6

“It's been a while,” Janice remarked as the guard brought her to the table. Byron noticed she wasn't tapping her fingers or jiggling her leg this time. Just looking straight at him, eyes expressionless, voice flat.

“A couple of weeks,” he said, glancing up at the two-way observation window and smiled at the officers he assumed were watching.

She nodded. 

“I want to ask you about the House today, if that's alright. You don't even have to talk about what happened there, not yet.”

“Then what about it?”

“Why did you go there, what drew you and your friends to it? You said earlier that it was a fitting last hurrah, but I want to understand why.”

“Alright,” Janice said and began to tell her story.

***

“When we were kids, we lived for Halloween. We didn't care about the candy, spooky movies, the cider, or any of that stuff, we were in it for the haunts. For one month, there were things to do, worlds to get lost in that broke the boredom of our day-to-day lives. It wasn't even about being scared, not really, but it was the chance to step outside the normal and live a little. 

This probably makes no sense to you, but I'm just telling it like it is. We were haunted house fanatics as kids. 

As we grew older, we still went to those things, though a lot of them lost their luster as we got more cynical. We began to seek out other things, other fairylands that could capture us, even if just for a moment. 

For a while, we immersed ourselves in the club scene. Frequenting the more 'out there' spots like Goth clubs, Industrial clubs, secret clubs that required scavenger hunting and puzzle-solving to find all the strange, wonderful things extremely rich young people with curiosity could find in the Big Apple. A lot of these places were eighteen and up, but it was disturbingly easy to get a fake ID back then. I wonder if it's harder for kids now, with Homeland Security becoming such a big thing? When we were kids, it was as simple as passing a few hundred to “a guy”. I'll have to ask some of the younger inmates. 

Anyway, after a while, the club thing got old too. There were only so many times you could dance with the same group of people to the same songs, and look at the creepy pieces of art the club owners hung on the walls. 

We needed something else to get lost in, and it was at one of these clubs, a place called The Asylum, we first heard about site-specific interactive theater. Finally, we thought, this was just the thing that would break through our seemingly endless boredom. Something big and beautiful and different to break through the haze.”