Fifty Paces Behind

The Gilded Cage Three years ago, my friend Leo and I were invited by Marcus,

the school’s star athlete, to a "scavenger hunt" in his family’s abandoned greenhouse.

We were nobodies, so we naively saw the invite as our ticket to popularity. Once inside the

humid, dark maze of vines, the "haunting" began. Fishing lines pulled at plants to mimic

snakes, and speakers blared screams. From the catwalks above,

Marcus and his friends filmed us, howling with laughter as we sobbed in fear.

The laughter stopped when a man in a tattered yellow raincoat and a porcelain mask emerged from

the shadows, dragging a rusted scythe. We thought it was part of the act