the building and returning to our cars.
-/-
Returning home at 2am was certainly an experience I understood was new to me, but the process was almost autonomous.
I entered the pitch black house and shut the door with almost no care for suppressing noise, despite the soft snoring to my right of my father splayed across the couch. I knew his sleep wouldn’t be interrupted by my arrival—neither of my parents felt the need to stay awake until I came home safely anymore. Maybe my mother would, if she was ever home again. As I hung up my keys and kicked off my shoes, I realized the absolute darkness of a room I had committed to memory was strangely comforting. I knew I wasn’t alone, and I knew that if something was more than 3 feet in front of me I wouldn’t see it till I slammed my face into it, but my heart rate was no higher than my drive home. It was a strange calmness—I wasn’t worried about the noises I was making, and there was no fear of something jumping out at me or screaming in my ear.
The thoughts of my time feeling terrified by every small sound I heard inside the escape room faded away, instead replaced by different memories. Times I spent quietly slipping around in the darkness of homes I recognized, the slow crawl across the kitchen floor as I made my way to get a glass of water. The shadows I saw in my room as a child that made me cower under my blanket hoping for them to go away. Each nightlight I purchased for my room or the hallways out of fear that without them I’d be ambushed by a creature I couldn’t see. Somehow, each of those memories felt impossibly far away from me as I made my way to my room to toss my bag onto the floor and collapse on my bed. Perhaps I got too tired to care about something attacking me, or perhaps I was just finally fed up with being scared of things. Whatever the reason, there was a new sensation that was pulling me across the darkness I once was afraid of as a child. It filled me with a strange sense of hope that I truly was growing.
The next shifts still held some of the fears I had as I moved through the escape room, the fears of loud sounds or people going missing keeping me from feeling completely uninhibited. I still called out to other coworkers if they were inside, or would go silent to listen as if something was sneaking around just out of view. The fear felt instinctual—a form of self preservation just in case some amount of carelessness would cause me to fall victim to an obvious trap. It’s a strange feeling—I always considered myself a coward. Even as I cleaned out the room filled with bloody props and fake skinned mannequins, I referred to my previous acts of cowardice as the reason I would perform slower than usual. Even still, the nighttime drives by myself with nothing but my own music and the humming of an engine brought me no more fear than being alone in my room with my lights on and nothing bothering me. Part of the irrational fears I felt of zombies and monsters in the dark had faded, and the night’s moon became a calming presence as I stepped out of my car at midnight before my house. It was freeing—the fears of the dark were fading away before my eyes, and I finally felt like I was making some progress in becoming brave. I could just stare up at the night sky and enjoy the comfort of darkness surrounding me.
It was then that a loud banging emanated from the garage as I was walking to the door, and I felt my heart gripped with fear as I froze. Perhaps I was still a little scared.