“The wind wasn’t strong enough to do that,” Frankie said as they approached the door. “Not even close. Something closed that door!”

Becca reached for the doorknob, frantically jiggling it back and forth in an attempt to open the door. “No way,” she said, her voice escalating in panic as she tried. How was this possible? She tried again and again, but each time the knob refused to turn. “It’s locked!”

Matt

The backyard was a lot larger than Matt had originally noticed when he’d been back with Becca earlier. There was the initial stretch of dirt behind the back porch that he saw the first time, but now he could see that farther behind it, stretching into the forest, was a large patch of overgrown weeds.

“This yard is huge,” Kylie remarked, looking over it slowly. “It’ll take us a hot minute to sweep through it.”

“I hope Elephant and Nacho aren’t out here,” Miguel said, worry lacing his voice. “Who knows what sorts of predatory animals might have made their home in those weeds?”

“Don’t worry,” Matt told Miguel. “And don’t forget that all the photos of Elephant that we received from the Game Master showed him totally safe. I doubt the Game Master would want for either of them to get hurt.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Miguel took a deep breath. “I just can’t wait for this to all be over with.”

“You and me both,” Kylie said dryly, leading the group over to where the weeds reached as high as their heads. “Look, there’s some sort of trail that goes into the weeds! Like someone made a path to walk through.”

“The Game Master,” Matt said under his breath, and Miguel nodded in agreement. One by one, the friends stepped on to the trail in a single-file line, Kylie at the lead, Miguel in the middle, and Matt in the back.

The path snaked around the yard, turning this way and that without much evidence of reason or order. Eventually, they found themselves completely surrounded by weeds that they couldn’t see over, and the path split off in two opposite directions.

“You know what?” Kylie said as they stared at the wider trail, trying to see which way they were supposed to go. “This reminds me an awful lot of a labyrinth.”

“A labyrinth?” Matt said, straining to remember what the word meant. He remembered, vaguely, a movie his mom had shown him when he was little that featured puppets and a lost girl looking for her baby brother who’d been kidnapped by goblins. “Like a maze?”

“Exactly,” Kylie said. “This is a maze. Regardless of which way we go, we need to stick together. Getting separated at this point could be catastrophic.”

“You won’t see me wandering off,” Miguel said with a shiver. “This is giving me the creeps. I can’t even see the house anymore.”