Looking for trouble

   They keep me medicated because the nightmares won't go away, even after thirty years, in fact its been getting worse now; like my resolve has been chipped away at till even the drugs can't banish the screams and the looks on their faces from my nocturnal mind. Heh, I sound like I'm trying to be a fucking poet. Read alot of books when you have nothing else you're allowed to do and the only TV is in a shared room and the orderlies always keep it on some "neutral" programming, meaning house building shows, pawn shop shows, and fishing; that sort of thing. So I guess I got a bit of that writing bug in me now. This is something they've wanted me to write for eons now; because its the reason I'm here. To anyone else who might read it who isn't a psych doctor or major or whatever; I havn't been in here since then. There were trauma courses I had to attend, a therapist I had to talk to, and for about a decade of my life some semblance of order was in place with a regular job, and visiting relatives, and I had a dog; and several cats around my property I didn't really claim ownership of as they were mousers but; this sentence is getting long. Okay, new sentence, then one day the police found me naked in a field, called in because the owner of the house adjacent the now cleared cornfield thought there was a dead body lying naked a few hundred feet behind their house. As cold as it got at night its a wander I wasn't dead. My only recollection of the events was dreaming, nightmares about that night; and running in the dream.

  I want to get one thing straight, I don't think it was the devil, sasquatch, or those lanky what the fuck evers everyone brings up when I talk about encountering something inhuman in the woods.

  Ya'know what, let's start this again, like a story right.

  Let's begin with the setting okay, my house,  it's not a farm house, just a regular two story house with a full basement, four bedrooms, two baths, and a two car garage. While not a farm house it was way the fuck out there in the middle of no where. I mean like we made sure we kept canisters of gas in the garage because it was a good thirty minute drive to the nearest gas station. Our nearest neighbor was a three story high white painted house looking like something from a haunted house movie; and so far away down an intersection that when the corn was full grown you couldn't see that house unless you got on our roof. There was another house you could see when the leaves fell off the trees just down the road, a good ten minute walk, so not far. It was on the opposite side of the road but around a gentle curve in the road in the opposite direction of the intersection. It would be another twenty minute DRIVE down that road to find another house; it was mostly woods out that way, woods that poked ominously into the corn field and I swear they never harvested the corn right up on the edge there. Like five feet around the woods was no-man's land to harvest corn. Although the stalks all did eventually fall down or animals eat them. I...honestly don't know if that's relevent to be honest, just something that always stood out to me. Not far from that house, which was more of a shed than a house, like someone parked and built onto a mobile home and then abandoned it. My dad told me that belonged to my great grandpa (his grandpa), who parked it there and lived there just to keep people from building there. Apparently he owned alot of the land around here, but the city wanted to use it for more lots and some zoning issue or something forced him to have to have a structure over there to keep them from building. I think my great grandpa knew something, because...no one should live close to it.

    Just a little further down the street, and across the street so back on the left side, technically same side of road as our house, but given the turn in the road not really as close as saying that feels like it implies. Anyway, there was a thin path in the woods, but it didn't start at the road, instead there was this large rock with an X carved into it that you could miss if the bushes and grass weren't trimmed back. Go directly off the road from that rock, down the ditch, over the fence that was poorly kept and only extend a few dozen feet in any given direction, and then dozen feet into the woods you'd find a path, like a game trail, just short grass and dirt with vegetation growing along the sides it lead deeper into the woods. It would be a good five minute hike at a normal walking speed and you'd come to a clearing with a pond. It didn't look natural, for one it was lined with rock and there was water dripping out of a pillar of rocks like a spring. The pond had lilly pads in it, tadpoles, small fish, it was maybe forty feet long and fairly circular or maybe a little stretched like a stubby bean. It got fairly deep, maybe 12 feet deep at the center and near the back by the spring, alot like how a swimming pool slopes so I was fairly certain this was once a pond someone built on their property but I didn't see any signs of a road any closer than the one we'd come off of, or any signs of where a driveway would be. There however were other signs there was something here. Go past the pond and up a hill with stone steps in it; a sign right there; and you'd find if you looked closesly the stone edges of a foundation, which had to have been a pretty big house; as well as two standing structures, a tool shed with rusted out tools still in it, really old looking ones at that; not just rusted from exposure; and a garage that was in surprisingly good shape considering the rest of the area with a concrete floor, windows in tact, the big garage door however was broken and looked like someone welded the wheels in place at some point, and the chain looked cut through like by wire cutters and the automatic garage door opener had a hole in it like someone shot it. The windows were boarded up, but the glass was mostly intact, one window was broken and a few cracks here and there. There is something else but I didn't find it, a friend of mine did.

  So I guess that brings us to "characters", I shouldn't talk about them like that. Despite living so far out in the middle of no where I had friends from school, many had our whole lives been on the same bus and several of us lived out there scattered about the country side. We were Seniors in high school and most of us had driving licenses. On weekends we got the idea to hang out in the abandoned house, not the pond property but park our cars off the road by the old house that had been my great grandfather's. Like I said already nothing special, but a cool place to hang out and drink, smoke weed, and just be dumb teens; an old mobile home with an added on bathroom, by that point in ruins, and an added bedroom whose floor had fallen out so was now a drop off to grass...which with the windows one of my friends thought would be a good place to grow weed. It was because of this I brought up a different spot, the abandoned remains of a house way off the road; they wanted to know why I never told them about it before; I knew about it for years; but I just never thought about it. Honestly the place had always given me an eerie vibe.

   So I showed them; oh right, so this group consisted of myself, Jake, Steven, Rob, Val, and by this point Mary who was dating Jake, Val was Steven's sister and a total tomboy, we jokenly called her Phil half the time and she never corrected us; even joked about stealing Mary if Jake didn't treat her right; I think she was joking anyway. When they saw the pond they freaked out, not believing this crystal clear pool could really be out there in the middle of the woods even if it used to be on someone's property; this lead Steven and Rob to have this long argument on if the spring was natural, or some sort of fed line that has continued to work without power; like a gravity feed. Up at the garage Rob tagged the inside of the garage, bragging he was the first and couldn't believe i hadn't at some point. It was Jake though that discovered what I'd missed; under some old boards, and under some burned out looking carpet fragments there was a basement door; one of those in the floor kind of heavy doors. We didn't have any flashlights with us, and it looked pretty dark down there; the wooden steps were rotted out, but there was dirt and rocks piled up so getting to the hatch would be just a two foot drop if that. Peaking down from what little light we had there was clearly more to it than we thought, although shallow it ran back it looked further than the length of the foundation, and Rob about freaked out and jumped back as he thought he saw a person down there. I looked, but even with what little light was shining down there I could see it was a mannequin lying on its side; which was still odd. We closed the door and put the rugs and wood back over it, vowing next time we were out there, the next weekend, we'd bring flash lights and clothes we didn't mind getting filthy as the floor looked to be at least ten feet down, but like I said there was dirt, dirt piled up like a ramp.

   I won't pad this, skipping to the next week and getting back out there. With flash lights in hand our first discovery was that the wood steps weren't rotted just rotted, those nearest the top looked like someone had tried to smash them and the one's near the bottom looked burnt; the floor of the basement was concrete as were the walls and weirdly the cieling; Steven I think it was, was the one that suggested it was probably a cold war bomb shelter type of basement. The dirt however was the freakiest thing, it was a ramp leading up the door, which we had propped open with a stone and a cinderblock, and the source of that dirt, behind a lot of boxes the concrete wall looked like someone had taken a sledge hammer to it and dug out a tunnel, not a very deep one, and likely caved in, but by the trail it was pretty clear someone had smashed this wall and had dug out the dirt and piled it under the exit to make a ramp...this was telling us something really fucked up had happened here, smashed and burned wooden steps, and a wall broken down to get to dirt and rocks to try and make a ramp back up the door. Other than that the basement was full of boxes, there was a corner with like seven to ten mannequins, all female piled up; although Rob swore that's not where he saw the one before; we laughed it off. They were wearing all sorts of Halloween cotumes, one dressed up like St. Patricks day, one Easter, and one in a sexy Santa outfit. The boxes had decorations from various Holidays, and there was a pile of empty soup and bean cans in one corner back around the dirt pile, they looked like someone had ripped the cans in half rather than used a can opener.

   It was all really freaky and Mary was keeping the creeps, despite staying up as look out, as Jake was yelling up to her what we were finding. I wish we had smart phones back then, I'd have taken so many pictures; and had proof I'm not lying. In the end, especially with how slippery the dirt was getting back up, including a freak out moment when Rob's foot slipped into the dirt like it was caving in, we decided it was too dangerous to mess around with anything down there or bring anything up as that dirt looked and felt really unstable. Rob and Jake however concluded given their "estimates" of how far away the other roads were and how invisible this place was from the closest road that behind the garage was the best place to grow a marijuana patch. Plenty of sunlight, and isolated. More room than that little room in the mobile home would have given them that's for sure.

    That brings us to the real meat of it all, summer time, we were checking out the pond, aside from some lilly pads, tadpoles and small fish it was basically a pool, wouldn't be surprised if someone had made it out of a pool. We were daring each other to go swimming, we had all brough suits, as we had planned on it as it was stupidly hot out that day. But that bit of courage, plus you know, kids being kids about it. Val was the first one in, followed by Mary they pretended to flirt in the water prompting Jake to jump in and be all over Mary, I think I went in next followed by Rob and Steven. We were goofing off and laughing when Rob practically lept out of the water and demanded to know who that was. That meaning there was someone else there, far end of the pond there was this lady swimming around naked, looked like she came out of a porno mag and never seen a spot of sunlight in her life, with really blue eyes and this long wild black hair. She swam to the edge and sat on a rock, humming something really pretty to herself and putting lillies in her hair. When she looked over and saw we were all just sitting on the bank staring at her she smiled and asked why we stopped swimming. Rob demanded to know who she was, without missing a beat and with this sort of creepily calm tone she told us we "could call her Grace", Rob was admittedly being kind of a dick about the whole thing, saying this was "our property" and a "private party", he was paranoid, of course he was growing pot not a hundred feet away, and here was this hippy chick come out of no where.

  Val apologized on Rob's behalf, as did her brother (Steven), Steven even whispered to Rob they didn't know if she was alone so calm down and he was going to "take a leak".. in other words put his clothes back on and check on the pot plants and get a good look from atop the hill to see if anyone else was around; there was no way this one hippy was out there by herself. I joined him. When we came back however there were three more, identical hippy chicks at the pond, we did not see where they came from; and according to Rob they had come from the direction we went in, rather than the road. So us six were now hanging out with these four hippy chicks. Rob I think felt like it was a war of atrician, trying to outlast them there, wait till they left. But Jake and Mary were the first to leave; one of the hippy chicks kept making sexual comments to Mary and Val, and even put matching flower wreaths around both their necks and saying what a cute couple they'd make. I saw it, I don't know if anyone else did, but when Jake practically dragged Mary out of there that one hippy chick got this look in her eyes, like pure violent rage, but only for a split second before her face practically morphed back into a smiling happy stoned out her wits face. Okay, before I go on, they weren't naked the whole time, just when swimming, to hand out with us on the shore they were wearing these white robes with flower belts, which were practically just them naked with sheer fabric sheets wrapped around the in a few layors.

   Steven was next to leave as it was starting to get late, and his folks would get on his ass if he came home after dark; they treated Val differently for some reason; I don't really know what their home life was like. Val didn't go with him, she had her own car, I last saw her that night walking off towards the garage and house remains with one of the hippy chicks. To be clear also, there was alcohol, not the few beers we had, these hippy chicks had some wicked shit in green glass bottles, all decorated with leaves and little pixies on the bottles. Rob had loosened up and two of the hippy chicks were practically hanging on him. He was sitting by the pond while they were in it, with their robes on, the wetness making them cling to their bodies. I hadn't drunk as much as them, the smell alone from those bottles was enough to make me gag, like someone had crossed whisky with moss; Rob swore it tasted like lime but....I stuck to my beers. We were short one hippy chick when I left the party in the woods. I made my way to the road, and got to my car. I lived like I said not far away, but still better to drive there given how long I'd be out, also who wants to walk home down a forest road with coyotes, deer, badgers, and whatnot out and about for what on foot when drunk would probably take an hour if I didn't pass out first. I was only a little buzzed, yeah I know "don't drink and drive" assholes always interrupt my story, or whatever you call this; with that shit. I got a chewing out by my dad for reeking of alcohol when I got home, but that's not important.

   The next day with my head pounding my dad yells for me that Steven is on the phone, Val hadn't gone home the night before. Steven asked me, me, not a message through my dad so we're clear, to check out the "party" and asked me what happened after he left. I left out that she had wandered off towards the garage with one of the hippy chicks; yeah I always thought Val was a lezzy but Steven was weird about that sort of stuff; totally indenial that guy was. So I drove out to the mobile home, Val's and Rob's cars were both still there. Steven hadn't shown up yet, I was closer obviously. Why he called me before just driving out there I don't know, maybe wanting back up. Whatever the reason I found Val inside the mobile home, naked, wrapped up in a white sheet, sleeping on another white sheet with flowers and the whole place smelling like sprayed on moss in there mixed with wild flowers. I ducked out and yelled in that it was morning. She had a major hang over and naturally was freaking out. I didn't question it. I could put 2 and 2 together; no sign of the hippy chicks though. I told her Steven was on his way and if she knew where Rob was. She didn't, she told me she left the party drunk and had to sleep it off rather than drive; she's surprisingly level headed when drunk; always was.

   We waited till Steven showed up, after his obligutory their parents are pissed speach and blaming him apparently and needing to call them right away or head home real quick; Val pointed out that Rob's car was also still there and after assuring Steven she didn't sleep with Rob she pointed out she didn't see him after she left the party. So, we didn't call Jake or Mary, didn't feel any reason to and went looking for Rob; we found him....at the bottom of the pond. After totally freaking out, excuse that, WHILE totally freaking out Steven and I fished him from the pond, figuring he actually out lasted the hippies hanging around but then fell in while completly drunk. Val was adament they hadn't drowned him; she told Steven and I they had slept in the mobile home too, to sleep off being drunk before leaving early in the morning while she slept in. I, will admit that was suspicious to me back then too, I never saw any other cars, not even while they were there. But we couldn't call the cops, we had pot growing right over the hill there, what were we going to tell them; we left our drunk friend with four total strangers whom we knew couldn't have been out there alone, with no ride, to guard our pot and beer cans. We were still seniors in high school, granted Val was 18, but that didn't mean shit for drinking; let alone pot growing; which back then really would have landed us in jail by its self; if not our parents. We made a pact, not to tell anyone, even if we suspected some guy or guys must have been with those hippy chicks, sure "they" might have gone to the mobile home with Val, but someone was their ride, at least that's what we were thinking at the time. We weren't going to tell Jake or Mary about how we found him. It was a risk, being spotted by troopers, but we decided to drive his car down the winding road to the river and push it over with Rob's body in the seat so it looked like he was drunk, and just rolled over the edge into the deep water. It...it was stupid, I know, my dad knew we hung out at the mobile home; he figured that out apparently some years prior; so when Rob's parents were calling I told him the story the three of us agreed on, Rob had left the mobile hime before we did and drunk, and hoped given we parked up off the road hidden by trees and it being a seldom driven on back road that no one could refute that. It wasn't long before the cops found the car, we had put it in drive and let it go into the river where we knew it was deep enough to fill the cabin but the back was still sticking up on the bank.

    Not long after that Jake and Mary broke up, and Jake got Steven and I to go with him to pluck all the Marijuana plants out; apparently he was afraid Mary was going to rat us out. None of us had been out there since the party though and were surprised to find the plants untouched. Jake didn't look good, blood shot eyes, heavy bags under his eyes, real bad mood. It was a good chunk of labor and requiring a wheelbarrow to cut down all the plants we had out there; we kinda over did it to be honest, I think Rob and Jake were planning to sell it, Jake was definetly planning to sell it, he wanted it all in his trunk. On our second trip though one of the hippy chicks surprised us, she was standing by the pond. Jake pulled a gun out of his pocket, yeah he had a revolver in his jeans' pocket. He was pointing it at her and yelling weird shit like Mary being his, no lezzy demon was going to have her, and other weird shit like that; Steven and I tried to calm him down but when we turned out backs on the hippy chick Jake's face went pale, eyes looked about ready to pop out of his head, dropped the gun and screamed. We turned and the lady was just gone, we didn't see where she had run too but Jake had dropped the load of stalks and took off to his car and peeled out of there. Steven and I didn't know what to do, I yelled out if they wanted this stuff they can have it we don't want any trouble. We dropped what we had, minus a bud or two that Steven pocketed and left.

   The next day though I saw smoke coming form over the trees and I knew what was happening, I drove out and there was Jake, clearly baked from the smoke burning all the marijuana that was left on the remains of the house foundation and dumping the ashes into that basement door we had left closed before. When he saw me he pulled out his revolver, I backed away slowly but then he shot at something else and this beast lunged at him, it looked like it came out of the hole. It was solid black, twice the size of a wolf easily, and had horns, like those goat horns you see on heavy metal albums with the two sets curled and straight; and it had a long cat like tail with a lion tuft on the end. My brain snapshotted that. It attacked Jake, and...I ran, there was nothing else I could do, I drove back to my house and; I couldn't see the smoke anymore. I called Steven and told him to meet me in town, not the mobile home. I told him what happened; he got this really pale look when I described the beast; he said he'd seen it too; just that previous night. He thought he dreamed it. He told me he had woken up because he heard the back door of his house open. His back yard has this open space where the grass is mowed, a swing set from when they were little, but just a decorative waist high wooden beam fence to mark the yard from the corn field. He said he saw his sister wearing that same sheer robe thing the hippy chicks were wearing run across the backyard lit up by the moon and into the field. He ran downstairs and out the back following the way she went and came across a clearing in the cornfield that shouldn't be there with a green carpet and there were a dozen of those identical hippy chicks dancing around, Val sticking out among them; and there was flute music playing; but the source of the music was a giant horned devil wolf that looked to be howling but instead flute music was playing. Now to be clear this is all stuff Steven told me, I didn't see this myself, and he told me this after I told him about Jake. But his dream ended with just blacking out when the music stopped and everyone just stopped and looked at him; which is what he told me, so I assume its true. But he insisted, rather strongly like he was leaving out more dramatic details, that it was just a dream as he woke up in his house in bed.

   We were planning to get some rifles and sneak out to the area but we heard Jake's parents had called the cops. He had been acting stressed out and lashing out at everyone according to them since Rob died. I did feel guilty, we didn't tell Jake what happened, better he didn't know, he and Rob though were closer friends than with the rest of us, how you going to tell a guy like that you dumped his body in a river to avoid being caught with drugs where he really died. He had apparently said ALOT to his family before that day I caught him in the woods, like exactly where he was going and talking about "the devil women" trying to steal away his girlfriend, and ranting about as his father put it, "the giant branch man and the twisted woman were haunting the fields around their house, harassing him and taunting him. Jake had clear to everyone lost it. On top of that Jake had stolen his father's revolver. But there was a search party, fanning out from the mobile home; my dad pointed that out and Steven and I were out there helping look, Val had gone over to console Mary.

  Things however took a turn for the even stranger though because Steven and I along with my dad and his dad, and three volunteers and two cops with dogs had gone straight across from the mobile home across the street and were going along this grid pattern through the woods when at one point I turned and saw the littlle stone by the road that marked the trail and we were ontop of a hill. Steven realized it too...the foundation, garage, should be right where we were standing, and the pond should have been right there. We always followed the stone marker and came straight back. But...I saw the smoke when Jake was burning the pot, but then again, no one else said anything about smoke, every house in the area should have seen that black plume as plain as day like I did. Steven and I even walked down from the hill towards the road, right to the fence behind the marker, with the X on it and everything, and looked back, the trees looked different, less dense, and no path, no stone steps, no pond. We walked to right where it should have been and there was just some stones there, they formed the ring, but they were much smaller and flatter, easier to miss in the leaf litter. The cops came over to see what we were staring at, dogs refused to walk into the circle, and kept going on with the search making nothing of it other than to ask if we made the ring of stones as we hung out not far away from there. We told him no, but Steven did say we had been to this hill, but was flubbing himself trying not to say too much. Jake was found, thankfully not by us, we heard the scream though, apparently a deer was eating on his body; yeah deer will do that, people don't often know about that; but deer will scavenge when given the chance.

   But despite what I saw, the cops concluded Jake had shot himself using the revolver he stole from his dad's gun closet. They concluded after Rob's death, then breaking up with his girlfriend he had just lost it and gone out to the woods where we sometimes hung out to commit suicide. They state of his body was chalked up to animals scavenging on him over night. Naturally everyone found out, and the school called in grief counselors afraid this could lead to a rash of suicides; apparently some towns had seen just that after a teen tied and then others started to just kill themselves one after another.

   It would be a whole month before we went back to the mobile home. Now just Steven and Val and I; just the three of us. Mary's family had moved a few weeks after Jake was found; they lived in the little village of a town near the schools and gas station and were being constantly harassed; people blaming Mary for Jake's suicide; like its her fault for breaking up with him when he was obviously getting more violent and unhinged.

   Thinking about it, I think it was actually after this that I told Steven what I saw with Jake and the beast; its been a long time, but yeah, the search would have been in summer and Steven told me about the thing with the dancing hippy chicks when the corn was head high; damn it, its shit like this that makes people think I am just making shit up. Fuck; but it was after Steven and I talked that we decided to go back out there alone. We parked at the mobile home, walked down the street to the marker. Looked at the woods, leaves had fallen now, we could see it went up hill. We estimated we had to be standing right there or further back to see the road, thinking maybe we just weren't far enough in before. But we walked behind the marker, down into the ditch and up and, yeah, the trees looked denser now and before too long we found the game trail which went right through where we would have been, no ring of stones, but in clear view was the pond and the garage. There is no way we could have missed it. I'd love to say we did experiments and had one of us walk one way and another, another way.but, used walkies. If we had been a few decades later of a generation and had smart phones with flash lights on them, cameras, drones, and shit like that I'd love to think things would have turned out so differently.

   We had never really walked further into the woods than the rubble because, well, there was at least three miles in that direction till another intersection; going by the maps we all had to look at for the search party especially, it was a sizable chunk of forest right here, who knew what was out there; like say, as Steven insisted a hippy commune could easily be hiding out there. Steven was on that but, by this point I felt he was in denial, I don't know what else was going on with him; but a few weeks later he called my house at 7pm asking me to watch the mobile home. He was in like panic mode, he said one of the hippy chick was actually at his house, dressed like a "normal teenager" and pretending she went to our school. Which obviously was a lie, and Val was vouching for her, saying she was going over to her house for a final semester of senior year slumber party. Apparently their parents were just so happy she was doing "girly things" that they didn't question it, but Steven was convinced they were trying to lure Val into a cult, a cult that might have killed Rob and Jake; he had gone from hippy commune to a cult being out in those woods. Luckily my parents were out that weekend, if they weren't I'd have had to come up with something. But I decided not to drive, instead walking to the mobile home, like I said it was just a ten minute walk to the mobile home/shed of a house, visible from my house that time of year. So I guess in retrospect the only reason I wasn't out there "investigating" by myself was pure cowardice; or obeying that gut feeling not to fuck with whatever was going on out there; granted in all those years as a kid nothing dumb ever happened until I took my friends out there; I don't know what we did that triggered this, my only guesses going by what people have commented range from, tagging the garage, growing pot, opening that basement, to swimming in the pond. All things I never did before out there, in truth I barely went out there by myself as a kid.

  I am stalling, head in the game, okay. I walked out to the mobile home and hung around inside checking my watch, after about an hour or so just as I was getting bored I heard a car coming and hid myself. It was Val's car, but she wasn't alone, and I don't just mean the hippy chick with her, Mary was there too. Despite having moved away, I don't know where they moved to so as far as I know it could have just been out to the country or one town over just to get away from assholes projecting their...fuck that psych talk, fucking doctors rubbing off on me; it was Val, Mary, and a hippy chick; I couldn't tell if it was the same one, but I think it was because she was all smiles as she put flower wreaths around Val and Mary's necks just like those at the party before the three of them took off into the woods. I followed a few minutes after, Steven had said he was going to drive out this way to be sure but I went on ahead. No one was at the pond or the house, but I could as the sun was dipping into the tree line that there were lights some distance further into the woods; I had brought a flash light just in case it got dark while i was out walking; and I had gotten into the habit of keeping a small one on me after we had to wait a day just to check out that basement before; just in case I ever needed one. Kids today are lucky, everything in one devise.

  Okay, when I ran down the hill I tripped on a root; I paused as I saw a little man in a red suit, like a leather vest and pants with like shoe shaped sacks over his feet made of leather and a pointed hat; but not like a lawn gnome hat, but like someone tried to make one at home out of a red couch and sewed it together with thick black cord. This man was old, white beard, really weathered looking face and smoking a pipe. He couldn't have been more than three feet tall at best and was just giving me this look, like studying me and judging me at the same time. He puffed his pipe and in a really gutteral voice said, "Blood pact only goes so far boyo" and blew a puff of smoke in my face. When it cleared he was gone but I couldn't move. It was like a lead ball was in my chest and my arms were paralyzed. I don't know how long I laid there as it got darker but I heard running from behind me and saw Steven run right past me; somehow not seeing me on the ground as he ran by. I heard him scream; but moments later I was hearing festive music from that direction. After it was completly dark out save for those lights I was able to move again, but wobbly, I leaned against some trees and tried to get closer. The lights were up on poles and the ground sloped down to a big field. The field was mostly this bluish-green grass and ferns with little purple flowers on them (yes I know ferns don't have flowers but that's what I saw);  in this field were dozens of hippy chick clones writhing on each other in a giant lesbian orgy, I could just make out Mary and Val among them; I still swear Val was only joking with Mary; but; but also I saw Steven by the edge of the field being fucked by the devil. A giant goat man with black fur, red skin and ram horns with a wolf face, he had tits but also a really muscular masculine build and a giant cock. He was holding my friend in the air and fucking him. Their moans and grunts came up, I...it gets really fuzzy after this.

   It broke me, I know I somehow made my way back, I remember being dizzy and looking at the ground alot, and making my way back to my house miracously; I called Steven and Val's house. Not sure what I said exactly, but I know it was something about hippy chicks, the devil, orgy out in the woods where Jake and Rob died...I know I fucked up and said where Rob died because the police questioned me about it the next day when Steven and Val didn't return home, and I found out Mary had gone missing too, both Steven/Val and Mary's parents describing the exact same hippy chick visiting their homes no one knew. But I had seen them before. I ended up telling the cops everything; but between the nervous breakdown I had then, and the deaths; they picked and choosed what to believe. Word got around about a hippy cult hiding out in the woods, murdering people and abducting people; it went out of control and everything wrong everywhere was being blamed on this mysterious cult no one could find. The police even "humored" me about the marker but, they couldn't find what I was talking about; one of them even kicked the stone into the ditch the X mark was on. I ended up in therapy, the mobile home was torn down some years later when a house was built there and fence put right on the road across the street, a new one, with a noticable blue scarf tied to the spot along the fence where the stone had been before. I wander if something went on with whomever lives there now.

    I was in and out of psych wards for years, got out had therapists, got my own place, and; I said this already; the nightmares though, and then they found me. To be clear the cornfield was behind where Steven and Val once lived. Their family moved a year after Steven and Val dissappeared. The cops don't know how I got there, I live...lived...fifty miles away from there and had been at work the night before till 9pm. I went to bed around 2am; I had a vivid dream I remember about the hippy chick clones, the devil, and other horrible forest monsters; and woke up to the cops shouting at me and freezing cold in the field; in September. I couldn't figure out how I got there, they couldn't. So I am back now in the clinic under observation, saying I had an episode with memory loss. They think I saw all my friends being murdered, was drugged by the cult and barely escaped, my memory all fucked up in the process. I know what I saw...just...I don't know WHAT I saw. I guess. But that's all there is to it. I don't know why my friends were picked off one by one, why I...who lived so much closer wasn't being haunted if what my friends all said was true about what they were going through; or why they didn't take me too; that little old dwarf-gnome; I'll never forget those words, "blood pact only goes so far" the mobile home had been where my great grandfather lived. He died when I was little and my grandfather had purchased the land and had the other house built, gave it to my dad when he moved into town to live and work at his own bar. I told my parents some of this, not as much as I told therapists though; but what little I told them just ended with them telling me not to go looking for trouble in the woods.