The hole in the fence was exactly where Reddit said it would be.
Sarah Beaumont found it first — she always found things first, that was just how she was wired, the kind of person whose eyes moved faster than everyone else's — and she pulled the chain link back with both hands and looked through it at the dark treeline beyond.
"This is it," she said.
"You sure?" Noah was behind her, torch already out, the beam cutting across the wet grass between the fence and the trees. He was doing the thing he always did when he was scared which was talk more than usual and pretend he wasn't doing either.
"The post said third panel left of the maintenance sign," Sarah said. "That's the maintenance sign." She nodded at the faded yellow sign bolted to the fence post to their right. "So yeah. I'm sure."
Jack said nothing. He was standing slightly behind both of them with his hands in his hoodie pocket looking at the trees beyond the fence with the expression of someone who had agreed to something in daylight that looked considerably different in the dark. He was sixteen. They were all sixteen. At sixteen you made decisions based on how they sounded to other people and dealt with how they actually felt later.
"We're doing this," Sarah said. Not a question.
"We're doing this," Noah confirmed.
Jack said "yeah" in a tone that meant something closer to probably.
Sarah went through first.
The forest received them the way it received everything — without acknowledgement, without ceremony, just the immediate closing of trees on either side and the path narrowing and the torchlight becoming the only thing between them and total dark. Sarah had been in forests before. Family camping trips, school orienteering, the woods behind her aunt's house in Devon where she'd spent summers until she was twelve. She knew what forests felt like.
This one felt different.
She couldn't have explained it properly. Nothing was visibly wrong — the trees were trees, the path was a path, the ground underfoot was the same mixture of dirt and pine needles and exposed root that you'd find anywhere. But there was a quality to the air here that she hadn't encountered in other forests. Something older. Something that had happened here and hadn't fully left.
"Okay so the campsite should be about twenty minutes in," she said, pulling her phone out and checking the map she'd screenshotted before they lost signal. "We follow this path and it opens up into a clearing."
"The clearing," Noah said.
"The clearing," she confirmed.
Behind them Jack said "can we talk about how it's midnight" and Sarah said "that's the point Jack" and Noah laughed and the three of them moved deeper in.
She'd found the Kill Count forum eight months ago.
It had started the way most things started — a YouTube video at two in the morning, an algorithm rabbit hole, one thing leading to another until she was three hours deep into a community of people who had spent five years dissecting every detail of what had happened in Vicrock Forest. The Kill Count case. Six teenagers, a fake horror experience, a hired killer, four dead. The two survivors — Indigo Derby and Anastasia Smith — had never spoken publicly about what happened. Which meant the internet had filled the silence with everything else.
There were theories. There were always theories. Some of them were reasonable — questions about ScreamForHell, about the company's liability, about how Jacob Cain had been contracted and by whom. Some of them were less reasonable — people who thought the whole thing was staged, that the deaths were faked, that Indigo Derby was somehow responsible for more than she'd admitted.
Sarah didn't subscribe to those ones. She'd read enough to know what was real and what was the internet being the internet.
What she did subscribe to was the fascination. The pull of it. Something about the Kill Count case had lodged itself in her brain and refused to come out — not in a morbid way, or not only in a morbid way, but in the way of a story that felt unfinished. Two people had walked out of these woods. Four hadn't. And the place where it happened was right here, accessible, twenty minutes from a hole in a fence that Reddit had been posting about for three years.
So here she was.
"Okay so I heard," Noah said, torch swinging as he walked, "that the Elizabeth Jack one — the first one — they found her like weeks later. Like nobody moved her."
"That's not true," Sarah said.
"I'm just saying what I heard."
"You heard wrong. They found her the same night. The police got there by morning."
"How do you know."
"Because I actually read about it instead of watching TikToks about it."
Noah made a sound that wasn't quite an argument.
"What about the photos," Jack said from behind them.
Sarah glanced back at him. He'd caught up slightly, was walking closer to them than he had been. The trees had a way of doing that — pushing people together without anyone deciding to.
"What photos," she said, though she knew exactly what photos.
"The ones online. Of the — you know. The bodies."
"Those are fake," Sarah said.
"Some of them might not be."
"All of them are fake Jack. Real crime scene photos don't end up on Reddit. They're evidence."
"Some of them looked really real though," Noah said.
"They looked real because people are good at faking things." She stepped over a root without breaking pace. "The actual crime scene photos were never released. The families made sure of that."
She said it with the authority of someone who had spent eight months reading everything there was to read, which she had. She knew the case the way some people knew football statistics or film trivia — not because it was useful but because her brain had decided it was important and had filed it accordingly. She knew the order of the deaths. She knew the layout of the campsite from the aerial photographs that had appeared in a Sunday supplement two years after. She knew that Indigo Derby had moved to New York and that Anastasia Smith had been spotted in Brooklyn by someone on the forum who claimed to have recognised her in a coffee shop and had been told very clearly to mind their own business.
She knew that the man responsible — Jacob Cain, later identified as a freelance contractor with a record — had officially been listed as deceased following the events of the final night, though no body had ever been formally recovered from the site.
She knew that last part too. She'd read the thread about it forty times.
No body recovered.
She'd told herself it didn't matter. People died in forests. Bodies were missed. The police had been thorough and Jacob Cain was dead and that was the end of it.
She told herself that now, walking through his forest at midnight, and it helped about as much as you'd expect.
The clearing appeared the way the forum said it would — suddenly, the trees pulling back without warning, the sky opening up above them wider than it had any right to be. Sarah stopped at the edge of it and swept her torch around.
It was smaller than she'd imagined. That was the first thing. She'd built it up in her head across eight months of reading and theorising and the reality of it was just — a clearing. A roughly circular space, the ground uneven, the remains of a fire pit still visible in the centre. Rings of stones, dark with years of weather, the interior choked with weeds that had grown up through the ash. Around it, logs. Four of them, still in their rough compass formation, softened by five years of rain and frost into something that looked almost natural now. Almost like they'd always been there.
Almost like nothing had happened here at all.
Sarah walked to the nearest log and sat down on it.
"Don't," Jack said immediately.
"Why not."
"Because someone died there."
"Someone died everywhere here Jack. That's kind of the whole point." She patted the log beside her. "Sit down."
He sat down. So did Noah, on the log opposite, his torch pointing at the dead fire pit between them.
The three of them sat in the clearing in the dark and looked at the place where six people had sat five years ago laughing about a four hour drive and waiting to be safely scared.
Sarah felt it then — properly, for the first time. Not the intellectual fascination she'd been carrying for eight months. Something else. Something quieter and more uncomfortable. The weight of the place. The specific heaviness of somewhere that had held something terrible and still held the shape of it even after the terrible thing was gone.
"She sat here," Sarah said. Quietly. "Indigo Derby. Right here."
"Probably," Noah said.
"Definitely. This log faces the fire and the forum reconstruction puts her on this side." She looked at the stones in the centre. "They were all just sitting here. Just talking. It was midnight and they were waiting for the actor and they thought—"
She stopped.
The torchlight moved.
Not hers. Not Noah's. Something at the edge of the clearing, in the trees, a light that wasn't a torch — just a shift of something, a change in the quality of the dark between the trunks. There and then not there.
"Did you see that," she said.
"See what," Noah said.
"In the trees. Left side."
They all looked. The treeline was dark and still and offered nothing.
"I don't see anything," Jack said.
"There was something. A light or — not a light, just—" She frowned at the trees. "Something moved."
"It's a forest," Noah said. "Things move in forests."
"I know that."
"Could be an animal."
"I know." She kept looking at the treeline. The dark between the trunks looked back at her and gave nothing away. "Yeah. Probably an animal."
She looked back at the fire pit.
"Okay so Elizabeth Jack," Noah said, picking up where he'd left off on the path, apparently having decided the light was nothing worth discussing. "First to die. Arrow through the stomach. Is that confirmed or is that one of the theories."
"Confirmed," Sarah said, still half watching the treeline. "The post mortem was leaked. Partial. Someone on the forum got hold of it through a freedom of information request."
"That's insane."
"People are dedicated." She pulled her jacket tighter. The clearing was colder than the path had been, the open sky above letting the temperature drop properly. "The arrow went through her left side. She was still alive for a few minutes after."
"God," Jack said.
"Yeah."
"And the one who did it was just — standing there? In the middle of their camp?"
"At the edge of the treeline first. Then he walked in." She looked at the left side of the clearing, the specific section of treeline where the reconstruction had placed him. "They thought it was the actor. The fake killer they'd hired. They watched him pick up the bow and they just — watched. Because why wouldn't you. You'd paid for it."
"Until the arrow," Noah said.
"Until the arrow."
The clearing was quiet.
Jack shifted on his log. "Can we talk about going back."
"We just got here," Sarah said.
"I know we just got here. I'm just saying. It's cold and it's midnight and we've seen it now. We've been here. That was the point right — to say we'd been here. So we've been here."
"I want to find the hook," Sarah said.
"The what."
"The hook. The one that—" She stopped. Looked at Noah. "The Addison Parker one. There were hooks on the trees as part of the site decoration and the — the Woodsman used one." She stood up from the log, torch sweeping the treeline. "They were along this side according to the reconstruction. Iron hooks, still there apparently. Someone posted a photo two years ago."
"Sarah," Jack said.
"Five minutes. I just want to see it. Then we go."
She crossed the clearing toward the treeline, torch up, scanning the trunks. The trees were dense here, closer together than on the path, the undergrowth thicker. She pushed through the first layer of branches and swept the beam along the trunks.
There. Fourth tree in. The iron hook, dark with rust and age, driven into the bark at head height. Exactly where the forum said it would be.
She stood in front of it and looked at it for a long moment.
It was just a hook. Just old iron. Just a piece of metal that had been here for years, rusting quietly, while the forest grew around it and the world moved on. She reached out and touched it with two fingers. Cold. Rough with corrosion.
Just a hook.
She took a photo.
"Got it," she called back toward the clearing. "Coming now."
She turned around.
Noah and Jack were still on their logs, visible through the gap in the trees, torch beams pointed at the fire pit. She could hear them talking — something about the forum, about one of the theories, Noah's voice carrying in the quiet of the forest the way voices did when people forgot where they were.
She started back toward the clearing.
The sound came from above her and behind her simultaneously — a mechanical whir, brief and sharp, like something releasing under tension — and then something hit her in the back.
Not hard. Almost gentle. Like someone had pressed a finger between her shoulder blades.
She looked down.
The point of the grappling hook was coming out of her chest.
She stood there and looked at it the way Elizabeth Jack had looked at the arrow — with the particular blankness of a brain that had received information it didn't have a category for. The hook was small and dark and it had gone through her and the wire attached to it was taut, running back through the trees behind her, and she could feel the tension in it like something waiting.
"Noah," she said.
Her voice came out wrong. Too quiet. Not enough air behind it.
"Noah."
He looked up. She saw the exact moment his face changed — the torch swinging toward her, the light catching the wire, his mouth opening.
The wire went taut.
It yanked her backward off her feet so fast the forest blurred — trees and sky and torchlight and the ground rushing up — and then she hit the dirt and the wire kept pulling and she was being dragged, heels cutting furrows in the ground, hands clawing at the wire around the hook that was in her chest that she couldn't pull out because pulling it would—
She screamed.
Noah was running. She could hear him — footsteps on the clearing floor, his voice saying her name, Jack saying something that wasn't words. The wire stopped pulling. She lay on the ground in the dark between the trees and breathed in the specific shallow way of someone whose body was managing a crisis her brain hadn't caught up with yet.
Footsteps. Not Noah's. Different. Slow. Unhurried.
The Woodsman stepped out of the dark.
She saw the boots first. Then the trousers. Then the jacket — dark canvas, heavy, a pale fur trim on the hood pulled up to obscure everything above the collar. And then the mask. Rough burlap, hand stitched, two dark eye gaps that absorbed her torchlight and gave nothing back.
He was holding the end of the wire.
He looked at her on the ground the way you look at something you've already finished deciding about and he reached down and wrapped the wire around both hands and pulled.
The wire went around her throat.
She got one hand between the wire and her neck — one hand, not enough, nowhere near enough — and she pulled at it and it didn't move and the Woodsman pulled from his end with the patient steady pressure of someone who understood that time was on his side.
" Noah— "
The word came out as almost nothing. Just the shape of it. Just air.
In the clearing she could hear them — Noah's voice, Jack's voice, both of them saying her name, the torch beams swinging wildly through the trees. She heard Noah crash into the undergrowth heading toward her and she wanted to tell him to run, wanted to tell him to take Jack and go back through the fence and get in the car and drive and not stop, but the wire was doing what wire does and the words weren't coming anymore.
Just the dark. Just the boots in front of her face. Just the patient steady pressure.
Just the forest. Quiet and indifferent and exactly as it had always been.
" Sarah. " Noah's torch found her. She heard him stop. Heard the sound he made.
" Run, " she tried to say.
The Woodsman looked up at Noah across the dark.
Noah ran.
Jack was already gone.
The clearing was empty. The logs sat in their compass formation around the dead fire pit and the torchlight swung and faded and the forest absorbed the sound of two boys running and then there was nothing left but the dark and the wire and Sarah Beaumont's hand still pressed between them, fingers loosening now, the forest floor cold against her cheek.
The Woodsman held on until it was finished.
Then he let go.
He stood over her for a moment in the dark — the mask, the jacket, the work boots that had walked through this forest a thousand times — and looked down at what was at his feet with the same expression he always had.
Nothing.
He turned. Walked back into the trees. The forest took him the way it always did — completely, immediately, without leaving a trace.
The clearing was quiet.
Somewhere far off, getting further every second, two boys ran through the dark toward a hole in a fence and a road and a world that didn't know yet what had just started again.
Sarah Beaumont lay on the forest floor and the trees grew tall above her and the stars came through the gaps in the canopy cold and indifferent and very far away.
The Woodsman was back.