Becca hurried down the hall, her excitement building as she imagined getting out of this dark, creepy house for good, with its spiders and shadows and stains. But she winced when she found the mudroom—the floor was covered in nearly an inch of dirty water, and the door at the back was now closed. That couldn’t be good.

“What?” Kylie said in disbelief when she saw the door. “We definitely did not close that door.”

Oh no, no, no. With a chill running down her spine, Becca walked through the water to try the door. Please open. Please open. Please open!

“It’s locked,” she said in a near-whisper, and everybody groaned behind her. “All the doors in the house are locked.”

They were all trapped. Again.

“No way,” Matt cried out. “We’re all locked in just like we were at summer school!”

The team reluctantly made their way back to the living room, and Becca was feeling especially defeated.

“The only choice is to keep playing,” Becca said. “But what are we supposed to do next? My team was trying to get outside to find a silkworm tree, and we ended up with a random key instead. One that doesn’t work on any of the doors.”

“You never told us what happened on your team,” Matt pointed out. “Fill us in so we can all move forward on the same page.”

“Right,” Becca said, struggling to regain her confidence. “Well, uh, we first got in and looked around the living room. Danny ended up finding a message written on the mirror in creepy red writing.”

“Speaking of red,” Miguel cut in, looking at the carpet warily. “Is that blood?”

“We’re going with no,” Frankie explained with a shake of their head. “Let’s keep going with no.”

Becca continued. “The message asked what Danny was afraid of, which is spiders, but before we could figure out what we were supposed to do, the door slammed shut. And locked.”

“On its own,” Frankie emphasized. “We still can’t figure out how the Game Master pulled it off.”

“Then we had to go to the dark, damp basement to capture all sorts of freaky bugs,” Danny cut in, turning the camera to face himself. “And I’m proud to say I’m the one who completed the spider jar.”

“The . . . spider jar?” Matt asked with a shiver. “That doesn’t sound fun at all.”

Becca nodded. “It was pretty freaky. At the end of the game, we were given a clue, something about webs and trees, but we never quite cracked it.”

“Unless you count the gummy worms,” Frankie said. “But that wouldn’t explain the stuff about the tree.”

“Did you just say gummy worms?” Kylie asked. “Gummies?”

“Embedded in a big flowerpot full of dirt cake,” Frankie said. “We had to eat our way to find the key.”