I won't go up north anymore, not by those woods. I'll go out of my way to avoid driving in that direction. Even so, I need to write this down, I need a paper trail if I suddenly disappear like Sean. We saw something up there, and I think it saw us, too. Now, I'm terrified it's just waiting for me to come back. I saw the Thing in the Woods, and I got away from it, at least I thought we did.
About six months ago, we were gearing up for one hell of a camping weekend out by a secluded lake that our friend James had found. He had said it was off the beaten path and not in any open campgrounds so the odds of us being disturbed were slim. That meant we could party and enjoy ourselves without needing to worry about other campers, and to top it all off we'd be near a lake so we could go swimming.
There were five of us in total: myself, Sean, James, Rick, and our buddy Dylan. We had piled into two cars with our camping gear and began the trip north. It was about 3 three hours, and James spent most of it talking up the campsite, telling us how awesome it was going to be getting to camp out by a lakeshore, and that we were going to have an awesome time. I hadn't been this excited to do something in a long time, I looked forward to a chance to unwind with some of my closest friends.
The road didn't lead us up to our campsite, and there wasn't a path, but James was insistent that we were in the right area. So, we gathered our things and followed him in a hike through the woods toward the site. That was when we first noticed that things may have been wrong.
As we journeyed through the woods, I had heard Dylan call out to us from behind. When we turned back we saw he was holding what looked like a rotted old sign.
"Says 'don't talk to it," he observed, staring at the old thing. "Looks pretty ancient, too. Maybe it's like a piece of old settler shit?"
"More likely the rambling of some crazy guy from a long time ago. Heard there were like cults in these parts in the early 1900s." Rick responded.
"Oh good, cults." I said rolling my eyes.
"Guys, there are no cults up here, I've been here a few times now and never ran into anything weird. Maybe got close to mountain lion once, but they're not gonna mess with you if you leave 'em alone." James didn't seem amused by the conversation that was being had. "The sign's obviously old, we can sit here and speculate about what it was about for the next six hours and we won't be any closer to the campsite, or we can leave it where we found it and not worry about what some old piece of wood has to say."
We all agreed that the sign was a little silly, maybe it was an old Halloween direction or a relic from some old movie they shot up here. None of us assumed it was some kind of cryptic warning. Warnings should be direct. "Hey, if you talk to this thing it's gonna eat your eyes" or something along those lines. Not just "Don't talk to it." What was it? Why didn't we want to talk with it? Vague warnings gave us nothing, and so we paid it no heed. No matter how much we should have.
There were no more weird signs or vague warnings on the journey, just the sound of birds and the growing sound of calm waters lapping against a shore. We had hiked a good four miles into the deep woods before we came to a clearing. James was right, though. It was magnificent. The sun illuminated a grassy field that broke into a sandy shoreline revealing a crystalline blue lake that shimmered like a diamond in the sun's rays.
"Wow." I murmured.
James elbowed me and grinned. "What'd I tell you? Absolutely gorgeous." I nodded in amazement.
"This is choice, man. Just, wow."
We all spent a few minutes admiring the scene set out before us, and then we got to work setting up our campsite. Within the hour we were ready to relax and enjoy our first night in paradise.
We enjoyed the day fishing, swimming, and drinking and as night began to fall we built a fire and enjoyed some of the food we had brought. We spent the night exchanging creepy stories and getting drunk. When James' turn rolled around he brought us all in close, shining the flashlight under his chin.
"You guys ever hear of the Thing in the Woods?" he asked, and as we all shook our heads he grinned. "There's stories that float around these parts of a monstrous creature that roams the woods at night. It speaks using stolen voices to draw out unwary travelers. Then, it tears them apart, stealing their identities and leaving behind nothing but a pile of gore. Legend says the creature can speak as anyone it has taken. That the only way to survive an encounter with it is to ignore it completely. Never ever acknowledge it."
Something clicked as he told this story and I muttered "Don't talk to it."
The others looked at me as James smiled. "That's right. Don't talk to it, don't look at it. Pretend it's not there, because the moment you acknowledge it. The moment it knows you know it's there. It will take everything from you."
"Like the sign..." I said warily.
"I did say it was a local legend, man." James replied with a smile. He said nothing else, handing off the stick we were using to determine whose turn it was to tell a story to Dylan. As Dylan was finishing his story about a man on the bus, we heard something. At first it was faint, and hard to make to out, but the sound continued and as it did it became clearer.
Someone was screaming. Long, agonized wails from somewhere within the forest. When Rick and I stood to see what the hell was going on, James stopped us.
"Animals are weird in these parts, man. Don't go putting your nose where it doesn't belong. Night time can be weird, and whatever the hell that was? Let's not bring it to the campsite." We both stared at him, bewildered. He wasn't usually that vague.
"The hell are you talking about, man? That sounds like a woman screaming! We need to go see if we can help her!" Rick hissed.
"And if it is? Did you bring a gun to shoot any mountain lions or bears that might be in the woods? Night time is their time, man. If you wanna check it out we can go in the morning. For now, I say we kill the fire and get some rest. No sense in drawing any predators in." James argued, and then he smirked "Besides. what if it's the Thing in the Woods?"
"He makes a good point, Rick. Even if we did get there and it was someone being attacked, what would we do aside from shout or get ourselves killed?" I responded, ignoring the comment about monsters.
Rick shook his head. "No, I'm going to find out what the hell that was. If you aren't coming, fine. Stay here and kill the light, piss your pants while you wait for this stupid Thing in the Woods. I'm not gonna. I came to have fun, not to be scared shitless."
James sighed and shook his head, and for a second I could swear there was the slightest of smiles on his face. "Your funeral man." he muttered as he stood and poured a water bucket over the flames. In the moonlight, he looked to the rest of us. "Get some sleep guys."
Rick growled and grabbed a flashlight from his tent. "I'll be back," he said bluntly, stomping off into the woods.
We weren't about to let our friend go out into the dark alone, and the rest of us followed suit. Well, all of us save for James. He just stood there at the campsite and watched, waving as we headed into the woods.
"What the hell is his problem?" Sean asked quietly.
"I don't know," I replied softly, looking back over my shoulder "But he told that weird story and now we're hearing things. You think he's trying to pull some kind of elaborate prank?"
Sean nodded. "James has always been kinda weird. You remember when him and Daisy went camping and he came back by himself? Said they broke up and Daisy wasn't coming back? You remember how we all quietly joked he killed her, but we got that call later on saying she was sorry she didn't stop by to say goodbye and that she was moving to California? She said she couldn't be around James anymore, that he did something that really pissed her off. Wonder if he tried to pull this shit with her?"
I barely remembered that incident, but I wasn't surprised Sean did. He and Daisy were always really close, and he must've been pretty upset that she didn't come by to talk about what had happened. "If this is a prank, it's an awful one." I whispered as we trudged through the darkness guided by the beams of our flashlights. Then we heard the scream again, louder and clearer than we had before. Rick burst into a sprint, heading off into the direction of the screams. We followed him, ducking under low branches and jumping over roots. Dylan, Rick, and James were way more athletic than I was, but I did my best to keep up.
Until my foot snagged a root and I tripped.
I hit the ground and stars rocked my vision as my head bounced against a rock. The others didn't notice, at least I didn't think they did, but I heard Sean. At first, he sounded like he was underwater, but as my head cleared I could hear him calling my name more distinctly. Thinking back on it now, hitting my head the way I did probably saved my life.
Sean helped me to my feet and we followed the direction Rick and Dylan and run off to, a lot more cautiously than we had been before. We arrived at what I could only assume was the site of the screaming, and we found Rick and Dylan.
We found what was left of them, and we saw it.
It was a campsite, the fire still smoldering and the tents thrown against trees, their frames bent and the canvas torn. There was a faint wet shimmer on the trees and all over the ground, I had assumed it was blood. As I took in the carnage there was something else that I noticed. There was no sound, no insects chirping no leaves rustling, just the occasional crackle from the fire. The world around this place was eerily still, but then something caught my eye just a few feet into the treeline. There, standing over what I can only describe as the viscera that was once my friends was a creature. It hunched over what was left of them, picking through pieces of gore. Its form looked as though it was made of gnarled and twisted branches woven together to form this weird facsimile of a body. Its face was like a skull carved from bark without a lower jaw, and as it held pieces of gore into the moonlight I could see the twisted, empty hollows that were its eyes. I wanted to gasp, to scream at the sight of the thing, but Sean's hand quickly shot to my shoulder and started to pull me away.
The snapping twig had to be the loudest thing I had ever heard. The creature's eyeless gaze shot into the trees and saw it speak, mouthlessly.
"Hey? Who is that? Who's out there? Sean?" it spoke with Rick's voice. "Hey bro, it's fine, come here real quick. I got something I wanna show ya."
"Run..." Sean whispered. "Run to the cars." I watched as Sean did a full about-face and broke into a sprint, and I followed close behind. We bolted through the darkness of the forest, in what we had both assumed was the direction of the road. Branches whipped against my exposed skin, scratching and tearing into my flesh as I imagined what those clawlike branches of the Thing would do to me. My chest burned and heaved as I spared a glance over my shoulder.
I wish I didn't.
It was following us, silently. It was sprinting after us on all fours, but its footfalls made no noise. "Don't run, man! Hey! It's gonna be alright!" it called to us in Dylan's voice. I rasped, focusing my attention back into the darkness, pushing my burning muscles to the brink. I wanted to fall over, every part of me screamed to just give up and let this thing take me, but I pushed forward. I was rewarded with the sight of a break in the treeline.
"Come play! Come be with us!" a child's voice called to me. "Stop being such a coward!" it was a woman's voice, vaguely familiar.
I burst from the treeline and threw open my car door, Sean dove into the passenger's seat. I got the engine started just as the Thing burst from the treeline. It furiously raise one of its gnarled claws and swiped at my car door. The vehicle crunched as the steel caved and its claws tore through the metal, but the door remained. I slammed on the gas and sped away, the creature roared in frustration, thousands of voices crying out in rage. "NO! COME BACK! COME BACK AND BE A PART OF US!"
I barreled down the highway as fast as my car would go, adrenaline pushing me forward. Every time I glanced in the mirror I expected the thing to be following, but it wasn't. I sped to the nearest town and we immediately went to the police. We didn't expect them to believe us, but they took one look at us and at my car and they told me they'd take a look first thing in the morning, that it was dangerous to go out poking through the woods in the middle of the night. There was nothing we could do to convince them to go earlier, they seemed adamant about going in the morning, claiming it would be safer for everyone.
Did they know? Did they know about the Thing?
The next morning, a squad of officers left to investigate the place we had described, they returned late in the afternoon. There was a grimness in their faces like they had seen something terrible. They told us about the campsite that we had found, and of all the blood. They chalked it up to an animal attack, claiming there was no way anything human could do that sort of damage. When we asked about James, they all looked at each other and shook their heads. They couldn't find any sign of him, and his car was gone. The only reason they were able to figure out where we had been were the skidmarks and the damage to the treeline.
We drove home after I got checked out by a doctor for my head. I swore to myself that I'd never go back up there. That whatever the hell that Thing was could have its territory.
Sean was different, though. He told me he was going to find James. Said he was going to figure out why James knew so much about this Thing and why he brought us up there in the first place.
Two months ago Sean called me, saying he got a message from James. He said James told him he could come to talk to him in the place where it all began. I begged him not to go. Pleaded with him to stay away from that place, but he told me he was going to expose James and everything he had done. That was two months ago, and I didn't hear from Sean again.
Not until last week, when I got a manilla envelope with a collection of recordings that he had made. There was a note, but only one thing was written: "Watch, Listen."