I’d known Cayden Kelly for the better half of my life. In fact, I couldn’t actually tell you how we met. We’d simply just been friends for as long as I can remember.
When we were kids, our parents would get together and we’d run around in the backyard, playing secret agents and pretending the coolest monster from whatever movie we’d seen most recently was chasing us.
Cayden liked movies. He especially liked movies with monsters in them although he never really cared about the human protagonists. They were just distractions from the real stars of the show. The monsters… Those were the ones he obsessed over. They were the ones he loved. I always liked the heroes. Ellen Ripley, RJ Macready, Ash Williams. I wanted to be cool and badass like them. Cayden on the other hand wanted to be the monster.
Looking back at it, I think he looked up to them. He was a small, skinny, pale kid with light blond hair who got sick all the time. He was shy around most people and struggled with approaching other kids he didn’t already know. He never seemed to know the right thing to say or do. He’d usually get upset when things didn’t go his way and lash out in anger. When we were little, that usually meant hitting someone. That’s admittedly a big part of the reason most of my other friends didn’t want to hang around him. I was just about the only person who he could spend time around without losing his cool. Everyone else just avoided him and that made him, in his own mind at least, an outsider. I think he saw some of himself in those movie monsters. An outsider. Misunderstood, but not necessarily bad.
When we played together by ourselves, he’d either pretend to be the monster, or he’d pretend that the monster was our friend, helping us fight another monster. I guess it was innocent enough. Some people just vibe with the monsters and that’s fine. I never judged him for it or saw it as a bad thing. Honestly, I think it was part of why always got along so well. We completed each other, in a sense. He was the Dracula to my Van Helsing and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Even when Cayden’s problems started to become my problems, I stuck by him.
Kids can be cruel by nature. Even when Cayden grew out of hitting people when he got angry, a lot of people still didn’t like him and he didn’t really want anything to do with them. Unfortunately, my other ‘friends’ not liking Cayden eventually evolved into them not liking me very much either. They’d complain when I tried to include him and when I ignored them, they simply stopped including me.
I won’t pretend it didn’t hurt… But at least I still had Cayden. It was just the two of us against the world and honestly, I could live with that. People were at least still a little nicer to me than they were to him. So I sorta became his bodyguard. When anyone decided to pick on him, they dealt with me first.
Some kids were happy to back off when I stepped in and stood up for him. Others, like Nick Carter weren’t so easily deterred.
Nick Carter transferred to our school sometime around 8th grade. At 13, he looked like someone who’d already picked out the shitty personality he’d have for the rest of his life and was just in the process of growing into it. I’d seen his Dad drop him off for school a few times and Nick looked exactly the way I’d imagine a younger clone of him would look. He wore his hair in a military buzz cut and his face seemed a little too wide for his head. He didn’t have his Dads muscular military physique yet, but it wasn’t hard to imagine him with it.
Nick carried himself like a soldier, head always held high. He walked with a brutish gait, head tilted forward as if he was going to ram anything that was in his way. Looking at him now, I realize that he probably had something to prove. Judging by the military tattoos on his Dads arms, he’d probably grown up in a pretty long shadow. I can’t imagine it did wonders for his mental health.
Needless to say, as a kid who was doomed to suffer an inferiority complex, Nick was looking for a target and Cayden might as well have had one painted on his back. As you might expect - That wasn’t exactly going to fly with me. And Nick wasn’t going to let me talk back to him.
It ended badly.
The first time he went after Cayden, about a week after he transferred into our class. He’d come up to him, asking if he was the ‘weird kid’ and telling him to do something weird. Trying to get a rise out of him, just to see if he could. I’d stepped in and told him to fuck off. He’d just laughed and asked me if I was Cayden’s boyfriend. I’d told him I wasn’t and that if he was asking me for a date, I wasn’t interested.
He may have taken offense to that…
It wasn’t exactly much of a fight. He’d taken a swing at me, and the next thing I knew I was on my ass, seeing stars. He got down on top of me, grabbing me by the shirt and yelling something at me. I don’t actually remember what he said because I was too distracted by the blood gushing out of my nose. He hit me again for good measure before a teacher pulled him off of me.
We both got suspended, him for hitting me and me for instigating. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Nick went out of his way to harass me and Cayden at every possible opportunity after that. Usually it was just petty little shit. Spitballs, name calling, stuff like that. Every now and then though, he’d go big.
He crushed an orange on my chair before class once. We didn’t have any spares so I had to stand and take notes the entire class. I could hear him snickering the whole time. In tenth grade, I’m pretty sure he pissed in Cayden’s locker. We never proved it was him. There were cameras in the halls but the vice principal said he didn’t see anything on the footage… Which I’m pretty sure just meant that he didn’t actually check. But who else would do something like that?
Nick started calling Cayden ‘Piss Boy’ after that. He got a lot of milage out of that one… It’s probably best if I don’t go into the details. Through it all, Cayden took it as well as he could. I think at some point, he just sorta grew desensitized to it all. It wasn’t just Nick that picked on him. Nick might’ve been the worst, but they all tormented him in some way or another. Even the ones who didn’t jeer simply didn’t want anything to do with him. Cayden hadn’t exactly gotten better at making friends over the years and sometimes, it was hard even for me to stay friends with him. For the most part, things were the same as they’d ever been. We were a little too old to play make believe in the backyard at that point, but we’d traded that in for late night scary movie marathons and survival horror games. His monster obsession had never gone anywhere. He’d gradually become more and more of a horror movie buff, and as we got older he started getting deep into some of the communities online.
He kept trying to get me into them too, but I was never really that interested. Most of them were forums, discussing movie monsters, and whether or not certain cryptids were real. But the less tame ones ventured a little into crazy territory. There was one that he showed me that looked like it was full of occult shit. Descriptions of rituals and magic that ranged from weird to completely fucked up. The people there posted diagrams of spell circles and runes. Some of them linked to stores that sold certain types of candles. One girl on there kept posting about how she’d been visiting her local graveyard to steal actual human remains.
I’d told Cayden that this was way too much for me and he’d just laughed it off, before saying:
“You’ll get used to it eventually. This is the real deal, man!”
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not… I wanted to believe he was.
Then came the cancer diagnosis.
Cayden getting sick was nothing new. I said before, he tended to get sick a lot. But when it hit him in 11th grade, it was worse than it had ever been before. He started losing weight to the point where he was almost bone thin. He got sick more often and when he did, it took more out of him.
The change happened gradually, and I’ll be honest, it did worry me a little bit. I never thought it would be as bad as it was, though.
Eventually, a doctor diagnosed him with leukemia.
Leukemia… Christ…
I remember the day he told me, he was so pale that his skin almost looked chalk white.
“It’s bad, Mitch…” He’d said. “It’s really fucking bad…”
His voice had been shaking as he spoke. I’d never seen him that scared in my life. Honestly, I’d have been scared too if I were in his shoes, staring down the barrel of death when my life had barely even begun.
“I don’t want to die man… Not yet. There’s still so much more out there… I don’t want to die like this…”
Christ… There wasn’t a goddamn thing I could say to comfort him, and I knew it. All I could do was hug him, tell him he’d be okay and hope to hell it sounded believable.
It didn’t.
Over the next year, they tried chemotherapy. It helped manage it… But it didn’t push the cancer back enough.
Next came a bone marrow transplant. According to Cayden, his Doctor had been hopeful it might work. But his body rejected it.
Everything they tried, failed. The cancer continued to devour him from the inside out and every day, I saw the fear in Cayden’s eyes grow deeper and deeper…
As his body wasted away, I saw him struggling to accept the fact that his death was coming and as the days went by, I saw that fear slowly turn into a slow, simmering rage. By the end of 11th grade, Cayden was never at school anymore. I brought his work to him, but he was never actually in class.
Some of the other students had signed a card for me to pass along to him. He hadn’t even looked at it. He’d just told me to put it in the trash.
“They never gave a shit about me before. They don’t get to give a shit about me when I’m dying.” He’d said bitterly, “I don’t need their hollow fucking sympathy…”
I’d just told the rest of the school that he’d simply said thanks.
Not everyone seemed to change their attitude towards Cayden so quickly though… No, Nick was the same as he always was. I suppose there’s some irony in the fact that Cayden would’ve considered Nick of all people was probably the only one who was sincere in the way he reacted to his sickness.
While everyone else wrote kind little notes and taped them to Cayden’s locker, there were always a few notes saying things like:
‘Die already, Piss Boy.’
It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out who was writing those.
“So whens Piss Boy gonna just bite it?” Nick had asked me once, “He’s been dying for over a year now. Might as well just take the easy way out. Have a little dignity.”
I’d almost hit him for saying that… But I really didn’t need to get my ass beat that day.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I’d asked him. “What if that were you, asshole?” Nick just shrugged.
“If it were me, I’d just fucking hang myself. Go out on my own terms. Guess he doesn’t have the balls.”
He’d shrugged again and walked away before I could think of a response. I decided that he just wasn’t worth it… He was probably only saying that shit to piss me off and try and goad me into picking a fight with him. I told myself not to let him get to me.
About a month later, Cayden told me that his Mom had gotten a call from a vet, telling them that they’d missed an appointment to put their sick dog ‘Cayden’ down. His parents never figured out who’d booked the appointment, but Cayden and I both knew who’d done it. I don’t think Nick had intended to make Cayden laugh when he did that, but he laughed all the same.
“It would be a hell of a lot easier…” He’d said, “He’s almost got a point there…”
By May, the doctor was saying that Cayden probably only had a few more weeks left. He was on his last legs and fading fast… Looking at him, he barely resembled the friend I’d known for my entire life. His skin was ghostly pale. His body looked thinner and his hair was gone. The dark circles under his sunken eyes made his face better resemble a skull.
Every day I went to see him, I dreaded that it would be the last one… He didn’t speak much anymore. His voice was low and weak, like a whisper when he did. More often than not, he slept. Some days, he was strong enough to go for a short walk. But those days were becoming fewer and further between.
He was dying in the slowest, cruelest way he could… And there was nothing I could do for him.Maybe that’s why I said yes to what he asked me to do. Because I couldn’t stand watching him keep wasting away… I wanted to believe that it would help. As crazy as it was, I wanted to believe that it would make a difference.
And maybe it did.
He’d asked me one day while I was visiting him. His voice was so low and raspy, I could barely even hear him speak.
“Can you do something for me… Something important. You’re the only one I can ask…”
I told him I’d do anything he wanted, and I’d felt him place his hand over mine.
“You have to promise… You have to promise you’ll do it. Will you promise?”
I promised.
“I need… I need a cat… Find one. A stray, maybe… Kill it and… and bring it to the woods. Out behind the hospice… Then, take me for a walk. Let me see it… I want to do something. One thing… I… I want to try…”
I’d blinked in disbelief. I thought I’d misheard him at first. I’d tried to pull my hand back but Cayden had gripped it tight, refusing to let me.
“Promised…” He rasped, “You promised… I… I need to try… Something I read… A ritual. I need to try…”
I thought that he must’ve been delirious… Maybe he didn’t even know what he was saying. But he kept an iron grip on my arm, refusing to let me pull away. Even when I tried to talk some sense into him, he wouldn’t listen.
“I need it…” Was all he’d said, “Last chance…”
He kept his grip firm on my hand and he didn’t let go until I told him I’d do what he asked… A look of relief washed over him as he sank back down onto the bed, breathing heavily from the exertion.
“Thank you… Tomorrow… Bring it for tomorrow… Please…”
I told him that I would.
Maybe I could’ve gotten away with just not doing it. I suppose I could’ve just not gone back… But I couldn’t do that to Cayden. I didn’t want to do what he’d asked of me. But I’d promised him, hadn’t I?
That night, as I lay in bed I thought about what he’d said. Maybe it was just some sort of episode, brought on as the cancer ate away at him… Maybe it was proof that his mind was going. In which case, I quietly wondered if maybe it would be better if he died sooner rather than later…. I hated myself for thinking that.
But the way he’d spoken as he’d asked for it. The way he’d grabbed my arm and refused to let go… The look in his eyes. I’d known Cayden for a long time. Long enough to know that he’d been begging me to do this for him.
Horrible as this was, it was important to him… Maybe he thought it could save him. I thought back to those weird forums he’d hung out on. I remember the strange occult one he’d shown me. He’d probably gotten the idea from there. Whatever he was planning probably wouldn’t actually work.
But what if it did…?
As I tossed and turned that night, unable to sleep, I started thinking more and more about the possibility that this might actually work. Sure, it was crazy… But maybe there was a chance it might help. Maybe this was all we needed to turn things around, to save him.
Maybe…
After school the next day, I went looking for a cat. I knew there were usually strays down by the old department store. I lured one out with a can of tuna I stole from the pantry and after a bit of trial and error, managed to trap it in a box, where I was able to slit its throat with a kitchen knife.
It was not easy… Not physically or emotionally.
I suppose in concept, killing an animal sounds a lot easier than it is. But as I looked at the blood on my hands, all I felt was sick…
I wanted to abandon the whole thing right then and there, go back to Cayden and tell him I couldn’t do it. He’d be disappointed. Maybe he’d even be mad, but could I really continue to go through with this? But by that point… I’d already finished the hardest part. Why not finish what I started?
I closed the box so I didn’t have to see the body as I brought it to the hospice.
The hospice had a nice little outdoor garden behind it. It was peaceful, with a little pond full of koi and some benches for reading. A stone path circled around the garden, winding through some of the trees and coming close to the woods out back. I took the cat there, setting the box behind some bushes before washing my hands one more time before visiting Cayden.
He looked as bad as he always did… But his eyes lit up when he saw me.
“Did you do it?”
The excitement in his voice caught me off guard. It seemed… Wrong, somehow. I almost told him I hadn’t. But instead, I just managed a quiet, uneasy nod.
Cayden managed a weak smile in response.
“Good… I want to go for a walk. Out by the woods in the garden… Can you take me?”
I asked the nurse to get his wheelchair. As we waited for her to bring it, he pointed one trembling finger towards a backpack sitting on a chair across the room.
“Bring that…”
I hesitated for a moment before slinging it over my shoulder.
We’d walked through the garden behind the hospice a few times before. It was peaceful there… But this time, I really didn’t want to go. Cayden seemed different than before. More excited. His body still seemed weak, almost on the verge of collapse but somehow he kept going, as if he’d been saving up the last of his strength just for this.
As I pushed Cayden along the path, I saw his eyes lingering on the woods. At his request, I’d set the backpack in his lap and he hugged it tight to his chest with both arms.
When I stopped in front of the place where I’d hidden the body. He slowly opened the backpack and took something out. It was clearly a herculean effort for him to give me what he gave me. I wasn’t quite sure what it was at first. I had to turn it over in my hands a few times before I figured it out but when I did… I felt my heart skip a beat.
He’d just given me a switchblade.
“I need you to do this for me… I can’t… Too weak… I need you to be… be my hands…”
I looked back at him, speechless. There was a stern, almost resolute look in his eye. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I took a deep breath and asked him what he needed me to do.
At Cayden’s request, I took the cat from the box and propped it up with some sticks. Then, I used the switchblade to cut open its stomach.
The smell and sight of its entrails made me gag and retch… But I did it anyways. The whole while, Cayden sat in his wheelchair, watching me intently.
“Read about this online…” He said, “They say it works… We’ll see. What have I got to lose…” He laughed humorlessly, before taking something else from the bag.
A small incense burner.
He told me to set the burner inside the hollowed out stomach of the cat… and I did as he asked. Then, I lit it and helped him out of his chair to inch closer to the twisted effigy we’d created.
Cayden collapsed to his knees in front of the desecrated cat. The smoke of the incense rose out of its open mouth and nose… Its empty eyes looked skyward, frozen in a silent scream. He patted the spot beside him and I knelt too, trying not to look at the face of the creature I’d killed… I asked myself what I was doing… Why I was doing this. But looking at Cayden and seeing the way he prostrated himself before the effigy made me almost believe it was worth it.
I could hear him speaking, whispering something I couldn’t clearly hear. As he spoke, he remained kneeling, never once lifting his head until he was done. Then, when he had finished whatever prayer he’d uttered, he took the switchblade and leaned in closer to the cat.
I watched as he began to carve a sigil into its body. His hand was shaking, but his movements were deliberate. He carved an inverted triangle and drew a line through the center. He carved two branching lines extending out of the triangle from the top facing up, two from the middle facing down, and two from the bottom also facing down. At last, he carved a V shape that intersected the four lines coming off bottom of the triangle.
I couldn’t watch anymore… I stood up, turning away as Cayden plunged his hand into the body of the cat to do something else. I never saw what…
I could hear him moving, hear him doing something but I didn’t allow myself to look. I’d seen enough. I could hear him breathing in the fumes from the incense and I could hear him whisper. I only looked back once to see him hunched over the effigy, and I could’ve sworn that the space around him seemed darker than before…
I closed my eyes and looked away again and I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge what he was doing until I finally heard him speak to me.
“It’s done… You can take me back now…”
Cayden had sank down into a sitting position. His hands were covered in blood that he wiped off onto his pants.
I wordlessly helped him back into his wheelchair. He slumped down into it, barely awake. He looked ready to pass out.
“Thank you…” Was all he said to me.
I didn’t reply. I just brought him back to his room.
When the nurse asked about the blood, I said that someone had killed a cat and left the body out back. It technically wasn’t a lie.
The last time I saw Cayden Kelly, he was dozing off as the nurse helped him back into his bed. He opened his eyes only briefly… And offered me a small, knowing smile. I never said goodbye to him. I just turned away and left as quickly as I could.
I’m not sure if that was a mistake or not.
I got the news the next day that Cayden had died during the night although in the end, it hadn’t been the cancer that had killed him. No… Cayden had cut his wrists while he was in bed that night. He’d bled out before the nurses could do anything about it.
I was told he’d probably been in a delirious state when he’d done it… I heard his Mom say that he’d been drawing on the walls in his own blood before he’d finally bled out.
I think I know what he drew…
The school held a memorial service for Cayden at the end of May. They asked me to speak at it. I told them I couldn’t. The excuse I gave was that the pain was still too fresh. The actual reason is that I had nothing I wanted to say.
Maybe that was wrong of me… But what I’d seen the last time we’d been together, what he’d made me take part in… I wasn’t so sure I could rightfully call him a friend after that. Maybe it was all just some delirium induced psychosis… A mad delusion cooked up by his mind as the cancer ripped him apart. Maybe… But I remember the way he looked as he knelt in front of the effigy. The single minded determination on his face…
No… I think he knew exactly what he was doing.
There were others spoke at his service. People who didn’t really know Cayden. Teachers, a few students who we’d technically known since first grade… But nobody who knew him like I did. I know that Cayden would’ve hated the way they talked about him, as if he was some beloved member of the community who’d been close to everyone. He would’ve laughed and called them all hypocrites and he would’ve been right. But I let them talk. I let them say what they thought was appropriate. It hardly mattered now. He wouldn’t be there to hear it.
I started having the nightmares a few days after Cayden died, but after the service, they only got worse.
In my dreams I’d see him in the woods, strung up like that cat was. His stomach would be cut open and his entrails spilled out of his body… But he was grinning from ear to ear as I approached him… He was smiling and laughing as if nothing was wrong, his body still skeletally thin and his face more skull like than it had been even in his final days.
He would only say one thing to me as he laughed. Just one.
“Look up in the trees, Mitch! Isn’t it beautiful?”
Then I’d look up… But I wouldn’t see it.
I woke up before I could.
In July, two months after Cayden died, Nick Carter hung himself in the woods outside of town.
A couple of hikers found his body after it had decayed so much his head had detached from the rest of him and sent him plummeting down to the ground. I heard about it over Facebook via a mutual friend… Even before they found his body though, people were talking about the last post Nick had made.
‘He’s there every night now… I’m going to the woods. I need to make it stop… I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.’
The funny thing is… I understood what he meant by that. I’ve been seeing him every night too… Every night in my dreams, laughing that horrible laugh of his…
I know I’m not the only one too… Judging by the comments under Nicks final post… I’m not the only one who still sees Cayden.
Another girl in our school died in a car accident yesterday. Apparently, she just drove off the road and crashed into a tree. People are saying it was deliberate.
Maybe they’re right…
I haven’t slept much lately. Every time I do, I dream of Cayden. Every night, he laughs and tells me to look up and through tears, I beg him not to make me do it.
But I do…
I see it now.
I see the bodies.
I see the empty branches with empty ropes, waiting for more… And I know that more are coming.
I don’t know what Cayden did before he died. I don’t know what I helped him do. I realize now that the ritual he performed wasn’t meant to save his life… Or at least, not the way I had hoped it would.
Every night I hear him laughing… Every night I see the nooses… And I’m not sure how much more I can take. I’ve tried not sleeping. But it doesn’t work. I’ll always have sleep eventually and he’ll always be there when I do. I’ve tried looking for information but I can’t find anything. I don’t know what he did or how to stop it.
I don’t know what I’ve done…
I don’t know what to do.