Morning came like an apology.
Indigo saw it first — the grey light seeping in through the open corner of the stone structure, slow and colourless, turning the dark into shapes and the shapes into a world she could see again. She hadn't slept. She wasn't sure any of them had properly — there'd been a kind of collective drifting in and out, the sleep of people whose bodies had given up arguing with their brains, shallow and unreliable and offering nothing in the way of rest.
She sat up.
Jett was awake beside her. She could tell by his breathing. He'd been awake for a while probably, lying there in the dark doing the same thing she'd been doing — waiting for the light and not knowing what to do with it when it came.
Anastasia was sitting against the wall with her eyes open, knees pulled to her chest, watching the entrance. She looked like someone who had decided somewhere in the night that she was done being scared and had moved into something quieter and more permanent. Not brave exactly. Just resolved.
Addison was still against the far wall. She looked exhausted in a way that sleep hadn't touched.
Outside the birds were going. The same birds as yesterday morning, the morning before that. The forest doing its thing completely indifferent to the four people inside the stone structure who had survived the night by doing nothing except staying still and breathing.
"It's light," Jett said. Stating it. Like the fact needed saying out loud to be real.
"Yeah," Indigo said.
She stood up. Her legs ached from the cold ground and her shoulder had stiffened overnight into something that pulled sharply when she moved it wrong. She ignored both of these things.
"We go now," she said. "Main trail. All of us. We don't stop."
Nobody argued.
The forest in daylight was obscene.
That was the only word Indigo had for it. Obscene. Beautiful and ordinary and completely indifferent — the light coming clean through the canopy, the path clear and easy underfoot, birds moving through the high branches, the whole world looking exactly as it had when they'd walked in two days ago laughing and complaining about the length of the drive.
She kept her eyes moving. Left, right, treeline, path ahead, treeline again. Jett was beside her. Anastasia just behind. Addison at the back.
They walked fast. Not running — running felt like panic and panic felt like exactly what she was trying not to be — but fast. Purposeful. Like people who knew where they were going and were going there.
The main trail was easy to find in daylight. The signs were right where they'd been on the way in, the path wide and well-worn, and for about four minutes Indigo let herself believe it was going to be this simple. That they were just going to walk out. That the gate was going to be open and the visitor centre was going to be empty and they were going to find a road and flag someone down and it was going to be over.
Four minutes. Then she saw the gate.
It was heavy steel, the kind that belonged on a construction site or a prison perimeter, not a woodland activity centre. It hadn't been there when they'd walked in — she was certain of that, certain enough that she stopped walking and just stood there looking at it for a moment trying to reconcile what she was seeing with what she remembered.
Padlocked. The chain through the bars was thick and new-looking, completely at odds with the weathered posts it was attached to. Beyond it the visitor centre sat quiet and dark, the windows reflecting the morning sky back at them, the car park visible through the bars — their cars still there, exactly where they'd left them, two days and a lifetime ago.
Jett walked up to the gate and gripped the bars and pulled. It didn't move. He pulled again. Nothing.
"Hey." Anastasia cupped her hands around her mouth. " Hey. Is anyone in there. Hello. "
Her voice went out and came back as an echo off the visitor centre wall. Nothing else. No movement behind the windows. No doors opening. Just the building sitting there looking at them.
" Help us. Please. Someone— "
"There's nobody in there," Addison said quietly.
"We don't know that."
"Look at it." She gestured at the building. "There's nobody in there."
Anastasia lowered her hands. Looked at the building. Looked at the gate.
Indigo was already looking at the fence running either side of it — steel mesh, tall, the kind with the outward angled top that made climbing it a specific kind of commitment. She walked to the left along the fence line, checking it. Jett fell into step beside her.
"We could try to climb it," he said, low.
"Look at the top."
He looked. Nodded. "Right."
"We follow the fence line. There might be another way through. A maintenance gate, a gap, anything."
He nodded again and they walked and the others followed and the fence went on.
They found him about a hundred meters along the fence line where the trees grew closest to the mesh, the undergrowth thick enough that they almost missed him.
Anastasia stopped first. She'd been slightly ahead, pushing through a low branch, and then she just — stopped. Completely still. Not making a sound.
Indigo came around the branch and saw.
He was lying on his back in the undergrowth between the fence and a fallen log, half obscured by the vegetation, and the first thing she saw was the boots. Dark work boots. Then the black trousers. Then the jacket — dark canvas, the fur trim pale against the forest floor, the hood fallen back from his face.
His face.
She knew him immediately. Knew the face the way you know someone you've only met once but paid attention to — the lines of it, the particular set of the jaw. The man from the visitor centre. The one who'd handed them the waivers with the patient smile of someone who'd done it a thousand times. Who'd shown them the laminated card with the costume photograph. Who'd walked them through the metal detector and told them to have a great experience.
He was wearing the costume. The Woodsman costume — the real one, the actor's version, the one from the photograph. He'd been the actor. Of course he had. The friendly man at the desk who knew every inch of the site was the same man who'd been hired to walk around in the dark and scare them.
He'd never made it to midnight.
The arrow was in his chest. One of the ones from the equipment rack — she recognised the fletching. His hands were at his sides. His eyes were open and looking at nothing and he'd been here since before midnight on the first night, lying in the undergrowth while they'd sat around the fire laughing and waiting for him to appear and the whole time something else had been in those woods instead.
Jett made a sound beside her. Not a word. Just a sound.
"He was the actor," Anastasia said. Very quietly. "He was both. The man at the desk and—"
"Yes," Indigo said.
"So the whole time—"
"Yes."
They stood there in the thin morning light looking at the man who'd welcomed them in and told them it was safe and believed it when he said it, and the forest went on around them being beautiful and ordinary and completely without conscience.
Addison was standing slightly behind the others. Indigo glanced back at her. Her face was pale, jaw set, eyes on the body. She looked like someone processing something difficult and doing it privately, which was just how Addison always looked, which was why Indigo thought nothing of it.
"We need to keep moving," Indigo said.
She turned away from the body.
The fence didn't give them anything. No maintenance gate, no gap, no section where the mesh had rusted through or pulled away from a post. Just fence, continuous and indifferent, all the way to where the trees became too thick to follow it further.
They stood at that point in silence for a moment.
"Back into the site," Jett said. It wasn't a question.
"Back into the site," Indigo confirmed.
Nobody said what they were all thinking which was that going back into the site meant going back toward whatever was in those trees and whatever was in those trees had killed three of their friends and the actor and had been doing it with a patience that suggested it had all the time in the world.
They turned around and went back the way they'd come.
The path back toward the clearing ran alongside a section of the site Indigo hadn't paid much attention to on the way out — a stretch of trees with the decorative hooks along the trunks, the same heavy iron ones she'd been noticing and counting and trying not to think about too hard. They were everywhere on this site. Part of the dressing, Addison had said on the first day. Just décor.
Eight of them here. Evenly spaced. Head height.
Indigo walked past them without stopping.
Behind her she heard Addison slow slightly — footsteps changing rhythm, a small hesitation — and then catch back up. She didn't think about it. She was watching the treeline.
The clearing was ahead. She could see the light changing through the trees where the canopy opened up and she was focused on that, on the open ground, on getting to somewhere with clear sightlines in every direction, and that was why she didn't register the sound immediately.
It started low. A scuffle, something displaced in the undergrowth, the particular sound of movement that wasn't wind.
Then Addison screamed.
Indigo spun around.
He was there — the Woodsman, the real one, the one who had nothing to do with the laminated card or the friendly man or any of it — there in the path behind them, and Addison was already not where she'd been. He'd moved so fast, so completely without warning, that the sequence of it didn't make sense — one second she was there, behind them on the path, and then the Woodsman was there and Addison wasn't in the same place anymore and it took Indigo's brain two full seconds to connect those things.
He had her by the back of her jacket.
" Let go— " Addison was fighting, properly fighting, both hands clawing at the grip on her jacket, feet scrabbling at the path. " Let go of me get off— "
Jett moved. Indigo moved. Anastasia moved.
He dragged her sideways off the path toward the trees in one motion, powerful and completely effortless, like she weighed nothing, like her fighting made no difference at all. Jett was shouting something. Indigo's feet were moving and the ground wasn't cooperating and the distance between her and Addison wasn't closing fast enough, wasn't closing at all—
" Please— " Addison's voice cracked completely open. " Please not me — please not me— "
The hook caught the light.
Indigo saw it coming and couldn't stop it and that was the thing she was going to carry longest — not the sound, not the sight of it, but the specific horror of seeing it coming and being exactly close enough that she thought she might and exactly too far away that she didn't.
The Woodsman swung her once — a single motion, controlled, deliberate — and Addison Parker hit the hook at the base of her skull and the sound she made was nothing like Elizabeth's sound and nothing like any sound Indigo had ever heard in her life and then she was quiet.
The forest was quiet.
Addison hung there in the morning light between the trees, the iron hook and the pale bark and the birds still going somewhere above them completely unaware, and Indigo stood on the path with Jett's hand somewhere on her arm and Anastasia beside her and none of them moving, none of them able to move, the three of them just standing there in the daylight watching it.
Jett was crying. She could hear it without looking at him — the particular quality of his breathing, broken and uneven. Anastasia made no sound at all. Indigo felt something happening in her chest that was too large and too complicated to have a name and she stood very still and let it happen because there was nothing else to do.
The Woodsman looked at them.
Stood there for a moment looking at what was left of the group — three people on a path in the morning light, not running, not fighting, just standing there in the wreckage of the last two days — and then he turned and walked into the trees and the forest took him the way it always did, quietly, completely, without leaving anything behind.
Gone.
Indigo looked at Addison.
She looked for a long time.
Then something happened inside her that she couldn't have explained and wouldn't have tried to — a shift, tectonic, deep in the place where the fear had been living for two days. Something moved aside. Something else moved in.
She turned away from the hook and the trees and the morning light and looked at Jett and Anastasia.
Jett's face was destroyed. Red-eyed, jaw working, the grief completely visible and uncontrolled the way it could only be in someone who had no energy left to manage it.
Anastasia looked back at her with that same resolved expression she'd had since dawn. Waiting.
"Tonight," Indigo said. Her voice came out different to how it had sounded before. Quieter. Harder. Like something had been burned out of it. "We end this tonight."
Neither of them argued.
She turned and walked toward the clearing and they followed and behind them the forest held everything it had taken and gave nothing back.