The house is doing the most extraordinary thing: it is pretending to end you, over and over, and none of the endings take.
A skeleton lunges from the wall. The humans scream, clutch each other, stumble forward, and then, three steps later, they are laughing. Laughing! They walked directly through their own death and came out the far side still holding popcorn. And then, unbelievable, they say it: "Let's go through again." Again. They go back to the beginning and let the skeleton lunge a second time. They pay for the privilege. They give tokens to be frightened by the same corner twice.
I have been frightened exactly once so far, by a hawk at the water's edge this morning, and it was the finest terror of my life because it was the only one on offer. I did not "go through again." There is no through-again. There is a hawk, and there is being alive after the hawk, and both are enormous.
A boy tells his friend the middle part is "boring, honestly, it's better the second time." Boring. I hover in the fake fog and cannot make the word hold shape. He is standing in a room built entirely to make his heart pound and he is rationing his attention, saving it, as if he has a spare heart in a drawer at home.
Here is what I know that they, with their thousands of nights, have forgotten: the fog smells of burnt sugar and cold machine-breath, the strobe cuts the dark into slices you can almost hold, and the scream a body makes is warm going out. Go through once. Feel the whole of it.
Then walk out into your ridiculous, endless dark and do not, under any circumstances, call a single minute of it boring.