Dana could not understand how all of this had happened.
She was a first-year college student.
The university’s sumr vacation had started early, and Dana and her friends did not want to part ways so soon. Before the break began, the group gathered together to discuss where they should go for the sumr. Barry said that a newly opened Erald Lake Campground had appeared near his hotown and was supposedly very fun, so he suggested that everyone go camping there together.
Although Barry himself had never actually been to the campground, he described Erald Lake Campground as unbelievably beautiful, and everyone was drawn in by his proposal.
So after vacation officially began, the group of seven drove across a great distance in two old cars to Vieska City in Dwight State, plunging headfirst into the dense red oak forest.
By the ti they arrived, it was already noon. The two managers of Erald Lake Campground warmly welcod Dana and the others, even inviting everyone to sample Vieska’s famous local chicken sausages.
The afternoon sun blazed overhead.
After putting away their luggage, everyone changed into swimsuits and jumped one after another into the calm waters of the lake. The lake was called Mirror Lake, though locals also referred to it as Erald Lake. Supposedly, the campground’s na ca from the lake’s alternate na.
Everyone happily swam and splashed around in the water. While the managers were away, the mischievous Corbett and Dyna secretly started up a small boat parked on the shore and sped around the lake dragging a trawling net behind them.
The two bragged that they would catch a whole net full of fish and roast them for dinner, but in reality, when the boat reached the middle of the lake, the trawling net accidentally snagged on sothing underwater. The people aboard noticed nothing and kept driving forward, nearly causing the boat to capsize from the tightened net pulling it backward.
Fortunately, Corbett reacted quickly. Sensing sothing was wrong, he cut the rope attached to the net. Otherwise, everyone probably would have faced not only a scolding from the managers, but also a hefty compensation bill.
Luckily, even without catching any fish, everyone still enjoyed a delicious and lavish campfire dinner.
After the al, the group lingered around the bonfire, unwilling to leave as the cool breeze drifted over from the lake.
Seeing that the atmosphere was just right, one of the managers took a drag from his cigarette and began telling these college students from the big city the story of the campground.
According to him, the place they were staying at now—Erald Lake Campground—had not originally been called that.
Two years ago, its na had been “Red Oak Campground,” because the area surrounding the camp was filled with lush red oak forests, and the camp buildings themselves had all been constructed from red oak wood.
Two years ago, a series of horrific murders had taken place around Red Oak Campground.
A sociopath nad Gary murdered his mother and then ventured out into the world.
He was cruel and rciless, slaughtering everyone living near Mirror Lake, yet still feeling unsatisfied. He then broke into the campground and consecutively killed several camping students, including one of the campground managers.
“In the end, it was only because the surviving students worked together that they barely managed to subdue him and throw him into the lake to drown.”
“As for the lake where the killer died…” The manager did not say it outright, but he turned his head toward Mirror Lake not far away.
Under the cover of night, the dark and deep waters looked like a passage leading straight to hell, carrying an ominous black aura.
A cool wind swept past, and a few of the more timid people could not help shivering.
“That case two years ago was truly horrifying. They say that when the police received the report and arrived here, Red Oak Campground looked like it had gone through a world war. There was blood and corpses everywhere, and half the mountainside near the camp had been set on fire—it burned for half a month! The campground’s owners thought the na ‘Red Oak’ was unlucky, so after renovating the place, they simply borrowed Mirror Lake’s alternate na and renad it Erald Lake Campground…”
Thanks to the manager’s story, everyone received a refreshing chill on that sweltering sumr night.
At the ti, though, everyone rely treated his words as an entertaining campfire tale. Even the manager himself did not take it too seriously.
After all, the murders had happened two years ago, and the killer was dead. No matter how frightening the story was, it could not possibly affect the present… right?
…
The abnormalities began the next morning.
After spending the night resting in the campground cabins, everyone left their respective cabins early the next morning and gathered around the dining table. That was when they realized that the couple in their group, Barry and Connie, were nowhere to be seen.
“I rember those two left together for the woods halfway through the story last night…” Dyna waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“Ahaha… then their nightlife must’ve been a little too exciting, and they accidentally overslept,” the others imdiately understood, bursting into teasing laughter.
Everyone assud the couple simply wanted so alone ti, so nobody paid much attention to their absence.
After breakfast, the group scattered throughout the campground and spent the entire morning having fun to their hearts’ content.
By lunchti, even more people were missing.
This ti, the two missing individuals were the campground’s managers.
The campground fees included three als a day. According to the schedule, by 11:30 a.m., the managers should have finished preparing lunch and co to call everyone to eat.
However, even by noon, the managers still had not appeared.
Hungry and starving, Dana and the other four returned from various parts of the campground to the dining hall. When they pushed open the door, they found nobody inside.
The kitchen was right next door. A large pot of soup simred on the stove, bubbling away, and the aroma of food drifted out in waves, making everyone involuntarily swallow.
“We’ll go look for the others. Dana, you guys can ladle the soup into bowls and set the table first.”
After saying that, Corbett left the dining hall together with Dyna to search around the rest of the campground.
About ten minutes later, the two boys returned exactly as they had left.
They had found no one.
The manager office door stood open. The coffee in the mugs was still steaming hot, and everything in the room remained neatly in place without any sign of disturbance, yet the people themselves were nowhere to be found.
As for Barry and Connie, their luggage was scattered near the entrance of their cabin. Everything was arranged neatly. Only the zipper of a clothing backpack had been left slightly open, while the rest of their luggage remained unopened. It looked as though after placing their things in the cabin the previous afternoon, they had never touched them again. There were no signs that anyone had actually stayed inside.
“So where did they go?”
“No idea… Maybe the managers needed to buy sothing and asked Barry and Connie to co help?”
Because they had not found anything suspicious during the search, most people remained optimistic about the whereabouts of the four missing individuals.
Only Dana felt uneasy, as if sothing was wrong. But everyone else acted as though this was nothing unusual, and gradually she began to suspect she was simply overthinking things, eventually pushing the matter to the back of her mind.
That afternoon, after lunch, everyone once again went off for free activities.
Erald Lake Campground had a wide variety of indoor and outdoor activities, enough to keep people busy for a long ti. Because everyone was so focused on having fun, no one noticed that another girl in the group had disappeared.
The first sign that sothing was wrong ca at dinner ti.
Dana and the other three returned from different directions of the campground to the dining hall, ready to eat dinner. But no matter how long they waited, the two managers did not show up, the dinner that should have been prepared was nowhere to be seen, and neither did the remaining three missing people.
It felt as if the four of them had been abandoned by the world.
The campground was far from the city, and there was no mobile signal. Calling for help was impossible. After so discussion, they decided to take flashlights and split up.
Dana and another girl, Lilia, were responsible for searching within the campground. Corbett and Dyna went a bit further, each choosing a direction and heading along the paths into the nearby forest to look for clues.
It would later prove to be a fatal decision.
The first to be attacked was Dyna, who was searching in the forest.
He was ambushed from behind by a man wearing a white porcelain mask, who used a sickle to slit his throat.
When Lilia heard Dyna’s cries and rushed over to help, the flickering beam of her flashlight revealed the masked man gripping Dyna’s hair with one hand and holding the sickle with the other, slowly and thodically cutting off his head—like slaughtering a chicken with its neck stretched out.
“Ahhhhhhh!”
Overwheld by sheer terror, Lilia’s limbs went weak and she could not run.
Just as the masked man was about to close in and kill her as well, Dana arrived in ti. She struck the attacker with a rock and took the opportunity to pull Lilia away as they fled.
Before hearing the commotion here, Dana had been searching the manager’s office.
There, she noticed the cup of coffee on the desk still sitting exactly as it had been, untouched. When she gently shook it, it made a strange clinking sound. Out of curiosity, she poured the coffee out—and saw that at the bottom of the cup lay a tooth.
A tooth, still stuck with bits of shredded flesh on it, irregular in shape—likely a human tooth that had been forcibly smashed out.
The mont Dana saw it, she felt so nauseated she nearly vomited.
She was certain that sothing terrible had happened. She grabbed the phone on the manager’s desk and tried to call the police. But when she picked up the receiver, there was no sound at all coming from the other end. After checking carefully, she discovered that the office phone line had already been cut.
That phone was the campground’s only link to the outside world.
“The phone line in the manager’s office is cut. We’re trapped here—we can’t get rescue. We have to save ourselves!”
Dana grabbed Lilia and ran through the campground between the buildings, panting as she shared the information with her companion.
Halfway there, they ran into Corbett, who was coming back from the opposite side of the campground. His face was equally grim. The first thing he said upon seeing them was: “The managers are dead.”
The three of them hid in the hollow beneath a raised wooden cabin. From Corbett’s fragnted account, Dana learned that he had found an “beached” old refrigerator at a shallow area where the forest t the lake.
The fridge looked like it had been subrged in water for a long ti. Its surface was covered in green aquatic plants, with shells clinging to it. A torn fishing net dragged beneath it.
The door of the refrigerator was open, and inside, lying in the compartnt, was a human corpse.
Its eyes were wide open, its face frozen in terror. The body had been split cleanly in half from the middle, with intestines and other organs spilling out, soaked in a reddish-brown mixture of blood and lake water. When the night wind blew in, the thick sll of blood was so strong it made one want to vomit.
Corbett recognized him at a glance—the body belonged to one of the missing people, one of the campground managers.
“I think everyone who went missing has already been killed,” Corbett said.
The two girls agreed.
“We need to leave here as soon as possible.”
After reaching a consensus, the three of them decided to escape using the cars in the parking lot.
Corbett had seen the car keys on the waist of the manager’s corpse. They needed to first retrieve the keys from the refrigerator site, and then run back to the parking lot.
But before that, the three of them had to shake off the masked man’s pursuit.
It was a chaotic and terrifying ordeal.
The masked man was like he had a tracker embedded in them. No matter how the three of them hid, he would suddenly appear from the most unexpected places and attack them with his weapon. Forced by circumstances, they had no choice but to split up and flee in three different directions.
Lilia was quickly caught. The masked man split her cleanly in half with a vertical swing of his blade.
Dana and Corbett managed to escape for the mont.
Corbett went to retrieve the car keys, while Dana lay in ambush at the parking lot, hiding beside the managers’ vehicle to provide support. Corbett obtained the keys and imdiately threw them to Dana, so she could drive the car out and pick him up for their escape.
They almost succeeded—if only the cars in the parking lot had not been sabotaged.
By the ti they realized the vehicles there were nothing more than bait, it was already too late.
The masked man slowly approached the car, dragging a blood-dripping cleaver behind him, walking at an unhurried pace.
The massive blade was slowly raised high into the air. Moonlight reflected off the lake, casting faint shadows over Dana and Corbett. With no way to escape, a suffocating sense of despair flooded Dana like rising seawater.
Just as she and Corbett clutched each other tightly and closed their eyes, waiting for death—
Bang!
A gunshot rang out in the distance.
The two in the car looked up in shock.
At that exact mont, thick clouds were blown apart by the wind, and pale moonlight poured down, reflecting off the lake and illuminating the entire campground.
Like the arrival of a savior in a film, they saw it—
Not far from the parking lot, about a dozen steps away, a figure had appeared without anyone noticing.
The person was dressed in black tactical gear, like an agent straight out of a movie.
!!!
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