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By Simina Lungu
'YOU’LL LIKE IT. I promise. It will be an entirely new Experience for you.’
The young salesman waved his hands around, an enthusiasm Lydia found hard to believe was faked.
‘What is it, exactly?’ she asked.
She tried not to sound too eager, still wanting to present herself as aloof, not one to fall for the first gimmick that was offered to her.
‘It’s called the Haunted House Experience. It’s the most popular of the Experiences, did you know that?’
Lydia shook her head wordlessly. She did not want to admit that this would be her first Experience. What if he made her buy the other ones as well?
‘It’s not a real haunted house, though,’ she said, thinking this was safe and would not betray her ignorance more than was necessary. ‘Is it?’
The sales assistant smirked.
‘If you wanted fake, sweetheart, you came to the wrong place. Here, we deal only in the authentic.’
Lydia nodded, making a show of patience.
‘Well, isn’t this what they all say? How am I to know if it’s really authentic, though?’
‘It’s authentic, I swear. I don’t know if the house was ever haunted, but something is there. Someone. People have mentioned her.’
Lydia nodded. They were coming close to what she wanted.
‘What is she, then? A ghost? An alien? An entity from another world?’
The sales assistant’s eyes dimmed.
‘Lonely,’ he said. ‘That’s what she is. Just lonely.’
This, Lydia could connect with.
‘Well,’ she said, extending her hand to receive the small disk. ‘If I do this, she won’t be lonely for a while, will she?’
Was it her imagination, or had the sales assistant actually hesitated before accepting her transaction? Strange, Lydia thought later. He had sounded so eager to sell his Haunted House Experience, after all.
Lydia did not tell anyone that she had purchased one of the Experiences. She was sure most of her friends owned at least one, but they were not the kind of people who talked about such things. Experiences felt too much like stuff catering to frustrated high school kids, who could not fit in with their peers and searched for any kind of escapism they could find. Successful businesspeople did not need Experiences. They did not need to escape—did they?
In her large apartment overlooking the river where she would often stand in the evenings and enjoy the cityscape with its glass towers and multicoloured lights, Lydia fingered the small, inconspicuous disk. She did not need to look at the instructions. She knew what she had to do. Plug it into the Experience Machine, plug herself in as well, and that would be it. The apartment would vanish, and Lydia would find herself... where?
She shivered. The proximity of the unknown, of something uncertain and unpredictable, was intoxicating. It made her lightheaded and confused. It terrified her. Lydia thought she might not need the Experience itself, after all. The feeling of anticipation was enough to take her out of the usual routine, to elevate her and turn her into something else, a being not of flesh and blood but of keenness and restlessness.
She would have liked to prolong the feeling, to delay the moment when she would start the Experience. There was little time, though. She was due to work early next morning, and she did not know when she would be free again for such indulgences.
With resolute steps she headed to the entertainment room. The Experience Machine had never been used, although she had tried other Virtual Reality tools, none of which impressed her too much. With somewhat shaky fingers, Lydia switched on the Experience Machine and inserted the small disk. She sat down in the easy chair, connected the wires that snaked out of the Experience Machine to her arms, leaned back, and closed her eyes.
And she waited...
At first, nothing happened. Lydia was still conscious of her body lying in the easy chair, of the uncomfortable sting of the wires, the electricity pulsing through her. Outside, the city hummed, calling her back to it, reminding Lydia that she belonged there, not in some simulacrum of the past. She fought with herself, rejecting the need to open her eyes.
Lydia breathed deeply. In. Out. In. Out. The rhythm was new to her. The slow cadence, soporific. It brought about a heaviness in her limbs, a fuzziness in her mind that would have been distracting and distressing at any other time. Now, it was new and exciting. Now, it turned her into someone else, or it opened up to her the possibilities of who she could be, if she allowed herself to stop running, to stop chasing one success after another and take stock of who she was.
Finally, Lydia opened her eyes. The action seemed to have been prompted by some outside force, and Lydia had obeyed without thinking. She gasped, taking in the changes around her.
She wasn’t in the Entertainment Room anymore. She was standing in a dark corridor, the coldness of the stone walls reaching out for her, coiling against the skin of her bare arms. She tried to take in a deep breath, and the air felt frosty and sharp, with the painful sharpness of a knife blade. Surprised by the sensation, she coughed.
Lydia moved her fingers, amazed that they obeyed her. She felt disconnected, as if she was not sure where she began, and what was just part of the game. Slowly, uncertainly, she took a step forward, swaying slightly. Then she took another step and another. She was walking as if she was stepping on sharp nails, stumbling more often than not, unnerved and scared. But she was moving forward. It felt like an assertion of her will over the Experience. It made her smile, triumphant that she still kept some of her agency even now.
The corridor seemed to stretch on, endlessly. Lydia frowned. After the first moments of awe, the novelty was wearing off. Disappointment was slowly taking its place. Surely, there was more to the Experience than just a corridor. Lydia had not paid that much money just for this.
‘Come on,’ she thought. ‘Give me more.’
‘What would you have?’
Lydia flinched. The voice had been close to her, uncomfortably close, as if someone had whispered in her ear. She drew a step back, disturbed by this unasked-for invasion of her personal space. She found herself hitting the wall and flattened her hands against its coolness.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Show yourself.’
‘I do not know who I am,’ the voice said. ‘The one who lives here, I suppose.’
Lydia shook her head.
‘Why can’t I see you?’
She waited with breath held for the answer.
‘I have been dead since before you were born. You would not want to see me.’
Lydia frowned.
‘Let me be the judge of that.’
The figure—a girl, Lydia thought it was, a child—appeared further down the corridor. It kept its distance now, as if sensing Lydia’s reticence to have her too close. It did not look particularly daunting. The girl had long blonde hair and wide eyes and the face of a painting. She wore a long dress that brushed against the carpeted floors. It sang whenever she moved.
Lydia found herself smiling.
‘This isn’t so bad,’ she said. ‘Come, give me a name. Surely, you must remember your own name.’
The girl bowed her head.
‘I have been dead since before you were born,’ she repeated. ‘My family lies in the ground as well. I no longer have a name.’
Lydia felt a pang of sadness that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the little girl from the stone corridor.
‘Then—may I give you a name?’
The girl tilted her head.
‘No one else has,’ she muttered.
‘Well, they were in the wrong if they haven’t. You deserve a name. Do you want one?’
Finally, the girl nodded.
‘A name would be nice, yes. Will you have to think about it for a long time?’
But Lydia found that she did not have to think at all.
‘Henrietta,’ she said. ‘It was the name of my grandmother’s best friend.’
The girl—Henrietta—frowned.
‘I am not your grandmother’s best friend, though. I am not that Henrietta.’
Probably not, although if Lydia could imagine someone walking around in the form of a forlorn ghost, it would be Henrietta.
‘You’re your own person,’ Lydia said.
Henrietta eyed her with something akin to disbelief.
‘And... am I your friend?’
Lydia laughed, feeling something bright and warm dancing inside her.
‘Oh, yes. You are definitely my friend.’
Lydia woke up disoriented. The fluid keeping her in the Experience had exhausted itself. Lydia groaned. She had not meant to stay that long.
‘That was.... unexpected,’ she commented.
She could still feel the chill of the stone corridor. And Henrietta. She could not get Henrietta out of her mind.
Lydia disconnected herself from the wires and got up, rubbing her legs to get rid of the pins and needles. One glance at the clock told her she had been under for five hours. That was not good. Even she knew that one was not supposed to stay more than an hour inside an Experience.
‘I thought there were fail safes to prevent this,’ she muttered.
She wondered if she should not return to the shop and give the Experience back. After all, if it was faulty... Then she remembered Henrietta.
You are definitely my friend.
Lydia could not capture the warmth she had felt inside the haunted house. Now, she knew Henrietta had not been real, not even as a ghost. She had been only a simulation in the mind of a computer. She was not lonely. She was not yearning for company. When someone like Lydia was not inside the Experience, interacting with her, Henrietta did not exist.
No one has given me a name before...
Was that even true? Or had the ghost girl been programmed to say something of the kind to anyone who walked in? Maybe this was one of the benefits of the Experience: to get to name the ghost. Henrietta had probably been Violet, or Kimberly or Frida, depending on who used the haunted house. And she had been just as eager to be those.
Lydia pursed her lips.
‘You are jealous of a concept,’ she muttered. ‘Pull it together.’
The euphoria was fading. She felt tired, and a little confused.
‘Maybe I need more time.’
Lydia rummaged through her drawers, finding more Experience fluid. She had received it as a housewarming gift, a few years ago. She had never heard of it having an expiration date, so she could still use it.
‘A little bit more,’ she thought.
This time, she found herself in a bedroom with wide, floor-to-ceiling windows. She could see intermittent flashes of lightning outside. A strong wind threatened to break the glass. There was no rain, though.
‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ Lydia muttered, amused. ‘Really, you can do better than that.’
‘Storms have power,’ Henrietta said, suddenly at her side. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
Lydia flinched at her closeness. She suddenly did not want to turn and look at Henrietta, even though it had been her company she had been seeking when she had decided to step into the Experience a second time.
‘I was never afraid of storms,’ Lydia defended herself. ‘Even as a child, I loved them.’
A storm was like her, Lydia had always believed. Impulsive. Eager. Ruthless. And yet, when it passed, the world was brighter. There was something inspirational in that, Lydia thought, something that took her breath away and made her shiver with giddy anticipation. Perhaps a haunted house was not enough for her. She should have tried to buy some Storm Experience.
Henrietta was watching her with a shrewd and slightly off-putting smile on her pale, thin lips.
‘If you like it so much, why don’t you step outside?’
Lydia imagined the wind and the vibrant electricity in the air. She imagined herself in the middle of a tornado, arms outstretched. She closed her eyes against the image.
‘Come on,’ Henrietta insisted. ‘You are not afraid, are you?’
‘Are you?’ Lydia shot.
She did not like how she sounded like a child. Almost as if she really was afraid.
Henrietta shrugged. There was a redness in her cheeks that had not been there the first time Lydia had seen her. It was almost as if she was becoming alive.
‘Do you want to go outside?’ Lydia asked.
Why not? It could not hurt either of them.
‘Let’s go outside,’ Lydia agreed.
She took Henrietta by the hand. She noticed the girl’s small smirk and had a moment of doubt. Was it truly her own idea to step out into the storm? Or was she simply following Henrietta’s instructions?
The bedroom was on the ground floor, so they could get out through the French windows. Lydia struggled with the bolts and the handle, as they had got rusty from disuse. When she was done, she was panting slightly. She did not know if it was exertion or excitement that had stolen her breath. Or maybe it was fear. The primal instinct at the back of one’s mind, warning one of something about to go terribly wrong. Lydia shook her head, telling herself not to be ridiculous. She had wanted this.
The wind enveloped her as soon as they stepped outside. Lydia gasped, gulping in the cold air, feeling it slide down her throat, wriggling like something alive and dark, made of smoke and shadows. She found herself bent over, taken by a fit of coughing.
When Lydia straightened up, Henrietta had let go of her hand. She had taken a few steps away from her. Lydia suddenly felt lonely. Isolated and at the mercy of forces that were not part of her world.
‘Henrietta,’ she croaked, throat still straining after that strange intrusion.
The girl turned towards her. There was a broad grin on her face. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed as if by fever.
‘Come on,’ she said, raising her hand and beckoning to Lydia. ‘You will enjoy this.’
I doubt it, Lydia thought, but she still obeyed, her legs moving before she could order them. This is not real, Lydia reminded herself. This is not real, and you can stop any time you want. You can get out anytime you want. Only—could she?
She had reached Henrietta’s side and placed her hand on her shoulder, surprised to feel the warmth of life beneath Henrietta’s dress. They stood side by side, and the wind was blowing in their hair, while the lightning danced around them.
Lydia felt her heart beat faster. This was it, she thought. Being alive. This is what it meant. Everything around her lived, even Henrietta, and everything was connected to her. Lydia finally understood what feeling one with the universe meant. She tilted her head back and laughed out loud. Her laughter mingled with the wind and the thunder, becoming one with them.
Henrietta did not laugh, but she watched Lydia with an indulgent smile. For a moment, Lydia had the impression that she was the child and Henrietta the adult: mother, friend, and mentor all in one.
Then she looked away, and the spell vanished. Something was coming for them, a dark cloud with traces of flames at the edges. Lydia tried to move away, but Henrietta kept her still.
‘What are you doing?’ Lydia shouted. ‘We need to move. We need to leave.’
Henrietta shook her head.
‘Don’t go. This is the best part. You’ll see.’
The cloud was getting closer. Lydia tried to pull at Henrietta, to get her to move out of there, but Henrietta was still and uncooperating as a statue.
‘We have to leave,’ Lydia repeated.
Maybe she could escape by herself if she let go of Henrietta. The thought had guilt swirling inside her, its taste bitter and sharp.
The cloud was on them now. Lydia threw herself on Henrietta and tugged her to the ground to protect her. The cloud engulfed her, and she felt pain and scorching heat and heavy smoke. She could not hear anything except Henrietta’s shrill laughter.
Lydia woke up panting. She had shifted in the chair during the Experience and had dislodged one of the wires. That was what had brought her back. She had not thought of coming back herself.
‘It was so real,’ she whispered shakily.
She leaned forward and placed her head in her hands. She could feel herself shaking so hard, the chair shook with her.
Henrietta again. Lydia could not stop thinking about her. She had left Henrietta alone in the storm. How could she do something like that?
It was only later, when Lydia had finally gone to bed, that she managed to convince herself that Henrietta was in no danger. She was not real. Somehow, that did not diminish the guilt.
The following days took on a specific pattern. Lydia went to work at the usual hour. She had lunch with her colleagues and occasionally allowed herself an evening out to a concert or an exhibition. At night, things were different. Then, she could be herself. Then, she could approach the Experience.
The Haunted House remained the same, but every time, Lydia found herself in a different room. After the storm, Lydia refused to go outside. Henrietta did not insist, either.
‘You think you’ll die in a storm, don’t you?’ Henrietta asked once.
They were sitting in a kind of drawing room. Lydia was in front of a piano, trying to remember if she had ever been good at playing. Henrietta had mounted a rocking horse in front of the fireplace. It was snowing.
‘What makes you say that?’ Lydia asked.
She never thought of her death. A storm was as likely as anything else, she supposed.
Henrietta did not answer right away. She kept rocking, and the hypnotic creak created a twisted melody in Lydia’s mind. Some cruel nursery rhyme whose words hinted at death and darkness. If Lydia tried, maybe she could even remember the verses.
‘I did not die in a storm,’ Henrietta finally said.
Lydia ran her hands over the keys. They sounded like out of tune church bells.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘It would have been sad if you had.’
Sparks were glittering in Henrietta’s eyes, embers were in her hair.
‘I died in a fire,’ she announced.
The wood cracked in the fireplace. Lydia yanked herself out of the Experience, tripping over the wires as she tried to get away from the machine. The needle had shifted against her skin, and now she was bleeding. She could smell something burning in her home.
That day, Lydia decided to stop using the Experience Machine. At least for a week or two. At least until she could control her own emotions. Until she could see Henrietta as a game and nothing more.
The experience the night before had shaken her. She had woken up in time to find a wire in her cooking panel had been set loose and was about to start a fire. There were fail safes for this kind of situation. The fire brigade had already been alerted by the apartment’s Monitoring System and had been on their way. No one died in house fires anymore. Not like Henrietta said she had died.
After work, Lydia decided to visit one of the chat rooms dedicated to Experiences. She read through a lot of nonsense. Someone had written entire blog posts chronicling their romance with the character from the Avalanche Experience. Another was certain that the War Experience plagiarised heavily from a novel he had written twenty years back and had not given him any credit. There were rumours of a young girl who had truly died in the Accident Experience, and, of course, the Volcano Experience had been banned two months after its release, because it had traumatised too many people.
‘What about the Haunted House Experience?’ Lydia asked.
She received an answer two hours later, when she was getting ready for bed:
‘If you started playing that Experience, you’re doomed. She will get you. She will grab hold of you and never let go.’
She... Henrietta... Lydia thought. She felt a cold wind dance on the back of her neck.
‘I can always stop,’ she wrote back.
The reply was prompt:
‘Stop then. See what happens.’
That night, Lydia did not enter the Experience Room. She even went as far as to lock it and place the key card at the bottom of her desk drawer. This way, she would not give in to any temptations.
‘What temptations?’ Lydia scoffed. ‘I meant it when I said I could stop anytime I wanted to. And now, I want to stop.’
She had trouble falling asleep, but she refused to take a Sleep Aid. That only meant trading in one weakness for another.
I wonder what Henrietta is doing tonight.
Lydia shook her head, dismissing the ridiculous thought. Henrietta was not doing anything. Henrietta did not exist.
It took Lydia two hours to fall asleep, and all the while, she could not escape the twisting sensation of guilt scratching against her brain.
‘Your room looks so much smaller than mine.’
Lydia woke with a cry. Her eyes found Henrietta leaning over her.
Lydia opened her mouth, but no words would come out. Her voice was gone, reduced to a pitiful croak that robbed her of air. She tried to move. To sit up, to scream, to push the intruder away—even she did not know what she wanted to do, only that she needed to do something, she could not simply lie there, vulnerable and helpless.
Henrietta was staring down at her, eyes wide and curious. Lydia could not see anything threatening about her. Henrietta looked just like the child she was. Except—she wasn’t a child. She wasn’t anything, and she should not have been standing by Lydia’s bed at all.
‘I waited for you,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘You didn’t come tonight.’
The pout had something artificial in it, reminding Lydia that Henrietta shouldn’t have been real. She was part of a game. A string of code. Unable to exist outside the larger program. Unable to walk the real world.
She is walking the real world, Lydia told herself. She is here.
Henrietta lay a hand on Lydia’s chest. The hand felt heavier than it should have.
Lydia gasped for breath. She was reminded of the legends about night demons sitting on the chests of sleepers, robbing them of life. Was this what Henrietta was, then? Had Lydia inadvertently befriended some malefic entity?
‘No,’ she whispered.
Henrietta pulled her hand away. Lydia struggled to sit up, pushing herself against the headboard.
‘You’re not here,’ she said. ‘You’re in the Experience. You can’t be here. You’re not real.’
She looked into Henrietta’s eyes and realised with a jolt that she could not see her reflection in them. Henrietta leaned over her once more and placed a hand on her shoulder. She did not look like a child anymore. She looked like something ancient and dark, dragged from the edge of the universe to haunt a world that had deemed itself safe from the likes of her.
‘How do you know it isn’t backwards?’ Henrietta whispered. ‘How do you know you aren’t the one who isn’t real, who shouldn’t be here, who shouldn’t be anywhere?’
The words battered Lydia’s mind until she was no longer aware of her own body, until she wasn’t sure she was breathing anymore, or if she had ever needed to breathe in the first place, until she became the concept, and Henrietta became real, flesh and blood and life.
It’s not true, Lydia told herself. I’m the one who’s alive. I’m me. I’m real.
And yet, as Henrietta leaned above her, she was gaining substance, while Lydia felt herself fading. She closed her eyes and dug inside herself for every ounce of strength of will that she possessed. She was still real. She was still herself. Henrietta could not change that.
‘I can change anything,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘After all, I changed you.’
‘No!’
The flash of defiance was enough to break the spell. Henrietta drew back. Her body became mist, became air, became a dream.
Lydia found herself sitting up on the edge of her bed, panting and shaking. The tension in her body did not fade. She placed a hand on her chest and felt the iciness of her skin where Henrietta had touched her.
It had not been a dream. Henrietta had been there. She had latched on to Lydia, finding a way to live beyond the Haunted House Experience.
The next day, Lydia walked into the Experience Shop. She did a doubletake when she noticed the middle-aged woman at the counter.
‘I need to speak to your colleague,’ she announced.
The woman—her name tag said ‘Tilly’—blinked at Lydia.
‘Who?’
Lydia hesitated. She closed her eyes, trying to remember if she had spotted the name tag of the man who had sold her the Haunted House Experience. She could not recall any.
‘He was a young man—working here about a month ago.’
Lydia spoke in a rush, fighting with her panic when she realised she could not even remember when she had bought the Haunted House Experience. It could have been a month ago. It could have been longer.
Tilly was frowning, not at all impressed.
‘He’s not working here anymore.’
Lydia swallowed against her distress. She needed to talk to him. He needed to explain to her what happened to those who played the Haunted House Experience.
‘Well, can you give me an address? A phone number, anything? I know it might be against store policy, but I want to talk to him. It’s a matter of life and death.’
Tilly rolled her eyes.
‘You can’t talk to him. He’s dead.’
Lydia clutched the counter. The Experience Store spun in front of her eyes.
‘How... ?’
Tilly shrugged.
‘House fire. It doesn’t happen anymore, they say—until it does.’
House fire. I died in a fire. Henrietta’s words echoed in Lydia’s mind. She left the store without a word.
Once again, Lydia visited Experience websites, searching for information on the Haunted House Experience. She did not find anything satisfying. It was as if people did not want to talk about it. Like mentioning it would bring them misfortune.
On a whim, Lydia started searching for apartment fires. She was lucky there weren’t many. Tilly had been right. When a house or apartment burned down, it was an anomaly.
Lydia wrote down everything she could find on the fires. She interviewed fire departments and neighbours and survivors. She researched everything she could find, neglecting the rest of her life. It was her only chance to escape. Her only chance to avoid the curse of the Haunted House Experience. To end Henrietta’s tyranny over her life once and for all.
Many of the people she reached out to did not want to talk to her. Lydia was stirring up old wounds, being morbid for no reason. She should satisfy her thirst for the sensational through other means.
‘Like the Haunted House Experience?’ Lydia snapped once.
She was visiting Mrs Lindstrom, a woman about her age who liked to wear old-fashioned dresses and, judging by the books Lydia could glimpse in the library behind them, was a fan of historical fiction.
Mrs Lindstrom paled and sprang up from her velvet chair.
‘I think you should leave.’
Lydia reached out and grasped her arm. She shuddered at the touch, at how cold and clammy it felt. That was how she knew she had been right. Mrs Lindstrom had played the Haunted House Experience.
‘I called her Henrietta,’ Lydia whispered. ‘The girl who lives in the Haunted House Experience. What did you call her? What was her name for you?’
Mrs Lindstrom flinched, but did not try to pull her hand away. Her lips trembled.
‘Flora,’ she breathed. ‘I named her Flora. After a friend of mine who disappeared when she was a child.’
Flora after a missing friend. Henrietta after a heroine from a family story. The girl in the Haunted House Experience brought about memories of the lost. That was how she gained their affection. That was how she latched on to them.
‘She appeared in my room one night,’ Lydia confessed. ‘The first night I stopped playing.’
Mrs Lindstrom clutched her hand.
‘She came to me as well. Told me I was not real. That she had more life than I did.’
And perhaps that part was true. Why else would people like Lydia and Mrs Lindstrom need to cling to virtual scenarios? If their real lives had anything to offer them, they wouldn’t have needed the Experiences.
‘How did you escape her?’ Lydia wanted to know.
Mrs Lindstrom released Lydia’s hand. Lydia found herself missing the contact. Her cheeks burned.
‘I didn’t escape. She burned down my house.’
Lydia frowned.
‘But you survived.’
‘I survived. My husband and my children didn’t.’
Lydia gasped. She had thought Henrietta targeted only the lonely. The directionless. The ones with no one to turn to.
Mrs Lindstrom caught her eye and shook her head.
‘Just because you’ve built yourself a family, it doesn’t mean you’re less lonely, Lydia. The ghost doesn’t care about what you have. The ghost only sees the emptiness in your soul. That is what draws her to you.’
And, once she latched onto you, you were lost.
‘How did she tell you she died? Henrietta. Flora. Whatever. Did she ever tell you how she died?’
Lydia’s eyes were fixed on Mrs Lindstrom’s face, as if she could discover the secrets of the universe from her. Mrs Lindstrom’s eyes were blank. As if she was dead herself. Just like Henrietta.
‘House fire,’ Mrs Lindstrom said tightly. ‘Flora died in a house fire.’
Back in the street, Lydia repeated the words. House fire. This was it. The common pattern that tied those playing the Haunted House Experience. Henrietta was doing to them what she claimed had happened to her.
One week and two more visits from Henrietta later, Lydia woke up with the rising of the sun and decided she would no longer be a victim. She would be a survivor.
This time, when she visited the message boards, she brought a solution. She wanted people to know what she was planning. In case anyone needed help with the Haunted House Experience later—or in case it all went wrong. People needed to know why.
‘I’m going to play the Haunted House Experience one last time,’ she announced. ‘I’m going to set fire to the house.’
The replies weren’t late in coming:
Isn’t that a bit extreme?
Hey, that’s sick. She’s just a kid.
You do realize you’d be in it, right?
There was only one reply that Lydia was interested in, though:
No one has done this before.
Lydia smirked. No one had done it before. Which meant she had a chance of succeeding. Because Henrietta, whatever she was, would not see it coming.
Lydia thought long and hard about what she intended to do. It was the only way to break free. She was marked for death otherwise. As for the thing in the game, it was not a child. It was not Henrietta. It was not even human. And, whatever it was, it had been the first to attack.
Her hands were shaking as she plugged herself into the Experience Machine. A feverish kind of frenzy had taken hold of her. Beyond the pounding of her heart, Lydia thought she could hear the whispers of the many victims of the Haunted House Experience urging her on. Wishing her luck. Wishing her to be the one who came out victorious.
Lydia blinked. She was standing in front of the haunted house, and it was night. Her feet were bare and numb. She looked down to find herself standing in the snow. She frowned.
‘It’s never snowed before.’
All her previous days in the Haunted House had been in summer. Did the change have to do with her long absence? Was this Henrietta exerting her anger?
Lydia dismissed the thought. It didn’t matter. She was there to put a stop to Henrietta’s misdeeds once and for all.
She ran down the snowy alley. Her breath stuttered, the cold air like piercing needles in her lungs. Lydia ignored the discomfort, ignored how real it felt. She was sure that, when she got back home, she would find frostbite on her feet.
Lydia sobbed in relief when the door opened. She burst inside and bounded up the stairs, not bothering to close the heavy doors behind her.
There was no sign of Henrietta so far. Lydia ran down long corridors and up several flights of stairs. She had spent enough time in the Experience to have a vague idea of the geography of the Haunted House. And she knew what she was looking for.
Panting, Lydia stopped when she reached the great drawing room. She blinked in the light of so many candles. The fire in the hearth had something wild in it. The wind sang in her ears with the giddiness of triumph. She was so close.
There was no hesitation. No overthinking. She could not afford to think now. If she thought too much about what she wanted to do, Lydia knew that she would panic and back out. And that would be the end of her.
Lydia grabbed two of the burning candles. She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw.
If I do this, there is no going back. Yet, if she didn’t do it, she was the one who would be burning.
She cast one of the candles in the centre of the room. Flames sprang up, multiplying before her eyes. Lydia hesitated, then dropped the second candle. She blinked in the smoke, chest tight. Was this it? Would it be enough?
A shrill cry shattered the stillness of the burning room. Henrietta stood at the threshold, eyes bulging, hair askew.
‘What have you done?’
Lydia took a step back, even though she was getting too close to the flames.
‘What I was meant to do,’ she said. ‘This is what needs to happen. Right?’
She could not bear the betrayal in Henrietta’s eyes. She had not been expecting a confrontation—in fact, she had hoped she would be able to exit the Experience by the time Henrietta realised what was happening.
‘How could you?’
‘You want to steal my life,’ Lydia accused. ‘You wanted to make me live out your death. Only, you didn’t really die, and you won’t this time. Because you’re not really alive, Henrietta. You never were.’
Henrietta was shaking her head in denial.
‘Of course I’m real. Of course I’m alive.’
Despite herself, Lydia felt a twinge of pity.
‘No. You’re a concept that went too far. A simulation that started to believe it was the real thing. Burning down your house won’t make a difference. You’ve never lived, so you cannot die.’
Henrietta stepped over the threshold, right into the flames. She was coming towards Lydia. If she was going down, she would take Lydia down with her. If her life was to be stolen from her, she would make sure Lydia suffered the same fate.
The flames were all around them, and Lydia could not move. She was unable to leave. She was unable to exit the Experience. Henrietta’s eyes found hers, fire reflected in them. As Lydia looked into that dead gaze, she understood the truth. That she might win that day, but only just. Henrietta would always be with her. One way or another.
The greatest question of the decade was whether or not you could die in an Experience. Whether your death in an Experience meant your death in real life. There had been rumours of such deaths, but none of them had been confirmed. Lydia did not intend to be the one to offer proof that you could, indeed, die in such cases.
She backed away against the bookshelf, ignoring the flames, trying not to think about the heat and the smoke and the vengeful howls of the house on fire. They were not real. They had never been real. This was just a game, and it was time for her to stop playing. It was time for her to go home.
She felt Henrietta’s breath against her face, hot as the flames themselves, felt the small icy hands around her throat—and how had she got so tall to reach her, anyway? Lydia opened her eyes, and she no longer saw Henrietta, but a tall, charred figure, disintegrating and then building itself from nothing.
Lydia tore herself from the unnatural touch and fled into the flames, searching for an exit from the room. She ran until she reached the corridor, and the fire followed her. There was something worse than the fire on her heels, though, and Lydia knew she could not stop running.
She tripped on her way down the stairs. Her ankle seemed to explode with sparks of pain. The pain was paralysing, yet the flames were all around, and the thing that had been Henrietta was approaching. Staggering upwards, Lydia limped the rest of the way towards the great doors that still swung open, just as she had left them.
She stumbled, but she did not stop. She ran like a wild thing, like the goddess of fire, like an untamed sprite of old legends. She ran like the first prey ever to be hunted by a nightmare predator. She ran until the chase was everything—all she was, all she would ever be.
Out the door, the cold air engulfing her, protecting her from the heat of the flames. Lydia did not stop, not until she was some distance away. She turned to face the manor, taking in the roaring fire, the roof about to collapse, the black smoke. At one of the windows, a small shadow scratched against the still unbroken glass. Begging to get out.
Lydia watched the house burn, tears stinging her flame touched faced. She watched for a long time, until the image faded, and she was back in the Experience Room once more. There were angry burns on her hands and face, and her ankle was sprained.
Eight years later
Lydia drove through the countryside, her son asleep in the backseat. It had been a long trip through the mountains, but now they were returning home. Not to Lydia’s old apartment of long ago. She had sold that a few weeks after her final confrontation with Henrietta.
The apartment was probably safe after Lydia’s desperate attempt to free herself from the Haunted House Experience. Yet Lydia had thought she could see Henrietta everywhere. She had needed a different place to live. A different life.
Lydia tapped her hand on the steering wheel. She frowned at the sunset. She never liked being in isolated places after dusk.
The house appeared out of nowhere. Lydia gulped as she looked up at it, the threatening walls looming over her in the greying light. She pulled over almost automatically.
It could not be, she tried to tell herself. It just looked like the Haunted House. It just reminded her of it. That was all.
Drive past, she told herself. Do not look at it. Do not think about it.
Even as Lydia was telling herself to leave and forget about the house, she was unfastening her seatbelt and fumbling with the door.
Her son stirred and half opened his eyes.
‘Mom? What is it? Are we home yet?’
Lydia plastered a reassuring smile to her face.
‘I just need to check something real quick. Go back to sleep, Henry. I’ll be right back.’
In front of the blackened house, Lydia felt strange, using her son’s name. She had told herself when he was born that the name had nothing to do with Henrietta the ghost and everything to do with Henrietta her grandmother’s friend. The manor made her question previous decisions. It reminded her that she had never let go of Henrietta—not even in her new life.
Lydia walked up the path that led to the manor. That night from ten years back was fresh in her mind. She could see herself running through the snow. She could feel the ice and the flames. She quickened her pace, as if to outrun her memories, even though she was heading in the wrong direction for that.
The doors were wide open. Lydia hesitated, then stepped over the threshold, expecting something to dismantle her world entirely.
‘Henrietta?’ she whispered.
Lydia waited, heart fluttering, but the house remained silent. She rejected the idea of simply going back and riding away. Instead, she headed up the stairs.
There was no mistaking the sounds of fire all around her. What Lydia could not understand was the reason the manor was still standing. The fire must have broken out a long time ago. Why had no one done something with the place by now?
Lydia could see signs of recent habitation. Squatters, perhaps. Or ghost hunters. What surprised her was that some of the original objects from the house were still there. Some of them were burnt, but some seemed to have escaped the fire with only minimal damage. And yet, no one had taken them.
It felt like a trap. Like Lydia had been expected to find that place all along. Cold and numb, Lydia searched through the house. She stopped when she saw an overturned picture frame. She picked it up with trembling fingers and turned it over.
The black-and-white photograph showed a young girl staring solemnly at the camera. Lydia had not seen her in ten years, but she would have been able to recognise her anywhere.
‘Henrietta,’ she whispered.
Lydia swayed, dizzy. The room became too small for her. The walls were threatening to crush her. She closed her eyes to steady herself but did not let go of the picture.
When Lydia left the burned-out house, she was clutching the picture to her chest.
Lydia drove carefully, eyes fixed on the road. Henry was asleep again. Lydia hardly dared to glance at him, afraid she might see Henrietta’s features superimposed on his own.
Afraid to discover that she had never left the Haunted House Experience, that Henrietta had captured her without Lydia noticing, and the rest of her life since the night of the fire had been nothing more than a dream in the mind of a machine.
Afraid that the real Lydia was not there, driving through the countryside with her sleeping son, but still in her old apartment, hooked up to the Experience Machine, endlessly playing the Haunted House Experience that had now become something else.
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