The strange thing about Lark House was that while it was immediately apparent that the rooms and hallways had been rearranged, it wasn’t like the house was moving in front of us. Instead, it just appeared as if the house had been built differently than we remembered.

Many of the hallways near the stairs were gone, and there was much more space throughout the area.

“This is different,” I said, feeling the need to comment on the changes On-Screen. “There were more hallways over here.”

The others shone their flashlights around to confirm what I had said.

“This makes no sense,” Camden said. “Even if there were mechanisms for closing off the doors, the walls themselves look like they’ve moved.”

“No,” I said. “They look like they were never here.”

We couldn’t discuss any further because, in the distance, we heard Bellanti screaming, an angry roar.

“Let’s talk about this outside,” Dina said.

We were all in agreement and started running up the stairs, but as we moved upward, we realized that there were no doors, not where they were supposed to be, at least. It was easy to tell that we’d passed the ground floor without any way of exiting the stairwell. The audience might not have been as clued in, though, so we had to say something.

“Have we passed the ground floor?” Nicole asked. “We’ve gone up at least two flights of stairs.”

“Have you seen a door?” I asked. “I’m going up because there’s nowhere else to go.”

And we continued up until we finally got to the end of the stairwell, but even then, we didn’t find a proper door. Instead, there was a hatch, the kind that you would lift up and climb out of.

“I think we’re at the attic,” I said.

“There is no attic,” Camden said. “Did you never look up when you were in the foyer?”

“I’m looking up right now,” I said, “and there is a hatch. I think there is an attic, or else this makes no sense.”

“Let me see,” Camden said as he squeezed past me and lifted up the hatch to peek out. He lost a little bit of that bravery as he stuck his head through so he could look around and shine his flashlight.

“This is one of the second-floor bedrooms, I think,” he said. “But I don’t understand how it’s here.” He closed the hatch behind him, and we stood in the stairwell, all of us just contemplating our next move.

I grabbed my radio and said, “Bobby, Molly, do you guys hear me?”

A voice pushed through the static and said, “Riley, you shouldn’t—” but then it stopped. It wasn’t quite to the point that my character should be able to recognize it, I didn’t think. It was still ghostly and staticky.

Soon, I would have no choice but to acknowledge it.

“I’m here,” Bobby said soon after the voice faded. “Thank God you got through. I lost Molly. I can’t find my way out. Something is really weird here. I think I saw…”

He started to say, but then he didn’t continue.

“Bobby, what floor are you on?” I asked.

It took a moment for him to answer. “A stone floor,” he said eventually.

“That’s either the basement or ground level,” Camden said.

“Keep looking for an exit,” I said into the radio. “We’re trying to figure this out.”

I nodded to Camden, and he opened the hatch all the way up so that we could climb through, and when we did, we found a relatively normal-looking room, a few odd items here and there that hadn’t been purchased in the auction, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The room we climbed into had hallways moving in multiple directions, and we picked one to try to find our bearings.

“Either this is the most elaborate practical joke ever,” Camden said eventually, “or we may have to concede that something supernatural has occurred here.”

“We may have to concede it,” Dina said mockingly. “The crazy guy in the basement told us everything we need to know. This house is trying to eat us alive. If we keep walking where it wants us to, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I say instead of finding a new door, we make one.”

It was pretty convenient that we happened to have pry bars on us, so that’s what we did. We found our way to another random-looking bedroom that I hadn’t even seen before, meaning it had been constructed completely by the house, and we started digging through one of the walls in the direction we thought the stairs were.

It was a pretty simple act. The boards were largely intact, so we just had to pry them off the wall one by one.

There was a pretty large space between the wall we were breaking through and the next wall, possibly even large enough for a person to walk through, although I wasn’t sure that was a wise move.

Still, Dina looked in and shone her flashlight around.

She screamed.

I quickly followed where she had looked and saw what had caught her attention. It was, by at least some definition, a mummy. It was a dried corpse leaning against one of the inner walls like whoever it was had simply sat down and chosen to die.

“Help me with this,” I said to Camden as we continued to pry a few more boards loose until we revealed the body. In the distance, there were other partial skeletons sticking out of the woodwork, but I didn’t draw attention to them.

We were staring at the mummy. He was wearing modern clothes, and he still had a thin covering of tight skin around his face, though I didn’t recognize him.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“He looks at peace,” Dina said. “Like he just fell asleep.”

We took a moment just to stare, maybe a moment of silence even.

“That’s either going to sink the resale value or put it through the roof,” Nicole said. “Could this be one of Bellanti’s victims? Maybe that’s why he said they were haunting him.”

We continued to look at the corpse as the dust settled.

“This isn’t one of Bellanti’s,” Camden said. “Not if he really was stuck in the safe room this whole time. This is a recent death. In fact,” he trailed off as he got closer to get a better look with his flashlight. “I know who this is.”

He looked back at us as if waiting for us to respond.

“Go on. Tell us,” I said.

“His name is Sims. I hired him to rob the vault,” he said. “He flaked on me, or I thought so.”

Yeah, I had wondered when Camden’s disappearing thief would show up.

“Turns out he just planned on cutting you out of the heist altogether,” I said.

“It’s strange,” Camden said. “It looks like he’s set into the wood, almost like he started to be absorbed.”

“It’s sounding like Bellanti wasn’t so crazy after all,” I said. “He must have been telling the truth. We may be in very serious trouble.”

My radio came alive with a voice, this time much clearer than it had ever been before.

“Riley, you have to get out,” it said. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

There was no way my character could deny recognizing that voice, even though I technically didn’t.

I froze like I had heard a ghost because I had.

“Marcus?” I asked. “Marcus, is that you?”

Marcus had been my character’s old friend who had been gunned down during a heist after he refused to leave when my character ordered it.

“Riley, I don’t know how you found yourself in these woods, but you shouldn’t be here. You need to get out. If you don’t leave by sunrise, you never will.”

As I heard the voice over the radio, I looked down the hall and saw on one of the wooden walls a figure set into the grain of the wood, its eyes and mouth made of natural knots—and yet somehow I knew I was staring at a person. A person my character recognized. It was Marcus himself.

And I used all of my acting ability to show exactly how frightened I was.

Off-Screen.

I messed with the radio a little bit more to get him to speak, but since we weren’t On-Screen, he didn’t have anything to say.

“All right,” I said. “You heard him. We’re in some sort of, I don’t know, barrier-between-worlds situation. I’m starting to think this is a puzzle storyline. Also, maybe the forest these trees came from was more than just sacred.”

“The natives used to bury their dead here,” Nicole said. “I never had a good spot to tell you guys. I’m sorry.”

“I figured it was something like that,” I said. “Did you at least get that On-Screen?”

“It was told to me On-Screen,” she said.

“Good,” I said. I sat on a nearby dresser. “Camden, do you have any insights on how to get out of here?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “This wood is practically untreated. The leaking resin is extremely flammable. If we need to, we can probably just light it on fire and find a way out.”

I nodded.

“I noticed how it seems to rearrange the material it has. Maybe it doesn’t create new wood,” I said. “So if we burned some—”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be able to trap us anymore,” Camden said, completing my sentence.

“I was thinking that the whole time,” Dina said. “If we can’t get out, why not burn the house down? I think the same thing about most haunted houses.”

“It’s obvious,” I said. “It’s easy.”

And then I realized exactly what was going on, and I started laughing. It probably would have made me look insane to the others.

“It’s clever,” I added after I caught my breath.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Camden said. “Burning things down works in a whole lot of horror movies.”

“No, no,” I said. “I wasn’t saying that burning it down was clever. I was saying the lock was clever. Think about why we’re here.”

“To raid another group of players’ base… Oh,” Camden said as he realized what I was talking about. “That is funny.”

“Wait, what’s funny?” Dina asked.

“We’re stuck in a fire trap,” I said. “Whatever magic or enemy is here, it’s clearly quite powerful if it can manipulate the environment this much to keep us in. But when we scouted this storyline, all of our tropes said it was easy. Why is that?”

Dina just crossed her arms and waited for me to go on instead of trying to guess.

“Because there is an easy solution,” Camden said.

It was an easy, obvious solution that anyone would realize: once they were trapped in a giant wooden house, they might be able to burn their way out. It was such a simple and obvious solution that any scouting trope would say that this storyline itself was easy. It was a toothless zombie of a horror movie. Wander around for the first two acts of the movie and then burn things down while finding a way to survive the flames in the third act. Boom, you beat the enemy, whatever it was.

But that only applied if what you were trying to do was beat the storyline.

“Burning the house down won’t work for us, will it?” I said.

“It won’t,” Nicole said. “Oh, this is inconvenient.”

We had come to Lark House to explore another team’s base, but if we burned the house down in the process of playing through the storyline, there would be no base for us to explore when we were done.

That was a pretty clever lock.

If the players who had chosen this house as their headquarters were away, any other team that tried to get in would probably think they were in for an easy time if their scouting tropes told them anything, but they would be wrong. The house would burn, and the base along with it. By the time the house had been rebuilt, the owners would likely be back to defend it themselves.

“We’re going to have to find a way to beat this story without doing the obvious thing,” I said. “We can’t destroy the house. We’re about to go On-Screen,” I said. “So you should all be thinking of another way out if you can find one. And Camden,” I said, looking to him, “we need to explain to the audience why we aren’t burning our way out if it’s so obvious.”

“I’ll come up with something,” he said. “Maybe we can just explain that we’re stupid.”

“That would be telling, not showing,” I said.

We smirked at each other, and then moments later we were back On-Screen.

“You need to run,” Marcus said over the radio. “Now. Get out of the forest.”

His voice was ghostly, but oh so urgent.

And it just so happened that at that moment, I was looking down one of the hallways that the house had presented to us. At the end was a sharp turn, and something was standing at the corner, peeking at us. At first, I thought it must have been a ghost, but then that wasn’t quite what it was.

On the red wallpaper, it was called a Forest Spirit, and it was surprisingly an NPC, a pretty high-level one, somewhere in the mid-fifties. It looked like a human child that was a bit elongated and had small antlers on its head.

It looked at us and giggled, and then ran off.

“Holy hell,” I said. I was prepared for ghosts, but not for the other spiritual residents of this forested house.

We all started running, moving down one of the hallways that didn’t have giggling spirits, and we ran until our path was blocked by what appeared to be a giant wooden spine, like from an animal, that crossed from one wall to the other as if it had been carved out of one huge block of wood.

“What in the world?” Dina asked.

And then she got her answer.

The spine began to move, passing through the wood with a creaking sound. First, it moved forward, and two massive legs appeared to walk right through the wood on the right side, along with a short tail.

Then the creature turned around.

It was a wooden skeletal elk. It called a high-pitched, wailing scream at us, standing well over eight feet tall.

On the red wallpaper, it was simply called Wapasha–Spirit Guardian.

Its plot armor was 76, and unlike the little giggling spirit, it was an enemy.

It had two tropes that I could see, and the rest were inaccessible to me, several dozen of them, from what I could tell. One was Animals Are Psychic, which was to be expected. It gave unintelligent creatures the benefits of intelligent instincts. The other trope it had was Animals Are Not Evil: this creature is merely meeting its needs or feeding itself. It has no malice or ill intent.

Well, whatever it was, at least it wasn’t going to kill us because it was evil. It was going to kill us because that’s just what it did.

We turned and ran without regard for sticking together or for maintaining any sort of clever plan.

We were running for our lives.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep