Epilogue One Year Later

EPILOGUE

ONE YEAR LATER

Bezi

Isit on a bench on the south shore of Mirror Lake, looking out over the black water. The forest is starting to reclaim most of the buildings that weren't razed. Remnants of the Western Lodge's foundation poke up out of the foliage, giving a little clue to what was there before.

I hope that one day, the forest will take back everything from this cursed place.

I breathe in the chilly nighttime air. I know I shouldn't be here. Technically, it's off-limits to everyone except law enforcement because they are still pulling body parts from the lake even after all this time. But not Charity. She's still down there, and that means I am too. I'm here because somebody has to bear witness. Somebody has to remember.

I touch the jagged scar that runs across my abdomen. Six surgeries later and things still aren't the same, but the scars remind me that what happened to me and to Charity and everyone else was real. Sometimes it seems so much like a nightmare that I wonder if one day, I'll wake up and find that it was all just an awful dream. Now I'm the final girl. A title I took from Charity—one I wish almost every day I could give back to her.

I should have died right here on the shore of Mirror Lake, but I didn't. And as it turns out, my frantic call went through, but the 911 operator thought my pleas for help were some kind of sick prank. It took them hours to actually reach me, and by the time they showed up, Kyle was long gone.

Unlike before, when people had died at Mirror Lake and the whole thing had been hushed up, the media turned its full attention to me in the aftermath of what people were calling a real-life sequel to The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. I was the final girl, and there wasn't any way to get away from the photographers and the journalists looking for a good spin on the tragedy that had unfolded here. They wanted me to talk about what it had been like to play dead for hours or what it had been like to realize the things unfolding at Camp Mirror Lake were so much worse than the events Charity and the staff had re-created as part of the terror simulation.

That's how it went for months. It wasn't until the following summer that things seemed to calm down. The press was on to the next, more interesting thing, and all I was left with was the grief and the sadness and the scars.

Paige, in her obsession with slasher films, had always talked to me about the rules. She was the one who seemed to know how that night, exactly one year ago, would go. It was her voice that drove Charity and me to make the decisions we did. It's her voice I hear now as I sit at the edge of Mirror Lake in the dark.

"The final act is never really the end," she said to me and Charity once as we watched the original Friday the 13th under a pile of blankets on a chilly Halloween night when we were about thirteen. "There's always a twist, but it only works if you don't see it coming."

I watched the whole movie through my fingers, and when Jason Voorhees's mother had her head removed by that movie's final girl, I breathed a sigh of relief. Paige smiled at me and told me to keep my eyes on the screen. I almost choked on a piece of pizza when Jason's decomposing corpse reappeared from the depths of Crystal Lake.

As I sit here now, I think of Paige's words again. She was always right.

I stick my hand in my coat pocket and pull out the folded letter that arrived in my mailbox three weeks ago. It came on a Saturday morning, and there was no postmark or return address on the letter at all. That told me that whoever delivered it had brought it to my house and put it in the mailbox themselves.

When I first read it, I thought it was a joke. An awful prank that somebody who had seen all the press about the murders at Camp Mirror Lake was playing on me. But as I read and reread the letter, my gut feeling was that it was real, and that was more terrifying than anything.

I take out the letter as I sit very near the spot where Charity died—where a part of me also died. A part that, as hard as I tried, I could not bring back to life. I unfold the letter and read it for the thousandth time.

I'm sorry, Bezi. I don't know if you believe me or if you even care, but I have to say it. I should never have helped them. I didn't have a choice. I got what I wanted. I'm free from them, but I think about what I had to do to have this. I'm sorry. But I have something I can share with you. I think you know what it is. Maybe it can make up for what I did. You can have money, strength, power, whatever you want.

If you want, meet me at the place where it happened on the day it happened. If you're not there, I'll assume you never will be.

It was from Kyle.

There is no one else it could have come from, and he put it in my mailbox with his own two hands. I didn't take it to the police. I didn't tell anyone he'd sent it. I simply put an X on my calendar and waited.

The fear of him that lived in my mind and guided my entire life since that terrible night evaporated as soon as I accepted that he had written the letter. He knows where I live. If he wanted me dead, I'd be dead. But it seemed like he was trying to make amends somehow.

And now it's time. One year to the day after the massacre at Camp Mirror Lake.

The place where it happened. The day it happened.

I shove the letter in my pocket and wait.

A branch breaks in the woods, and I angle my head to the right. Footsteps move closer as the soft sounds of the forest fade away. Almost as if the creatures that live there know they're in the presence of a monster. From the tree line, a figure emerges, draped in shadow.

"Bezi," a voice calls.

I recognize it.

I recognize him.

He steps out of the dark and into the dappled light of a nearly full moon, and I have to ball my fists in the pockets of my jacket and clench my teeth together to keep from running up on him. I want to tear him apart with my bare hands.

"I didn't think you'd come," Kyle says. He edges in with his back to the lake, keeping a wide distance between us.

"I almost didn't," I lie. There is nothing that would have stopped me from being here.

"I'm glad you did," he says.

He looks taller and a little more gaunt than the last time I saw him, which was when he stepped over me, thinking I was dead, and disappeared into the dark like some kind of ghost.

"You said you were going to share something with me," I say, trying to keep my voice steady.

He nods and takes a step toward me. "This." He takes from his pocket a piece of folded paper and holds it out in front of him. "It's the incantation that the Owl Society used. That my grandfather used when he—"

"When he thought he'd killed me," I say.

Kyle nods. "He thought he'd succeeded. But you didn't die and your body didn't go in the lake, so it wouldn't have worked anyway."

I take the paper from him, but I don't unfold it. I don't need to.

"What is it you think this will help me with?" I ask as I stare into his eyes without blinking.

He shrugs and kicks at the rocks on Mirror Lake's shore with the toe of his shoe. "I don't know. Whatever you want."

I press him. I want to know how he thinks this will make amends. "What does that mean?"

He comes another step closer. "You can have anything you want. Or almost anything. My grandfather didn't get what he wanted the first time around when he killed all those kids."

A shudder runs through me. "What did he want this time around?"

"Money, fame," Kyle says, shaking his head. "Maybe that's not so bad."

"And you think that's what I want?" I ask, looking up into his face that is now covered with a length of unkempt beard. "You think power, or money, or influence will make this better?"

He shakes his head. "I'm not saying it can undo what happened, but think about it—what if you never had to worry about money or what if you wanted to be in charge? Come on, Bezi. The Owl Society has been using this power for whatever they want. Why shouldn't you use it to get something you want?"

"It requires a sacrifice," I say.

Kyle gestures to the lake. "Do you know how many bodies are in there? How many people have been sacrificed to the land and the lake? What's one more if it means you can have some peace?"

I glance down at the ground, then back up to Kyle. "You know what, Kyle? You're absolutely right."

He smiles and nods, clapping his hand down on my shoulder.

I quietly slip the knife from my pocket and stick it into Kyle's abdomen, just below his ribs on the right side. I grasp the handle with both hands and drag it across his belly. There is a terrible ripping sound, a warm splash across my hands.

I chant the Owl Society's incantation aloud.

I don't need the paper Kyle gave me. I remember every syllable from the night he spoke the incantation as he murdered Charity and as Mr. Lamont tried to do the same thing to me. The words are burned in my mind.

Kyle's eyes grow wide. A gurgle erupts from his throat as he staggers back, clutching at his stomach. My heart pumps furiously as I scream the incantation at him. His blood spills across the ground, and his feet splash into the murky lake water. He collapses to his knees and sways from side to side.

I approach him slowly, still gripping the knife, a white-hot rage coursing through me like electricity. I finish the last of the secret words and plant my foot directly in the center of Kyle's chest. I shove him back as hard as I can, and he falls into the water. The light fades from his eyes as his corpse bobs in the shallows.

I retake my seat on the bench and close my eyes. I concentrate on the thing I want most. I wonder what the other people who had access to this knowledge concentrated on when it was their time to collect the rewards their sacrifices won them.

For me, there's no amount of money or power or influence that will suffice to ease the ache I feel in my chest. Only one thing can do that—one person.

"Me and you till the end of the world, right?" I whisper into the dark.

There is a splash somewhere in the lake.

I keep my eyes closed.

Another splash and then the sound of water spilling onto the crumbling pier, as if shed from the body of a swimmer exiting a pool.

The creak of aging wood planks under someone's weight.

The shuffle of footsteps.

I keep my eyes closed.

The footsteps come closer, stepping off the wooden pier and shuffling across the rocks until they're right in front of me.

I lift my chin and open my eyes.

"Charity."