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Oct 16th, 2018
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  1. It's common knowledge that time flies when you're having fun... and that it slows to a crawl when you're terrified. When your breath catches in your throat as the wind rustles the trees beside a dark path, or in front of the blackboard when everyone's waiting patiently for you, seconds stretch out to become minutes, minutes to hours
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  3. I reflected on this as I crouched down behind the bushes and checked my phone, covering the screen's glow with my hand. I didn't know who(or what, a growing voice in the back of my head insisted), might see it. I'd only been hiding here for a few minutes, here in the dark in Tygart Valley, listening to rainwater dripping off the trees all around me and feeling it insistently make its way through my pants, soaking me to the skin.
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  5. 22:10, the screen informed me. About as far from dawn as I could be, not that it'd make the place much less terrifying. We'd all heard how someone's brother, father, uncle, or father's brother's uncle, had found a dead body here while out hunting, or for some unspecified reason. If all the stories were true, I'd have been tripping over human bones just making my way down here... but they seemed a lot easier to believe in the middle of the night, after an unsuccessful attempt to take a shortcut.
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  7. You could believe how someone could die here, maybe killed, maybe just getting lost and starving, and never be found.
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  9. It didn't help calm my nerves that I was convinced someone had been following me for the last hour or so. That was why I veered off the narrow, barely-visible trail and in through the bushes. I was sure I'd catch up with it five minutes later but, ten minutes later, heart thumping in my throat, there was nothing ahead of me, and almost certainly something behind me. Sliding down muddy inclines as the rain started, stumbling through bushes, soaking my feet in muddy creeks swarming with mosquitoes, nothing seemed to help.
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  11. I shuddered and pulled myself closer together, trying to ward off the encroaching cold, focusing carefully on nothing but a single leaf in front of me, letting myself be mesmerized by the steady dripping of rain on it.
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  13. I didn't want to turn around and find out what was breathing in my ear.
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