 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. My inaugural trip to a haunted attraction as a boy was to a farm-themed hay maze with all the scarecrows and old barns and cheap animatronic crows with red eyes you might expect. At the end of it, a theater kid dressed as a hillbilly farmer would chase you to the exit with a cap shotgun. Get out of here, you dang kids, he'd say. In an appellation drawl that was hysterically overdone, I'm coming for you, y'all better run! At a place was cheap and low-budget and entirely ridiculous, and I fell in love with it all the same. So a year later we visited another place, Miss Wretched's House of Horrors, it was called I think, down on Gardersdale. And that was an equally cheesy haunted mansion with pop-out skeletons and suits of armor that dropped their rubber axes near your feet, which would trigger an often off-time clang sound from poorly-hidden speakers. I loved that experience too. At my insistence we got fake IDs the year after that, and with those gained admittance to the big kid haunt that was all the rage at the time, it was called Dark House. I remember the blood-red vampiric font above the door quite clearly, and it was my first run-in with professional actors and dirty words and pitch-black hauls and chainsaws. Upon completion, fifteen-year-old me felt like he'd become a man. But as the years wore on, attractions like these lost their edge, and I tried to up the ante a bit. Truly, I did. I went out of town on road trips to all the spookiest places in the state and beyond as soon as I was old enough. Among the locales checked off in this period were various real haunted houses in which nothing happened, several of those win a prize if you last the night spooks, in which I won simply by falling asleep, and two of those infamous adult haunted houses in Vegas, where you have to sign a waiver and be okay with extensive but not really extensive physical contact. Those were effective, to be sure, but after my second visit to one of those places, even those lost their merit in my eyes. I was starving for a legitimate scare by age twenty-seven, and that's when on a deep web forum for like-minded adrenaline junkies, I first heard about an attraction known as Labyrinth. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here, you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness, I'm sharing a story recommended to me by a fellow Weirdo family member. It's from professional writer and screenwriter Jesse Clark, and it's called Never Accept an Invitation to Labyrinth. Now, fold your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Labyrinth was mentioned almost passively by another user, and when I pressed them for further information, the response was frustratingly vague. Can't tell too much, they'd said. They contact you if you want in. Whatever. In my experience, there was rarely ever a payoff frightening enough to justify that type of gimmicky cloak and dagger nonsense. I closed the forum and forgot about it entirely by the end of the week. And then came the black envelope. Inside that was a black letter, appropriately enough, typed tastefully on its inner sleeve is said the word Labyrinth, and beneath this is provided an address and a date and time. Given its name, I would expect Labyrinth to be a maze of sorts, or one of those escape rooms with a horror bent. But instead, I found myself staring up at a palatial, chateau-esque estate of impossible size, with spires and towers and wings and various other gratuitous additions to the structure. It was truly magnificent. I'd visited North Carolina's Biltmore once, and that estate wasn't any more impressive than the one before me. On the door to the place was a second black letter that read simply Labyrinth, Find the Heart to Escape. And despite my initial jaded skepticism, I now found myself quite intrigued. In the context of the location, I now found these vague letters more tasteful and reserved than gimmicky. So it was with a strange optimism that I entered the place and shut the door behind me. It locked on its own with a faint click. There was no mechanism on its interior to unfasten it from what I could see. The interior of the place was every inch as magnificently constructed and furnished as the outside would suggest. It was regal and immaculately clean, and it was empty. Hello? I said. An echo responded. I waited a bit before I spoke again. I'm Andrew Owens, got a letter in the mail yesterday, said to come here today at three, so here I am. Nothing. I checked my phone for the time and it agreed with my punctuality. I guess this is the game? I thought back to the letter. Find the heart to escape, it said. It was short. It was vague. It was open to interpretation. And I am used on its possible meanings and reasoned that I had to somehow prove my courage, my heart, to be allowed out. The isolation was a fresh twist. And so was that creeping thought that if something goes wrong there is nobody here to help. It made me a bit afraid, and I loved it. I decided to explore. In no particular order of my visiting them, the mansion had on its first floor and in the immediate vicinity of its parlor, a coat room, a sitting room that featured both two separate fireplaces and multiple redundant couch and table furniture sets, a grand study with a gorgeous multi-thousand-dollar mahogany desk by the window and more books in its floor-to-ceiling shelves than all but the largest public libraries in every single private collection I had ever heard of, a billiard room, a grand banquet hall with filled wine goblets at every seat of its table, a kitchen behind that with a fresh bowl of fruit on the counter, and a gallery in which various regal-painted portraits of young and beautiful people were hung, who I assumed to be either the owners of the estate or relatives of those owners, although I didn't stop to see if there were any informative plaques. A centerpiece portrait of a woman in a blue dress was particularly striking. Striking, but not frightening. Now that I was not particularly appreciative of. I'd come here for a thrill, had I not, but the magnificence of this place aside, I wasn't sure what made it a fearful experience and not just an elaborate puzzle. But I got my answer shortly enough. I moved from the billiard room to the coat room, and from the coat room to a long hallway that was, like the others, fit with cushioned benches on the sides of it and Persian rugs and a grand-player piano that provided a pleasant enough tune and the only sound beside my own footsteps. Then I opened the door at the end of that hallway and found myself, bizarrely enough, back in the billiard room. I stopped cold. Now, I hadn't taken so much as a single turn since I'd arrived at the building, much less in the quick minute since the last time I'd been in that room, but here I was all the same. The first thought I had was, okay, so that's the twist then, they build identical rooms to create an illusion of going in circles. But that theory was frustrated by the fact that everything matched. Everything, from the pattern of the balls on the tables to the order of the cues in the rack to the way the chalk was placed on the windowsill and the stain that I'd left there. I then reasoned, it's an architectural trick, I think. The halls are curved ever so slightly to give the impression of being straight when, in reality, they're turning you every which way and circling you back around to other rooms, hence the name Labyrinth. I was impressed, truly, genuinely impressed. Not scared, really, but I'd been tricked and surprised, and even a seasoned critic like myself had to admit that the twist was indeed effective. Maybe this place isn't such a dud after all. So I moved through the room and opened the door at the far end that led back into the hallway. And I walked straight into the old study that I'd been in 15 minutes and 6 rooms earlier. My heartbeat skipped a step and, for the first time, I was unable to muster up any explanation at all to explain this phenomenon. No amount of subtle hallway twisting could account for this. I decided at least to test the extent of the trick, while still standing in the billiard room, I shut the door and opened it again to find not the study, but a new hallway instead. When I shut it a third time, I opened it to find a bedroom, and after the fourth such attempt, I was staring into the kitchen. More revelations followed. That place, while otherwise identical to its former self, was beginning to decay. I slid my finger across the surface of a kitchen counter and rubbed it against my thumb. Dust sprinkled onto my trousers. Dust, and not a negligible amount of it, in a room I'd noted earlier for its immaculate cleanliness. I felt that old damn dread mounting up, and this time I was powerless to swallow it. And the door there led me not into the banquet hall, but into the sitting room again. And like the kitchen before it, it was dirtier than it was before. Not filthy, but it was certainly lived in. A crooked picture frame. A pillow on the floor. Cup rings on the table. The blanket that had been neatly folded on the couch the first time I'd been here was now crumpled up against the arm of the seat. It was then, though, that I got an idea. Leave the door open behind me to keep open an avenue of escape. The rooms can't change if the doors are open, right? So I left it hanging halfway and moved to the door at the other end of the living room. But I stopped when I reached it. What awaited me wasn't the billiard room or the kitchen or the gallery of the bedroom, but the sitting room again, the very same room in which I stood, even filthier now. And standing in the door at the far end was myself again, leaning halfway through the threshold in what was a perfect mirror of my exact stance and exactly my demeanor. I turned around behind me then, and sure enough, I could see myself there too, looking back into another version of what was no doubt the same room from the door I had just come through. Hello? I and a chorus of me's said at the same time. I slammed the door in a panic when that happened and threw into action my second plan, a forced breakout through the window at the end of the room. I picked up the chair and let out a shouted, I'm done with this place, and then I hurled the chair at full strength into the glass. It bounced off without so much as scratching it and tumbled onto its side. I turned around to lift it up again for a second toss, but I stopped before I did. Sitting, propped up on its two ends on the surface of the table and clean amidst all the dust, was a third black letter. My doc agrees that I need to lose a few pounds. I knew that going in, but he also told me that the meds I'm taking from my type 2 diabetes aren't going to do me much good if I finish each meal with ice cream or cheesecake. I kind of knew that in advance too. But cutting back on carbs and sugars is a lot easier said than done. I've tried a lot of protein bars while on the road, but I swear it's like eating non-sweetened chocolate-dusted particle board. But now I travel with built bars. Built bars taste like candy bars. In fact, I'm now using them for my dessert. And in about 150 calories per bar, less than 3 grams of sugar, up to 19 grams of protein, I can satisfy my sweet cravings guilt-free. Visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Built in Try a Box. You can go for a variety pack of several flavors to try or pick and choose to build a box of your own. Use the promo code WeirdDarkness at checkout and get 10% off your entire purchase. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Built. Birthdays. The presents. The friends. The games. The silly hats and noisemakers. What's not to love? But no birthday is complete without a cake. Am I right? And even as an adult, when you take a bite of birthday cake, those memories just come flooding back like they were yesterday. But if you're watching your calories, sugars, carbs, well, birthday cake is off the menu. Until now. I just received the newest flavor from Built bars, birthday cake, puff. This is a protein bar with 16 grams of protein. Low calories, low sugar, but I swear it is like eating a piece of moist birthday cake. You can taste the cake, the frosting, even the candy sprinkles with the satisfying little crunch they give you. If you miss birthday cake, or if you're looking for a healthier option to get your birthday cake fixed, you'll want to grab this limited release protein bar before they run out. Visit WeirdDarkness.com slash Built and look in the limited release section for Birthday Cake Puff. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Built and use the promo code WeirdDarkness all one word to get 10% off your entire purchase. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash Built and use the promo code WeirdDarkness. Sitting prompt up on its two ends. On the surface of the table and clean amidst all the dust was a third black letter. No cheating it read. Find the heart to escape. I blinked. I felt sick. I felt my heartbeat in my throat and I backed up and then after a brief pause I began to run. Through door after door I went to find the parlor but it was a fruitless effort. The billiard room led to the banquet hall, to the coat room, to the portrait gallery, to the bedroom and each chamber entered featured more disorder and more ruin and more decay than the ones before. The wood had rotted, the light bulbs were dead, there were cobwebs and spiders in the corners, but not once did the parlor present itself. And after the third pass through the study I collapsed by the leg of the desk to catch my breath. But it was then in a bizarre stroke of luck that I looked to the other end of the room and saw that one of the grand bookshelves had snapped under the weight of age and collapsed spilling its books to the ground and crushing a corpse. It was old I realized when I inspected the body up close. It looked like the thing had laid there for decades by the time I found it. Long enough for the smell to wash away and for the clothes to rot off. But in its hand was what appeared to be a dust-covered book of sorts, or a tome or a collection of notes. I picked it up and flipped it open and I began to read, and after some searching I found the following relevant passage. Found the pattern to the rooms, took me forever but I found it. Just got to make sure to run to the door when I am done. Beneath that there was a scribbled diagram of sorts where a task in a certain room would lead to another. Light fireplace in living room, go to kitchen. Eat from the fruit bowl, go to the pool room. Pocket the eight ball, go to the coat room. Find the key in the pocket of the right coat, go to the banquet hall. Drink from the chalice, go to the portrait gallery. Make it through, go to the study. Spin the globe to match the… And the notes ceased at that precise moment. I can only imagine it was then that the shelf fell, perhaps purposefully by some mechanism or perhaps because of sheer age and the absence of maintenance and crushed the author. How long they'd laid here I couldn't tell, and at the moment, shamefully, I didn't quite care. I was simply worried about avoiding the same fate for myself. So I crept around the study and to the desk, and while I did, the floor creaked and it moaned and it protested with each and every step. But I made it, luckily, and when I did I placed my hand on the globe and spun it once without purpose. Match the globe to the… what? I searched for a bit before I saw an old 18th century cartographer's map, yellowed and weathered and worn like the globe, and ripped a bit on the far edges of it, at the far end of the room and above another shelf. I looked back down at the globe and nudged it left until both it and the map depicted the new world in the middle. I guess that's good enough. And just then, something hit my head, whack, and tumbled to the floor. I looked at the ground to find a book there, and when I looked up just in time for another book to fly from the other listing shelf and hit me in the forehead, whack, then came another book, and another, and another. It quickly became impractical to dodge them all. I simply put my hands over my head and made for the exit, and as soon as I did the trickle of falling books became a stream and that stream became a waterfall and that waterfall became an avalanche that consumed the room utterly. From every shelf of every standing case in the room books flew off the shelves and they began to pool on the ground before filling it up and flooding it. And the torrent rose like the ocean tide, and I climbed over the piling mountain of the stuff and was battered hideously as I did. My vision swam. My ribs cracked. I had the wind knocked out of me no fewer than three times, and by the time I reached the far end of the room nearest the exit, a tidal wave of books and encyclopedias and tomes and leatherbound and hardback collections had reached its crest and began to crash down in my direction with a tremendous and simply earth-shattering crash. I dodged left and to the door, and seconds before I was consumed, I threw it open and tumbled unceremoniously into the next room and kicked it shut with a slamming click. When I did, oddly, not a sound could be heard from the other side. No falling books or setting shelves or breaking things. It was as if all that had been there in the first place was nothing at all. I gave myself a once-over and a quick pat-down to make sure nothing broken or bruised mercifully enough, and I allowed myself to rest and breathe. Holy, okay, okay, I'm okay, I'm here. I made it. After a moment more of rest and regrouping, I looked around the sitting room I'd already been in multiple times, and I remembered the instructions from the notes. Light the fireplace in the living room. Okay, easy enough, right? Just need matches and wood or something. I looked around the room and found old newspapers and kindling already in the floor of the fireplace. Above the mantle were matches. I took the last one from the box and swept it across the edge, and it produced for me a small flame. I tossed it into the pit. But before I could even begin to make for the kitchen, that flame caught and roared with stunning speed. Then a moment later, there was another swoosh. I whirled around and found the other fireplace in the room had been ignited too, and before I could process this development, its flames spread just as quickly and just as menacingly as the ones from the first, and they leapt out of the gate and caught on the ratty old carpet and began to climb. The chimneys in this dilapidated place had been so choked with soot, too, that the smoke spread right out into the living room and began to fill it up. I hit the ground when I noticed this, and I began to crawl. But the fire was far, far faster than I was. Within a minute, it had consumed the couch closest to the door. Then it reached the table, and that old untreated wood went up all at once, and cracked and crumbled and fell to ash. And soon I felt those flames licking at my legs and bearing down on my back, and I gave up any effort to crawl and stood up to begin to run. I leapt over the second couch and the table there, just as the ceiling cracked and tumbled in behind me. But when I reached the other furniture, the flames from the second fireplace that had already eaten it up caught on my trousers and climbed up the rest of me, too. I was engulfed in fire in seconds flat, and all of my screaming and all my thrashing produced nothing for me then. Soon my hair was singed off, my clothes burned away, and my skin itself began to bubble and boil and char and melt. It was excruciating to an indescribable degree, but I knew there would be water in the kitchen, so with the last ounce of my strength I stumbled to the door and opened and entered it and shut it behind me. And I stopped, and I padded myself down for the second time. I could breathe, I realized. I could breathe, and I had hair and hell I was utterly and completely untouched by fire. Even my clothes were only as unkempt as they normally were. I leaned up against the door and closed my eyes and regrouped again. I opened my eyes. I was in the kitchen, as expected, and sure enough it was as filthy and dilapidated as the rooms before it, if not considerably more so. The lights had long since snuffed out, and the wood was old and it was molded and rotted through, and the various hanging pots and all the appliances throughout were lopsided and broken. And then I saw my objective on the counter. Eat from the fruit bowl, then go to the pool room. And no longer was that bowl filled with fresh produce, either. Instead, its contents were little more than molded, thoroughly rotted mush, a cloud of flies buzzed above and around it. I said aloud, Hell no, nope, no way. But I knew even as I spoke, I had no other way to escape. I approached the bowl and squeezed my eyes shut tight and reached into it, past the swarming, feasting insects, and I grabbed what felt like it had once been an apple. And then I breathed in and out several times and told myself, It's temporary like the fire. And I held my nose and ate the thing and chewed it faster than I could taste and swallowed it whole. To say the fruit was simply expired would be a profound understatement. It was filthy and so putrid and so thoroughly rancid that at least half of it stuck to my teeth and required me to lick it off or pull it out with my bare hands. I heaved, I wretched, I nearly threw up, but stopped myself before I did. Unsure if doing so would void my accomplishment and require me to start the game over or eat more from the bowl or feast on my own vomit. So I swallowed the stuff and ran to the door and slammed it shut behind me. Fortunately labyrinth was merciful enough to purge that taste too. But the memory remained and once I was confident the contents of that stuff were out of my stomach, I released what wasn't yet and vomited onto the floor in a series of splats. Not like it did much for the decor of the place one way or the other. The billiard room was, like the others before it, of course, profoundly decayed. The ceiling here had caved in almost entirely and the pool table on which I had to pocket the eight-ball, if memory served, was old and feltless. And while it had a stick on it, though, there were no billiard balls at all. Under my breath I mumbled off crying out loud as the parameters of the upcoming search began to dawn on me. But then I heard something in the far corner of the room that sounded like something wet, a slurping maybe or a sucking or a licking. I turned to look and there were the balls at least, at the feet of an enormous, likely rabid, mange-ridden mastiff that had been feasting on them in the absence of proper food. Fortunately, the thing was fastened to the desk in the back, but how much yield the chain had I was unsure. It saw me a second later, and when it did, it stood up and stared, and for a long moment we did little else but eye each other, up and down and sideways. I harbored few illusions about its intentions, with all its bared teeth and its aggressive stance and those ropes of spit hanging from its jowls. Before making a move I ran through a series of plans that would ideally get me in possession of the eight ball without having to wrestle it out of the thing's paws. Among the rejected ideas were one in which I used a pool cue at the very least beat the dog unconscious from a distance before making for the ball, and one in which I tried somehow to distract it. Eventually, though, I decided to use a cue not to mess with the mastiff at all, but to try and roll the ball away from it. Any direction I could get them to move would be a victory, I reasoned. So, after tossing the dog a piece of wood to bite on, I knelt down and began to poke at the pile of slobber-covered billiard pieces. They scattered, but I was so focused tapping the eight on its head and nudging it towards me that I didn't pay enough attention to the dog at all. It had ignored the wood, it turned out, and it lunged for my cue and grabbed it in its jaws and tossed it and me with it into the wall. I tumbled back onto the floor and before I could regroup that damn snarling barking dog was bearing down on me with full speed and monstrous demonic aggression. Its chain kept it from my neck at the very least, but after a panicked struggle it managed to clamp down onto my ankle and drag me with me howling and grasping for ground and digging into the wooden floorboards with my nails to no avail back to its corner. Two things happened that worked in my favor then. First, our wrestling sent the billiard pieces across the floor, the eight ball with them, and second, I managed to flip around and crack the beast in the jaw with my good foot before it got me back far enough to deliver a mortal strike. I broke free after that and I limped over to the eight ball and placed it on the table and fetched a fresh cue from the wall. I lined up the shot, come on baby, come on, come on, come on, and knocked it in. Yes! But a half second later the dog broke free of its chain and bound it over in my direction. I had an olympic second to react. I flipped the table over to startle the mastiff and made a mad dash for the exit while it made a mad dash for me. But it reached me first, unfortunately, and it snarled and snapped and I held it by the throat an inch from mine. Its breath stunk like the end of the world, like rendered flesh and bone and disease and rot. I gagged and pushed and scrambled back towards the door and it pounced again and knocked me back down and began biting my bad leg for a second time. I screamed and I flailed and my hand found a pool cue that had snapped under the toppled table. I grabbed it and jammed it into the dog's mouth and scrambled free while it yelped and pawed at its wound. I didn't wait around to see how or if it released the wood. I simply limped into the coat room and slammed the door shut. The pain subsided. Three rooms left. Three rooms left, three rooms left. I opened my eyes after a bit and gave myself another pat down for good measure. I was intact. The corpse in the study indicated that these hazards weren't mere illusions, but things did at least appear to reset themselves whenever a door was closed, assuming the player was on the far side of it. I looked around the coat room, a single naked bulb flickered in the center of the ceiling and provided just enough light to illuminate the coats, but not the floor. I didn't pay much mind to that, though, once I remember the instructions for proceeding. Find the key in the pocket of the right coat. Well naturally there were dozens and dozens and dozens of coats hanging in that place, leather and tweed and business attire and windbreakers and dusters and countless other varieties. I started with the closest one. Nothing in that pocket but lint. The same thing awaited me in the pockets of the next four coats, too. But it wasn't until the fifth that I understood it wasn't lint at all. Ow, what the- I yanked my hand out of the pocket and found there a red welp ringed and with a puncture wound in the center of it. I blinked, then I turned back to the coat and took it off its hanger and held it upside down until the contents of its pockets were emptied. I heard no clang indicative of a key hitting the floor, but even in the poor lighting I could see the spider hit the ground and scurry off into the shadows. I looked at my hand. It had begun to swell and fester and little more than 10 seconds had passed since I'd been bitten. From that point forward I opted to empty out the coats rather than reach into the pockets, and without fail each and every one of them held at least one and as many as four spiders per pocket. By the twentieth coat there was a constant skittering around me as the horde swept across the floor to and fro and this way and that and over my boots and up my legs. Still no sign of the key, and by then I was losing my nerve. Ah son of a- I grabbed at my forearm and winced and found there another bite. The culprit had fled before I could return the favor. On my hand the initial wound had swelled to the point that the whole limb felt heavy and on my legs and ankles were a multitude more such incisions. Whatever species of arachnid this was they carried extremely potent venom in their fangs and quick acting stuff to boot. I became sluggish after a dozen or so bites and then I began to lose control of my muscles. I tripped over my feet, my breathing slowed and by the time I found the key in the right side pocket of the forty first coat I checked I counted them as I went I could hardly see straight at all. I caught the thing but I collapsed no sooner than I did. And then came the horde. From the shadows behind me and in front of me and on both sides and above me the spiders swarmed. Adrenaline alone gave me the strength to get back up to my feet but even that was a challenge beyond anything I had encountered thus far. My body was covered in welts and stinging bites from head to toe. There were spiders on my hands, there were spiders in my shoes, there were spiders in my clothes too all throughout and on my neck and on and in my face. Each and every one of the things was biting and feasting as I lumbered clumsily to the door. Each step felt like a mile and by the time I thumped my right hand onto the knob and managed after excruciating effort to insert the key miraculously I never once dropped it doing so would undoubtedly be a death sentence the things were in my ears and in my nose and in my mouth. I tried to grit my teeth but so inflamed were all the facial muscles required for that task. I was unable to stop the things from pouring into the opening and down my throat. I couldn't even gag. All I could do was throw every last inch of strength left in my bones to the task of turning the knob and pulling open the door with wrists so beaten and so red and so swollen that doing so felt like shattering bones. And when it was open I then had to take steps with feet so enlarged that my shoes themselves felt ready to burst. The light from the next room, what little of it there was spilled into the coat room and illuminated the bones of at least a dozen other souls who had also never made it. I slammed the door shut behind me and collapsed and I gasped for air. As had always been the case, the wounds reset themselves and I was in good health. Not a single spider crawled on my skin or through my ears or underneath my clothes. But like with the rancid fruit, the memory remained. I screamed, What the hell is this place, huh? There was no answer to that, of course. So in my rage, I walked up to the banquet hall table and grabbed the closest chair and tossed the thing with all of my strength across the surface. Plates and cups flew to the ground and broke there in a thousand pieces among all the other debris. The chair I had thrown simply tumbled across the length of the table and stopped at last near the other end of it. A goblet stood fast at the far side untouched and unweathered. Drink from the chalice then to the portrait gallery. I didn't move for some time. I simply stared at the thing and felt it was doing the same to me. Not unlike the dog and I was unable to keep my mind from running wild through the possibilities of what it might contain. Rancid milk, I thought, or a cup of insects, maybe, or fresh blood. And at that point I was so thoroughly exhausted and disheartened that the mere thought of drinking such vile content brought me to tears. But I put one foot in front of the other anyway and marched over to it. And although it was likely ill-advised, I peered inside. It looked like wine, I saw. So I smelled it and it smelled like wine. Then I picked up the goblet and swished the drink around a bit and saw it had the same consistency as wine too. I wiped my eyes and set my resolve and made sure to locate the exit, behind me and to the left, and then held my nose and drank the stuff. It tasted sweet, not like any form of alcohol as I had expected, but sweet and thick and cool and refreshing. I downed the drink in its entirety. Then I wiped my mouth and no sooner did I turn towards the exit and form the thought that was way too easy, what's the catch? Then I noticed that there were now, curiously enough, two exits. Not two exits in any concrete way, but with my vision swimming the way it was, I realized there were two of everything, really, two doors, two pairs of feet, four hands, two tables, two goblets. I thought, huh, that's weird. Then I collapsed onto the ground and was all at once and once again utterly unable to coordinate my movement and to think and to make sense of sight and to breathe. It was punishingly aching hard to breathe. In fact, each breath I drew brought fire with it, and before long the poison had swollen shut my throat until no air could pass through it at all. I tried to gasp for air, but couldn't. I tried to reach into my mouth and pry open the airway, but got nowhere in that endeavor either. I wretched and convulsed and seized and clawed at my throat and made all the motions of gasping desperately without receiving any air at all. The last coherent thought I had was that, as usual, salvation could be reached at the exit and nowhere else. So with my body in revolt I commanded it up and then I stumbled and wobbled and tilted and fell in the direction of that door and picked myself up and fell again, but a bit closer this time and with a knee full of splinters. Soon it hurt to take in even what little light there was in that damned room and every movement I made was agonizing and cumbersome and burdened, but I'd come too far to give in now. Just as I began to black out, I reached the door and threw it open and fell through. Only when I slammed it shut could I breathe again. Haven't broken me yet, you assholes. Not yet. The portrait gallery awaited me now. Make it through. By now I had purged myself of illusions that any room in this demented place would be easy to solve, and the more vague the instructions, the more difficult they'd be to follow. So I looked around for potential hazards and saw none. There were no spiders. There were no dogs. There were no fires, and there were no poisons or falling books either. There wasn't even proper darkness in that place. It was as old and as broken as any room before it, but a hole in the ceiling allowed the moonlight to pour in and bathe it. And in that light all there was before me was a hallway lined with aged portraits. So I began to walk forward, slowly and deliberately, and with every hair on my neck and arms standing straight on up. At first there truly was nothing to fear. But then I turned my attention to the paintings themselves, and I realized that they appeared to be aging. When I stopped, so did that process, but if I moved so much as an inch toward the end of the room, which itself was shrouded in darkness so thoroughly at the bottom I couldn't see any door at all, then the figures would age. It wasn't profound or rapid really, just little things here and there. A new wrinkle would appear, or their clothes would lose just a bit of their luster. The only one I could see for the entirety of my walk, though, was that mighty centerpiece ahead of the woman in blue. She aged a year a step as I walked. When I entered the room she was young and youthful and vibrant with the sun at her back and a sparkling dress that matched the sky. But halfway through the room, even that sky had grown gray. Her hair was nearly white, her smile had fallen to a more tired countenance, and her dress was old and wrinkled and worn and faded. She looked terribly, terribly sad, and all at once I got the impression that I was killing her myself that every step I took brought her closer to death. I paused for a breather after that, and for a time we stared at each other as I rested. I almost wished I could tell her how sorry I was. I took another aching step forward. Almost there, I told myself, almost out. My hips stung. My breathing was heavy, yet again, although for entirely different reasons, and I had begun to sweat. I rubbed my hand across my forehead in my smooth scalp and did my best to pace my… Why is my scalp smooth? I patted the top of my head with both hands. Nothing up there but skin. Then I looked at my hands. They had aged profoundly in just the few minutes since I had entered this place. Wrinkled and veiny and liverspotted and simply old. And all at once I was overwhelmed with dread and fear and anger and confusion. I looked back but knew there was nothing for me there. I could only go forward, but each step brought more pain and more anguish. My joints ached. My eyes became tired. I looked back up to the portrait at the three quarters mark and saw the woman there was now in her eighties or nineties at the door of death and without even the resolve to frown. I pressed forward and looked down and saw my clothes too had begun to weather in age. I now wore rags and barely that. It was an exponential falling apart. In the beginning of the room, each step aged me a month. Then a month became two months and that became three. By the middle of the place I aged a year for each step and now, now every footfall brought with it a decade or more. Soon I could no longer stand at all but merely crawl. My elbows shook and they wobbled and at last still a mere two or three running strides from where I imagined the door to be. It was still too dark to make out what waited in those shadows but in eternity away in my condition I collapsed. There was nothing left. I looked up one final time at the painting. All the flesh was gone, only bones and dirt remained and then I too was little more than bones. Paranormal experiences encountering extraterrestrials, extraordinary states of consciousness, spiritual phenomenon encounters with non-human entities that can't be explained by science. These stories of what people have come across are ubiquitous here on Weird Darkness and often those who've had these encounters choose to stay quiet and not even tell close friends or family out of fear of ridicule and they suffer silently trying to deal with the internal horror of what they've experienced. If I'm describing you or someone you know, there is now a place you can turn to for professional counseling from experts who, unlike others in their field, are open to the paranormal, supernatural and extraterrestrial experiences of others and they're not there to explain away your experience but to help you recover from it and move forward with living. I'm referring to the Opus Network. If you want to reach out for help or learn more, look for the Opus Network towards the bottom of the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. The only thing more spooky than Halloween in October is Spooky Empire. Join me October 27th through the 29th in Orlando, Florida to meet horror celebrities like a nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger, Robert England, and co-star Heather Langenkamp. Hellraiser's Doug Pinhead Bradley will be there with other casts from the film, Candyman's Tony Todd, an American werewolf in London's David Moughton, the Crypt Keeper John Kassir, Rose McGowan from Charmed in Death Proof, Kane Hodder from the Friday the 13th Films, Harry Hamlin from Clash of the Titans and so many more including Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira Mistress of the Dark. Get autographs, take photos and hear Q&A sessions with your favorite horror celebs. They've even asked me to moderate a few celebrity Q&As too. You'll also find horror themed workshops like making movie props and make-up, horror writing and more. Get all the details, see a full list of the celebrities, and grab your tickets at spookyempire.com. That's spookyempire.com and I hope to see you there October 27th through the 29th in Orlando, Florida. that I'd been there for a very, very long amount of it. Weeks perhaps or months or years or decades, I was unsure. By the time the door presented itself to me, I'd long forgotten about Labyrinth or even who or what I was. I simply opened it like it was the most natural thing in the world. And inside I found a pillar of light that pulsed and beat to a steady rhythm. Like a heart. And then it came back to me. Find the heart to escape. And with that, flooded in all the memories of that place. The changing rooms, the rapid decay, the books and the fire and the rancid food, and the dog and the aging to the door of death, all at once, all of it. I willed myself forward and into the light and I tumbled out onto the grass. Then I looked up and saw stars there and I looked around and found myself in front of the mansion at twilight. I felt a quick pang of relief and hope and instinctively repressed it until my patdown was complete. Then I let it sing. I was alive. I was alive and I was breathing and I was young again and unharmed and for the first time in hours or days or however in God's name long it had been I felt free. I began to laugh and cry at the same time and while I did I ran away from that horrid place and threw and passed the gate and out to the field where my car was still parked. I made it home an hour or so later and fell into a deep and restful sleep. Suffice to say the wretched experience and labyrinth completely and utterly cured me of my need to be thrilled by fear. And to you I will merely say this. If you ever hit a black envelope in the mailbox, toss it, or better yet, burn it. Never accept an invitation to labyrinth was written by Jesse Clark and it was posted to Reddit under his username TheJesseClark. You can also learn about the author himself on his website at TheJesseClark.com. WeirdDarkness is a registered trademark of Marlar House Productions and now that we're coming out of the dark I'll leave you with a little light. First Chronicles 16 verses 11 and 12. Look to the Lord and his strength. Seek his face always. Remember, remember the wonders he has done, his miracles and the judgments he pronounced. And a final thought by Linda Mastendrea. Go after your dream no matter how unattainable others think it is. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.