I work as a park ranger in the deep South. My assistant was a member of a cult, the lone survivor of a mass suicide orchestrated to get their souls free passage onto the nearest UFO. His name is Jay Hardwick, and mine is Jay Salem. To avoid confusion, everyone just calls him Wickie and me Little Jay, even though I despise that nickname and always have.
The Little Jay thing is an old, and rather worn-out, joke, as I stand about seven feet tall. My parents were also monstrously tall, and their parents before them too, and so on and so forth, probably all the way back to the time of the Denisovans. Just like Great Danes are inbred for their gargantuan size, apparently my family followed a similar policy of foolhardy eugenics. Regardless, I prefer people to just call me Jay. The “Little” thing gets old.
“Hey Jay,” Hardwick said to me, “does that look normal to you?” He pointed across the field where a two-headed black bear stared at us, blinking in bewilderment.
“It doesn’t not look normal to me. Just ignore it. Rule number one of this job is to always ignore everything that doesn’t immediately threaten your life. And even some of the stuff that does, maybe.” I looked down from the bear, but Hardwick was still frowning.
“He has a hat on.” I looked up, and Hardwick was right. One of the bear’s two heads had a Herbalife cap on. I frowned.
“Well, that’s not against the law,” I said. “Bears can wear hats.”
“Yeah, but it’s a scam,” he said.
“That’s not against the law,” I said. “Americans have the right to participate in any scam they want. They call it the free market, I think. Or maybe the First Amendment. I forget the difference.”
“OK, point taken… BUT…” Hardwick raised his index finger for emphasis. “…it isn’t even sunny out. Why the hat?”
“Hardwick, I feel like you’re asking the wrong questions here,” I said. “Siamese twins, two-headed bears, flying saucers from outer space, these things all happen. The real question is, do I care?” I shook my head. “You need to learn the ropes of this job if you’re going to become a real park ranger like me. Rule number two: do the least work possible all the time, and maybe even less than that if you need to. Don’t make yourself look too good or people will be expecting you to do things all the time. And that comes back to rule number one, which is to ignore nearly everything strange or weird.” I tapped my nose in confidence at him. “If you do almost nothing from the start, people will expect nothing of you. Then you have nowhere to go but up!”
“Yeah, but you’ve been in the same position at the same pay for ten years, so…” He shrugged. Point taken, Hardwick. I just looked back down to the magazine I was reading, some rag about Bigfoot sightings in British Columbia and how Elvis was just spotted, alive and well, in a bathroom in Guatemala somewhere.
Hardwick was an average looking guy, six feet tall with a manbun and pale gray eyes. He had two degrees from Stanford, but decided he would rather work here, for some reason that I had never asked him about. He currently sat in the ranger station, looking out the window, still observing the Herbalife bear.
As usual, we were understaffed, and weird stuff was happening. Weird stuff seemed to always happen when we were understaffed, almost as if the universe knew we had two people working in a hundred square mile park and could do almost nothing about any of it. Management would try to fix the problem, occasionally hire some new blood, some motivated youngsters who thought they could change the world or save the environment or whatever it is kids wanted nowadays, but as soon as they realized just how strange and dangerous the park was, most of them quit. Some of them disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. The only exception so far was Hardwick, because he said he had seen far weirder things in the UFO cult. I’m not sure I believe him. Nothing could be weirder than Goreham Park.
At that moment, Sheriff Ames burst in the door. He was a good old boy from a plantation family, and moreover he had the strangest and most aesthetically unappealing body I had ever seen- his legs and arms were thin and emaciated, like sticks, but his gut and chest were huge. He looked like a walking barrel with four skin-colored twigs attached. I don’t even know how his legs supported his massive gut. His watery blue eyes and protuberant nose were a maze of burst capillaries from lifelong alcoholism, and his Southern drawl was so thick that even I only picked up about one word out of two that came out of his mouth.
“Hey y’all,” he said, nodding his head at me and Hardwick. Hardwick turned around to face the newcomer. “You ever end up calling the DEP about those meth labs that exploded back there?” He pointed a shaky, crooked finger towards the woods.
Last week, a meth lab had caught fire and started a small brushfire. Exploded was, in my book, a little bit too strong a word, but then again, I wasn’t a law enforcement agent. None of this was too out of the ordinary- meth labs were found all over the deep South, and sometimes they caught fire.
What was bizarre was that the meth cook had apparently cut off his own feet, hands and head, then nailed these to random trees in a hundred foot radius around the burnt out meth lab. The cops, as usual, ruled this death a suicide. Anything they didn’t want to deal with was inevitably ruled a suicide or accident, especially if it involved someone nobody would ever notice was missing. I think all the townies knew it was a lie, but the police force was so underfunded that they had to cut corners somewhere. I respected that, and knew it was just a part of life in small town America.
“Oh yeah, the Department of Environmental Protection said the whole area is totally FUBAR,” Hardwick said behind me. The Sheriff looked at him with his bleary eyes.
“The Environmental guy told me it is going to take at least six weeks to clean the area,” I elaborated. “Actually, I think they have some people working down there right now. They said the toxic chemicals in the area are off the charts. Apparently, lots of dumping and…” I could tell he wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes roved around the small ranger’s shack where I currently sat and where Hardwick stood by the window.
“You know what I think the problem is with these kids nowadays?” the Sheriff asked me. I thought to myself, No, but I bet you are about to tell me. “Satanism! There’s lots of creepy shit going on around here and it all boils down to Satanism. These kids have no sense of Jesus Christ, no sense of pride in our country, so they cover themselves in cat blood and smoke meth and do orgies, or, even worse, get gay married. No offense if y’all are part of any of that,” he said, motioning from me to Hardwick as if I didn’t get the insinuation. “It is for the dissolution of our once-great nation, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“Huh,” Hardwick said, stroking his goatee. That about summarized my thoughts on it too. “By the way, did you ever find out more about that suicide back there?”
“You mean the goddamn guy who cut his feet and hands off with a power saw?” the Sheriff asked, his eyes widening. “Well, we know he was the one cooking that crap.”
“I kinda assumed that…” I said, but the Sheriff cut me off.
“Second, we found traces of some weird stuff in his meth. Guess it isn’t even meth technically, though a lot of it is. But some of it was crap we ain’t never seen around here before- acetyl alpha-methcathinone this and bromo-birdiefly that and a bunch of other bizarre hallucinogens and bath salts that would send anyone over the edge, pronto. I’m guessing we are going to be seeing a lot more psychotic drug breakdowns around this here town before the week’s end, assuming that shit got out into the community.” The Sheriff shrugged apathetically at me. “Nothing I can do about it, anyway. You just gotta carry a .45 for protection. A .22 don’t do NOTHING to those nutjobs on bath salts. They laugh it off like it’s some sort of a paintball gun.” He raised his hand to the ceiling. “Word to my mother, I’ve seen it happen.”
“So, you think he was sampling his own product, went insane on it, and somehow cut himself up like that with a bandsaw?” I asked, genuinely curious as to how the Sheriff would react. He leaned close to me, a subtle smell of rum or some other sweet spirit on his breath wafting over me, and whispered, as if he were confiding the answer to the mystery of life, the universe and everything else to me. Instead, he told me the most obvious statement I had heard all week.
“I don’t think that was a suicide, boy,” he said, shrugging his eyebrows up and down as he talked. “Sure, sure, a man could cut off his feet easily enough with a bandsaw, maybe the head too, but the hands? How in God’s Green Earth could he get the hands?” I shrugged my eyebrows back at him in what I hoped was a non-threatening, brotherly gesture.
“Geez, I never thought that maybe he was murdered,” I said, hoping I sounded serious. “I mean, what if he gerry-rigged the bandsaw to keep running, like put a heavy band around the trigger and then fell into it with both his hands after getting his feet, then saved his head for last? Maybe someone hopped up on enough drugs could ignore the pain long enough to get through that.” Sheriff Ames shook his bulldog-like face, loose skin rippling as he looked down at the well-worn wooden counter between us.
“Nah, not a sign of gerry-rigging or anything else in the area, CSI would have definitely found it by now,” he said. I had my doubts but I kept them to myself.
“According to my research, law enforcement investigative techniques actually have a long history of mistakes and overall negligence, and it’s sent countless innocent people to prison,” Hardwick said behind us, perking up like he always did when rambling about a subject he knew. And he knew about nearly everything. He read a book a day, seemed to remember everything and didn’t find any subject too boring to study. “The only area of expertise where they don’t have an insanely high error rate is DNA testing, but the rest? Bite mark evidence and hair sampling and even fingerprinting? Their error rate is so high that it puts thousands of innocents into prison alone in…” Sheriff cut him off, lifting his hand up as if he were flicking away a housefly.
“Look, boys, I ain’t come here to talk about studies. I don’t care, honest. It ain’t my job and I trust my men. I actually need a favor from you,” he said, looking mainly at me with a small glance towards Hardwick, as if sizing him up. Seeming satisfied with what he saw, he continued. “Do you remember where those Satanists killed that little girl?” the Sheriff asked. I nodded solemnly. “I need you to go back there and see if someone dropped something, something small, maybe just a bracelet or a necklace. We got a tip that certain undesirables are revisiting the site.” I wondered who would have given him the tip, or how they could have known who was visiting what miles in the woods.
And I certainly didn’t know about any Satanists. From what I had seen, that little girl had been savagely killed by a monster, not a human being. And no one had ever been caught for the crime. Yet somehow the local media had known it was “Satanists” as if by magic. No one ever wanted to acknowledge that there were demons and monsters in the park, and they would attribute it to anything they could as long as they could avoid it.
“Sure, Sheriff,” I said, nodding. “Hardwick and I have to go on patrols today anyway. We can stop by the area.”
After nodding and shaking my hand, Sheriff Ames took off in his car, leaving just Hardwick and I alone in the ranger station. I turned and noticed the two-headed bear had gone. He had probably left before Ames even got there.
At that moment, the phone rang. Hardwick picked it up, tilting his head slightly. “Hello, ranger’s station, how may I help you?” he said quickly. He pulled the phone away from his ear slightly, grimacing, then handed it to me. “It’s for you.” I took it begrudgingly, holding it at arm’s length as if it was a poisonous snake getting ready to strike. But after taking a deep breath, I put it to my ear.
“This is the head ranger on duty. How can I help you?”
“I will eat your soul,” a deep, demonic voice said, coming through the phone at an amazingly loud, eardrum-shattering volume. “I will kill everyone you love in front of you and rip off your skin. I will burn your town to the ground, for I am the destroyer of stars, the devourer of worlds and the bringer of the dead lights. You will all tremble before me. Before I am done with you, you will…”
“Sir, are you sure you have the right number?” I asked. “I mainly just clean up the trails around here.”
“You dare interrupt me?” the voice screamed, making my right ear ring. I winced, pulling the phone farther away. “Listen to me, maggot, and listen closely. If you go to the spot where the girl’s sacrifice was performed, you will die. Stay far away. If you want to extend your puny life by even a single minute, you will avoid the areas we have deemed holy ground. Remember this, or today will be a day of endless torment and pain for you!” With that, the phone call ended. The dial tone seemed so quiet and serene by comparison that I forgot to hang it up.
“What was that about?” Hardwick asked, curious.
“Wrong number,” I said, walking the phone back to the cradle. “Alright, let’s get this over with. We need to go to the spot where that little girl died and see if we can’t help somehow.” I sighed. “I guess we better do it while there’s still daylight, as I really don’t want to be trapped out there after dark.” We grabbed some protein bars, water and a couple walking sticks, and headed out. As we got a few miles out on the packed dirt trail, mostly walking in silence and enjoying the scenery and the smell of pines and maple, Hardwick lit up a joint.
“Hardwick, you should not be smoking that shit on the job,” I said. “In fact, you shouldn’t be smoking it at all. It makes you stupid, and it smells like a skunk ate another skunk then shit him out.” Hardwick shrugged, ignoring my point.
“I don’t get how the Sheriff knew someone was visiting the site,” Hardwick said. “Or why he couldn’t just go himself, or send one of his cop buddies to do it. Why come to us? None of this makes any sense.”
“I have a feeling that if Sheriff Ames tried to hike five miles off the beaten path, up and down all these hills, his heart would explode and that would just give us more paperwork to do. Besides,” I said, stopping to move a large branch off the trail, “we need to clean the paths up anyway. I haven’t been out this way in over a month.”
As I dragged the immensely heavy oak branch towards a deep pile of brush ten paces or so off the trail, I saw a long arm begin to snake out from behind a tree and approach Hardwick. It looked like an optical illusion at first, because the tree was only a couple feet wide but the arm that came out looked like it went on forever. By the time I noticed it, literally over ten feet of white, bony arm had extended and it was still coming out, like a massive cobra uncoiling from a tiny basket at the tune of some invisible snake charmer.
“Um, Hardwick…” I said, my mouth suddenly going dry. I could only point silently while the blood drained from my face as the arm came to within inches of his shoulder. He raised one eyebrow at me as he took another inhalation off the joint, and then all Hell broke loose.
The arm grabbed him with an iron, vise-like grip and dragged him out of view so fast that he looked like nothing more than a Hardwick-sized blur to me. Behind me, the same voice I had heard on the phone began to speak.
“You couldn’t wait to meet Death, to die screaming and watch your friend be torn apart, limb from limb,” the demonic voice said, incredibly deep and resonant. I felt every word shake my bones as it spoke. I turned and saw one of the most hideously deformed creatures I could ever imagine.
It stood over fifteen feet tall, with the same endless bony arms as the other one that had come from behind the tree. It was entirely naked, bone-white, emaciated and nightmarish looking in every sense of the word. Its eyes looked like pure white cataracts with a thin bluish film near the pupil. Its skin clung so tightly to its body that I could see every rib and bone that composed it. Its nose looked like the thin slit nose of a snake, and its ears were missing. But its smile was the most disturbing part- it had a grin that looked far too wide for its face, showing off dozens of bleeding, sharp little teeth. Small rivulets of blood ran down from its mouth, leaving pink streaks over the bottom portion of its entire face.
From behind me, I heard Hardwick shout, then a gunshot. I turned and saw Hardwick holding a pistol, another creature like the one before me holding him ten feet off the ground. Its other long arm snaked out and whipped the gun out of Hardwick’s hand, sending it flying far away into the brush, and I knew we were doomed. Hardwick always carried a small .22 on him for protection, but I had nothing more deadly than a Swiss-army knife on me.
Then, just as all hope left me, I heard a roar from behind me and a scream of pain from the creature that had spoken to me. Turning quickly, I saw the two-headed bear bound out of the woods and rip into the monster’s thin, immensely long leg. With a quick snapping sound, one of the heads snapped its femur, sending a bloody spike of bone out through the monster’s flesh.
I heard Hardwick fall with a grunt as the other creature dropped him and began to draw forward, planning on attacking the bear. But with all of its attention on the main threat, it didn’t see me as I ran at him from the side, raising my walking stick and whacking it across the head as hard as I could. I heard a crack of bone and then the creature looked unsteady, stumbling along for a few steps, before falling. The two-headed bear quickly rushed forward and went for its throat.
“Hardwick, run!” I said, pulling him up and heading back to the ranger station. I don’t think either of us have ever sprinted three or four miles so fast before in our lives. I thought at multiple points I might pass out, but we made it back to the station in record time, panting heavily and chugging water after water before slumping down against the wall. We looked at each other.
“Did we just get saved by that Herbalife bear?” he asked me. I nodded, smiling.
“I think we owe that two-headed bugger quite a bit,” I said.
“Hell, I’ll buy it a whole steak dinner with mashed potatoes and apple crisp for dessert. He deserves it. Why do you think he saved us?” I could only shake my head, having no answer.
Things continued to get weirder after that, and I know at least one of those monsters and two-headed bear survived, because I would run into them later that week. I wasn’t going to give up on being a park ranger just because of a couple near-death experiences, after all. This was my place, and I felt like I belonged to it, just like I hoped it belonged to me in some way. Later on, I would immensely regret not reaching the site of that girl’s murder, as the Sheriff had been right- there was a necklace there, and it would cause a heap of trouble later on. But that’s a story for next time.
Continue to part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/10jmfr8/i_am_a_park_ranger_at_goreham_state_park_and_our/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button