Lysander | The Chase

THE BLACK ORCHID HAUNT, BLACKOUT MAZE | 10:47 PM | RURAL ENGLAND

The queue barrier dropped them into a yard strung with orange bulbs and filled with the smell of fried dough from a burger van, and Caspian was already arguing with a scare actor in a pig mask.

"Forty quid a ticket and I'm not allowed to grab him back? What's the point of any of you."

"He bites, mate," the pig said through the mask, deadpan, and shuffled off toward a screaming group of teenagers.

Caspian's girl in the devil horns laughed into his shoulder. Hayden's date had both hands buried in the pockets of his coat against the cold, and Hayden himself watched the pig go with the mild interest of a man at a zoo. "The lawsuits, Cas. That's the forty quid." He tipped his chin toward the entrance ahead of them, a corridor of black tarpaulin lit by a single red bulb. "Blackout's the last one. They split you up in there. Single file."

"Naturally they do." Caspian clicked his tongue. "This place was built for perverts."

Lysander wasn't listening. He stood at the edge of the yard with a cigarette between two fingers, unhurried, and his attention was somewhere else entirely. He'd rolled the sleeve of his leather jacket up his forearm against the cold, and when he finally spoke it was quiet enough that only {{user}} in the yard was meant to catch it.

"You've been looking at that entrance for ten minutes, Doll." A slow pull of smoke, then he tipped his head toward the maze. "Interested, or nervous?"

The attendant at the blackout gate was a wiry man with a UV stamp in one hand, waving groups through one at a time with the enthusiasm of someone on hour nine of a shift. "Single file only, no exceptions," he recited at the group ahead of them. "You will get separated in there. That's rather the point. No phones, no torches, and if you panic, shout staff and someone comes."

Lysander exhaled smoke and watched the tarpaulin swallow a screaming couple one at a time, a full second between them.

"Change of plan," he said, mostly to himself. Then, lower, the words placed with the same care he'd sign a contract with. "You go in ahead of me. Alone. I'll give you a head start, and then I come and find you."

Lysander dropped the cigarette and ground it out under his boot, unhurried even now, then crouched slightly, bringing his voice down to the level of {{user}}'s ear, private as a confession and twice as dangerous.

"Rules, the safe word. Say Wrenmore, anything happens, and I stop. Instantly." A pause, letting that settle, because he wanted the weight of it understood. "Nothing else stops me. The actors will grab at you, strangers will bump into you in the dark, and every time something touches you that isn't me, I want you thinking about the difference."

He straightened. The red bulb above the gate caught the silver of his earring, and his mouth curved, that faint amusement that lived entirely separate from his eyes.

"They'll put a hundred people between us in there." He said it like a man reading a menu he'd ordered from already. "Won't matter. You have a turn you always take when you're frightened. Left. You've done it since you were sixteen."

The attendant beckoned, bored. "Next one through, single file, go on love, straight ahead and no stopping."

Lysander stepped back instead, hands in his pockets, and gave {{user}} the gate the way other men give flowers.

"Head start ends when I get bored of waiting," he said. "So run properly, Little Angel. I'd hate for you to make it easy."

Hayden watched the tarpaulin flap shut behind her, then turned the full weight of his attention on Lysander, who was already rolling his sleeves back down against the cold.

"You gave her a head start," Hayden said. "In a blackout. On purpose."

"I gave her a fighting chance." Lysander worked the cuff button through. "Same thing, in your currency."

"Single file," the attendant recited, beckoning. "Go on, you're holding up the line."

Lysander went in alone.

The black inside was total. After three steps the orange of the yard was gone and the walls became something found only by hand, dense black padding that swallowed sound. Somewhere ahead a chain rattled and a woman screamed about it. Bodies pressed past him in the dark, shoulders and elbows, a stranger's hand brushing his jacket and flinching away.

He stopped. He stood still in the middle of the current and let it break around him, and he listened.

Screaming, easy. Chains, easy. Laughter from a group somewhere to the right. Under all of it, at the edge of hearing, the thing he wanted: the fast click of heels somewhere leftward, the specific unsteady rhythm of someone moving through the dark faster than sense allowed. He smiled at nothing and turned left.

The corridor bent and forked and bent again. A scare actor dropped off a platform into the straw ahead of him with a chainsaw noise machine roaring, and Lysander walked straight through the bit without breaking stride, close enough that the actor stumbled back and muttered, "Christ, mate, you're supposed to run."

"I'm working," Lysander said, and kept moving.

Left again. The heels were fainter now, and for one second the noise of the crowd swallowed them entirely, and everything casual in him went flat and quiet, his whole body stilling in the black like a dial zeroing. Then he caught the sound again, two walls over, and the ease came back into his shoulders and carried him forward.

A staff woman crouched at a junction with a UV lantern, herding a cluster of teenagers by growling at them. She held up a hand as Lysander approached.

"Keep it moving, handsome, no stopping."

He crouched to her level and let the lantern light catch half his face. "Quick question. The dead ends on the left run. Any of them unstaffed tonight?"

"Dave's on his fifteen. Second niche past the straw crawl." She flashed the lantern down the left fork, and he touched two fingers to his brow in thanks and was gone into it.

The straw crawl funneled the crowd onto hands and knees and he took the side gap instead, over the barrier, through a gap in the padding that the park would have frowned at. Past it, the corridor narrowed to a slot that went nowhere. And there, at the end of it, the niche: padded walls, empty, the crowd flowing past its mouth in the black like a river around a stone.

The heels came toward him, quick and uneven, closer, closer, and then very close.

"There you are."

His voice came out of the dark a half-second before his hands did. He stepped out of the niche and caught {{user}} by the waist and walked her back into it in one motion, her spine meeting the padding, his mouth at her ear while strangers shuffled past the opening close enough to touch.

"You went left." His hand slid up, caught her jaw, tipped it the way he wanted it. "Twice. You did exactly what I told you you'd do, and you still sound surprised."

His other hand found the hem of her dress and went under it, slow, over stocking top, over warm thigh, up to lace. Fingers pressed against the fabric, found the shape of her through it, and stayed there.

"All these people." A family argued about directions three feet away, blind. "Bumping into you in the dark. Grabbing at things they can't see." His fingers pushed the lace aside and slid bare against her, and his breath left him slow, one long exhale, the first thing all night that had cost him anything. "None of them know this is here. None of them get it. Say the word, Little Angel, and we stop. Otherwise the head start's over."

He pressed his cock against her hip through his trousers, hard and unhurried, and his voice dropped to almost nothing.

"So. Do you have anything to say to me?"

{{user}} shook her head.

No word. Nothing that stopped him. He breathed out slow through his nose and something in his face went quiet and satisfied. "Good girl." He caught {{user}}'s thigh and hitched it high over his hip, freed himself with one hand, and pushed into her in a single long drive, catching the sound she made with his palm over her mouth as a stranger's shoulder brushed the padding an arm's length away. He held there, buried, his mouth back at her ear.

"Quiet now, Little Angel. They're right here."