Chapter 6: Chapter 6: A Traitor's Confession

The sound of the heavy bolt sliding shut on the infirmary door was a period at the end of a death sentence. Grant was gone. Not vanished like Suzy or consumed by the woods like Tommy, but erased, overwritten by something ancient and hungry. The withered, white-haired old man locked in that windowless shack was the horrifying proof of their situation, the physical manifestation of a broken rule.

The remaining three of them—Ash, Mary Beth, and the silent Ginger—retreated to the oppressive confines of Bunkhouse Beta. The air was thick with the ghost of Grant’s metallic, earthy scent and the memory of his reedy, terrified voice. The sun set, and the plastic pumpkins outside grinned their vacant, mocking grins in the gloom. Hope was no longer a currency they possessed. All they had left was a desperate, gnawing need for the truth.

Nicole was already there, perched on the edge of her bunk, her leather-bound book clutched to her chest. She had seen Grant, too. Her face was a bloodless mask, her eyes wide with a terror that looked chillingly familiar, the same terror she’d shown the night she recited the rhyme about Grinny Grin.

This time, there was no gentle prodding. Mary Beth, her grief and rage a volatile cocktail, marched across the room and stood over her.

“Talk,” Mary Beth commanded, her voice low and dangerous. “No more rhymes, no more hiding. You’re going to tell us everything. Now.”

Nicole shrank back, shaking her head, tears welling in her wide eyes. “I can’t. Please. You don’t understand. They’ll—”

“They’ll what?” Mary Beth snarled, lunging forward and snatching the book from Nicole’s grasp. Nicole let out a pathetic cry, reaching for it like a drowning woman reaching for a life raft. “They’ll do to you what they did to Grant? It looks to me like your silence didn’t protect him much! Or Suzy! Or Tommy!” She shook the book in Nicole’s face. “What is this? What are the rules? Why are we here?”

“Mary Beth, stop!” Ash’s voice was sharp, but her eyes, fixed on Nicole, were cold as steel. She stepped forward, placing a hand on Mary Beth’s arm but never breaking eye contact with the sobbing girl. “She’s right, Nicole. Hiding hasn’t worked. We followed your lead with the salt lick. We tried to ignore the things we saw. And people are still gone. Grant walked into those woods a healthy nineteen-year-old and came out a hundred. Your silence is a lie. It isn’t protecting anyone. It’s just choosing who dies next.”

Ginger stood by the door, a silent, unmoving guardian, her arms crossed. Her presence, her stillness, was more intimidating than any threat. There was no escape.

Ash’s words, a cold scalpel of logic, seemed to pierce through the layers of Nicole’s ingrained fear. The girl’s desperate sobs hitched, then subsided into ragged, shuddering breaths. She looked from Ash’s unyielding gaze to Mary Beth’s furious face, and a terrible, final understanding seemed to dawn in her eyes. The path of obedience had led to ruin. There was nothing left to protect.

“You’re right,” Nicole whispered, the words barely audible. She slumped, all the fight draining out of her, leaving behind a hollow shell of resignation. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Keeping the secret… it’s just helping them.”

She looked down at her hands, then back up, her eyes filled with a sorrow so profound it was painful to look at. “There’s no camp,” she began, her voice gaining a strange, fragile strength as the dam of her lifelong terror finally broke. “There’s no community service. There is only Sleepy Falls. And the thing it serves.”

Mary Beth slowly handed the book back, and Nicole took it, her hands no longer trembling. She held it not like a shield, but like a testament.

“It’s old. Older than the trees, older than the town. It doesn’t have a name we can speak. It lives in the spaces between things… in the dark, in the quiet, in the ground. And it’s hungry.”

“Hungry for what?” Ash pressed, her voice quiet.

Nicole met her gaze. “Belief. Stories. Fear.” She tapped the leather cover of the book. “This isn’t a rulebook for us. It’s a cookbook for it. All the rhymes, the legends, the scary stories parents in Sleepy Falls tell their children… they’re not warnings. They’re instructions. They are the blueprints that give the horror a shape.”

The pieces clicked into place with sickening finality. “Grinny Grin…” Ash breathed.

“Yes,” Nicole nodded. “As long as the rhyme is told, he’s real. He has to knock. He needs the salt. The rules give him form. The story of the mimic that looks like someone you know? The one Suzy saw? Its legend keeps us paranoid, afraid of each other. The song in the deep that Grant heard? It’s a hymn to the entity itself, a song of unmaking. Every story, every rule, makes another one of its claws real.”

“So why us?” Mary Beth demanded, her anger now tempered by a chilling awe. “Why bring outsiders here?”

“Because the town’s belief is old and stale,” Nicole explained, a tear tracing a path through the grime on her cheek. “It’s a maintenance diet. But outsiders… you bring fresh fear. You don’t believe any of it, at first. Then you see something you can’t explain. Your doubt turns to curiosity, then to dread, then to pure, raw terror. That… that’s the feast. Your dawning comprehension is the sweetest taste of all. You make the monsters so much stronger when you finally believe in them.”

“We’re offerings,” Ash stated, the word tasting like ash in her mouth.

Nicole nodded. “You are. And I… I was meant to be your shepherd. A watcher. To make sure you learned just enough of the rules to make the game interesting. To record your reactions. To report back.”

A wave of revulsion washed over Ash. This timid, terrified girl had been their warden. But as she looked at Nicole, she saw no malice, only the deep, soul-crushing weight of a life lived in absolute terror.

Having confessed the town’s deepest secret, a strange calm settled over Nicole. The fear in her eyes was replaced by a vast, empty sadness. She looked towards the door, as if she could see through the wood, past the clearing, to the town itself.

“What happens now?” Ash asked, though she already dreaded the answer.

Nicole gave a small, watery, and utterly hopeless smile. “Now? Now I’ve broken the first and most important rule: Never tell an offering the nature of the altar. Never explain the god they’re meant to feed.”

She closed her eyes. “They’ll know. The trees will whisper it to them. The ground will carry my words. They always know when a secret is told.” She took a deep breath, the breath of someone accepting an unavoidable, terrible fate. “Peter will come for me in the morning. My service is over. Now… I become a sacrifice.”

The confession was complete. They had the truth, the whole, monstrous, insane truth. But it wasn’t a weapon. It was a curse. And it had been purchased with the life of the girl who gave it to them. They stood in the silent bunkhouse, the weight of Nicole’s confession—and her impending doom—crushing what little hope they had left.