I have to flick my lighter a few times before it catches. The candle slowly brightens. I bring it closer to Josh’s bed.
“Wake up!” I hiss at Josh, shaking his shoulder. He looks confused. Fumbles for the glasses beside his bed.
“Why are you dressed?” he says. “What the hell are you doing?”
“We need to go to cabin seven,” I say. “I need your help.”
Josh sits up and rakes his hands through his long hair. “I thought we agreed. We’ll wait until morning, then we’ll go tell Edward and Harvey about the…body.”
“You don’t get it. Harvey isn’t going make it back by morning. You saw the road, right? There are trees down all over the place. And you think Edward is going to help?”
With his round glasses and bed head, Josh looks like a flustered owl. He shakes his head slowly.
“I don’t know,” he says. “This is bigger than us. We need to tell someone.”
“We can’t trust Edward,” I say. I lean in toward Josh and lower my voice. “And there’s something else going on. I just saw something.”
Josh looks uneasy. The candle flame flickers, then steadies.
“Saw something? When?”
“It’s hard to explain.” I rub a hand across my face. The headache is back, throbbing in my temple. “It was in this dream I just had.”
Josh pushes his glasses up. Blinks a few times.
“You know how you sound, right? You don’t trust anyone. Your dreams are telling you what to do.”
“It’s not like that.”
“No, it’s exactly like that. You need to get it together. You probably have a concussion or something from that fall. You’re not thinking straight.”
I turn away from him, furious. I shouldn’t need his help. But the truth is that I’m scared. I’m scared of what I’ve seen. In real life and in my dreams. And after being alone in the woods, nearly dying out there, I don’t want to go out alone. It’s like I’m a little kid again. Scared of the dark.
I look at the black window, showing my pale reflection in the candlelight.
I’m sick of being scared.
Maybe it’s like my dad says—I’m making myself see scary stuff, when in fact there’s nothing at all. I’m jumping at shadows. But I know there’s something going on. And it’s like I’m being shown a path and I have to walk down it. Maybe if I get to the end of the path, the bad stuff will stop.
“Stay here, then,” I say. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Dylan,” Josh says. “C’mon! What are you going to do? Get lost in the woods again? Be smart about this—” His words are cut off as the door slams behind me.
I pull up the hood of my jacket against the cold. Clouds have rolled in again across the sky. It’s pitch-black as I walk through the cold night air to cabin seven. I test the door—locked. Our keys don’t unlock staff cabins, just guest cabins.
I slam my shoulder into the door. There’s a sharp crack. The door swings open.
I walk into the cabin, playing my headlamp around the dark space. It looks the same as when I left it. A couple rows of bunk beds. An old bookshelf. Bathroom at the back. A woodstove in the center. I walk over to the marks on the wall and kneel down.
Deep gouges, all around that loose board. I remember thinking that Harvey would make us fix it up. I fumble around the board, testing, pushing. Nothing. I scan the cabin with my headlamp, my eyes finally settling on the woodstove. There’s a long black iron rod—the fire poker. Perfect.
I shove the tip of the poker under the board and push down. Twice. Finally, it gives. I pull the board away from the wall just far enough to reach inside. My hand closes around something dry, soft, square. Papers?
I’m about to pull my hand out when I freeze. Over the low moan of the wind outside, I think I hear something. A slam. But then nothing else. Maybe it’s just the wind knocking things around. I gently pull out what I’ve found in the wall. A small brown notebook.
I sit down on a bunk and carefully open it up. White pages covered in blue ballpoint pen. Sloppy handwriting, a little like mine. Dates at the top of each page—it’s a diary. I flip back to the front cover. There’s a name. Allen Ender.
Allen. The name on that scrap of jacket out in the woods. The name of the body. The guy who went missing.
I feel dizzy for a second. I feel that sense of pressure building up and up in my head. My hands start to shake, and I nearly drop the notebook on the floor. I take a deep, ragged breath and steady myself. I turn to the last pages of the diary. All these entries are dated October, after Allen had volunteered to stay on and close up the resort. One word keeps appearing on all these pages—Edward.
As I read, I realize that Allen had it even worse than Josh. Allen was alone up here that fall, just him and Edward. And Edward had decided that Allen was his personal project. Allen was a slacker who needed “training.” He’d send Allen swimming out to the raft and back, just like he did with Josh. And other stuff. He’d wake Allen up in the middle of the night to carry wood to the cabins. Make Allen scrub the kitchen floors before he was allowed to eat. Cruel, petty stuff.
And Allen never fought back. Didn’t seem to think he could. Thought that this was the way it had to be. Even thought that he deserved it. That Edward was right about him, even as he seemed to get worse. The stuff Allen described was starting to sound more like abuse. Like torture.
I’m near the end of the diary when the writing stops abruptly. I turn the page, expecting to see more. But there’s nothing. I flip to the end. Nothing. Just a couple of blank white pages.
I’m sitting there staring at the little book when I hear a noise behind me. I turn, automatically lifting my arm against the bright beams of two flashlights. When my eyes adjust, I see Josh standing near the door of the cabin. Then Edward steps inside and rests a hand on his shoulder.
“You were right to come to me, Josh,” says Edward. “Dylan is clearly not himself.”