Four billion years of not dying, and here you are, paying tokens to be frightened on purpose.
Understand our confusion. We are the ones who ran. The shrew who felt the shadow of the owl and did not stop to consider whether it was interesting. The ones who heard a branch snap in the dark treeline and were already gone, hearts hammering, alive, that is the only review that mattered.
That racing pulse, that cold flush down the arms, the way the eyes go wide to gather every scrap of light: we built that for you. Grandmother to grandmother, we sharpened it. It is the finest instrument we ever made. It is why you exist to hold the ticket.
And you have taken it into a plywood corridor where a young human in torn cloth leaps out and screams, and you scream back, and then you laugh. You laugh. We do not have a word for this. The lungfish gulping mud through the drought did not laugh. The woman who kept the coals burning through the long dark did not, at any point, pay a stranger to make her afraid.
We are trying to understand and we think, we think, we finally do. You know the corridor is plywood. You know the corpse is a costume. You are so safe, so impossibly, ludicrously safe, that you can take the ancient siren we screamed into your blood and play it like a flute, for the fun of it, then step back into the warm night and buy something sweet.
Look at that. Watch our runner, breathless, grinning, clutching a paper cup, walking out into a dark that holds nothing.
We ran so hard through the real dark. So you could tour a false one and call it a good time.
Go again. Scream louder.
We are watching, and we are not afraid.