I drag the other kids along with me excitedly.
“What’s so interesting?” asks Rich. “Oh, you’ll love it.” I reply back as I jump over rocks and bushes.
Finally, we are there. Before us lies a mass grave of mostly deer carcasses.
“What the hell?” Patrick exclaims in terror. Linda just stares.
“Amazing isn’t it? And I’m the one who found it.” I proclaim proudly.
“You’re sick.” Rich rebukes.
“Not as sick as this stuff. Look! You can see an eyeball over there.”
“What is all this?” Asks Rich.
“I told my dad I found a bunch of dead deer in a pit and he said it must be the dumping place for the hunters. You know that upper class kid’s dad is a hunter.”
“Okay, we’ve seen it, let’s go.”
“You’re no fun.” I fake a look of disappointment lightheartedly.
“Wait, what’s that?” Asks Patrick as he points to something in the pit.
I don’t want to go into it, but I want to be the badass fearless kid so I feel I have to. I pick up a stick and step into the pit, one shoe on a deer carcass. I use the stick to fish up the thing Patrick is pointing too.
It is a skull, but this skull is all wrong. It’s completely black with six eye holes and four horns.
“Woah, that kid’s dad is freaky, who hunts this kinda stuff? What even is it?” I say.
“It must be a toy sculpture or something.” replies Rich.
“Well, I think it’s real.”
“I want to go home.” whines Patrick. Linda looks scared.
“Fine, go home.” I say. I want to keep the freaky skull, but it has dark rotten flesh clinging to it and it smells awful. So I temporarily dump it at the edge of the pit and then I go home with the others.
At twilight the next day I come back with a bucket. Thinking that I’m going to put the skull into it, but when I arrive at the place I see something horrifying.
Amongst the animals in the pit lies a dead person’s body. It’s flayed, and the head has been cut off.
I almost scream, but some instinct of self preservation sets in, and I quieten as I realize that whatever did this might still be near. I quickly hide behind a large bush.
Then, a thing arises from the pit. Just from the middle of all the rotten carcasses it rises up. It is at least twice as tall as my dad and it has horns like a deer. By now it is so dark outside that the other details of it’s body are hard to make out, but I can see with terrifying clarity what it holds in it’s massive clawed hand, because the pale flesh of it shines in the moonlight.
It is a human head. Held like a trophy.
That is when I run. Undoubtedly the thing hears me scrambling away, but I don’t care, I wasn’t going to stay there. Running all the way home that night is the scariest experience of my life, but I lived. I imagine the thing chasing me, but it hadn’t. When I come home I go immediately to bed. I don’t want to be awake any more, I don’t want to have to think about monsters.
The next morning I realize I have to tell someone about what had happened. So I tell my dad to call the cops because I had seen a murderer in the woods and a dead body. I don’t tell him about the monster because I know he won’t believe it.
He thinks I might have mistaken a deer for a human body, so he wants to check it out himself first, and brings his gun along.
Then he sets off, in the wrong direction.
I tell him “Dad, that isn’t the way.”
He replies “Yes it is, where have you been going?”
Then it hits me.
I had played around in a hunter’s pit, yes, but not for human hunters. What I had been playing around in was a desolate place meant to be unseen by my kin’s eyes, where inhuman hunters dropped their sometimes inhuman prey.
That was why the thing had let me escape, despite being completely capable of killing me with ease.
I was lucky that I was just a kid, because no proud hunter cares to kill a random fawn.