The campsite was bigger than any of them had expected.
They followed the trail from the visitor centre for just under twenty minutes, bags heavy on their shoulders, the trees thickening around them until the path felt less like a walkway and more like a suggestion. The afternoon light came through the canopy in long broken shafts, catching dust and insects, turning the forest floor gold in patches. It would have been beautiful if Indigo hadn't already been quietly cataloguing every shadow between the trunks.
She knew it was fake. She knew that rationally, completely, in the part of her brain that dealt in facts and logic and the reasonable cost of a planned scare experience. The other part of her brain — the older, quieter part — had decided it didn't care and was going to be afraid anyway.
She kept that to herself.
"I feel like we've passed that tree before," Elizabeth said, from somewhere behind her.
"All trees look the same," Nico said.
"That's exactly what someone says before they die in a forest."
"We're not going to die in a forest, Elizabeth."
"You don't know that."
Jett glanced back over his shoulder at Indigo with a look that said this is going to be a long three days and she bit down on a smile despite herself. He reached back without looking and found her hand in the way he always did — automatically, without effort, like it was just where his hand belonged.
She let herself have that. Just for a second.
" Here. "
Nico stopped so suddenly that Anastasia walked into the back of him. He was standing at the edge of a small clearing — natural, roughly circular, the ground flat and covered in a soft layer of pine needles. At the centre sat a firepit, ringed with stones, with four thick logs arranged around it like the points of a compass. Beyond it the trees continued in every direction, dense and dark and indifferent.
"This is it," Nico announced, with the satisfaction of a man who had discovered something rather than simply followed a marked trail to it.
"It looks exactly like the last three spots," Addison said.
"It's fine, Addison." Jett was already swinging his pack off his shoulders, rolling his neck. "This is the one."
Addison looked at the clearing for a moment longer with that quiet appraising expression she sometimes got — like she was running calculations nobody else could see — and then set her bag down without another word.
It was 2:32pm. The sun was still high enough to feel safe.
Anastasia dropped onto one of the logs, stretched her legs out in front of her and tilted her face up toward the patch of sky visible through the canopy. "So when do we think we'll actually see him? The Woodsman?"
"Tonight presumably," Indigo said. "They said midnight."
"I wonder how scary it'll actually be," Addison said. She was unpacking methodically, sorting items with the kind of focused efficiency that always made Indigo feel vaguely disorganised by comparison. "Like will it actually be frightening or just a guy in a costume doing jazz hands in the dark."
"It'll be scary," Nico said, with enormous confidence, despite having visibly flinched at a squirrel approximately eleven minutes ago on the trail.
"You don't know that."
"I have a feeling."
"You have feelings about everything and you're wrong about most of them."
Nico put his hand over his heart. "That is genuinely hurtful, Addison."
She handed him a tent pole without looking at him. "Put this up."
Jett had grown up camping. His family did it every summer without fail — proper camping, not glamping, not a cabin with a coffee machine, but tents and sleeping bags and cooking on a gas burner and his dad pointing out stars whose names Jett could never quite retain past morning. He moved through the setup with the ease of someone performing a familiar routine, and by 3:12pm both tents were standing — the small two-person one for him and Indigo, and the large family tent for the other four, slightly lopsided on one side where Nico had enthusiastically over-tightened a peg and then said nothing about it.
Indigo was organising the inside of their tent when she heard Anastasia make a sharp sound behind her.
She looked up.
Anastasia was standing very still at the edge of the clearing, staring at something attached to the trunk of the nearest tree. Indigo followed her gaze.
It was a hook. Heavy iron, old looking, driven deep into the wood at roughly head height. The kind of thing that might have been used to hang lanterns or game or equipment — utilitarian once, purely decorative now, the staff member had said. Part of the site's aesthetic. There were probably dozens of them.
It was large. Larger than Indigo had imagined when the man at the counter mentioned décor.
"That's a big hook," Anastasia said.
"They said it was décor," Addison said, not looking up from what she was doing. "The whole site is dressed. It's supposed to feel creepy. That's the point."
Indigo looked at the hook for another moment. The iron was dark with age, the point curved and sharp enough that it didn't feel entirely decorative. She thought about saying something and then didn't.
" Oh, how scary, " she said instead, voice flat with sarcasm, and turned back to the tent.
Something cold pressed against the back of her neck.
She spun around.
Nico was standing behind her holding a bow — a proper recurve bow, unstrung, clearly pulled from the equipment rack she'd noticed near the firepit — with an arrow nocked loosely against it, aimed directly at her face, wearing an expression of profound comedic commitment.
Indigo's body reacted before her brain did. Her right fist connected with his nose with a crack that sent him stumbling backward, bow clattering to the ground, hand flying to his face.
There was a beat of complete silence.
" Sorry, " Indigo said immediately. " Sorry — but what the fuck , Nico—"
Nico was laughing. Actually laughing, eyes watering, one hand pressed over his nose which was already going red. Jett was laughing too, the kind of helpless silent laughter that bent him at the waist.
" That is not funny, " Indigo said.
"It's a little funny," Jett managed.
"It's not — you can't just—" She stopped. Breathed. Looked at her own hand. "Are you okay?"
"Completely fine," Nico said, nasally. "Totally worth it. Did you see how fast—"
"Don't," she said. "Don't finish that sentence."
He finished it anyway. She chose not to hear it.
She picked the bow up from the ground and put it back on the rack, and stood there for a moment with her back to the group, listening to Jett and Nico still laughing behind her, and thought about how strange it was — how something could make your heart rate spike like that, your hands go cold, your body flood with something hot and electric, and then be completely fine a second later. How fear and relief were separated by almost nothing.
She turned around. Jett had composed himself mostly, only the edges of the laughter still visible around his eyes.
"You're both children," she said.
"Yeah," he agreed, and smiled at her, and she felt the cold thing in her chest dissolve completely.
10:02 PM
The fire had been going for hours.
They'd eaten — badly and happily, the kind of camp food that tasted better than it had any right to purely by virtue of being cooked outside. They'd talked about everything and nothing, the conversation moving the way it always did between the six of them, looping and doubling back, years of shared history making every topic a shortcut to three other topics. Elizabeth had made everyone laugh until Anastasia had to put her drink down. Nico had burned his hand on the fire iron and said a word that startled a bird out of a nearby tree. Addison had sat slightly apart from the group for a while, looking at something on her phone despite the barely-there signal, and when Indigo had asked if she was okay she'd smiled and said of course and moved back closer to the fire.
The forest around them was dark now. Properly dark, the kind that exists beyond firelight and means it. The trees had become a wall of black in every direction, and somewhere behind that wall, according to the schedule they'd been handed at the visitor centre, an actor in a burlap mask was waiting for midnight.
Indigo knew it was fake. She kept knowing it, repeatedly, like a mantra.
It didn't help as much as she'd hoped.
By ten o'clock her back teeth ached from clenching her jaw and she had moved approximately six inches closer to Jett than she'd started the evening. He hadn't commented on this. She appreciated that about him.
The problem, and she had been quietly negotiating with this problem for the last forty minutes, was that she needed to use the toilet.
Not the kind of need you can ignore or defer or simply think away. The kind that had progressed well past discomfort into something that was making it difficult to focus on the conversation happening around her.
There were portable toilet facilities on the site — she'd clocked them on the way in, a small block maybe three minutes walk from the clearing, back along the main trail. Three minutes there, three minutes back. Six minutes total. In the dark. Alone.
She knew it was fake.
"Back in a minute," she said, standing.
Jett looked up. "Where are you going?"
"Toilet block."
His expression did something complicated. "Want me to—"
"I'm fine," she said. Firmly. "It's fine. It's fake , Jett."
She grabbed the torch from beside her bag and clicked it on before she could give herself time to reconsider.
The trail was easy to follow with the torch. That was the rational thing she told herself with every step — the trail is easy, you can see fine, it's six minutes total, you've walked in the dark before, this is nothing.
The forest at night had a different quality to it than the forest in daylight. Not just darker but denser somehow, like the air itself had thickened. Every sound was a question. The crack of a branch somewhere to her left — wind, or an animal, or nothing. A rustling high in the canopy above her — just the trees, just the trees. The distant sound of something moving through undergrowth that stopped the moment she stopped walking and started again when she did —
She stopped.
She stood completely still on the path, torch beam cutting a pale corridor through the dark ahead of her, and listened.
Nothing. Silence so complete she could hear her own pulse.
Six minutes, she told herself. You're almost there.
The toilet block was exactly where she remembered it — a small wooden structure set slightly back from the trail, a single bulb burning above the door casting a weak yellow light over the immediate area. She pushed inside, did what she came to do, and was washing her hands in the small sink when the bulb above the door flickered.
She froze.
It flickered again. Then steadied.
Old wiring, she thought. Old building. It's fine.
She dried her hands on her jacket and pushed the door open.
The torch beam swung out across the trail ahead of her automatically and she was already stepping forward when something at the edge of the light made her stop.
He was standing on the path.
Maybe fifteen meters ahead of her. Completely still. The dark canvas jacket, the pale fur trim of the hood. The burlap mask, the two dark eye gaps that seemed to pull the torchlight in rather than reflect it. Just standing there on the path between her and the campsite, not moving, not making a sound.
Looking at her.
Indigo's heart lurched hard against her ribs. Every rational thought she had — it's the actor, it's midnight, it's fake, it's fine — arrived at once and simultaneously meant absolutely nothing because her body had already decided and her body had decided to run.
She ran.
Back to camp in under two minutes, branches catching her jacket, torchlight swinging wildly, breath coming in hard ragged bursts. She crashed into the clearing and the five of them looked up at her from around the fire with expressions ranging from alarm to immediate delight.
" He's out there, " she managed. "On the path. Just standing there — right there, fifteen meters, just standing —"
For a half second nobody moved.
Then everyone was on their feet.
They grabbed torches and streamed out of the clearing onto the path, six beams of light swinging through the dark, everyone talking at once — where, how far, what did he look like — until they reached the stretch of trail where she'd seen him.
Empty. Just the path and the trees and the dark between them.
Elizabeth shone her torch slowly across the treeline. Nothing.
"He was right there, " Indigo said.
"He probably moved when he heard us coming," Anastasia said. She didn't sound afraid. She sounded interested.
"That's so creepy," Elizabeth said, but she was smiling, torch beam still sweeping. "That's actually so creepy I love it."
"He's good," Nico said, with genuine appreciation. "Like he just vanished. "
Jett put his arm around Indigo's shoulders. She felt her heartbeat begin, slowly, to return to something like normal.
"He's an actor," she said. Mostly to herself. "He's just an actor."
"The best thousand pounds I've ever spent," Nico announced to the forest at large.
They walked back to camp still talking, still laughing, Elizabeth doing an impression of Indigo running into the clearing that was unfortunately quite accurate. The fire had burned lower while they were gone. They added wood, sat back down, talked for another hour until the conversation softened and slowed and one by one they drifted toward the tents.
By midnight the campsite was quiet.
In the dark between the trees, something that was not moving before began to move.