Scared Seriously Silly

Which is why Nick Markoff, 37, who's in charge of dreaming up and building anew the trail's scenes each year, says the forest's very best scares are the very simplest ones.

"My favorite place," he said, "isn't a scene. It's being behind a candle at eye-level, and my head would be right there." He gestured to a dark spot. "And you snort right in their ear, and you just get 'em, and they love it."

Candles, he said, not only create atmosphere, but they also lull people into momentary lapses of security -- the better to reach in and really terrify them. People tend to believe that, with the candle's glow, they can see. But the flickering flame succeeds mostly in mesmerizing people -- "People always stare at the candles," Nick said -- and blinding them to everything but that little cone of light.

Matt grinned. "We play with the shadows, man," he said.

"You see what we make you see," Alderton said.

Nick added, "It seems like the more light you give them, the darker things seem."

* * *

There's a crashed plane lit by an army jeep's headlights, and two soldiers lurching along the ground, gurgling, "Help!" There's a cemetery, a village of cannibals and skulls on fence posts, the sort of horrors that a lot of kids will spot as stage sets. More unsettling, perhaps, is a shack that contains nothing but darkness. The Poolesville kids will have to feel their way through -- without knowing what they're touching, without seeing what's about to touch them. It makes you imagine worse horrors than anything the Markoffs can devise.

"Can you go first?" Katie asks the tall, older boy next to her, Marty Micheals.

"I already went first," he answers. " You go."

"The point of coming here," says an impatient Cameron Dickerson, "is to get scared." The 12-year-old adds, sotto voce, as though intellectual distance will help quell the rising panic, "I learned all about it in science."

If the Markoffs have done their jobs right, adrenaline is flogging hearts to a gallop and hyper-pumping lungs. Fear -- in its purest, deepest form -- is flooding fresh blood and oxygen to muscles, which are tensing up, preparing for fight or flight. Senses sharpen, colors brighten -- adrenaline is a drug, it gets people high. The amygdala, the brain's almond-shaped fear center, lights up like a sabotaged ammo dump.