Flip (OFFICIAL WATTPAD UPLOAD)

Chapter 1

If he was being perfectly honest with himself, Velvet had a feeling that this hadn't been the best idea.

"Go stay with your Buzzfeed Unsolved-obsessed internet friends for a summer, they said," Velvet muttered, dragging his feet as he walked back down the twisting, narrow trail on the side of the steep, rocky outcropping that this tiny town in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere, Oregon was locally famous for. "It'll be fun, they said. You're guaranteed to get some good photos for your friend's cryptid 'zine, they said!"

Oh, he'd gotten photos, Velvet thought to himself, sulking. He'd gotten plenty of normal landscape and nature photos he could sell—he was a freelance photographer on the side—but the paranormal activity he'd been promised?

"Haunted lake my ass," Velvet grumbled, kicking a rock off the trail and watching it bounce away into the trees on the steep slope below, vanishing into the twilight of the overcast evening.

It was foggy, and the air smelled like rain.

Velvet made a mental note to not take Boomer's word for something ever again, because Blue Ridge Lake had been one of the nicer places he'd camped. Pristine water that reflected the beautiful mountains and sunsets, deer that weren't afraid of humans and ventured straight out onto the rocky beach near his campsite, and not a single sign of being haunted like the brochure maps of the area suggested. Even at night the place was in no way eerie, except for that time he'd gotten up in the middle of the night to take a piss and startled a thrush out of the bushes, which had (almost literally) scared the shit out of him.

He should've known the local legends were exaggerated to try and lure in tourists. Damn, Gumi and Punz were gonna be pissed.

Velvet sighed heavily. He'd driven all the way from San Francisco for this.

He'd been so excited, too! He'd even mentioned casually to a few people in town where he was camping, like that muscular guy behind the counter in the bakery with the shark hoodie. Most people had given him weird, alarmed looks, but that one guy especially had kinda freaked him out, which he'd taken as a good sign.

"I wouldn't go there," Shark Hoodie Guy had said. "People go up there. They don't come back. If I were you, I'd stay on the trail."

Well, apparently, local legends were bullshit, as was the supposed Siren of the Blue Ridge, a local legend Velvet had been particularly excited to check out. Blah blah blah, people disappearing suspiciously in the area around the lake, hikers reporting strange sounds at night, all the typical cryptid bullshit. Gumi had promised him a percentage of the 'zine's profits when he'd arrived if he got any particularly creepy photos, and hey, Punz had a nice place at the edge of town (where he got to stay for free) and he was getting paid to fuck around in the woods and take pictures of shit (both activities he happened to enjoy).

That is, if he got photos at all.

The bushes up the side of the cliff above him rustled, and the trees groaned in the light, moist breeze.

Velvet shrugged it off. He didn't get psyched out very easily by these kinds of things, which was probably why he'd taken up the offer. Maybe if he went down where evening mist was starting to pool among the trees...

Suddenly the clattering of shifting rocks pierced the silence, and Velvet glanced up nervously. Maybe it was a rockslide, he thought, squinting at the cliff above for anything loose. He definitely didn't want to stick around for that—

—Velvet looked back at the trail in front of him, and he practically shat himself.

"FUCK!" He hissed, freezing in his tracks. He'd gotten out onto a wider, relatively flat part of the trail, on a small plateau with a few trees and a creek that he'd crossed a few days ago.