Cinnabar Ridge

Liam and Chloe were stranded on a stopped train in a remote Appalachian valley due to a landslide. Looking out the window, Liam was mesmerized by a jagged mountain that resembled a giant rat. A young train attendant told him it was called Cinnabar Ridge, and she grew up in the ghost town at its base. Bored with the delay, Liam asked Chloe to explore the mountain with him, but she refused. The attendant, heading home to check on her property, offered to guide him. They were gone for three days. Liam returned alone on the third evening. He looked entirely drained, collapsed on his seat, and slept for hours. When he woke, he began screaming hysterically, grabbed Chloe’s hand, and begged her to get them far away. Back in the city, Liam changed completely. He became strictly nocturnal, fiercely avoided sunlight, and only ate in the dead of night. When Chloe asked what happened, he would just tremble and avoid her eyes. Chloe eventually brought in a hypnotherapist. Under hypnosis, Liam sobbed out a disjointed nightmare: "She told me a legend on the way up... about the Rat King... She said it was the time of the Offering, and outsiders had to pretend to be her fiancé, or the Rat King would drag them into the earth... "The village was dead empty. She said they were all preparing for the feast... At night, I heard this horrible scratching and chanting... She stood at my door in a moth-eaten wedding dress and whispered, 'Let me in just for tonight.'... I opened it. "I asked her, 'Where are your family?'... She smiled and said, 'They're right here.'... Her face... it shrank, grew pointy, whiskers sprouted out... the floor was a sea of writhing rats..." Liam went into a violent seizure, ending the session. Desperate for the truth, Chloe drove to Cinnabar Ridge herself. She found the village, only to see it was a ghost town surrounded by a graveyard. The mounds of dirt were swarming with thousands of rats. Terrified, she fled. On her trip back, she ran into the same train attendant at a gas station. Chloe confronted her: "What is going on up there? What is on that mountain?" The attendant smiled vacantly. "It's just an old mining town. People went hungry a long time ago, started eating the rats in the mines... offended the mountain, they said. They all went mad or died. Oh, by the way, I met a nice young man wanting to hike up there recently. I forgot to warn him—" "Don't drink the water. And don't eat anything from the soil." As Chloe listened, she suddenly felt an intense, burning itch under her skin, as if tiny claws were scraping beneath her fingernails.