I was never fond of forests, or at least that was the case before I reconnected with an old friend of mine.
Him and I were childhood best friends. We met when my dad and I were lost on a hike trail, I forced my dad to go a different route as I didn’t want to go through the forest that was connected to the trail, I was terrified of it, it always gave me an ominous feel. His dad found us and we followed him back to the original route, luckily we were beyond the woods and we didn’t have to go through it. His son, Alex, was waiting for us. Alex and I connected really well, and it turns out we lived in the same town. After that, we would constantly play and hang out with each other. When a year passed after we met each other, we both begged our dads to take us on the same hike trail, and we did.
I didn’t know what I was expecting, but we had to go through the forest, I decided to hold it in, as not to ruin the trip. When we had reached the middle of the forest, we decided to take a break and relax. We opened our backpacks to grab some snacks, and found a nice spot to sit. Then, disaster struck. Alex was no where to be found, we yelled and shouted, but there was no response. After an hour of this state of panic, we called the police, and we returned home, waiting impatiently. A week of worry and anxiousness had passed, and we got the call. They found him. The exact same spot we lost him, as if he went completely invisible to us, but I can assure you he wasn’t there. When his dad picked him up, I rushed to his house, I needed to see him again. I asked him about everything, where he was, why he went away, and what happened.
He told me that he saw something in the woods. It wasn’t clear, but it kept making a noise, yet somehow we couldn’t hear it. He went closer to the noise and to what he thought he was seeing, but it disappeared. When he went back, he couldn’t find us, we were gone. Apparently a week passed in those few seconds he went to explore. He stayed in the same spot for hours and he was found by a hiker going on the same path. After that, we continued to hang out with each other, but it was like he was a changed person. He was … different. He was less emotional. He felt distant, like a hollow shell of who he was. But every now and then, he would stand up and say “There’s something in the woods.”
I chalked it up to trauma, going missing for a whole week messes with your brain, makes you remember different things and changes how you perceived time, makes you have random outbursts. (If you were wondering how I knew this stuff, my dad was a psychologist and he passed this information about trauma onto me.)
I’m not sure if it was a coincidence as we lived in a sketchy town, but every time he said that line, someone would go missing, most of the time near the hike trail, they would never be found again, I guess Alex was the lucky one. As I said, people going missing was normal for us, what was not, is them being last seen at the hike trail.
Him going missing made me even more terrified of the woods, especially the ones near our town.
Regardless, I stayed friends with him, up until we graduated. It’s pretty normal though, friends always grow distant after graduation, it’s just how life is.
A couple years passed, I graduated college, got a job, I bought a house. To my surprise, Alex was my next door neighbour. We reconnected and started to become friends again. After a while of coming over to his house, he invited me to go hiking with him.
I was hesitant, but he kept budging, and he finally pushed me. I loved it. We started going out to the woods and forest more and more. I changed my view of the woods, I started to like them.
One topic we used to talk about was the town we used to live in. It had been abandoned and destroyed.
Nothing had changed about his pattern of randomly saying about something in the woods, except that it was more spread out, he said it less. I thought maybe he hadn’t gotten therapy and his trauma still affects him.
I didn’t live in the town anymore, nor did anyone else so there was no local news, so I couldn’t confirm my suspicion of someone going missing everytime he said that. I talked around and found out that people who lived in neighbouring towns visited the hike trail frequently, yet some of them would never come back.
After learning that, I rushed to his house, I needed to confront him about this.
When I came up to the door, there was no reply. I got tired of this and slammed it open. There I found him, dead. Supposedly, he had a heart attack and no one was there to help him.
On the anniversary of his death, I went back to the trail, both to honor him, and to find out what’s happening.
When I reached the middle of the forest, I got a text from his number.
“There’s something in the woods.”