Nobody went back for Elizabeth.
Indigo told herself later that there was nothing they could have done. That going back would have meant going back toward him and that was — it wasn't cowardice, it was just sense. Basic survival instinct. You don't go back into the dark toward the thing that just—
She told herself that a lot over the next few hours and it helped about as much as you'd expect.
The old house let them in through a back window that Anastasia found unlocked, the latch rusted enough that a firm push popped it without much resistance. They climbed through one at a time into what turned out to be a kitchen — dark, dusty, the surfaces bare, the kind of empty that said nobody had been here in a long time rather than nobody lived here. A table. Four chairs. A dead plant on the windowsill so dried out it had stopped looking like it was ever alive.
Indigo was the last one through. She pulled the window shut behind her and stood there for a second with her back to the room, forehead almost touching the glass, looking out at the dark.
The clearing was somewhere back through those trees. Elizabeth was somewhere back through those trees.
She pushed off the glass and turned around.
Nico was sitting on the floor against the far wall with his knees up and his head back and his eyes closed and he was doing the kind of breathing that means you are actively fighting something down and mostly losing. Addison sat in one of the chairs at the table not looking at anything in particular. Anastasia was standing near the door to the hallway, torch low, listening.
Jett was looking at Indigo.
She looked back at him and gave him the smallest nod she could manage — I'm fine, it's fine — and watched him decide to believe it even though she could see he didn't quite.
"Okay," she said. Her voice came out steady which surprised her. "We need to think."
"Elizabeth is dead," Nico said, without opening his eyes. Not aggressive. Just — stating it. Like if he said it out loud enough times it would start to make sense.
"I know."
"She's dead. She's actually — that actually just—"
"Nico." Addison's voice was quiet. "I know."
He went silent. His jaw was working. Indigo watched him fight it and win by the narrowest possible margin and felt something pull hard in her chest that she immediately put somewhere else. Later. She could do that later.
"We need to find a way out," she said. "The main trail goes back to the visitor centre. That's the most direct route."
"We don't have a map," Anastasia said.
"I know we don't have a map."
"The trail signs — there were trail signs when we walked in," Jett said. He'd moved to stand beside Indigo without her noticing, close enough that his arm was against hers. "We follow those back to the entrance and we get out and we call the police."
"And if he's on the trail?" Addison said.
Silence.
"We stay together," Indigo said. "We keep moving. We don't stop."
"We tried staying together," Nico said. "We scattered the second—"
"We didn't know. We do now." Indigo looked around the room. "We stay together. All five of us. No one goes anywhere alone. Not to the toilet, not ten meters off the path, nowhere. Okay?"
Nobody argued. Which wasn't the same as agreement but was the best she was going to get.
They tried the front door first.
It opened fine — no drama, no locked bolt, just a door that swung inward on stiff hinges into a narrow hallway. Beyond it the house opened up slightly. A sitting room on the left, bare except for a sheet covered shape that turned out to be an armchair. Stairs going up. Another door at the end of the hall.
They did a slow circuit of the ground floor together, torches low, nobody talking much. The house had the particular quality of somewhere that had been abandoned deliberately — not left mid-life, not evacuated in a hurry, but closed down properly. Cleaned out. Like whoever lived here had packed everything they wanted and left everything they didn't and hadn't looked back.
Indigo didn't find it comforting.
The front door opened onto a small porch and then a path that wound down toward the main trail, the same rusted gate they'd come through, the forest on every side. Anastasia stood in the doorway and looked out and then looked at the others.
"We could go now," she said. "Just go. Run for the trail."
"It's past midnight," Jett said. "We can't see anything."
"We have torches."
"We have phone torches. We're not going to outrun him in the dark with phone torches, Ana."
Anastasia looked at him for a moment. Then she stepped back inside and shut the door.
They settled in the sitting room. Floor mostly, the armchair going to nobody because sitting in the single comfortable piece of furniture in the room while Elizabeth was lying in a clearing seemed wrong in a way nobody articulated and everybody felt.
For a while nobody said much. Just sat with their torches off to save battery, the room dark except for the pale blue square of Addison's phone screen — no signal, just light — and the faint bleed of moonlight through the gap in the curtains.
It was Nico who said it first. He'd been quiet for so long that when he spoke it made Addison flinch.
"It wasn't part of the experience."
"We know," Jett said.
"No I mean — I mean it couldn't have been. That's not — nobody signs off on actually shooting someone. That's not a waiver that exists. That's not—" He stopped. Started again. "Someone did that on purpose."
"Yes," Indigo said.
"So who." He looked around the room. "Who does that. Who does that."
"Someone who knew we'd be here," Anastasia said.
"Everyone knew we'd be here. We've been talking about this trip for four months. Anyone could've—"
"Not anyone," Addison said. "Not just anyone. Someone who had access to the site. Someone who knew the layout, knew where the equipment was, knew when the actor would be out." She paused. "Someone who knew we'd all be sitting around that fire at midnight."
The room went quiet in a different way than before.
Indigo felt it — the shift in the air, the way everyone's eyes moved slightly without moving, the sudden awareness of who else was in the room. The specific discomfort of looking at people you have known for years and feeling, for the first time, the edges of what you don't know about them.
She hated it. She pushed through it anyway.
"We're not doing that," she said.
"Doing what," Nico said.
"Whatever you're all thinking right now. We're not." She looked around the room. "We need each other. All of us. We start pointing fingers in here and we're done before he even finds us."
Another silence. Then Jett nodded. Then Anastasia.
Nico looked at the floor. "Fine," he said. "Fine. So if it's not — if we're not going there — then who else. Who else knew."
It came to Indigo slowly, the way things do at two in the morning when your brain is running on fear and bad air and grief it hasn't processed yet. She'd been turning the question over for a while — who knew, who had access, who could walk around this site in the dark like they owned it — and then the answer arrived not as a revelation but as an obvious thing she was annoyed it took her this long to reach.
"The man at the desk," she said.
Everyone looked at her.
"The visitor centre. When we arrived. He knew everything — the layout, the schedule, the equipment. He walked us through the whole thing." She sat forward. "He knew exactly what time the actor would be out. He knew where everything was stored. He's the only other person who—"
"What was his name," Jett said immediately.
Indigo opened her mouth. Closed it.
"I didn't—" she started.
"I didn't either," Anastasia said.
They looked at each other. Then around the room. One by one the same expression crossing each face — the particular blankness of someone reaching for something that isn't there. He'd introduced himself. She was almost certain he'd introduced himself. There'd been a lanyard maybe, or a badge, or—
"I wasn't paying attention," Nico said quietly. "I was looking at the costume picture. I wasn't—"
"None of us were," Addison said.
"Someone has the waiver," Jett said, suddenly. "We all signed waivers. There might be a company name, a—"
"Our bags are at the campsite," Indigo said.
Back where Elizabeth was.
The sentence landed and nobody finished it.
Indigo leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes for just a second — just one second, just for herself — and in that second she let herself feel the full weight of it. Elizabeth on her knees in the dirt. The sound she'd made. The way she'd asked someone to take it out and nobody had moved fast enough. The way she'd gone quiet.
One second. Then she opened her eyes and put it away.
Later. She could fall apart later.
Right now she needed to think.
It was Jett who suggested they check the upstairs. Not for any particular reason — just that they didn't know the house, didn't know if it was actually empty, and knowing felt better than not knowing. Indigo agreed. They went up together, the stairs creaking badly under their weight, torches back on, the landing above revealing three doors all closed.
Bedroom. Bathroom. Another bedroom, smaller, a single window looking out over the front of the property.
Nico pushed that door open and swept his torch around — bare floorboards, bare walls, a curtain across the window, nothing else — and started to say something about how it was clear when his torch beam caught the curtain and he stopped.
The curtain was moving.
Not much. Just slightly. The faint shift of fabric in a draught from somewhere.
They all looked at it.
Nico crossed the room slowly. Reached out. Gripped the edge of the curtain.
Pulled it back.
The Woodsman was standing at the window.
Outside, face almost to the glass, the burlap mask filling the frame. The two dark eye gaps. Nothing behind them.
Just standing there in the dark looking in.
Like he'd been there the whole time.