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UNTIL DAWN
a valley · a guest book · thirteen deaths apiece

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Ah. There you are. Do come in — mind the frame, it's older than it looks.

I've been expecting you, in the way one expects weather. This particular picture arrived in my collection some time ago and I confess I've grown fond of it, which should trouble you rather more than it troubles me. It is not a large story. A mining town in Pennsylvania that dug a little deeper than was wise and went down into its own tunnels with several hundred people still inside. A clearing the rain refuses to enter. A squat wooden building with a guest book by the door and an hourglass on the wall.

Five young people will sign that book looking for a girl who signed it a year ago. You may be the sixth. You may be something else entirely — I find my guests rarely take the seat I set out for them.

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THE TERMS, SINCE YOU'LL ASK

One. When the last of you dies, the sand turns and the night begins again. Same hour. Same rain. Same clothes. You will remember all of it, which is the cruelty.
Two. Thirteen. That is the number each of you is given, and nobody will tell you so until you've spent four of them.
Three. On the thirteenth you do not come back a person. You come back hungry, and you stay.
Four. The thing hunting you tonight will not be the thing hunting you tomorrow. The valley reads you first. It builds the evening out of what it finds.
Five. There is no road out. There is only the sand running out with you still breathing.

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I am obliged to mention that a man keeps a gas station forty miles back, and that he will be unfailingly polite to you, and that he has been collecting people here for a very long while. I shan't say more. It spoils the arrangement.

Step in wherever you please. The first night, when nobody knows anything and a tall man in a pale mask is still only a man. The ugly middle, when they've started doing arithmetic with each other's lives out loud. The last one, hairless and armed with the wrong tools, going down into the mines. Or past it all — a car pulling into an empty clearing, somewhere north, a lodge in the snow.

Every choice here is yours. I do so want to stress that. I merely turn the pages; I have never once held the knife.

Sign the book. See how many you've got left by morning.

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