Chapter 2

Crack... Crunch...

Deep within the closet, the bone-jarring sound of dislocation, coupled with the sticky chewing, was magnified infinitely in the dead-silent room.

Outside the window, a pale flash of lightning violently tore through the night sky over Blackwater Lake.

In that half-second of intense glare, I saw a scene that would be burned into my memory for the rest of my life.

Evelyn was kneeling on all fours in the corner of the closet. Beneath that thin white nightgown, her spine was undulating violently with an amplitude that absolutely did not belong to a human. Pushing down three joints from the seventh cervical vertebra, the flesh bulged abnormally high, as if some living creature was about to tear its way out from beneath her skin.

And in her hands, she cradled that piece of half-raw venison we had brought back from the camp. Her mouth was stretched wide open as she frantically shoved the icy, bloody raw meat down her throat, dark red juices spilling from the corners of her lips.

That stench of deep-sea sludge and dead fish was radiating straight from her.

Carter's prophecy was dead-on.

BOOM—!

A delayed, rolling thunderclap rattled the cabin windows.

Almost simultaneously, the chewing sounds in the closet abruptly stopped.

Evelyn had sensed something. She didn't turn her body; instead, she froze in a sickeningly twisted posture. Then, accompanied by a few sharp clicks, her neck twisted backward nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, like a rusty mechanical bearing being forced into reverse!

Those ashen, cloudy glass-marble eyes swept dead straight toward the bedroom.

My heart practically stopped beating at that moment, my breathing completely seized.

Run!

Instinct drove my legs. But in the second I turned around, a faint yet inexplicably authoritative whisper echoed from the deepest recesses of my mind.

It was an emotion laced with primordial wrath, as if chastising my fear, roaring at me to step forward and tear this reeking monster across from me into pieces.

But the spiking adrenaline instantly drowned out the hallucination. I chalked it up to mental dissociation caused by extreme stress.

I had to survive.

Summoning the lifetime self-control of a psychology professor, I forced myself to make absolutely no sound, silently backing away to the bed.

I had just slipped beneath the covers when I heard the sound.

Not footsteps.

Crack... sss... clack...

It was the sound of limbs scraping the floor on all fours, joints forcibly inverted. Evelyn was inching her way out of the closet in an inverted spider contortion, her abdomen facing upward.

The awful stench drew closer.

I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing myself to mimic a "deep sleep" breathing pattern. As a researcher of psychological defense mechanisms, I knew the easiest tell of a person faking sleep was the rapid eye movement under the lids and the erratic chest heaving caused by a racing heart.

I shoved my hands under the quilt and dug my fingernails fiercely into my inner thighs, using the sharp pain to divert my attention and force my breathing to become deep and steady.

The mattress suddenly sank sharply.

An ice-cellar chill, thick with the smell of blood and rot, completely engulfed my face. She had climbed onto the bed and was now hovering directly above me.

Hoo... hiss...

That wasn't human breathing; it sounded more like some slimy mollusk gulping air.

Next, a cold, rigid finger touched my cheek.

It didn't feel like skin-to-skin contact; it felt like a chunk of dead wood freshly dredged from freezing water dragging across me. That fingertip slid slowly down my cheek, traced past my jawline, and finally rested flat over my carotid artery.

She was feeling my pulse.

If my heartbeat fluttered even fractionally out of fear, that finger would absolutely pierce right through my windpipe without hesitation.

Under the extreme pressure of the Grim Reaper's blade at my throat, my mind went blank for a second. Then, a sheer will to survive forcefully squashed my instinct to tremble. I relaxed the muscles in my throat, and, leaning into the freezing touch, even let out an unguarded, heavy, sleeping snore, tilting my head slightly.

Silence.

Deathly silence.

The finger lingered on my carotid artery for an agonizing ten seconds. Slowly, finally, the icy touch withdrew.

The mattress let out a soft sigh as the weight lifted. The "spider" crawled off the bed, and the horrific grinding of bones drifted further away, seemingly settling into another corner of the room.

But I still didn't dare open my eyes.

For the next few hours, shivering in the extreme dark, I endured the longest night of my life locked in the same room as a monster. My mental defenses were ground down inch by inch by a terror hovering constantly on the precipice of collapse.

...

I don't know how much time passed.

The storm outside finally weakened. The faint morning light filtered through the gaps in the blinds and struck my eyelids.

Sizzle—pop—

Vaguely, I could hear bacon frying in the kitchen, accompanied by the warm aroma of buttered toast. Last night's nauseating, fishy stench had miraculously vanished without a trace.

I stiffly opened my bloodshot eyes and sat up in bed. My clothes, which had been drenched in cold sweat, were now dry and plastered to my skin. I had pinched my inner thighs so hard that a massive dark bruise had formed.

I took a deep breath, pushed open the bedroom door, and walked toward the open-concept kitchen.

Evelyn was standing at the stove.

Sunlight hit her chunky knit sweater; her hair was neatly pinned up as she used a spatula to slide a pair of over-easy eggs onto a plate.

Hearing footsteps, she turned around, sporting her usual, flawless, and impeccable smile. Her eyes had regained their clarity; the mechanical stiffness from last night seemed as if it had never existed at all.

"Good morning, darling." Her voice was soft as she set the plates onto the dining table. "The storm was so loud last night. Did you sleep well?"

Looking at that familiar face, my stomach churned violently, and my back was instantly slick with cold sweat.

Compared to that raw-meat-devouring, limb-distorted monster of last night, this seemingly completely normal, gentle, and virtuous wife standing before me felt infinitely more horrifying.

It was a flawless disguise. Had I not witnessed it with my own eyes, who would honestly believe that beneath this gentle shell hid a carcass completely dead to both temperature and pain?

"...I'm okay." I stared intently at her right hand holding the spatula.

No blister.

That horrifying blood-blister, scalded by boiling grease over a hundred degrees yesterday, had completely vanished after just one night, leaving not even a faint red mark behind.

"Eat up, it'll get cold." Evelyn walked over, seemingly reaching to pull out a chair for me.

"Wait." I abruptly took a half-step back, dodging her hand.

Realizing my reaction was a bit too intense, I quickly squeezed out a stiff excuse. "The car! The blizzard was so bad last night, I'm worried the antifreeze in the rental cracked. I need to go check on it first."

"Right now? Eat breakfast first..."

"No, I'll be right back."

I grabbed my heavy coat from the sofa and threw it on haphazardly.

At the exact moment my hand slipped into the pocket, my fingers brushed against the cold, black communicator giving off that eerie green glow.

I could absolutely not stay in Cabin 14 any longer.

I had to seek outside intervention immediately to find out what the hell had happened to her!

Pushing open the heavy wooden door, the freezing wind instantly filled my lungs.

I stumbled into the knee-deep snow, without even looking back once at the "wife" standing inside the doorway.

Squinting against the blinding snow glare, I sprinted frantically toward the opposite end of the camp—toward Dr. Carter's Cabin 4.

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