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He’s bleeding. No, there’s blood. There’s blood dripping down and pooling around him, underneath him, but is it his? He lifts his head up, slowly, to inspect, to discover, and it hurts. He squints. No, it isn’t his. The beheaded corpse of a man he doesn’t know hangs above him, bathing him in guts. He’s seen this man before. He doesn’t know him and he’s never seen him alive, not that he can remember, but he’s seen this exact scene before, just now, just moments ago with Mike. Mike. He came to rescue him, he and Sam did. They were going to escape, they were going to be okay. Where are they? Josh lifts a hand up to his head, touching it absently as his heart sets off in a panicked rate. They must’ve left him behind, they might never have come for him. He might’ve imagined it all, like he tends to do, like he does with his sisters. His twisted, demonic sisters. He shuts his eyes closed, grabbing his head with both hands. It does nothing to smooth his breathing. He’s shaking and there’s foreign blood soaking through his worn-out overalls, chilling him further, touching his bones. He couldn’t have imagined salvation, could he? Was he really that far gone? So desperate and alone that his tattered mind resorted to this. It shines a dim, old light where hallucinations end and reality begins because he can’t tell them apart any longer.
He’s rocking back and forth, sitting on his ass, unable to see through the tears. This cave is dark and humid and he’s alone with a corpse. He must’ve been alone this whole time. He must’ve imagined his sisters shedding skin, the pig’s head charging for him through intestines, Mike slapping him in the face, Sam taking the cable car keys from him and rock climbing away. The cable car keys, oh God. How will his friends leave and save themselves if he has the keys? They may be good but they’ll never be able to rock slide down Blackwood Mountain and reach the bottom alive. Fuck, they’re dead. He killed them. He’s going to die and he killed them. There’s no signal, there’s no food. There’s nothing here aside from moose and Wendigos. He’s going to follow them soon, into the ethereal world, unfit for men. He sniffles grossly and whimpers, folding in on himself. Pulling both knees up to his chest, unbothered by the cold blood tainting his skin at this point. He never wanted this. He never wanted any of this to happen.
He never wanted anyone to die. It was all supposed to be a prank, just a stupid, mean-spirited prank, not this. Whatever this is, not this. None of this Wendigo bullshit was supposed to be. The curse, the cave, the miners and Hannah. God, Hannah. “I’m sorry.” His voice is hoarse and raspy and echoes all around him, engulfed in sobs and whimpers. Where did she go? She grabbed him by the head and threw him back here, didn’t she? Not if she was also a figment of imagination, another pathetic excuse for company, for denial. Hannah, Mike and Sam, all in his head. Rock climbing away with the cable car keys. He palms himself, his pockets, all of them—the cable car keys. His heart skips a beat, his blood runs as cool as the dead man’s. The keys are gone. They were taken, he didn’t drop them. So that much was real, Sam was real. Was Mike real, too?
A noise. Loud and desperate, a shout. He’s scared. He hugs his knees even closer to his body and his breathing hitches, stops completely. The noise loops, repeats itself, echoes away, more and more desperate each time. Are they still here, is this a Wendigo? The tear tracks freeze on his cheeks and his eyes are dry. He listens. The shouts are breathless with a tinge of a cry in them, edging on despair. Mike. This can only be Mike’s voice, calling for him, coming back for him. He scrambles to his feet, quickly, charging for the metal door faster than he’s ever moved before, tripping on himself, slamming his shoulder against it, avoiding the floor by sheer luck and stopping just before the water. On the edge of the underground lake, a few dozen feet away from the water wheel. “Mike!” He yells deafeningly loudly, over and over again, growing more desperate each time he doesn’t hear a reply. His hopes are crushing and his grip on reality is loosening but he hears it. He hears his name back, he’s sure of it. That only makes him shout impossibly louder, touching the edge with the toes of his boots, threatening to fall into the black water. “Mike, please!” He’s crying again, frantic, desperate, about to jump in when Mike shows up. Across the lake, waist-deep in, waving and shouting back at him. A weight drops from Josh’s back as he falls in.
Mike meets him halfway and they swim awkwardly to the other side, shivering and grunting and hugging themselves. “Fuck, are you okay? I thought you were fucking dead.” Mike eyes him down with concern, rubbing a hand on the overalls where the man’s blood colored the fabric, remaining even after the swim. They’re up on both feet, on dry ground, chilled to the bone. Josh pulls away instinctively, stumbling on himself. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” He brushes himself down with both hands, wiping cold water away and achieving nothing else. Mike nods curtly in his peripheral before grabbing him by the arm and starting further into the cave.
It takes so long, so much time of darkness and rock walls passing them by, all looking the same and holding as much promise of death as all the others, lost, zig-zagging under Mike’s lead, their ragged breathing the only sound in miles, the only sound accompanying them through this endless maze—better the assertion of known loneliness than unknown company, dangerous company—Mike’s fingers digging in his arm, numbing the spot, almost ripping his flesh off the bone, but present and worried and firm, forcing him to keep going until they reach colder air, much colder air and finally snow. But they don’t stop. They’re tired and breathless but they’re far from being safe, far from salvation. They’re still in the middle of the woods.
“Is it true what Sam said? About Hannah?” His voice is lost in the cold winter wind and the crunching noise of the snow underneath their feet and the frozen leaves rattling in their branches but he needs to know, he needs to discern imagination from reality and Mike hears him anyway. He doesn’t slow down or loosens the grip on Josh in the least, the most he does to show acknowledgement is pass him a quick side-glance. There’s silence while they cover a couple dozen more feet of terrain. “Yeah,” Mike finally says, voice drifting away from himself, “but forget about it.” He picks up speed, jogging now rather than walking fast, and firmly tugging Josh along. Josh doesn’t say anything else but something inside of him is glad that hope wasn’t a fantasy.
Fire suddenly bursts into the horizon, behind and above the line of pine trees surrounding them, lighting the dark sky ablaze. The sound of the explosion catches both of them by surprise, causing Mike to push Josh off the path and into the cold forest floor, into a bush and snow. They both hit the ground as a loud shriek reverberates across the entire mountain, possibly even reaching the road to neighbor towns by how loud and horrifying it is. They’re left unable to move, paralyzed by horror and fear for the longest minute, composed of enough seconds to make Josh realize what’s catching on fire is his house. The lodge, where everyone probably is. All of his friends, all of the people he terrorized earlier in the night. It all seems so stupid now.
“M-Mike, it’s the lodge! The lodge is on fire! Everyone—!” He’s scrambling out of the frozen bush, out of the snow and back into the path, where Mike is lying with eyes fixed on the triple story high flames. “Where is everyone?!” Both of his hands grip Mike’s shoulder, shaking him violently, nearly ripping the jacket off him—whose jacket is this?—but Mike pries his hands away from him in one rough motion, getting up to his feet caked in dirt and snow. He offers no reply, not a word, simply takes Josh by the wrist and continues over to the house, this time running, running straight for the flames, off the path and through the woods, well-lit now and melting away. They trip on fallen branches and toss snow all around them but never stop, never part, never peel their eyes away from the wall of fire that rapidly approaches them.
Before the fire are all of their friends and above it are a couple of helicopters, shining spotlights over them all. Salvation. Mike finally lets go of him, allows blood flow back into his hand and jogs over to Jessica, breathless, sore and unbelieving. Possibly tearing up, Josh isn’t sure; he’s alone now. He doesn’t approach anyone, he stays in the back, standing a couple of feet behind them, feeling sheepish and stupid. Chris is holding Ashley a few feet away, Matt and Emily are standing next to each other and Sam hurries over to Mike the moment she catches sight of him. She seems frantic and worried and Josh can’t hear what she’s saying from here but Mike extends an arm and points at him and her eyes follow. She covers her mouth when she sees him.
The helicopters turn out to be the police and they’re all led to individual interrogation rooms for questioning about what happened. Matt and Jess have the quickest sessions, everyone eventually following them one by one, Mike and Sam the last to leave and Josh having to stay longer. They make him explain himself, the prank, his sisters’ presumed death, the disappearance of some man he’s never heard of, his family’s state, his pills and psychotherapy sessions and the connection is all has to him. It’s a mess. He’s unable to speak clearly out of fear and a lot of what they tell him makes no sense to him, there’s a lot he’s never heard of. He tells them about the curse and the mountain and the little he knows about the miners and his sisters and the creatures but the officers don’t look impressed or believing. It makes him nervous and afraid, desperate to explain himself and prove his innocence. It becomes tougher to do because of the real saws and the real guns, the rifles and pistols that his friends talked about, that his friends shot creatures with, that were not his, never his, he had only one pistol loaded with blanks, he swears—the ax, the animal blood, the intricate strategy and planning and absurd hazard that followed and got out of hand.
He gets held back all morning and his parents are called from Los Angeles along with Dr. Hill for more questioning. It’s Hell. They spend the entire day speaking with the police, his parents waxing poetic about him and Dr. Hill being brutally honest about their sessions, about his mental state, about everything he’s told him while off his meds. It gets worse when they analyze the dried blood from his clothes and find a match with the archives of the man he’s never heard of. He tells them about the hanging body in the mines, beheaded, killed by the Wendigos as if this would help prove his innocence. It only doesn’t put him in jail because Mike and Sam apparently also said the exact same thing about it. In the end, he goes unpunished. Unpunished for the attempted murder of his friends by reason of insanity. It’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, all of it, the attempted murder and his supposed insanity, but he doesn’t argue. The police won’t throw him in jail and his parents won’t dump him at a psychiatric ward, so he takes it. Although his parents do intensify his visits with Dr. Hill, from once a week to every other day, that’s still nothing compared to intensive care at a mental hospital or time spent in jail.
After they leave Canada, the promise of everything going back to normal hangs in the still air. Going back home, back to work, back to scarcely socializing between themselves and instead schmoozing their way higher up the corporate ladder with expensive dinners and gatherings to rich and uncaring men in black suits as if nothing had happened. Never talk about what happened. Sell the lodge and forget it all. Most of that does resume, except his parents now get weird around him, start acting strangely unlike themselves. They begin to speak in a faux kind tone to cover their fear, their shame. They act mildly around him, always cheerful, as if nothing is wrong with the world and they are perfectly content with it. As if they’re a perfect family, happy and healthy, without a tragic past that they’re covering up day after day. It’s unsettling and makes Josh feel abnormal. His parents believe in the police, they believe his prank was a murder attempt and that he’s clinically insane. He tries to tell them, to explain, to validate himself but it has no effect on them. They plaster a fake smile on their faces and nod condescendingly, not listening. It gets to the point he needs to call for backup.
He calls Mike first and ends up not needing to call anyone else because Mike does that for him. All of his friends group up to stand behind him, explaining over and over again to his parents what really happened, who really killed the mysterious man. Not who, but what—those creatures, Hannah. His parents don’t want to believe it. For them, it’s easier to label their son as insane and their daughters as missing rather than believe that one girl cannibalized the other and morphed into a monster. It’s a tough and painful process but the looks in everyone’s faces, the intense reality in their voices eventually get across to the couple. They hurt and mourn and tell the police. More expeditions are sent to Blackwood Mountain and it takes a couple of weeks for the evidences to be no longer dismissible. The curse is real and the entire mountain is closed off.
As for Josh’s psychotherapy sessions, he gets treated for psychosis and, after much dwelling on Dr. Hill’s part, gets switched back to SSRIS, following the former treatment. It’s different and strange at first, strange how he slowly stops seeing his sisters, not altogether but less frequently, much less frequently, and the sheer amount of peace it brings him is unbelievable. He wants to grab Dr. Hill’s neck with both hands and feel the life being squeezed out of him for not doing this earlier but it’s a pointless venture now. The pills are finally helping him, truly helping him, and he couldn’t be gladder about it. They make life so much more manageable that he even considers going back to college, film school, to finish what he started. With them he feels almost normal, good enough to blend in with the crowd, but it still takes a couple of months to build up the courage to apply. When he does, his parents back him up, especially his father. The acceptance letter is motive of rejoicing and dining expensively. The promise of a brighter story.