The story I’m about to tell happened last year while I was a camp counselor. I had just turned 21, which meant it was my final year. The thing I found in the woods was the most terrifying thing I have ever faced. I keep replaying the events over and over in my head to make sense of them, and for that purpose, the following recollection of events is told in present-tense. I wrote it that way to help me feel like I’m back there, not because I enjoyed it, but because I hope to someday solve the mystery. Let’s begin, shall we?
I’ve been tossing and turning for an hour. I haven’t gotten a wink of sleep yet. My chronic insomnia is back. Great!.
What can I do to get to sleep? The usual things of counting to a hundred never works. If anything, it wakes me up further.
Children are snickering nearby. I glare hatefully in the direction of my door, on the other side is the cabin where those brats are. They’ve been making noises for the past hour, whispering to each other, telling jokes, and laughing.
I lay on my back and close my eyes and stare at the ceiling. Get distracted. Relax. Breathe.
But after an age of laying here staring into the darkness of my eyelids…I’m still laying here staring at the darkness of my eyelids.
“Bigfoot don’t eat Ores!” a little boy exclaims in indignation.
I’ve had enough.
Snapping my eyes open, I sit up and put my slippers on. Then, still in tank top and shorts, I storm out of my pathetic cabin and cross the mere six feet to the boy’s cabin. I open the door and stick my head and shoulders inside. Everyone instantly goes silent, and I see several of the boys drop back into their sleeping bags and close their eyes. Little pretenders.
“Shut your privileged little troll mouths!” I glare around at the room. “Brats.” It takes all of my willpower to not drop an F-bomb in there. Still glaring, I shut the door shut and storm back to my bed.
Maybe now I’ll finally be able to go to sleep. I brace myself for the inevitable whispering from the brats to pick up again, but miraculously, they don’t.
The next thing I know, I’m on my side. It takes me a few moments to remember where I am. Ah, my cabin, it was still dark. I breathe a sigh of relief. I must have finally gotten a little sleep.
“Don’t do that! You’ll wake her!”
I tense. The boy’s voice is coming from right next to me. They’re in my cabin.
“Don’t worry, we won’t wake her,” another boy replied. “I just needed to make sure she wouldn’t wake. See, she’s fast asleep. Come on, let’s get to work.”
I close my eyes. Whatever prank they’re about to do is going to be nasty. But I don’t want to stop them before they start. No, now I’m angry and I want to know exactly how much these obnoxious brats deserve to get punished.
“On her shoulder first, just in case.”
What are they going to do my shoulder?
I feel little kid fingers on my shoulder, then something crawling down my arm. It’s small, some kind of insect.
Ugh! Now I have some sort of insect crawling on me. I am tempted to wake up to brush it off, but I don’t. Dropping insects on me isn’t as bad as what I thought they were going to do. I had pictured something like spreading honey on my feet, cutting my hair, or maybe even dragging my mattress out to the lake – which REALLY would have gotten them in trouble.
“Another, another!”
A few more small insects get placed on my shoulder.
“Put some in her hair!”
No way. I wasn’t allowing an insect to go in my hair. I give a soft moan and, with my eyes still closed, tightened my pillow around my head, protecting most of it.
Both boys are silent. One of them is breathing nervously.
“Okay, close call,” says one of them after a few moments pass. “No hair. We’d have to move her hands holding the pillow and I think that would wake her. Here, better idea, better better better!”
The fingertips of one of the boys runs down the edge of my right tank top strap. Next thing I know, at least two insects are walking in that area.
“Hey, what’s that red A written on the tank top over the front of her chest?”
“I think it’s anarchy, or Antifa, or something. You know, kind of makes sense with the way she insults us.”
(I was unpopular with a bunch of the kids because I was always tone-policing their jokes, but some of the kids appreciated me for that.)
I open my eyes. The first thing I see is the dimpled freckled face of one of the boys, just a foot away from mine. He’s the one sticking the insects down the front of my tank top. The mischievous smirk on his face is replaced with a look of fear as our eyes meet.
“Get the FUCK off me!” I shove him backwards and sit up.
“AWW!” The boys scream. I stand and begin brushing the ants off my arms.
“We’re sorry, sorry!” the boy who I hadn’t shoved sounds like he’s on the verge of tears, while the one I shoved is just standing there, pale with his mouth hanging open.
“You two are in so much trouble,” I growl, but then a searing pain goes through my arm.
“GAA!” I grab at the spot on my arm where I felt the pain, and then I feel it in my chest, even worse. “OOH!” It’s so painful that I give out an involuntary grunt of pain, and then my entire chest area is feeling the same biting sensation again and again. “OOH! AHH! HELP!” The ants are biting me!
I pull an ant from my shoulder and toss it on the ground. Wincing through the pain and tears, I reach into my tank top and pull a long stick covered in honey and fire ants from between my breasts.
“EWW!” I distort my face in disgust and throw the stick to the ground.
Both boys are laughing. One of them, the one I shoved, is recording with his camera. “Fire ants rock!” he shouts. He blows a raspberry in my face, then shouts, “Come on, let’s go!” They run out of the cabin.
“YOU BRATS ARE SO FUCKING DEAD!” I put on my slippers and run after them, but they’ve already hidden.
A large bug jumps on my shoulder.
“Gross!” I shout, swatting it off.
And that’s when I see it. A red balloon with blue lines going through it, shining brightly. It hovers at the edge of the camp.
The balloon begins to move away. It’s going over some bushes. Now it’s going back into the trees.
“Not so fast!” I walk after it briskly. As I approach, I notice the red lines seem to be moving on their own inside the balloon. For some reason they remind me of a heartbeat. Or a fetus. As I approach, it begins to float away faster. I increase my speed until I’m jogging.
“You’re not going anywhere, bitch!” I shout out, ducking around a tree branch and ducking under another as I struggle to keep the balloon in my line of sight. It’s floating fast, only a little faster than I am running. I increase my speed, cursing as some sharp fir braces my bare leg. I can’t let this balloon escape.
“Yo!” I call out. “What the fuck are you, anyway?”
It quickened its speed.
Cursing, I grit my teeth and have to slow to avoid getting tangles in a bunch of burr plants. Something darted off to the side, probably a deer.
The balloon vanished behind a thick cluster of dead trees. There are no leaves in them. I should be able to notice if the balloon was glowing on the other side. But it isn’t.
Wondering if it popped itself against a branch, I make my way to the dead trees and make my way through them.
It is like I stepped into another world. It is still night, and there are trees behind me, but that’s all that remains the same. There are no trees in front of me. Only a wide plain of tall grass and a brightly lit carnival of tents stretching far as I can see.
“What the hell?!” I stare, mouth hanging open. There is not a single person in sight, but all the tents are lit. A Ferris wheel towers over all the tents. Tracks, probably for a roller coaster, are suspended high above the carnival tents by metal poles.
I can’t help myself. I have to know what is going on. So I approach the tents, transfixed despite my apprehension. Why was there a carnival in the forest and why did we not know about it?
But as I approach, the lights go out.
“SHIT!” I swear in shock. Squinting through the darkness, I can still see the tents. They’re still here.
“What is going on?!” For a moment, I consider turning around and heading back to camp. I’d wake everyone. I’d tell them to come see what I’d found, and we’d explore it together. No, not everyone. This might be dangerous, who knows how many of these rides are even properly maintained and safe to ride? The kids would stay behind. But some of us counselors would explore and try to find out what the hell was going on.
What if it’s not here when you get back? What if it vanishes the moment you step away?
I didn’t believe in ghosts. Or anything supernatural. But this carnival in the woods and the balloon I’d been chasing…that was right out of a horror movie. Did all of this have a logical explanation? If this was supernatural, then it must be meant only for me, at least at this moment, and if I leave, it will probably vanish and not be there when I’m back with other people. I had this strange, terrible feeling that I would never, ever find this place again if I turned around and walked away.
“That’s stupid,” I tell myself, but I’m not convinced. “There is NO such thing as magic.” I tell myself that repeatedly until I have reassured myself. No, this place isn’t magical. It’s just a carnival in the woods.
There is a logical explanation. As for the lights going out right when I was approaching? That’s just a freaky glitch. Maybe the lights can sense movement. Like the lights some publish bathrooms and apartment complexes had. And since they’re broken, they turned OFF instead of on like they were supposed to when a person approaches.
“Alright, that’s one supernatural thing debunked,” I say, out loud to reassure myself. I nodded. “Now what about the balloon? Well…the wind was blowing. It was just blowing it away from me. And those red veins moving inside it were just light sticks.”
There was in fact a gentle breeze that night. It was giving me goosebumps just standing there in my tank top and shorts. “BRR!” I start rolling my shoulders to warm myself.
But why was there a carnival out in the woods to begin with? And why hadn’t we ever seen it in our years at camp?
“Well, second one is easy, it’s new this year!” I say, rolling my eyes. “Duh!”
Wow, I’m such a freak arguing with myself.
But as for why there was a carnival out here to begin with? Okay, that was more than a little odd. But now I’ve already proven that everything else weird has a logical explanation having absolutely nothing to do with the supernatural. So, this last part of the mystery also had to have a logical explanation.
But still…
There might be a grain of truth to the idea that I won’t find this carnival again if I go back. I’d been running for a few minutes after that balloon, and I was never a good tracker, unlike all the other counselors. I was the only one who could still get lost out here. I might not be able to lead everyone back to this place. Though surely something so big couldn’t be hidden forever, it would be found eventually…
I was going back. But first, I would find something inside the carnival and bring it back as proof.
Something that no one would be able to accuse me of packing from home. It would be something interesting, something big, preferably, but not so big I couldn’t carry it. Not sure what it would be. Maybe one of the lights or a billboard.
The haunting howl of a wolf pierces through the night. It’s not coming from the carnival; it’s coming from the woods. Another howl answers it, and soon the silence of the night is overcome with a pack of howling wolves.
Okay, that’s enough to make me want to return to the safety of the cabin. I didn’t want to be torn apart from wolves.
But just as I’m about to turn back, one of the tents in the carnival turns on again. “Huh?” I exclaim.
It is not one of the tents at the edge, it looks like I have to pass around forty tents to get to it. It’s pretty deep in. And it looks larger than many of the other tents. It is lit up with red and blue lights that look as if they are moving in a circle around the edge of the tent.
I squint towards the tent. Hovering in the center is the balloon with the red veins. It’s just hovering.
“Oh, I know what my little souvenir is going to,” I say with a small laugh as I begin to made my way into the carnival. I passed all the dark tents, barely hearing a noise at all from any of them until at last I had arrived at the big tent. I soon realized that it was not just one balloon – every one of the lights that had lit this tent up was a balloon. That’s why it looked like they were moving in circles around the tent from the distance – because they weren’t stationary lights.
I stare in wonder at the balloons. None of them are attempting to escape now. Of course they’re not, idiot. The first one wasn’t trying to escape either, that was just the wind blowing it.
I don’t have a good explanation though for why they’re behaving like how they are now. There are around six of them, not including the one hovering inside the open tent, and all six of them are moving rapidly in a circle around the tent. “Must be some magnetic field,” I mutter, though I don’t really know much about magnets. I approach the circle of balloons, and they float up lightning fast to hover high in the air where I can’t reach them. They continue to circle the tent, illuminating the ground below in flashing neon reds and blues.
Only one balloon is left: the one hovering still inside the entryway of the tent. Its blue veins pulsated.
I approach it carefully. I’m planning to grab it. It’s not going to escape me. I will pop it as soon as I grab it.
A voice booms loudly over speakers:
“LADIES AND GENTLETHINGS!”
“GHA!” I whirl towards where the sound is coming from – it’s coming from two speakers hanging on the ceiling of the tent.
“I PRESENT TO YOU THE BIG TIDDY GOTHIC BITCH!!!”
The balloon zooms into the tent and flies to the ceiling. It illuminates the entire inside, and I see the Big Tiddy Gothic Bitch the loudspeaker was referring to. There is a life sized hyper realistic cardboard cutout of a teenage Gothic girl. She was thin and beautiful. All her clothing was black. Her petticoat stops just short of her knees and was frilly with lots of lace. She wore black stockings that covered went all the way up her legs, vanishing into the petticoat. Her heart faced shaped is unnaturally pale because of makeup. She has almond shaped eyes with a slight tilt, and her nose is small. Her eyebrows and thin and well plucked and she has a pair of thick, pouty lips.
I know what I’m going to bring back to camp.
“BIG TIDDY GOTHIC BITCH!!!” The annoying voice shouts again.
“Who’s there?” I shout, turning my head all directions to see who is talking. But I can see no one.
“Just a recording, I triggered it when I walked in,” I mutter. I turn my attention back to the Gothic cutout.
“Her boobs aren’t so big!” I exclaim. They look perfectly normal to me.
“IF YOU KILL THE BITCH, YOU GET A PRICE!!!” shouts the voice again. I then notice the tray of darts resting on a counter separating me from the cutout. Ah, so it’s one of those games.
“Piece of cake! I’ll puncture you and then I’ll take you back.” Maybe I would be able to puncture the balloon too.
I am surprised at how sharp the darts are. I could easily cut myself on them if I wasn’t careful. I aim.
“You want to see a real Big Tiddy bitch?” I say to the cardboard. “You’re looking right at her, and she’s not Goth. Have some, bitch!” I throw the dart.
It hits her in the forehead. Blood squirts out. It quickly trickles down her forehead. “What the fuck?”
How did they get fake blood (probably paint of food coloring) inside a cardboard cutout? It probably had little bags of liquid on the other side that I couldn’t see from behind the counter.
Smirking, I pick up another dart. But I pause. The expression on the cardboard cutout has changed. While before she was pouting and she had a catlike neutral expression on her face accentuated by her thin eyebrows and eyes, now her face looks concerned. Her eyes look waterier than before and her mouth is open in horror.
“Wait. How did they do that?” I suddenly feel a little afraid.
“What happens if I throw another?” I muse to myself. Out of morbid curiosity, I pick up another dart. I throw it at her right eye.
POP!
A sickening pop is accompanied by blood squirting from her eye. The cardboard girl’s expression changes again. Now her remaining eye is bulging wide in terror and her mouth open like a scream.
“This is sick.” But I’m mesmerized. I have to keep throwing. And so I do. I throw another, but staring into her horrified expression distracts me, and this time it only grazes her right shoulder. Her expression doesn’t change much, but blood squirts from her shoulder.
“How about your ‘tiddys’ then,” I mutter. That was the name of the game, after all.
“Last one,” I promise myself, but I have to see what happens. I look into the horrified eyes of the cardboard girl, and I hesitate. She is horrified and in pain and her eye look…pleading. Like she’s begging for mercy. And that blood, it’s so real. I’ve half blinded her, her right eye is gone forever…
“No!” I snap, shaking my head to clear it. “She’s not REAL. She’s just a cardboard. This is just a very realistic, very sick, awesome toy.”
I stare back into her horrified, pleading eye, and I throw the dark at her chest. Right where her heart is.
“SCOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRE!!!” The voice booms over the microphones. “THE BITCH IS DEAD!”
Blood is flying everywhere. It gushes out of the cardboard’s chest like a waterfall, only it doesn’t stop. It flows and it flows, more blood than any person could ever have. Intestines are coming out, long wiggly worm like things. Body organs are spilling out of her stomach and the piercing cry of a girl echoes through the air. The cardboard girl is screaming, screaming without moving her lips. She topples to the ground behind her, only she’s floating, for the blood is so high that it is flooding the entire chamber. And the scream is getting louder and louder and louder.
I scream. “WHAT THE HELL?!” I turn and run, run as fast as I can out of the tent.
All of my self-assurances that there is nothing to worry about, that there is nothing supernatural are gone. I run, arms pumping back and forth, running faster than I’ve ever run in my life before. I have to get back to camp. I have to get out of here… Her terrified screaming is still echoing in my ears. I can still picture her, body organs spilling out as she drowns in a lake of her own blood. What the hell is this place?!
Something is following me. I can hear it, running through the grass, pounding on the ground behind me.
And then I’m toppling to the ground. “OOMPH!” Pain ripples through my forehead. I’m bleeding. I put my hand to my forehead and I realize that horror that there is something sticking into my scalp. Then the pain gets worse, much, much worse. I can’t think. I bend over, screaming and clutching at my forehead. No, not like this. Please, not like this. Struggling just to breathe, I reach up towards my forehead with both hands and try to pull it out. “AHHH!” I shriek as it comes out. Blinking through tears and blood, I see I’m holding one of the darts from the tent.
There is only one other thing I see before I am blinded:
A humanoid shape approaching, eyes glowing yellow. It is holding a box of darts.
I throw myself at the shape, planning to knock it down and wrestle the darts away.
The shape drops the box and opens its arms wide. A balloon floats above its head, illuminating every detail.
I scream, but it is too late to stop my tackle.
My mind shudders even now as I look back at thet THING and try to describe it. I refuse to describe it. Just know that it was humanoid and it the worst thing you could ever see. I ran away after that and soon I was back at camp.
Nobody believed me, of course. They all went to look, but no fair was ever found. I was fired for yelling at the two boys and I can still remember them blowing raspberries at me the next day as I got into my energy-efficient truck to drive away. But my mind was still thinking of the fair in the woods, and I wondered what dark things were happening there. I determined to come back to investigate, but so far I have not mustered the courage.