Page 141 of Hide And Seek

“You’re Ivy League students, not medieval peasants,” Rhys said, voice dripping with contempt. “You’re actually telling me you all sat around convincing yourselves some fucking occult book gave a man real magic powers?”

“I told you, we were fucking wasted!” Gen shot back. “And some of us were high, too. Really high.” Tears spilled faster down her face now. “Things just made sense in that moment. I don’t really know how else to explain it. It was like we were in a dream or something.”

The camera shifted slightly.

“What happened then?” Rhys asked.

Gen’s eyes dropped to the ground. “At some point somebody joked that we should try one of the rituals ourselves.”

Rhys said nothing now, and that silence somehow felt more dangerous than yelling would’ve.

“Most of the rituals in the Codex were horrible,” Gen went on. “Like torture and mutilation and bloodletting. Really insane stuff. But there was one that sounded…” She hesitated for a second. “Slightly less awful. It was called ‘The Realization of Dreams’.”

She stopped talking for a moment, and her breathing turned uneven again.

“The book said if the ritual was performed properly, your deepest ambitions would become reality,” she finally said. “And because we were all drunk and completely out of our minds, everyone started talking about what they’d wish for if it actually worked. Brad and Olivia talked about qualifying for the Olympic trials again. Sutton said she wanted to walk in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show one day. Knox wanted to get drafted into the NHL. Everybody just started feeding into it.”

As she spoke, I could almost picture the atmosphere turning.

The false closeness of late-night confessions around a fire.

The drunken hysteria.

Young, privileged people convincing themselves the world owed them every fantasy they’d ever dreamed of.

“After a while, it stopped feeling like a complete joke,” Gen whispered. Her mouth was trembling violently now. “We all kept hyping each other up, talking about how amazing it would be if this ritual actually worked. But the book said we needed a human soul. A sacrifice made by the participants. And…”

Rhys’s voice came out dangerously calm. “And what?”

Gen squeezed her eyes shut. “It said the purer and more innocent the soul was, the stronger the ritual became. So we figured that meant a baby. Or a kid.”

As the words sank in, a cold heaviness settled into my chest. She wasn’t actually going where I thought she was going with this story… was she?

“Then we started talking about the campers,” she went on. “Which kid we’d use if we actually did it. Obviously we weren’t serious at first. But then we kept talking about it, and we—”

“Stop. Just fuckingstop.” Rhys finally moved, the camera jolting sharply as he stepped closer. “Are you telling me that what happened to Carly wasn’t even an accident? You sickmotherfuckers actually picked her for some kind of bullshit sacrifice?”

Gen opened her eyes. They were bright with tears again. “You just don’t understand what it was like that night,” she said, head slowly shaking. “None of it felt real anymore.”

“The fuck it didn’t.”

“We were totally delirious!” she said. “You just… you had to be there to get it. Everybody was drunk and high and feeding off each other’s energy, and it was like…” Her voice broke apart completely. “It was like we’d all gone into some kind of trance. Nothing felt real anymore.Nothing.You’d understand if you were there. I swear.”

“No. I wouldn’t. Not in a million fucking years.” Rhys exhaled deeply, and the camera jerked slightly with the motion. “You know, up until thirty seconds ago, I thought you guys caught Carly sneaking out and decided to go swimming with her. Then maybe something went wrong and one of you accidentally drowned her, and then you all panicked afterward and covered it up because you didn’t want to get in trouble. That’s already bad enough. Butthis? This is beyond fucked up.”

“I know how bad it sounds.” Gen folded forward slightly, face crumpling. “But… you just don’t get what it felt like that night.”

A long silence followed that. The wind moved through the trees at the edge of the clearing. Gen stared at the ground between her feet.

“I don't care what it felt like,” Rhys finally said in a stony voice. “Just tell me what happened.”

Gen swallowed hard and wiped her eyes again. “We chose Carly for two reasons,” she said. “Piper and Noura had overheard the girls in their cabin talking about this stupid game they’d invented. The Challenge Game. One of the dares involved getting something from the lake, so we knew we could… you know…”

“Lure her there and drown her for your stupid fucking ritual?” Rhys snarled.

“Yes,” Gen whispered.

“There were five girls in that cabin,” Rhys said. “Why choose Carly over the others?”