Thanks to everyone for the very kind words of support. It’s hard telling this story, but it is cathartic and does help me. I really appreciate after part 1, all the messages saying take my time, and I did. It’s been nearly a week, and I think I’ve organized my thoughts enough to continue now.
If you haven’t read part one, then start here.
Danny Merrick.
How does he fit into all of this?
You imagined I’d say he was the killer didn’t you?
Danny Merrick was a devil in boys clothes who had a short fuse, and when lit blew up like a firecracker. He wasn’t quiet. I don’t think he had the mental capacity to be quiet.
Problem was Danny had run away from home that summer after dropping out a month and a half shy of finishing Grade 9. His mother, Mrs. Merrick had searched everywhere for him - and put up posters all about town.
I didn’t know that at the time, because I had been away at camp by the time she realized it wasn’t just a cry for attention and that he truly wasn’t coming back. I think it’s odd she waited two months though. That doesn’t fit the image of the doting mother that she’d always portrayed herself to be, and successfully too as that is indeed how we all saw her.
Danny had been gone 2 months, and then all of a sudden one day she woke up and decided it was time to look for him? I remember thinking that was odd, even back then. I remember wondering what the hell had happened that was so terrible that Danny would run away like that.
Unknown to me, I’d hear plenty of possible reasons why in the coming months, but standing stunned in front of our tent, as they hauled Mark’s body away from prying eyes and into the ambulance, Danny was nowhere near my first thought.
Our parents were called, but arrived before the councilors could get halfway through the emergency contact list. News traveled fast in Midway back then. Landline to landline, mother to mother and father to father. And like a parade of panic the minivans and SUV’s stretched a mile long as they tried to jam into the small parking lot out front.
I don’t remember much from that day. It was mostly a blur. Our parents dragged us away as if the killer was still amongst the crowd. I’m not even sure we grabbed my bag– my parents opting to buy new clothes that weren’t stained with the memory of Mark.
My parents banned me from watching the news, and I know Aaron’s parents did the same. I think it was their way of protecting us from any more trauma, but really it was a bad idea with good intentions.
It wasn’t long until I had my first panic attack. The thought that a killer had done his work right next to me. I’d slept through the sound of breaking vertebrae, and never even opened my eyes to see his face. There was already so much uncertainty in my life, and I wasn’t even allowed to seek closure or at least seek peace of mind because it became that thing we weren’t allowed to speak about.
After my first panic attack it wasn’t long until I began to experience night terrors.
I’d go to bed each night in my own room, and wake up back in that tent. Except it wasn’t just me and my bunk mates, but a large shadow figure standing right over me.
It felt so real, and it was the same every time.
I’d be zipped up in my sleeping back, unable to move, too scared to barely open my eyes but I could hear him breathe. I could feel him breathe as he stood over me straddling me with his stance, his heavy booted feet on either side of my head as he stared down at me contemplating if I was the right fit for his needs.
Each night I’d lay there terrified, until he stepped over me moving to mark, and I could hear him bend down placing his knee on Mark’s spinal cord and reaching around to his mouth. He’d place his gloved hand over Mark’s mouth and press all of his weight down on that knee until I could hear the crunch of bone turning to gravel underneath his skin.
Part of me felt guilty. I felt it was my fault for not waking up, for not seeing his face, or maybe even stopping whoever it had been. I often felt guilty for not realizing that Mark was already dead when I’d woken up that morning to enjoy my day, or even that I’d woken up at all.
And every night I relived it all.
Back then psychiatrists were for “crazy” people, so I didn’t even bother asking if I could see one, though I surely needed to. Instead I just walked around in a daze and did my best to put a smile on around my parents, who had been hovering, keeping a watchful eye on me.
I knew they weren’t 100% percent certain I wasn’t the killer. I don’t blame them. The entire scenario was so preposterous. Perhaps it wasn’t just me, perhaps it was the whole lot of us. Myself, Aaron, and Arthur. Makes sense. Occam’s razor, and all.
That probably hurt the most that summer. The unknowing looks my parents would give me, and my unending quest to decipher the subtext hidden beneath it.
Those looks subsided largely by the time school started in the fall. I thought it was parental anxiety moving to the wayside in favor of trusting their son, but as I came to realize later– that wasn’t the case.
The first day of Grade 8 was hell for me.
It started much like any school year. My mother stood me outside the house, took a picture of me and my first day of school outfit, and drove me to my first day of high school. As I said before, middle school didn’t exist in Midway. I was nervous already walking into the hallways. Aaron’s parents and mine, had kept us apart all summer so normally we’d be walking into homeroom together (our last names are very close), but we’d been dropped off separately in yet another well meaning attempt by my parents to separate me from the event of the summer.
The looks started immediately, and then the whispers. The whispers grew so loud it became a clambering of young teens jostling one another, goading one another to talk to me. Teens aren’t nearly as brash or as brave as they think they are so I made it all the way to the home room before anyone had the courage to ask me.
Just as I rounded the corner and headed towards the door to the classroom, peering at Aaron just beyond the threshold I felt a heavy tap on my shoulder. It was a girl with Auburn hair. She was 3 or 4 inches taller than me, and pretty in a very homegrown way.
“Hi,” she said with no reservations.
“Hi,” I replied, already uncomfortable and unsettled from the reception I’d received so far in a foreign school, with crowds of people I didn’t know.
“You were at Fort Worden, right?” She asked.
“Uh, yeah.”
“You were in the murdered kid’s cabin weren’t you?”
“It was a tent,” I corrected her.
She smiled as if she couldn’t tell by my standoffish tone I was praying she’d go away.
“Someone said you didn’t even notice he was dead. Lucky it wasn’t you.”
“His name was Mark,” I snarled at her. I really wasn’t in the mood to talk about it, but I did feel a sense of relief wash over me that her first question wasn’t, “did you do it?”
“Right, sorry. Mark.”
The look on her face shifted and I knew instantly I had misinterpreted her intentions. I was so inside myself that day. So insecure. She walked away, and I felt terrible. Certainly not how I had imagined starting high school.
I followed her into the home room, and made my way over to Aaron. As I sat, Aaron looked over at me, and I at him. I’d missed my best friend.
“Please be seated,” shouted an adult from the front of the class, glasses barely hanging off his nose, and a coffee in hand.
“I am Mr. O’Connell. This is your homeroom. Summer is over, much to my dismay, so please sit quietly. Read a book, or text your friends. Let’s just get through homeroom together shall we and on with our days.”
He sat, and swung his legs up onto the desk, leaned back and took a deep swig of his coffee. I remember being so shocked. So this is high school, I thought to myself.
Aaron and I spoke a little. We got through the awkward tension of having not seen each other in, what to us at the time, felt like forever. Walking out of the homeroom the tide of the hallway swept us away from each other, and off to our next class.
English dragged, and then math– both were typical first days. Dragged out and boring. No one else spoke to me, which I welcomed at first until I realized they were avoiding me. Nothing like the stink of a murder to stunt your social life going straight into high school.
Lunch came and I found myself walking about with my tray, searching for Aaron. Hundreds of students jostled one another, jockeying for seats, and eventually I gave up, and sat down at the last empty table already resigned to the fact that high school wasn’t for me.
“Hi again,” I heard a voice say.
I looked up and saw the auburn haired girl from earlier.
“Mind if I sit?” She asked as she sat down, not waiting for a reply.
“I just wanted to apologize for what I said earlier. It was really insensitive of me, and I really didn’t mean it that way just sometimes I get excited, and nothing ever happens in midway, and we all spent the entire summer talking about Fort Worden, and there you are right in front of me in the hallway and I could hardly believe it, because your sort of a celebrity, but not really y’know?”
I swore she said it all in one breath, as if she were afraid I’d get up and leave before she spoke her piece. Honestly though, the embarrassment I felt as I walked around the cafeteria alone looking for some social que that I was allowed to sit at a table, I was willing to pay someone to talk to me.
“It’s fine, really, I thought you were going to ask me if I killed him or something crazy like that.”
As the words left my mouth I regretted them immediately, and I even did a little stabbing motion with my hand. Luckily, she seemed unperturbed.
“Why would I ask you if you killed him?” She asked looking genuinely confused.
“Well I mean, we slept through the whole thing. I don’t know, maybe…” I trailed off, not willing to dig myself in deeper than I already had.
“Yeah, it’s crazy, right? They’re still trying to figure out how he did it.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” I asked, feeling my mouth fill with cotton balls.
“What do you mean, you don’t know what I mean? Danny Merrick.”
I was left speechless. I hadn’t been allowed to watch television the remainder of the summer, let alone leave my house, and that was the first time I’d hear Danny Merrick’s name in a long while.
“Danny who? I thought you just said Merrick,” I replied not knowing what else to say.
“I did,” she stated proudly. “Danny Merrick, you know him don’t you? I heard from Beth’s best friend Tiff’s little sister Sam that you went to Midway Primary School as well.”
This girl was well researched.
“There’s no way,” I said plainly. “Why do they think it was Danny?”
As I said, Danny was never quite right, but he was also a bull in a china shop. I’d never considered him bright, or covert in his rage, and in all my dreams and night terrors, I had never imagined the silhouetted figure to be Danny friggin Merrick.
“Apparently he’d been stealing food from Fort Worden, and living in the caves up in the hills just northeast of the mess hall,” She paused for a moment, trying to look me dead in the eyes as if to search for some reaction.
I stared down at my tuna sandwich, and vanilla milk, and tried to imagine the path he took through the camp, making his way night after night past tents on his way to steal…
“The donuts,” I said to myself, the words leaving my mouth involuntarily.
“Donuts?” The auburn girl had a sharp ear.
“It’s nothing,” I replied, trying my best to shove the words back down from where they came from.
“No, what donuts? Please!”
I knew then that I stood at a crossroad. Either I tell her about the stolen donuts and the alleged note, or I could have said nothing, picked up my tray and moved on with my life.
“One of the counselors was mad because someone stole their donuts, and left a note behind.”
Her mouth dropped open, and I saw a smile stretch across her smooth cheeks.
“I’ve never heard of a note. Do you know what that means?”
I shrugged.
“That means the police probably don’t know about the note. Rick’s cousin Max’s dad is a police officer, and Max told Rick everything, and of course Rick told me, otherwise I’d tell him sister what happened to her bat mitzvah money last year.”
She spoke so fast. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone speak so fast in my entire life.
“Do you think there’s any way I could find that note?” She asked, grabbing my hand and tugging at it gently.
I blushed a little, and dropped my head again peering up with one eye.
“If they didn’t burn it, maybe it’s left behind in the counselor’s cabin, or the trash if that hasn’t been taken away.”
I was young, and filled with hormones. I hadn’t thought of her as pretty until she touched me, but the second she grabbed my hand, she probably could have gotten me to admit anything.
“You are amazing! When can we go?”
Go? Go back to Fort Worden? I felt the blood drain from my face. She must be joking. Surely she hadn’t thought it through. I pulled my hand away and out of her grip.
“Why would you want to go to Fort Worden?” The familiarity and congeniality in my tone disappeared, and it was all I could do to keep the tears from my eyes that sprung forth even simply thinking of going back.
“Do you think he did it?” She asked, just as serious as my challenging question.
I stayed silent. I can’t remember what I was thinking at that moment. All I remember was a cold sweat. I clearly knew very little of what had transpired since camp. How could I answer one way or another? I wanted to say yes and put it behind me, accept the simple truth no matter how poorly it fit with what I knew of Danny Merrick.
“Neither do I,” she said with cold steely conviction.
I looked up and met her eye. The playful girl next door with Auburn hair was gone, and in her place sat a woman with a mind made up, but on what I didn’t know.
“I think I’ll go this Sunday while my parents are at church. I’ll ask my older brother if he can drive. You can come if you want. It would help if you did, but you don’t have to. I want to see if I can find that note.”
The lunch bell rang and students began standing up around us, laughing and shouting as they bounced against one another draining out into the corridors leading to class.
“I don’t even know your name,” I said as she stood with her own lunch tray leaving me to my thoughts and her insane proposal.
She hiked her backpack up over her shoulder and began backing away from the table, her playful smile returning to her face.
“Rebecca,” she said, turning away, glancing back at me over her shoulder.
I need to stop writing late at night. I keep sitting down trying to get out more of the story in one sitting but either my tiredness or emotion gets me.
This part is much easier to tell, but I’m not looking forward to the next entry I make. I might try and ride the momentum I felt after this, or it may be awhile.
I really hate talking about what happened next.
EDIT: I’ve updated the story with Part 3
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/16ce3mh/monster_of_midway_creature_in_the_woods/