Never Wander Alone

         Growing up in southern Ohio, I spent a lot of time in the woods. Back before there were cell phones in every pocket and TVs in every living room, all I had were the woods and whatever narrative my vast imagination could conjure up. Most of my stories involved investigating a murder site, where I was always the perfect detective for the job. I could pick up a case in the morning and have it done by dinnertime, that’s how good I was. Sometimes I would get through more than one case in a day. Those stories that I created were one of my only sources of entertainment throughout my childhood.
I just never expected one of them to follow me into my adulthood.

         In the summer of 1992, I was about ten at the time, I ventured off in the woods in the early morning. My parents were still sleeping so I was sure to leave a little note on the fridge letting them know of my whereabouts. This wasn’t the first time I had done this, of course, and my parents made sure to teach me about being safe on my own. About half a mile into the woods, there was a broken down wooden fence – we believed this belonged to the family that owned the house before us, and they had used it to keep animals from wandering onto their property – and my parents told me to never go past that fence. Black bears were common in Ohio, especially in the south, and the last thing my parents wanted were to find the mutilated remains of their only child. So that half-a-mile-long stretch of wilderness was all mine.
         The sweet smell of pine needles and dew-covered grass filled the air as I traversed the fog-coated terrain of the woods. Fog, as a young boy, was both the scariest and coolest thing in the world. It reminded me of this one horror movie I had seen on TV one night (we only had one TV in the whole house) about a lighthouse that gets overtaken by a thick fog, and hiding within the fog were ghost pirates with glowing eyes and lethal weaponry. While there weren’t any ghost pirates where I played, there was still this eerie feeling that something lurked just beyond where the fog reached, watching, waiting for me to get closer so it could finally pounce like a lion and devour me whole. Nothing like that ever happened. What did happen on that day, however, was much worse.
         My detective story started that day with a lone and rotting tire that leaned against the truck of a tree. There was blood splattered against the tree as it ran down the trunk, pooling around the tire. Leading away from the tree were bloody footprints, but they didn’t appear human. They were much larger than man’s feet, and there were three long toes instead of five. A single thought came to my mind: Bigfoot did this! In one of my pockets I carried a large magnifying glass that was gifted to me from my dad, which I brought out and began examining the ground, looking for any other clues the savage beast had left behind. I followed the prints and came upon a ripped t-shirt hanging from the branch of a tree. The thing that surprised me the most was that the shirt was real and not a product of my imagination. There was some graphic on the front of the shirt, but whatever it was had faded from the constant exposure to the elements. I pulled the shirt from the branch, careful not to rip it, and felt how damp the shirt was. It hadn’t rained the day previously, or the day before, so whatever was soaked into the shirt was not water. I squeezed the fabric, trying to wring out the dampness, and my eyes widened as a few drops of blood fell from the shirt and onto the ground and my feet, which were donned in my usual pair of sandals.
         I stood, staring down at the ground and feeling the still-warm blood on my toes. I was so scared I failed to hear the leaves and twigs crunching and snapping behind me. Without even realizing what I was doing, my head slowly to face the black overalls and the three points of a man’s pitchfork.
         The man breathed heavily and each exhale sounded raspy and dry, like a broken car engine trying to start. Mud caked his hands and clothes, and especially his bare feet. His face, though, was what stuck with me. The man’s bald head had a crack in it and it seemed like his brains were leaking out of it. His nose was crooked in several places that gave him a cartoon-witch appearance, but the eyes and mouth were the worst of it. Instead of resting on two hinges, his jaw dangled on one, but a smile still seemed to be on his lips. And his eyes were bright white. Not like they were glossed over, but they were pure while and looked as if they never housed corneas or retinas.
         All at once my body was frozen. I vaguely remember the man grunting and lifting his pitchfork, but at that point my legs were already moving, even though my mind wasn’t. I sprinted as hard as I could, allowing the browns and greens of my surroundings to blur into one as I made my way deeper into the wilderness.
         I remember wanting to look back and see if the man was hot on my trail, but my neck wouldn’t budge. I kept my head straight and tried to focus on the sounds of my increasingly heavy breathing and the hard thuds of my feet hitting the ground.
         At some point I stopped running. Not because I wanted to, but because I heard splashing from under my feet and the sound scared me so much I let out a scream and fell into the cool flowing waters of a small stream. I opened my mouth and allowed water to flow in and stomp out the fire in my lungs.
         Once I did sit up, I looked all around me and saw nothing. No birds, no deer, no man - nothing. Everything had happened so fast, I had already begun to wonder if there was ever a man at all. Or maybe I was thinking about too many ghost pirates that I conjured up one of my own, but instead of a pirate, it was a mix of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. I sat in the stream and, without realizing, I was crying. Sobbing, even. The adrenaline that pumped through me went away just as fast, and left me with terror gripping my heart. I crawled out of the stream, soaked, cold, and afraid, and lay down on the dry ground. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
         When I woke up, the sun was now on the other side of the sky, descending so the moon could take its place. I stood up, much dryer now, and started my way home, hoping my parents weren’t too worried. My legs were wobbly, but I managed - barely. The man I had seen was already beginning to fade from my mind, just like a bad dream. I made it home in one piece, just as it started to get dark. My parents asked what took me so long to get home and why I was covered in dirt, and I told them the truth. Afterwards, they laughed and clapped me on the back, saying that it sounded like I had quite the adventure.
         When I tried to sleep that night, I found it very difficult. The man’s hanging jaw stayed in the front of my mind, and when I eventually found sleep, the jaw followed me in the dreams. But when I awoke, it was gone, almost as if it was never there in the first place.

         A couple years later, after my family and I had moved to a different city and I had a better grasp of the way the world worked, I had learned on the news that the remains of a young boy’s body was discovered in the woods by my old house. The boy, who they had kept the identity of from the public, was brutally mutilated and heavily decomposed. The police had conducted a wide search of the surrounding wilderness to locate all of the boy’s body parts. What ran my blood cold was one detail in the middle of the report: a ripped up shirt was found by the bank of a stream in the woods, and the shirt contained traces of blood that matched the boy’s.