‘You can see her too?’ he whispered, and Nikki nodded, unable to speak.
‘Abigail?’ said Greg, peering at the same spot the other two were looking at. ‘Oh. Abigail.’ His voice was full of wonder.
‘She wants us to do this,’ Carl said. The others nodded. Carl put a hand on Nikki’s shoulder. He had no idea how much time had passed since they’d stopped – it could have been hours – but when he checked his watch he saw they were still on schedule.
In the intervening years, he would cook up Abigail’s potion many more times, but it never worked like it did that night. Was never as intense, as magical. And he found he couldn’t describe it, even to himself. Like a dream, it stayed out of reach. He recalled the glowing trees, the velvet blackness of the spaces between them, the way the sky above appeared to rush and flow like a river of stars. He remembered heat spreading from inside his belly, like there was a sun burning there, and how when he touched Nikki’s shoulder she felt hot too. At one point he thought he heard wolves howling in the distance and saw a pair of deer rush across their path as if pursued, but the others had no memory of this. More than anything, he recalled feeling more alive than he had ever thought possible, his body vibrating with energy, and Abigail walking beside him, serene and beautiful, emanating love.
All the while, he felt absolute certainty that his plan would work. That it was happening now.
They arrived at the line of trees at the edge of the clearing, the spot from which he’d watched the teachers the previous two nights. Greg and Nikki stopped beside him. He could feel them breathing. He could feel, too, Everett’s bandana in his pocket.
He looked at Nikki and Greg, at their black eyes and slack jaws, and spoke to them in a low voice.
‘We’re going to make an offering,’ he said.
They nodded.
‘To the forest, to the spirits. Do you understand?’
They stared at him.
‘This is for Abigail. For the Hollows. Are you with me?’
‘Yes,’ they said together. ‘Yes.’
‘Put your masks on,’ he whispered.
Nikki became Fox, Greg turned into Goat, and Carl slipped on his own mask, becoming Crow.
He parted two branches and stepped into the clearing, where the teachers lay wrapped up in each other. Entwined and pale in the darkness. So caught up in their passion that they didn’t see or hear the three masked teenagers approach. Didn’t see the boy in the crow mask with the rock raised above his head.
After Carl brought the rock down on the back of Eric Daniels’ skull, Sally screamed once.
He silenced her as quickly as he could.
There was a moment when he hesitated. Almost stopped. It was the look in Sally’s eyes, the unspoken plea for mercy. But Abigail whispered to him: Do it.
This is for me.
Afterwards, when they were certain both teachers were dead, they arranged Eric and Sally’s bodies on the flat stone. They were heavy, especially Eric, and it took all of Carl and Greg’s strength to move them, with Nikki helping too. He produced Everett’s bandana and Nikki didn’t react at all. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. It was hard to tell what she was thinking. She was crouched on the forest floor, motionless, her hair hanging around her face, staring at nothing. He was so set on what he was doing, on carrying out the last steps of his plan, that he felt almost sober.
He dipped the bandana in Eric’s blood and used it to daub the symbols on the flat stone, the symbols he’d seen in Abigail’s book. The horned god, which was also on the back of Everett’s jacket, and the triple goddess. He looked up at the sky, the moon invisible among the stars.
He gestured for Fox and Goat to follow him. When they weren’t paying attention, he dropped the bloody bandana by the path.
Now, just over twenty years later, he stands outside the cabin, looking up at the same spot in the sky. After the ritual in the clearing, they had gone back to the lake and he had waited for the potion to wear off. Abigail had been right. Both Nikki and Greg appeared to be dazed, unsure of exactly what they had taken part in. So he had told them; filled in the blanks.
He didn’t sleep that night. In the morning, he tuned in to the local news channel, waiting for the bodies to be found, and discovered they already had been, by two kids from the camp. Carl had gasped at that, wondering how close he and the others had been to getting caught. He forced himself to relax and waited for news that Everett had been arrested.
But that was the only thing that didn’t go the way Carl had hoped. It turned out that some idiot reporter, who must have spoken to an idiot cop, revealed live on air that the police were planning to talk to a local youth who was known to be ‘interested in the occult’。 It would have been obvious to any local watching that this youth was Everett, including Everett himself. By the time the cops turned up at the junkyard, Everett was gone.