2. Ethan
ETHAN
Ablood-curdling scream tore through the barn, sharp enough to cut clean through the hum of anticipation that had been building all night. Opening night of the Butcher’s Den. Right on schedule.
Good. Effective. Textbook.
The sound didn’t echo so much as settle, catching in the rafters and lingering there with the damp, metallic scent of the place.
The air inside the barn always felt heavier than it should have—thick with fog and old wood and something faintly sour that never went away, no matter how many times we aired it out.
I’d developed a love for it around year three. Now, it just smelled like October.
Paul lingered behind the group, scraping one foot against the concrete, the sound quiet but intentional.
He wore a white mask with a too-wide, painted-on grin, warm enough for the first second or two, and then unsettling the longer it held.
It was the kind of smile a real face couldn’t sustain, fixed no matter what anyone in front of it did.
I’d need to borrow that one night.
A guest turned, already half-laughing at something, and then saw Paul. He tilted his head and lifted a gloved hand, his fingers twitching. She screamed, high and immediate, and she and her group scrambled forward in a rush of shrieks and laughter that echoed down the corridor.
I adjusted my grip on the chains wrapped loosely around my hands. The familiar weight was grounding. I itched for a reaction like that—the clean, uncomplicated kind where someone screamed and ran, and the whole thing worked the way it was supposed to.
The Butcher’s Den had always been good, but this year felt sharper, like everything had been tuned tighter. The lighting hit cleaner. The spacing between rooms made more sense. Even the actors were better, but we were still missing something.
I had told Miles that weeks ago. I’d taken the time to build him a playlist, something layered and deliberate, designed to carry the energy between rooms instead of letting it die in the gaps.
He’d nodded, said it sounded great, and promptly done nothing with it.
Typical Miles. I somehow hadn't accounted for it, even though I’d known the guy since potty training.
Ten groups in, the silence between scares had stretched too long. It felt like a waste.
So, I pulled my phone from my pocket and sent him a single message.
Me
Music. Loud. Trust me.
I deposited my phone back in my pocket. The speakers crackled overhead then came alive with the low, heavy pulse of Heavy Metal music. The bass rolled through the barn, not just filling the space but absorbing it. It vibrated up through the floor into my boots and chest.
The shift was immediate.
Actors straightened. Timing tightened. The next group hit the hallway, and the scare landed harder.
That was better.
Miles might run the place, but I knew how to make it breathe.
Out there—in the hardware store, in the house, in the life I had inherited and was still figuring out whether it fit—everything moved at someone else’s pace.
Steady and predictable, which had its own kind of comfort even when it didn’t feel like mine.
In here, it was noise and movement and controlled chaos, and I was the one setting the rhythm instead of adjusting to it.
This was the one season where I got to disappear into something that didn’t follow me home. I waited for it. Craved it.
The fog curled low across the floor, catching in the blue light that washed the hallway cold. I rolled my shoulders and reset my stance, settling back into position.
Another group pushed through.
I stepped forward, let the timing build, then dragged the chains once across the concrete—just enough to pull their attention before I stepped into the light. They reacted how they were supposed to, and for a few seconds, everything was right.
Set up. Break. Reset.
Paul slipped past my line of sight, already moving toward the next group, his mask catching the light in a way that made the grin look like it had widened since the last time I looked at it. He was annoyingly good at this.
I had wanted to wear a mask, but Alba had other plans. She’d painted my face herself—skeletal lines drawn with careful precision—and paired it with combat boots, black slacks, and suspenders.
And, against my better judgment, no shirt.
“Social media era,” she’d said in the tone of someone explaining gravity to someone who had just fallen off a building.
I had a strong feeling I was going to regret this the second someone recognized me at the hardware store register tomorrow.
Nothing stayed private in a town the size of Gray Harbor.
Someone’s aunt was going to see it; that was just how this worked.
Every year, someone mentioned how they saw me at the Den, but this would be the first year I would have been seen without a shirt.
Mrs. Patrice from the corner store alone would have opinions.
More screams echoed down the hall, blending into the music. I scanned the corridor ahead as the fog thickened again, settling into the rhythm of it.
That was when I saw her.
Everyone who came through here moved the same way.
Fast. Reactive. Already looking for the exit before they’d fully entered the room, their bodies angled like they were one good scare away from a full sprint.
There was an energy to it—anticipatory, wound tight—that made the whole thing an adventure. When it released, it released hard.
She wasn’t doing any of that.
Her steps were unhurried, her attention moving from one detail to the next with quiet, almost annoyed curiosity. Her lip turned like she was taking mental notes on everything she found unimpressive.
The fog curled around her boots and broke apart as she moved through it. The overhead lights caught in her dark hair as it lifted slightly in the draft from the fans. She brushed it back, the motion absent and unbothered.
When the fog machine hissed again, sending a thick plume rolling low across the floor, she rolled her eyes.
Actually rolled them.
At my fog.
Something in me sharpened. This was not okay. You didn’t eye-roll the fog. The fog was not the problem here; it was doing its job perfectly.
I set the chains aside and reached for the barbed-wire bat resting against the wall. If she was going to treat this like a field trip, then I was going to give her something that warranted an opinion. A Yelp review that started with, ‘Be aware of the last hallway…’
I dropped low onto the cold concrete, sliding through the fog until it swallowed me. The music pressed in around me, heavy and steady, the beat syncing with each movement as I closed the distance.
I pushed up and out of the fog directly in front of her, the bat raised, the lights flashing hard against the walls. The whole thing was calibrated for maximum impact.
I let it build—slow, deliberate, controlled—rising out of the floor like something that had been waiting there the whole time. I gave her the full weight of it: the approach, the timing, every second I’d spent learning how to make this successful.
She tilted her head.
That was it. Just tilted it. Her gaze moved over me with quiet focus, and the blue light caught in her eyes, reflecting something brighter than it had any business being in a place like this.
I waited for the breath catch. The step back. The laugh that cracked open into something louder. The thing that always came. The thing I waited all year for. The same reaction over and over again.
It didn’t come.
If anything, she moved closer.
The space between us changed; it was charged, like the air pressure had shifted. The bat hung loose at my side. I was distantly aware that I’d stopped performing. Whatever this was had nothing to do with the job. I was frozen in her gaze.
I had scared plenty of people before. I was good at it. I had never once lost the thread of the moment I was supposed to be living in.
My breathing slowed. The barn and the music and the fog were still there, but they felt like they existed just outside the edges of something smaller.
I forgot the bat was in my hand.
That had never happened.
No one ever just looked at me. That was the thing. They ran, or stumbled, or grabbed whoever was next to them and bolted. There was a contract—unspoken, assumed—between the scare actor and the patron of this establishment, and that contract involved a reaction. Any reaction. Something to work with.
She wasn’t holding up her end.
Then she smiled.
Small. Slow. Just enough to be teasing.
I stepped forward before I could think better of it, closing the distance until there was barely any space left—close enough to feel the warmth of her breath through the fog, close enough that the music and the barn and the manufactured world of the Butcher’s Den fell away as if it had never been there at all.
Her inhale caught. Just slightly. Just enough.
I heard it. Felt it. Both.
The lights softened at the edges of my vision, the bass blurring into something low and distant. For a long moment, I was only aware of the inches between us and that she hadn’t moved away.
My hand lifted, finding the line of her jaw and sliding just beneath her chin, tilting her face up until her gaze met mine. There was nowhere left for either of us to look except at each other.
Standing here, close enough to feel her exhale, I understood that I had already crossed it. The line was behind me somewhere.
One long, suspended, entirely irrational second.
I was on the edge of it—caught in something I hadn’t seen coming and couldn’t have named if asked, closing the last inch because there was nothing in me that wanted to do anything else.
“Salem!”
The moment snapped.
Someone grabbed her from behind, pulling her back into the fog, her laughter breaking free in a bright, startled burst as she disappeared from view. The space where’d had been felt empty.
I didn’t follow.
The noise rushed back all at once—music, voices, footsteps—reaching me like sound through water, present but slightly wrong, as if it were coming from the right direction but arriving a half second late.
The bat still hung in my hand. My pulse was running harder than it had all night, which was saying something given the hours I’d already put in.
I stared into the fog. Was this real? Had I imagined her?
Then I set my jaw, rolled my shoulders, and turned back toward the hallway.
I had never forgotten what I was supposed to be doing in here. Never lost the thread. Never stood in a corridor holding a prop weapon, staring at empty air, trying to remember what came next.
The scene kept moving, indifferent and loud. Everyone around me was completely unaware that something I did not yet have a name for had happened in this hallway.