We Built A Haunted House. Something Auditioned.

The haunt has nine rooms and the owner can only afford eight actors. So Room Nine never got a theme, or a set, or a person in it — just black walls, a strobe on a timer, a pressure mat under the plywood, and a pneumatic scarecrow that drops when somebody steps on the mat. At two in the morning, Perla counts her crew out the exit door and gets nine. She counts again and gets eight. On the floor of Room Nine there is a set of human teeth laid out in the shape of a mouth. She puts a knuckle against a molar to check whether it's resin, because after four seasons she knows what resin feels like. It isn't resin. It's warm. Perla Quintero is thirty-one, she runs the floor, and this job is nine dollars an hour for twenty-four nights, paid in cash out of the door on Halloween. That's the arrangement, and it's why nobody walks no matter what they're asked to do. On night three, a woman who has done this haunt every October since it opened goes into Room Nine at the head of the fourth group. Perla gets there in time to see what is left of the arm and not in time for anything else. The county tags the rig out of service. The haunt does not close. Then a costume comes back to the rack still warm, with the shoulder seams walked open and the sleeves hanging four inches lower than they were cut. The count comes out one high. A scare actor performs his scene twice in one night and remembers doing it once. In Room Seven, a group watches somebody deliver Bobby's line with Bobby's stammer on it, on the right word, while Bobby stands in the dark and listens. It is moving up the running order. Room Nine, then Room Seven, then the forty feet of corridor everybody has to walk to reach the time clock. The woman in the box office has worked eleven seasons and will not say what happened in twenty nineteen. A standalone story. No prior episodes required. Best experienced in the dark, with headphones. The Somnolence Hour delivers immersive horror stories and original nosleep-style narratives built on realism, pacing, and tension. Written to be heard in the dark. Written by J.P. Vesper. Original fiction. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental. Audio soundscape design by Bradley Morton.