Chapter 5: Chapter 5: The Man from the Mine

A week passed. A week of agonizing, suffocating silence. The knowledge from Nicole’s book did not empower them; it paralyzed them. Every creak of the bunkhouse, every shadow that danced at the edge of the clearing, was now filtered through the lens of a monstrous new reality. Ash found herself holding her breath when a bird fell silent, her body tensing for the ground to tremble, for the world to Shift. Mary Beth’s fiery defiance had been banked, replaced by a tense, coiled vigilance. Even her jokes were brittle things that shattered in the heavy air.

They knew some of the rules, but the blank spaces in their understanding were terrifying voids where anything could be lurking. What rule had Suzy broken by acknowledging the mimic? What had happened to Tommy and Grant in the rearranged woods? The questions festered, unanswered, in the suffocating quiet.

Peter seemed to relish their fear. He continued his routine with a cheerfulness that was now transparently sadistic, his booming “Morning, campers!” a daily mockery of their imprisonment. He never mentioned Tommy or Grant. In the world according to Peter, they had never existed. It was as if the forest had not only taken them, but had also consumed the very memory of them from the camp’s official history. The remaining outsiders—Ash, Mary Beth, and the ever-silent Ginger—were a tight, grim knot of fear, their shared knowledge a burden that isolated them from a world that no longer made sense.

The silence broke on the eighth day.

It was late afternoon, the sun casting long, golden spears of light through the pines. Ash was listlessly sweeping the porch of the main lodge, the rhythmic scrape of the broom the only sound in the clearing. Then, she saw it.

A figure, stumbling out of the treeline.

Her heart leaped into her throat. Her first thought was mimic. She froze, her knuckles white on the broom handle, her mind screaming Rule 4: Do not acknowledge it. Do not give it shape. It was lurching, its movements jerky and unnatural. But it wasn’t wearing Peter’s face. It was tall and lanky, like…

“Grant?” Mary Beth’s voice was a choked whisper from beside her. She had seen him too. Ginger, who had been sitting on the steps, slowly rose to her feet, her headphones slipping from her ears.

The figure stumbled into the full light of the clearing, and a collective gasp was sucked from the air. It was Grant, but it was a horrifying, desecrated version of him. The handsome, arrogant young man who had walked into those woods a week ago was gone. In his place stood a withered husk.

His hair, once a thick, glossy brown, was now stark, bone-white and hung in thin, brittle strands around his face. His skin, once tanned and healthy, was a pale, translucent gray, stretched tight over his bones like old parchment. He was hunched, his broad shoulders stooped, his body frail and shrunken as if decades had been stolen from him in a matter of days. He wore the same t-shirt and jeans he’d left in, but now they hung off his skeletal frame in loose, pathetic folds.

But it was his eyes that were the worst. They were ancient, clouded with a profound and terrible exhaustion, swimming with a terror so deep it had burned out everything else.

He shuffled forward, his feet dragging through the dirt. He wasn’t looking at them. His gaze was fixed on something a thousand yards away, something only he could see.

“Grant?” Ash finally managed, taking a tentative step forward.

His head snapped towards the sound of his name. His cloudy eyes struggled to focus on her. A dry, rasping sound escaped his chapped lips.

“Ash…” The voice was a ruin. It was thin and reedy, the voice of a very old man on his deathbed. He took another shuffling step, his body trembling with a palsy that shook him from head to toe.

“Where’s Tommy?” Mary Beth asked, her voice shaking. “Grant, what happened to you?”

A flicker of something—memory, pain—crossed Grant’s face. “Tommy…” he rasped, shaking his white-haired head slowly. “Tommy heard it too. He listened too long.”

“Heard what?” Ash pressed, stepping closer. A strange, metallic smell wafted from him, like old coins and damp earth. A mine. The thought struck her with sudden, chilling clarity. The man from the mine.

“The song,” Grant whispered, his eyes widening with remembered horror. He began to tremble more violently. “In the deep. Down… down in the dark. We got lost. The trees… they moved. We found the shaft. We thought it was a way out.”

His words came in broken, fragmented pieces, a puzzle of insanity. “There’s no bottom. Just… just the song. It’s not a sound. It’s… it gets inside you. It vibrates in your bones. It tells you things. Terrible things.” He clutched his head, his frail fingers tangling in his white hair. “It’s a hymn. The one from the book. The one you’re not supposed to sing.”

Ash’s blood ran cold. The rule about certain melodies. They hadn’t sung it. They had found it.

“It rewrites you,” Grant babbled, his voice cracking. “Verse by verse. It takes… it takes the time. Eats the years. Tommy… he said it was beautiful. He wanted to hear the end. He just… sat down. And he listened.” Grant’s face crumpled. “He got old so fast, Ash. He just… fell apart. Like dust.”

The image was so horrific, so complete in its cosmic cruelty, that Ash felt bile rise in her throat. This was the consequence. This was what happened when you broke a rule in this place. It wasn't a quick death from a monster's claw. It was a slow, agonizing dissolution. A fate far, far worse than simply vanishing.

The screen door of the main lodge slammed open. Peter stood there, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He took in the scene—the terrified girls, the babbling, withered old man who was once Grant—and his relentlessly cheerful expression didn’t even flicker. He simply sighed, a sound of mild, parental disappointment.

“Well, well,” he said, his voice casual. “Look what the cat dragged in. Seems one of our little adventurers couldn’t handle the curriculum.”

He walked towards Grant, not with alarm or concern, but with the weary air of a janitor about to clean up a spill. He put a firm hand on Grant’s shoulder. Grant flinched but was too weak to resist.

“Come on, son,” Peter said, his voice dropping into a falsely soothing tone. “You’re all tuckered out. Let’s get you to the infirmary. A little rest and you’ll be… fine.”

The word ‘fine’ was a lie so profound it felt like a physical blow. As Peter led the shuffling, broken boy away, Grant’s head lolled back. His clouded eyes found Ash’s one last time.

“Can’t get it out of my head,” he rasped, his voice a ghost of a sound. “The song… it’s still singing…”

Peter led him into a small, windowless shack behind the lodge—a building they had all assumed was for tool storage—and closed the door. A moment later, they heard the distinct, final sound of a heavy bolt sliding into place.

Ash, Mary Beth, and Ginger stood frozen in the clearing, the silence rushing back in, heavier and more menacing than before. The setting sun bled across the sky, and in the encroaching darkness, they were left with the horrifying, undeniable proof. The rules weren't just about survival. They were about preserving your very self. And they had just witnessed the price of failure.