Me and my best friend came back to our hometown for the summer, now he’s gone missing. I hadn’t seen Thomas in almost a year as we both went our separate ways after high school but we still made an effort to keep in touch. Growing up Thomas always had this obsession with the occult and ended up loving it so much he went to school for it. It was actually our own town history or I guess part of his family history that got him started on it. You see, when me and Thomas were barely crawling, this little mountainside town of Willowbrook had created its very own group of fanatics. A small group with a dozen or so followers who all talked about reaching out somewhere, some outside place they called Lyndrich.
I got to hear all about Lyndrich from Thomas, he consumed any information he could get on it. I guess he did have a good reason to be, his dad led the group after all. His name was Daniel Baker, he was the man who put this small community on the map. Luckily, Thomas didn’t live with him as Thomas’s mom, Mary, divorced Daniel not long after he received his “revelations.” From what I’ve read and heard from Thomas, Daniel had supposedly received visions of this other place, a place that was as he and his followers described it outside of our own. You can still find some of his sermons, and I use that term loosely, out there if you dig hard enough. Anyway, as the group slowly grew, they started becoming more and more secluded until eventually almost a month had passed and no one had seen or heard from any of them. Mr. Evans, who was my 5th grade math teacher eventually called the cops because he hadn’t seen his neighbor, who he knew was a part of this group, in a few weeks and was concerned. When the cops found their house empty they went to the group’s compound, which was just a small hunting cabin that Daniel had purchased after his divorce.
The place was full of cars, as was usual when their meetings took place except this time no one was home. The police searched around the area for hours but after finding nothing they gathered that this was enough cause for concern and entered the building. I don’t know exactly what they found inside except for two things. One, there was a symbol drawn on the floor which was later determined to be human and deer blood, as well as other bodily fluids in the shape of a circle that spiraled into its center. On the outside of the circle it had curved lines that looked like branches and at the tip of said branches were handprints. Each one belonging to a member of the group. The second thing they found was a note.
The devout have prayed, Lyndrich has answered
How I know all of this is thanks to none other than Thomas. How he found this out I couldn’t tell you because from my knowledge the police never released that information. Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let me tell you why I am worried about my friend. When I met Thomas Saturday to catch up he seemed… different somehow, exhausted maybe but that wasn’t everything. We met up at a local coffee shop and the first words that left his mouth were about Lyndrich.
“Listen Ethan, I’ve been digging recently, I mean really channeling my inner Sherlock. Look at what I’ve managed to get my hands on,” Thomas said as he began rummaging through his bag producing multiple photos and placing them in front of me. They were photos of the sigil I just described and the note. The way his eyes lit up when he brought them out was uncanny, but at the time I just shook it off cause I mean, the guy’s always been a little weird. Looking at the photos Thomas produced gave me this feeling that I don’t really know how to place, it made my head go all fuzzy like TV static. I didn’t look at them long before Thomas continued.
“So you know about the paper I’m writing about this town right, well my dad and his group to be more precise,” Thomas said as he leaned in closer, “I’ve found a few people who are helping me research and man, you wouldn’t believe the things we’ve found.”
“That sounds great, glad you’ve found some friends up there, but you know, don’t get too swept up in it all,” I responded and for a moment really looked at Thomas and noticed how worn out he looked which sparked an idea, “Say, how about tomorrow we head out on the lake, we can borrow my dad’s pontoon just like old ti–”
I got cut off by Thomas’s phone which he answered immediately. He stood up from the table and walked off. After a few minutes he came back and immediately grabbed his bag and the photos on the table that I had flipped over.
“You headin’ out already, we haven’t even ordered anything?”
Thomas stopped and looked up at me for a moment, “I’m sorry man something came up and I gotta go, we’ll talk later yeah?”
“Yeah man for sure, take care.”
“You too Ethan, good seein’ you man,” and with that Thomas walked off and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.
Ethan became a missing person Thursday after me and Ms. Mary’s near-constant pestering of the police department. She called me the morning after he and I met at the coffee shop saying he didn’t come home last night which worried me a little initially. I told her I would call around and reassured her that she shouldn’t worry because it wasn’t like he hadn’t done this before. We used to sneak off all the time in high school after raiding his mom’s liquor cabinet and heading off to a friends house. I was sure hoping that he had gone and just crashed at someone’s house but an itch in the back of my head told me otherwise so just to be sure I started calling everyone I knew that Thomas was associated with which frankly, wasn’t many. To my dismay, no one had seen or heard from him. That’s when I called the police who of course did nothing because it had only been one night.
I looked everywhere for him. His car was at his moms so it’s not like he left town. Willowbrook isn’t some bustling city, there might be a little over 1000 people who actually live here, I could search the whole town over in an afternoon. There is a considerable amount of wilderness out here though, but there’s no way he went out there without telling someone. That’s literally like rule number one. I try not to be negative about the whole situation and think about the worst possible scenarios but I can’t help it. One thing is on my mind more than anything though. I can’t stop thinking about Lyndrich and that sigil Thomas showed me. I even saw it in my dream last night.
Normally, I don’t even have dreams, especially not vivid ones. I went to bed last night and woke up in this dark space. I thought I had just woken up in the middle of the night so I started feeling around for my lamp but my hands never reached anything tangible. I rolled off my bed and my feet landed in something cold and wet which sent a shiver through my body. I reached for my bed to get off the wet floor but it had disappeared. I stood there feeling around in the dark before I heard something. It sounded like someone was crying. I turned around and to my horror, there was a whole group of people all facing away from me towards something suspended in midair.
The sigil Thomas had shown me minus the handprints was just floating there, plastered onto nothing. Its gave off a red hue and the dark tendrils on its edges seemed to writhe and whip around as if it was trying to latch onto something. Taking my eyes off the thing I looked at the figures below. They were all cast in deep shadows except for one. One that was at the back of the group closest to me was mumbling something. I stepped closer, my heart thundering in my chest. Then I noticed the bag they had on. It was the bag Thomas had when I saw him last.
The figure slowly turned as I got close, just enough for me to see his face. Thomas was smiling, so wide, as tears rolled down his face while he repeated the same words over and over, lips barely moving through his frozen expression.
“help me…help me… help m-….h-help”
I woke up completely soaked. My throat was on fire, I had to get a glass of water. I didn’t look at my phone but I knew it was early morning because the sun wasn’t up yet but I could just start to hear the birds waking up outside. I walked into my bathroom and as if my heart hadn’t gone through enough trauma for one night my doorbell rang. I nearly leapt out of my skin when I heard it. I stayed crouched in my bathroom for what felt like an hour before I worked up the courage to go, very slowly, to my front door. It hadn’t rung again so I was praying that my visitor had left. I looked through the peephole and luckily saw no one so I edged my door open. Nothing but the night sky and an empty porch. I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped out into the cool night air and when I did something crunched under my feet. A letter.
Who doesn’t love an ominous letter at four in the morning? I sat down at my kitchen table as there was no hope of me going back to bed and opened the letter. The paper was old and yellowed but the writing seemed fresh. It was a map of Stonebridge trail with a black X just off from a section of the trail that if I remember correctly wraps around the base of a mountain. What really caught my eye though was the name at the bottom of the letter.