I hadn't thought too much about what our escape route actually looked like - after all, when the Ouija board led us to the cellar, it was pretty much a straight shot from the front door to the cellar door. So it was with some confusion that I cleared the top of the stairs to find myself in a room we definitely had not passed through earlier.
"Guys, did we somehow go up a different staircase?" I asked, unwilling to believe my eyes.
"We didn't," Tobias said, "This is just where we ended up."
"No. We have to have gone up a different-"
"There were only two ways out of that basement," Cassie said, "The staircase we went down, and the secret passage that other guy opened."
"Well, did we miss a door or a landing or something?"
"I don't see how that's possible," Marco said, "The staircase only went one way, and that was down into the basement.
"So then how did we get here?"
This was not the dark hallway we'd passed through twenty minutes ago. It was... red. Red shag carpeting, red velvet sofas and chairs, red wallpaper, carved mahogany wall panels lit from behind with red light, and a chandelier with candles hidden behind rose-colored glass.
"You know, I'm starting to think this house might be haunted," Marco said, "Or probably cursed. Yeah, definitely cursed."
The only escape I could see was the door we'd just come through - and looking behind me, I could see that it still led back down into that basement laboratory. Even worse, the bald man was peeking around the corner.
"Quickly," I heard him shout, "They're in the Red Room!"
I slammed the door shut.
"We need another way out of here and fast," I said.
"Way ahead of you," Marco said, running his hands along the walls, "This is a haunted house, right? That means there should be a secret door somewhere. If it's not a bookcase that swings open, then there's a wall panel that slides when you lift a candle, or a trapdoor that drops open when you twist a statue."
"What about a magic door that leads to a different room every time you open it?" Tobias asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him looking through the door I'd just closed.
"What are you doing?" I yelled.
"Just a hunch," he answered, "See, the door doesn't lead to the basement anymore.
I looked through. The basement had disappeared. For that matter, so had the stairs. Instead, I was looking at a dining room. Large table set with silver utensils, wine glasses, fine china, and candles. I closed the door, then opened it again. Now the dining room was gone, replaced with an oversized canopy bed and a massive wardrobe. Close, open again, now it's a kitchen. Library. Billiards room. Basement steps again, now with the bald man right at the top of the stairs. Dining room again.
"All right, how about we try and get out this way?" Rachel said, "Gotta be better than waiting for that guy to find a way in."
"Works for me," Marco said, pushing through. We followed him, and to our relief, the door on the far side of the dining room didn't open to some mysterious chamber with no escape - it led straight to the balcony overlooking the front door. Praying that the stairs wouldn't suddenly vanish beneath our feet, we scrambled down to the main floor and charged the door. This time, it burst open, letting us tumble off the front porch and land in a heap on the front lawn.
We disentangled ourselves, got back onto our feet, and started running for the gate - no fooling around with trying to hop over the fence this time. There was no sign of the men we'd seen in the basement, or anyone who looked like they might be part of the same group, or anybody, period. Of course, with the hilltop being shrouded in heavy fog, there wasn't much of anything to see. We couldn't even find the dirt trail that down to the bottom of the hill. So we just stumbled around through the trees, trying to stick together, blindly hoping we'd come out of the woods somewhere that looked halfway familiar. After twenty minutes of getting scratched by low-hanging branches, tripping over exposed tree roots, and walking right into a large spiderweb, we did manage to get back out to the edge of Valmy Park.
We staggered across a deserted soccer field towards a pavilion whose lights glowed eerily through the fog, and, by unspoken agreement, sat down at two of the picnic tables to recover. We were a mess - every one of us was covered in bits of green slime from a dozen shattered bottles of Monster Blood, pieces of twigs, cobwebs, and bits of broken glass.
"I vote we go home and never speak about this again," Marco suggested, "All in favor?"
"Fine with me," I said.
"Same here," Cassie agreed.
"I don't know," Rachel said, "I kind of want to find out what's going on up there."
There was an awkward silence as Marco, Cassie, and I stared at Rachel. Finally, Cassie said what we were all thinking.
"OK, Rachel, you're my best friend and I love you, but... are you nuts?"
"I know you're fearless," Tobias added, "But that's way more than the rest of us want to get involved with. We went up there to have fun with a Ouija board, not get involved in some sort of Scooby-Doo mayhem."
Rachel frowned, looked each of us in the face, realized she was outnumbered, and relented.
"All right. We'll go home and pretend the rest of you guys have never even heard of Haunted Hill."
We did go home after that. But pretending the night's adventure never happened turned out to be a lot harder than we expected.