I was a world class janitor. I cannot share my resume of places I have cleaned, only that I am qualified to polish palaces and butler to the wealthiest. That is how I ended up stuck on an island where people are taken to die.

They collected people from all over and watched them and kidnapped them and brought them to the island. They called it Suicide Island. It is where they had a series of difficult mazes that they put people into after drugging them. If they could solve the maze they were actually allowed to go home, they were reverse kidnapped and placed back where they were originally taken. Sometimes that actually did happen.

As a janitor that was forced to work on the island, I knew who all the paying audience were. Hundreds of elite could afford to watch the victims in the mazes. That was only part of the funding. The rest I did not understand, a mysterious organization that had put people into mazes on islands for a very long time, some kind of cult.

I was not allowed to listen to anything discussed by the cult. That did not mean that I heard nothing. I learned that they were obsessed with the difficulty of the mazes and the efficiency of the mechanical traps inside. A different group than the dozens of gray-robed monks were in charge of the kidnappings. They wore ordinary cloths, but gray cowls when on the island. They also mentioned that the victims had to be adults, not children or elders. On occasion they disqualified someone for being too old, too young or otherwise incapable of escaping from the deadly mazes. They would ship them back home, to the chagrin of the kidnappers.

I watched where they kept the files of employees and where they kept the files on the victims. They were each kept in file cabinets in gray folders. I pondered that for a long time. I had to go into the mazes, as my sanity and skills deteriorated. I was no longer good enough for housecleaning. I was demoted to a slave that scrubbed blood off the floors of the maze while diabolical blades and drills and such were suspended over me in lock-out-tag-out.

Other employees sometimes wanted to escape and tried to and were hunted down and usually killed, tortured or given more severe workloads. I didn't want the caprice of my employers to decide my fate. I was too old for that.

Some tried to sneak out in body bags, which was just stupid. I never doubted they incinerated the bodies. It turned out I was wrong, they simply tossed them over a cliff, out to sea. The sharks and seagulls and crabs got whatever was upon the rocks below. It was a one in a million shot to survive it; maybe one in a billion. Seemed asinine.

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Over the years I began to get a real good understanding of the mazes. There were really only so many configurations around the mechanisms that powered the variety of death traps and they only rarely reinstalled those. I also had worked in the mazes, walking through them with flashlights and tools to maintain the traps themselves, when they were powered down. In general, I wondered if I should take my chances in a maze, as one of their victims. Would they let me go? There wasn't exactly a human resources department that I could ask, on Suicide Island.

The strict requirements for someone to be invited to Suicide Island is a suicide attempt. Their agents monitor emergency rooms and suicide hotlines and other places for potential victims. I wondered if trying to escape from their island was lethal enough to warrant a suicide attempt.

One day I decided I was just too old to try to escape. I gave up sitting there until they found me not working and beat me up. Some wealthy elite, in their white cowls, walked by and laughed at the cruelty. I was terrified they would beat me to death.

"Do you want to die? Get back to work." I was told. I obeyed, frightened and bruised.

With terror of Suicide Island in my heart I left my work post again. I was supposed to be cleaning it, an ivory Rube Goldberg with a scythe and tusks that grabbed and maimed. It came out of the floor to trap someone in the dead end. I stared at it in horror, noting the dripping blood and parts of the victims and their clothing that were caught in its gears.

It was overly complicated and had many moving parts and blades and large powerful open gears. It was typical of the death traps in the mazes, but far more advanced than the ones I had first seen. Always they were improving the quality of the mazes and death traps. I wondered if there was a corresponding drop in maze survivors, or if their selection process was becoming more progressive as well.

Trembling with fear of the device and the maze I began to clean it. I never got used to the awfulness of my job. Instead it grew worse each day. I lived in a horrible nightmare, my work was Hell.

I realized I would prefer anything. I left my post and began to go back through the maze. I avoided all the traps and dead ends expertly and reached the exit. When I got to the stairs I went up and found the office. Two cultists were in there and I walked over to the employee cabinet while they worked on something on the table, barely noticing me. I shuffled around with my folder until I was at the other cabinet. On top was an out box. I set my folder in it. Then I shuffled out of the room, while the cultists muttered to each other. I went to my quarters and slept.

I awoke groggy and drugged on the street where I had departed in a taxi to go and meet my boss, a rich guy who had hired me to accompany him on his cruise. The place was different, which made sense. I figured out I had lived on the island for almost ten years. Times never change, I was wearing a butler's outfit and had my papers and some money. I had a chance to go back to the life I had known. For that, I could never be too old.