Page 140 of Hide And Seek

“Don’t bother looking for other hikers,” Rhys said. “Hardly anyone knows about this trail. That’s why I picked it.”

The hope that had flickered in Gen’s face went out completely.

Rhys stepped closer, knife moving into the frame again. “Now,” he said. “Start talking.”

28

Gen draggedboth 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 someincompetent 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.”