Page 3 of Stay Scared

I know the name because anyone who works in horror knows it.

Crimson Night operated for six weekends three years ago inside an amusement park abandoned after a ride accident and a bankruptcy fight. The public never received an address. Guests were transported from a secondary location after signing nondisclosure agreements, and staff confiscated phones before entry. Anonymous reviews appeared afterward, then some of them disappeared. The attraction closed, but the stories survived it.

One participant reportedly left in an ambulance. A performer vanished before the final weekend. The worst account claimed a guest had been kept inside after the event should have ended. Decay Brigade never explained what happened. I wrote about Crimson Night twice and never found enough evidence to publish either piece.

Now they are in my inbox.

I scroll farther down and find the completion fee: $25,000. That is enough money to make this sound slightly less like a terrible idea.

Jessa wants an exclusive strong enough to drag my numbers back up before December. My audience wants proof that I can still be frightened. Crimson Night wants one participant on Halloween night and already knows exactly where to find me.

I check the timestamp and stare at it long enough to make sure I haven’t misread the numbers. The invitation arrived before I started searching for them.

You still stay up too late.

My pulse spikes. Maybe my mind is already inventing connections, but when I check my phone again, the message from the unknown number is gone.

I turn back to the invitation. It has no sender, yet it contains my full name and an offer for a private overnight experience from a company famous for knowing too much about its guests. I click the attachment, and thirty-two pages load onto the screen.

The first page contains a warning so large that nobody could claim to have missed it.

CRIMSON NIGHT DOES NOT RECOGNIZE PARTICIPANT SAFE WORDS.

I read the sentence twice, then scroll to the next page.

Chapter 2

The waiver fills my monitor with thirty-two pages of narrow text beneath a title polished enough to make the threat look expensive.

CRIMSON NIGHT PARTICIPANT AGREEMENT.

The warning beneath it is larger.

THIS ATTRACTION DOES NOT RECOGNIZE PARTICIPANT SAFE WORDS.

I read it twice. Twenty-five thousand dollars if I remain inside until dawn. Exclusive access to the footage afterward, with publication rights no other creator gets. The money could keep Jessa from cutting my guarantee before December, and the footage could give my audience what they keep demanding: proof that I can still be frightened.

I return to the waiver. The early pages cover restraints, blindfolds, isolation, altered routes, and personalized psychological material. The language stays clinical until page five.

VERBAL REFUSAL MAY BE TREATED AS PART OF THE PERFORMANCE.

Phrases like “stop” and “let me go” will not necessarily end a scene.

Once I enter, ordinary refusal doesn’t automatically stop the attraction. Resistance can become part of whatever scene they have built around me, and the operators decide when intervention is necessary. There’s no safe word or kill switch, and I can’t end it from inside.

I open another tab and search Crimson Night Decay Brigade. Most of what survives consists of reposted videos, archived forums, and screenshots of articles that disappeared years ago.

I click a compilation with four million views. A woman with black lipstick sits in the driver’s seat of a parked car, eyeliner smudged beneath one eye.

“I just left,” she says. “My hands are still doing this.”

She holds them toward the camera. Her fingers refuse to stay flat.

“They knew things about me that I never put online.” She looks toward the passenger window. “They knew what my brother, who died seven years ago, used to call me.”

The clip ends, and the next video shows a man washing theatrical blood from the back of his neck in a bathroom mirror.

“The actors remember you,” he says. “This is different than anything else I’ve ever experienced.” He leans toward his phone. “I signed up again before I got home.”