𝐃𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐋 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐔𝐒

𝐬𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧

———
"it still hurts,
watching him fade away"
———

19 July, 1978

The branches and dry leaves crunch under our feet as the five of us trek through bush, our only sense of direction being Alice and Arnie's high asses following Nurse Lane's map. I can vaguely hear the kids in the distance, yelling and screaming as they run away from the other team.

Tommy grips my hand and I notice he's sweating again. "Tommy, take your jacket off, surely you're boiling." he's the only one out of the five of us wearing jeans AND a jacket, the rest of us just wearing shorts and a shirt.

"Nah it's fine, I'm a little cold, to be honest." he replies, looking at me and giving me a half-hearted smile while I just gape at him. "It's like 36 degrees still how are you cold?!"

"We have bigger things to worry about. Alice! Alice c'mon it's disgusting out here!" Cindy yells to the pair who are way ahead of us.

"We're close, Berman, hang in there!" Alice yells back to her.

"I swear to God- Shit! Oh it's ruined now!" Cindy gasps, swearing for the second time today as her polo catches on a branch, ripping the fabric. I'm shocked considering thats twice the amount of times she normally swears everyday.

"You cursed again." Tommy points out, voicing exactly what I was thinking.

"You want me to murder you?" Cindy said, clearly agitated with either him or Alice, but either way she's taking it out on him. Tommy shuts his eyes, almost apologetically and then winces. Something's clearly wrong with him and he's still not telling me the truth.

"Babe, please tell me what's wrong?" I ask, concerned for him and why he keeps zoning out and why he looks so unwell. He just shakes his head, brushing my question off again.

Alice's voice echoes throughout the forest as she screams, the three of us looking at each other, wide-eyed and concerned before running toward the sound of her scream. "Alice!" I call out, confused as to why Arnie's just standing there until Alice climbs out of a deep hole I didn't see before.

"Watch your step." she says while swiping dirt off her shorts as she climbs out.

"Someone digging a grave?" Tommy jokes.

"Graves." Alice says, shining her torch around near where she fell, revealing more "graves" scattered around.

"Mary." Tommy realises "Where's the..." he trails off as he picks Nurse Lane's diary up from the ground where Alice presumably dropped it. The rest of us are visibly confused which is slowly becoming normal for everything that's going on tonight. "The X's, look!" he points to the annotations on the map of camp, the red X's on the paper connecting to the holes in the ground.

"She was marking where she dug." I breathe, happy to finally get some answers into what's happening, even if it doesn't make any sense.

Alice looks at Tommy and I before turning to another page in the diary, a drawing of a woman and a hand next to tall, loopy handwriting. "But without her hand, her grip on the land holds firm... and the curse will last until body and hand unite."

"So what, she was looking for Sarah Fier's lost hand?"

"Yeah the curse that made her daughter lose her mind." Alice, Tommy and I are slowly start putting the pieces of the puzzle together while Cindy and Arnie just stand there, Cindy looking more or less annoyed.