The second in the Academy Award winning George Marshall approved ‘Can You Survive?’ series. You survived the first one. Now can you survive… again? Now set in a haunted house.
You wake up deep inside a haunted house. It is very dark and your phone is nearly out of battery. You check for cell service but have no bars, but what you lack in bars you make up for in spooky clanging noises picked up by your ears coming from somewhere in the darkness around you. Quick! What do you do next?
Thinking fast, you tap about until you finally manage to hit the flashlight button on your phone. Upon doing a quick sweep of your immediate area you’re able to determine that the noise appears to be a robot clown menacingly teetering its way towards you. On the one hand it appears pretty unstable. On the other, it appears to be wielding a knife. The only exit is just a little past it some ten feet away.
Quickly scanning over the room with your flashlight your eyes quickly settle upon some promising options. There appears to be a bat hanging from the ceiling just right above you. Perhaps you can grasp on to its little bat feet and use it like a sword?
Alternatively, there appears to be a particularly dark corner of the room obscured behind conveniently placed boxes. Perhaps it’s never too late to cower?
After a second or two to prepare yourself you finally manage to muster the courage to rush past your assailant. Giving it as hard of a shove as you can muster on your way towards the exit you’re surprised to find it toppling over with relative ease. Apparently they didn’t teach it how to prepare for that in robot clown school. It falls down on its back in a way sightly reminiscent of a really weird turtle doing the same.
Great! Out of one room and on to the next. And best of all, is that the exit right there? It is, but unfortunately it’s one of those doors which locks from the inside. You still need a key.
Looking around your surroundings two things immediately jump out at you: A gothic Victorian staircase leading to presumed upstairs, and a doorway just under said stairs. There are ghost noises coming from above and internet troll noises coming from below. Hmmm. Decisions decisions.
Galloping up the stairs like a child you’re soon greeted by the sight of a candlelit hallway with two equally enticing doors at the end. You quietly mutter to yourself about the lack of natural lighting in the building and the tacky wallpaper before continuing to the hallway’s end.
To your surprise, the twin doors begin speaking to you, each imploring you to crawl inside their mouths and explore them.
The Right Door: Come in! Come in! Come in, I say! Don’t listen to my brother. Let me have sway!
I am the good one, he is bad. Crawl into my mouth now or you’ll be sad.
The Left Door: One of us is a liar. One of us is true. One of us will bubble and turn you into goo.
Gravity is wet, dogs are cats, right is wrong and will make you sad.
Nom nom nom. Get in my belly!
Hmmmm. A tough call to be certain. Which will you believe?
Right is right after all! Or so you can only assume. Stepping inside the rightward room you’re not immediately killed, so that’s a plus.
But what you lack in impending death you make up for in the sight of what appears to be a nursery room. In the corner of the room there is a pale blue ghost in a rocking chair with a shiny grey key glinting around their neck. YES! That key must be linked to how to get out of here. But how to get it?
Looking up and down the ghost your heart drops upon realizing you don’t have a lot to work with. They look like a glowing drowned corpse. You’re aware that ghosts typically don’t have the luxury of choosing how they look when they die and by extension for all eternity, but still, this ghost is rough stuff. And yeesh… That mustache has not aged well. You realize Charlie Chaplin had it and it was a popular style for the time but talk about awkward. Finally you find something not objectively terrible: Their right nostril. It’s not much, but it’s something, and so you go to town.
“My! What lovely nostrils you have” You say to the ghost without a hint of irony.
The ghost looks at you in bewilderment.
“Why if I had a sniffer like yours I’d sniff and sniff and sniff with all the joy in the world. I’d probably even forget to eat because that’s how much I’d enjoy having a sniffer like yours.”
The ghost’s face begins to scrunch up. You think it’s working.
“Pigs, elephants, and bears, oh my! Their snorters are great, but yours is aces! Top of the line! Easily the most beautiful nose I’ve ever had the pleasure of observing.”
A silence follows. At long last the ghost blushes and hands you the key before politely asking you to get the****out of his house. It would seem your unique style of socialization has left him not in the mood to do much with you beyond imploring you to go away.
