Chapter 28
Gen dragged both hands over her face again, trying and failing to steady herself. Even through the screen I could see how violently she was shaking.
“That night…” she started, voice thin and uneven. “You were sick, but the rest of us still felt like partying. So we went out to the firepit in the woods, same as always.”
Rhys said nothing. He just stayed behind the camera, silent and watchful.
“We were drinking,” Gen continued. “A lot. And some people were high too.” She swallowed hard. “Basically everyone was fucked up.”
Her eyes darted nervously toward the knife again before she forced herself to keep talking.
“At first it was just normal stuff. Music, stupid games, gossip. Then somebody brought up Edmund Strake.”
Something tightened in my chest at the name. I’d heard it during the Wilderness Wander. Strake was the occult-obsessed lunatic who’d murdered several followers on this land back in the forties before vanishing from a locked jail cell overnight.
“You know how Jensen’s dad collects all that weird stuff?” Gen went on. “And he managed to get the only copy of Strake’s ritual book?”
“Yeah. The Codex,” Rhys replied.
Gen nodded. Then she sniffed hard and wiped under her eyes. “Jensen told us he’d taken photos of all the pages on his phone because he thought it was funny,” she said. “He showed us a few, and everybody started losing it because the rituals sounded totally insane.”
“How so?”
“It was really hardcore stuff. Lots of violence. Mutilation. Blood. All for crazy things like invisibility, time travel, unlimited power. Stuff like that.”
Gen paused, and a shaky breath left her.
“We started doing dramatic readings of the rituals around the fire,” she continued. “Like… really over-the-top. Different accents and voices and all that.”
She let out a brittle laugh that sounded close to a sob.
“Delia did one in this fake Victorian accent that sounded ridiculous. Knox started pretending to be possessed halfway through one of the chants and fell backward into the dirt,” she said. “It was stupid. But it was so funny. Everybody was crying laughing.”
She paused again, dragging in a shaky breath.
“Nobody was taking any of it seriously. We were just making fun of the rituals. But then the conversation… changed.”
“Changed how?” Rhys asked stiffly.
“Somebody brought up how Strake disappeared from his jail cell,” Gen said, rubbing at her left eye. “I can’t remember who. But they said something like, ‘What if this stuff actually works? I mean, he got away in the end, right?’”
Rhys let out a disbelieving scoff from behind the phone. “Everybody knows Strake only escaped because some incompetent cop didn’t lock his cell properly,” he said. “After that he probably spent the rest of his life on the run.”
“That’s what we all said at first,” Gen replied. “But then people started arguing about it. Like… how do we actually know that’s what happened? Nobody ever saw him afterward. Not once. So maybe he escaped some other way.”
“What other way is there?” Rhys asked flatly.
Gen swallowed hard. “Invisibility,” she muttered.
Rhys barked out a short laugh of disbelief. “You can’t be fucking serious.”
“I know how stupid it sounds, okay? But we were all totally wasted.”
“You’re Ivy League students, not medieval peasants,” Rhys said, voice dripping with contempt. “You’re actually telling me you all sat around convincing yourselves some fucking occult book gave a man real magic powers?”
“I told you, we were fucking wasted!” Gen shot back. “And some of us were high, too. Really high.” Tears spilled faster down her face now. “Things just made sense in that moment. I don’t really know how else to explain it. It was like we were in a dream or something.”
The camera shifted slightly.
“What happened then?” Rhys asked.
Gen’s eyes dropped to the ground. “At some point somebody joked that we should try one of the rituals ourselves.”
Rhys said nothing now, and that silence somehow felt more dangerous than yelling would’ve.
“Most of the rituals in the Codex were horrible,” Gen went on. “Like torture and mutilation and bloodletting. Really insane stuff. But there was one that sounded…” She hesitated for a second. “Slightly less awful. It was called ‘The Realization of Dreams’.”
She stopped talking for a moment, and her breathing turned uneven again.
“The book said if the ritual was performed properly, your deepest ambitions would become reality,” she finally said.
“And because we were all drunk and completely out of our minds, everyone started talking about what they’d wish for if it actually worked.
Brad and Olivia talked about qualifying for the Olympic trials again.
Sutton said she wanted to walk in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show one day.
Knox wanted to get drafted into the NHL.
Everybody just started feeding into it.”
As she spoke, I could almost picture the atmosphere turning.
The false closeness of late-night confessions around a fire.
The drunken hysteria.
Young, privileged people convincing themselves the world owed them every fantasy they’d ever dreamed of.
“After a while, it stopped feeling like a complete joke,” Gen whispered.
Her mouth was trembling violently now. “We all kept hyping each other up, talking about how amazing it would be if this ritual actually worked. But the book said we needed a human soul. A sacrifice made by the participants. And…”
Rhys’s voice came out dangerously calm. “And what?”
Gen squeezed her eyes shut. “It said the purer and more innocent the soul was, the stronger the ritual became. So we figured that meant a baby. Or a kid.”
As the words sank in, a cold heaviness settled into my chest. She wasn’t actually going where I thought she was going with this story… was she?
“Then we started talking about the campers,” she went on. “Which kid we’d use if we actually did it. Obviously we weren’t serious at first. But then we kept talking about it, and we—”
“Stop. Just fucking stop.” Rhys finally moved, the camera jolting sharply as he stepped closer. “Are you telling me that what happened to Carly wasn’t even an accident? You sick motherfuckers actually picked her for some kind of bullshit sacrifice?”
Gen opened her eyes. They were bright with tears again. “You just don’t understand what it was like that night,” she said, head slowly shaking. “None of it felt real anymore.”
“The fuck it didn’t.”
“We were totally delirious!” she said. “You just… you had to be there to get it. Everybody was drunk and high and feeding off each other’s energy, and it was like…
” Her voice broke apart completely. “It was like we’d all gone into some kind of trance.
Nothing felt real anymore. Nothing. You’d understand if you were there. I swear.”
“No. I wouldn’t. Not in a million fucking years.
” Rhys exhaled deeply, and the camera jerked slightly with the motion.
“You know, up until thirty seconds ago, I thought you guys caught Carly sneaking out and decided to go swimming with her. Then maybe something went wrong and one of you accidentally drowned her, and then you all panicked afterward and covered it up because you didn’t want to get in trouble.
That’s already bad enough. But this? This is beyond fucked up. ”
“I know how bad it sounds.” Gen folded forward slightly, face crumpling. “But… you just don’t get what it felt like that night.”
A long silence followed that. The wind moved through the trees at the edge of the clearing. Gen stared at the ground between her feet.
“I don't care what it felt like,” Rhys finally said in a stony voice. “Just tell me what happened.”
Gen swallowed hard and wiped her eyes again.
“We chose Carly for two reasons,” she said.
“Piper and Noura had overheard the girls in their cabin talking about this stupid game they’d invented.
The Challenge Game. One of the dares involved getting something from the lake, so we knew we could… you know…”
“Lure her there and drown her for your stupid fucking ritual?” Rhys snarled.
“Yes,” Gen whispered.
“There were five girls in that cabin,” Rhys said. “Why choose Carly over the others?”
“That was the other reason,” Gen said in a small voice. “We knew everyone would take it more seriously if one of the other girls died. Because…”
Her voice cracked again, and she buried her face in her hands.
“Because they were from rich families, right?” Rhys said in a low voice. “You were supposedly too drunk to think rationally, but somehow sober enough to calculate which dead child would create the smallest scandal. Which murder you were most likely to get away with.”
Gen’s answer came out ragged and barely audible. “Yes.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rose. The sense of evil I felt from the video was almost physical, as though something cold and unseen had crawled straight out of the screen and begun winding through the room around me.
Rhys cleared his throat roughly. “What happened after you chose her?”
“Noura and Piper went back to their cabin to wake her without disturbing the others, and they grabbed her swimsuit too,” she said between shaky breaths. “They told her they had a surprise for her. They said they were going to help her win the Challenge Game.”
Her voice faltered, and she dragged a trembling hand across her face.
“They made it sound exciting,” she went on. “Like they had some kind of underwater light she could wear on her head, and they were going to swim out into the lake with her so she’d be completely safe the whole time.”
Rhys swore under his breath. “She trusted them.”
Gen nodded. “They took her into the bathroom to change first, and then they walked her down to the lake. By the time they got there, the rest of us were already waiting with copies of the ritual.” She sniffled hard. “Jensen had sent screenshots of the pages to everyone beforehand.”
“Carly didn’t think it was weird that sixteen counselors were standing around the lake in the middle of the night?”