The Woods--A (scary)(?) Story

My first foray into scary stuff. 

The Woods

by John Caudill

April, 2^nd

Hiker went missing today. Out at Longleaf Preserve, off 44. 28 year old Christy Machen. She left from DeLand earlier in the week on Thursday and evidently, she'd been hiking through the back-country all weekend. Was supposed to be home and into work as a sky-diving instructor on Monday. Never showed up for work yesterday morning. We had the search parties out there today.

Why would a girl of 28 go hiking out there through the pine duff and palmetto blades by herself? There's miles and miles of trails out there. Probably close to three-hundred miles of fire roads and game trails intersecting each other like snakes in a pit, and only about 40 of those miles are blazed for recreational use. According to her supervisors, she was doing some camping to get in shape for a bigger hike she was planning over the summer.

I saw a picture of the girl. She looked fit and strong. One of them short little bob-cuts and a stout frame. She looked like she was the type of person who had trouble standing still for any period of time. Maybe ex-military. The kind of girl who drank beer and lifted weights at the Y and knew how to field dress a fish. Not the type to get lost out on the game trails.

April, 3

Still no sign of Christy Machen. We have close to forty, strafing the trails for any signs and additional air support making lines.

It's a lot of land out there to get lost in. Almost hundred thousand square miles of converted timber land. Back in the 70's before the sprawl from Orlando started creeping north, this was all just pine timber forests and cattle fields and cypress dome swamps. The big stretch of land connects DeLand inland and Smyrna over on the coast. There ain't nothing to see out there. Once you've seen one pine tree, you've seen 'em all.

It's been raining all week. Overcast skies and muddy trails. I come home smelling like a hog pen. Claire don't much care for it but she's watching the news like everyone else, waiting for something on the Machen girl and she just tells me to go wash the stink off and come right back down and hold her as soon as I'm done. So I do.

April, 4

We found some stuff today. Strange thing too. Searchers had maps and notes proving they'd already searched the areas where we found stuff. It feels funny, the way it all happened. I'm beginning to get an uneasy feeling about this case.

We found a sneaker, still laced and tied, sitting in the center of the green trail out towards I-4. Just sitting there, pretty as can be, like someone chucked it off and left it behind not ten minutes before we were there. Kind of cock-eyed right in the center of the trail. We found Christy's driver's license propped at the base of a tree about a mile in from the 44 trail head parking area.

The damnedest thing was finding her backpack up a tree, just sort of dangling from a cypress branch about sixty feet up. There was no way a human could have climbed up the straight trunk without some serious equipment. It took us three hours just to get the thing down.

Inside, we found a bunch of hiking stuff—clothes and food and water purifiers. And stuffed down at the bottom, an empty video camera carrying case.

I don't know much what to think anymore. It feels like somebody is playing with us. We called out the national guard for tomorrow morning to do sweeps. I'm going to speak to Christy's father in Lake Mary.

April 5

Went out to speak with Richard Curtis, Christy Machen's step father and only immediate relative in the area. Curtis was all torn up. His face was blotchy when he answered the door, like he'd just been crying before I got there. Said he'd known Christy since she was three. Married her mother right after he left the service and stayed with her until the cancer took her a few years back. There were pictures all over the living room of Curtis and Christy out at New Smyrna, surf boards propped between their arms. A picture of Christy with her mother.

Curtis had a solid alibi and wasn't really a suspect. He was the one who called in the report when Christy never checked in on Monday. Said she always left a schedule with him so that if she got lost, he'd know where to look. At this point, he started crying for about ten minutes.

I asked Curtis about the camera case we found in the pack.

Christy would always carry her video camera on her adventures.

Curtis said that if we found the camera, maybe we'd find Christy.

April 6

We found the camera.

It was in a culvert, wrapped in a plain blue shirt. One of the boys dug it out of the slimy ditch while a bunch of gators watched from the other side. It was getting late in the day and most of us were close to giving up.

The camera was dead but appeared to still be in working order. We took it back to the station and hooked it up to the computer to see what was on there.

Chief didn't want everybody watching at once so he told me and Scraggs and McCormac to come back to his office with the tech guy and watch the thing.

The tech guy said the recorder had only one video file and it was two minutes long. He hooked it up to the TV and the whole screen went scratchy for a few seconds. When the file started, the tape was of the woods. The camera was on its side, on the ground. Grass was obscuring most of the frame but it was clear enough what we were looking at.

It was early evening. It looked like the sun had maybe set not but a minute prior. The lens was pointed down a trail that was dark at the end. I say a trail because it didn't look like anywhere I'd been out at Longleaf Pine. The whole trail system out there is rigged as old logging roads, so that all trails are two tire tread marks next to each other for trucks to go over easier. Most of them are overgrown these days.

But this trail on the video wasn't at Longleaf.

It was just a single line trail pointing off into the woods, where it looked like it turned right. The grade was dark around the edges and white in the center, like rain had just washed mud over sand. The only sounds coming through the speaker were of the night—crickets and frogs. Peaceful as can be.

Then the screen went fuzzy and the picture kept spinning—the camera was kicked for a field-goal.

Everyone in the room held a collective gasp. I felt like I was going to melt into the wall.

The camera landed right-side up, on the trail, looking the other direction.

This was no place I'd ever seen.

The image was unmistakable. There was a bright little house off the side of the trail. The whole thing looked like it was made out of windows and brilliant yellow light was spilling out of those windows. I couldn't make it out—it was the strangest little house I've ever seen. It looked like one of those Santa's workshop things they set up in the park downtown. It was just so damn crazy. My back felt like it was turning to water from all the gooseflesh and chills running down me.

There were pine trees in the back ground but they were mammoths, gripping 100 feet into the sky.

The frogs and crickets moaned in a steady cadence for a few seconds while the camera rested in its new position. Then the speaker screeched the most terrified, hopeless, painful human sound I'd ever heard in a long vowel sound that made the whole room grow small and freezing cold. The scream lasted for several seconds in one, steady punch before it just completely, instantly stopped. The image of the strange little house, glowing in the background never changed.

The image went fuzzy again as the camera was kicked into the brush. The screen went black and the camera whirred to a conclusion.

I don't think as long as I live I'll ever forget the silence in that room, after the tape stopped. It was like the whole world stopped right then, too. Just for a second.

The Chief leaned back in his seat and the creaking sound made us all about jump out of our skins.

The other detectives and I were instructed not to speak to anyone about this.

I came home tonight and can't sleep. So here I am...

April 18

Nothing new on the Machen girl. The geeks over in forensics are looking at the tape, trying to find clues in the footage. I don't think they'll find anything though.

I was out at Longleaf for several hours this morning. It started raining on the drive out and didn't let up for the rest of the day. All this rain has made tracking impossible. Half the searchers are giving up by the end of the week. The other half's leaving the end of next week.

Things are pretty grim in that respect. There ain't much way a person could survive without food or shelter for this long out in that wild.

But something doesn't feel right out there. I can't say for sure. But looking at the video, seeing that single line trail—I don't think Christy is at Longleaf. It's all retired timber land out there. Most of the trees ain't more than thirty years old. The pines on that video were pushing a hundred feet tall. It takes a pine tree almost a century to get that tall. When I told this to chief, he sat me down and called in the tech guys again.

They set up the video and chief asked me to point out the hundred foot pines to him, so as he could make a note of it for the investigation.

But when the tape started playing, none of it was there. The camera was still in the grass, on its side and it was still dusk and the frogs and such were making their racket but damned if no kick ever sent the camera flying nor no scream of a thousand years of pain and suffering did come screeching through the tiny little speaker. I stared in complete disbelief. The tape was just a sideways picture of a single line trail at dusk—about a minute's worth of footage all told. And then the camera shut off. You couldn't even see any tree tops.

Chief looked at me for a minute and then asked the tech boys to take a smoke break outside.

It's hard to imagine someone you've known almost your entire working life, someone you've trusted with your very survival more times than you can count turning so completely against you so quickly. Chief looked at me long after the tech guys had left with the sort of steely gaze I'd only seen him shoot at perps and no-goods.

I looked to my hands and explained exactly what I remembered seeing on the video the first time we watched it—the camera flying off into the brush like some monster had kicked it right before grabbing the Machen girl and making her scream like her soul was being sucked through her eyeballs. The giant trees in the back, serving silent witness to incomprehensible horrors taking place just off-screen—things I might never understand or could never understand, even if I'd wanted to.

When I left this afternoon, I turned in my badge and my gun and started contemplating this upcoming forced holiday with severance and what it means to my career as a law enforcement officer, because that's what chief told me to do.

April 25

It's been a few days since that whole mess with Christy. Still nothing on her. Volunteers are still searching out at Longleaf but from what I gather, there aren't enough of them to cover any sort of ground. I went out there shortly after the start of what Claire calls my “pre-retirement” and did some volunteering myself.

Honestly though, I can't say it felt like we were doing any good. Wherever Christy Machen is, I don't think it's at Longleaf.

There is something else. Something I almost don't even bother writing for fear of giving it too much recognition—a dream that I've had the last couple of nights. Something—horrible. The type of thing that could only exist in a dream.

But it's not even really a dream. It's more like images that fall together, like a slow-speed projector—only with slides missing. And when I wake up, but before I can open my eyes, the whole thing just sort of creeps back into the abyss up there and I forget anything more concrete than it's occurrence.

I'm getting damned restless here without anything to do. I made Claire cry the other day. She said I was being a bear of husband lately. I can't say I don't agree with her. I'm just not cut out for doing nothing.

April 29

I'm still having that dream. Recurring dreams, they're called. They usually represent suppressed memories or some jazz like that.

Went out to see Richard Curtis again today, unofficially. I'm not really sure why I went. When I got up to the door, it was open slightly. I called out but no one answered so I went into the house. Curtis was nowhere to be found. I searched every room in the house for some kind of explanation. I turned over mattresses and examined plumbing. I raided closets and dresser drawers. I finally found myself exhausted on the couch in the living room, gazing covetously at Curtis' big-screen high-def television. Then it hit me. Check the TV. I turned it on and the screen went blue and then fuzzy with static. I stepped back to the couch and slowly sat down. The tape appeared to be blank—nothing but fuzz. I hunted for the remote and fast forwarded through several minutes of tape before an image appeared. It appeared to be an areal view of a town on the coast. I thought of Smyrna but this didn't seem to be Smyrna. The buildings were too tall. The camera seemed to be attached to the wing of a small plane or a hang-glider or something. I could hear voices but they were far away and scratchy—possibly from the wind. It was hard to tell. The image went black and then showed a beach—now the camera was being held by someone—a woman, presumably Christy Machen. She was laughing. Curtis was standing by a hang-glider, shielding his eyes from the sun and scanning the beach-line. Christy was talking about the weather when the image went black again. When the screen came back, it was only with sound—a very faint, scratching sound. I turned up the volume and scooted to the end of the couch. There was something on the screen...it was just faint pin-pricks of light. The image started to settle—I could see now that it was trees. This was the forest at night. Someone, presumably Curtis, was out at Longleaf filming after dark. No voices or movement, just the gently swaying pines in the dark night. The image went dark and the television turned itself off. I tried the remote but the TV wasn't having it. I stood up and tried manually with no luck either. That's when I heard the car door outside.

Someone—a nosy neighbor had called the fuzz and now I was trespassing. I showed my badge to the rookie patrolman and drove back home, trying to make sense of the whole thing.

May 2

Had a nightmare again last night. Worse than the others. I damn near had a stroke when I jumped awake.

It was the kind of dream most folks don't have once they leave childhood. The sort of thing that just haunts you all morning. A dream that sends you awake in a crash of adrenaline and fast breathing. Makes you want to stay in bed for a while, coiled in your quilts, until you hear other human sounds that will remind you of what it's like to be back in the human world. Well, I forced myself out of bed and shook my head—took stock of myself in the mirror and wondered what in the hell was going on in that brain of mine. But I looked away from the reflection—almost ashamed at what I'd done to myself. The thing followed me to the shower and made me feel the need to peek out behind the curtain every few minutes, just to make sure nothing was there watching me. It sat there across from me while I was drinking my coffee like death come down to talk about the weather. It just wanted to keep showing me, over and over, that moment sitting up there in my head when the dream became a little too real and the fast breathing started kicking in.

Nothing Claire said made any sense. I sat there, hunched and forlorn, watching her read to me from the paper—blathering nonsense between dainty bites of toast. I stumbled around the neighborhood behind the dog twice today. He shit in the neighbors yard and I couldn't bring myself to clean it up. That's a littering ticket—I've written them before.

But something is wrong. This thing is like a goo that's all over me. It's just this thin little film that no one else can see but it's there, blocking out the sunlight and giving me gooseflesh all day long. I can barely even sit here and write this. Maybe tomorrow when I wake, I'll look at this nonsense and wonder what all the fuss was about?

Maybe...if I wasn't so afraid to go to sleep.

October 22

How long has it been? Almost six months. Shit. They found Christy Machen yesterday. A father and son were out hunting on one of the game trails near where the interstate slices through the old northern pine-flat timber lands in the extreme far corner of Longleaf—over there near where the Ocala Forest kisses the preserve's edge. Suppose to be some kind of corridor for wildlife or something. They were out there hunting for boar real early in the morning, probably before the mist had melted off and she was sitting there propped up against a pine tree on the other side of a clearing. The father said at first he didn't know what he was seeing—said he couldn't even recognize whether it was a person or not because it was just so odd to see anything like that out there in all those woods.

I heard all of this second hand from Scraggs. I haven't been back into work, even though the leave of absence ended weeks ago. I'm realizing now that Claire was probably right when she called it my pre-retirement.

It was strange but I knew why he was calling as soon as I picked up the phone. I could hear it on his lips like a curse word. He didn't mince any words either—got right to the heart of the matter. Said she was just sitting there, still wearing her clothes, like she'd sat down for a rest and had never gotten back up again. What he said was really strange though was that she hadn't started to rot yet. She was still fresh even though the coroner found out she had been dead for several months. Nothing had taken a nibble—not even the maggots.

He said what really got him going though was how her eyes were still open and moist looking. Said they were real peaceful looking like the eyes of most dead folks but that they were wide open and clear. This isn't what you'd call a huge homicide area but we've had our fair share of murders in town. Usually domestic violence type stuff. Drunks getting too liberal with their fists and so on, as is common in a poor little town. Well what I mean is that both Scraggs and I know what death looks like. The way a body can get after only being dead even a short time. A few years ago an elderly gentleman with Alzheimer’s walked out of his daughter's living room and just up and disappeared. He turned up in the copse of trees where the homeless sometimes camp out behind the old train yard. Had been dead for a few days and already, just from being out in all that Florida heat and humidity, his body had started to decompose something fierce. You could smell it before you could see it type of thing.

Well, Scraggs told me there was no smell to Christy. No decomposition. She might have been in a trance but for the fact that her heart hadn't been pumping in several months and evidently her blood and all her insides had turned to molasses.

What was strangest of course was that there was no evident cause of death. Exposure would have been my best guest but evidently the body didn't show any signs of that at all. The coroner, Ed Hamilton—good honest guy who've I've known for years—finally just put down heart-attack for lack of a better explanation. I don't think he or anyone else would believe that a fit, strong young girl with no family history of heart problems could just keel over from a heart attack one day without warning. Probably more likely that something must have made her heart stop beating.

Foul play is still on everyone's mind—how else could you explain all the strangeness? But there's none of that absolutely necessary physical evidence to support the suspicion. Scraggs says they wouldn't even know where to begin an investigation without a shred of evidence.

I guess it goes without saying but I'll say it anyways because I can't stop thinking about it—this spot where they found her was an area that had been combed over several times. I myself had been out there with the search and could almost picture which clearing it was that she found was in.

October 30

The dreams have started again. They're clearer now though when I wake up, as in I can actually sort of remember some of the stuff that's going on. I don't like to, though. After all, they're just dreams, right? Just stupid shit that you're mind is stuck on because it's got nothing else to do while you're sleeping.

I saw her eyes just before I heard that scream again—I can't even barely get this out. I've got a glass of whiskey sweating almost as much as I am and it's not making it any easier. I don't want to describe the sound but it's what makes me wake up—the screaming sound. Every time I shoot awake, it's because of that scream, just like the one I thought I heard on the tape last April. Such a horrible, sad, suffering sound. But there is something behind the sadness too—some kind of forceful thing—a sort of powerful echo that sounds infinite and hopeless.

October 31

I

I should have known. You don't go out to the woods on Halloween. Why would you do something like that?

Well I did. I'm a fool. A drunken fool.

I went out to the woods today. I just got home. All the lights are on. I turned them all on and locked the door and loaded my gun and poured myself a triple and am sitting here at the desk trying to get this out. Claire is already asleep in bed. She doesn't ask where I go anymore. Just assumes I'm down at the watering-hole like a good little wifey.

Christ why did I go out there? I don't know if it's because I'm just drunk but I can't recall my rationale for wanting to drive out there this afternoon.

Should have known better. Should have known it was too late in the day already—the sun sets at five o'clock for crying out loud. But but I couldn't stop. Shit I couldn't stop walking. As soon as my feet hit that trail I was gone. It was like there was a magnet out there somewhere in the dark, quiet swamp dragging me in deeper and deeper, past the never ending halls of perfectly lined up timber pine and the exploding green palmettos. I'm not a young man anymore. I've been polishing a seat with my ass down at HQ for far too long. I was winded and ready to stop before I even got but a half a mile out there. That's when I realized I was going so fast. I was basically jogging. Where the hell did I think I was going that fast?

Well the sun just kept getting lower and lower and the sky was getting paler and paler and I was just going deeper and deeper into those cursed woods.

I guess it was probably about sundown when I hit the river. I don't have my map of Longleaf anymore but I know it almost by heart after having gone over the whole thing so much and damned if I can remember any river or stream out there. There are creeks and culverts and swamps but none of the trails actually cross a river or stream.

But there it was. Just a quaint little stream trickling on by like it had been there forever.

So I crossed. Got my feet soaked and all but I didn't care. I don't seem to remember feeling much of anything. I do recall that before I crossed, I noticed that the trail which continued on the other side of the stream was not a double line but just a single line, and that it turned off and disappeared into a stand of cabbage palms and live oaks on the other side.

But I don't remember what happened after I crossed. I know I stopped on the far bank for a moment and looked at my shoes and the next thing I knew I was walking through the cabbage palm and live oak hammock, still on the single line trail. It was getting dark now and the brush was rustling with crickets and critters but I wasn't scared. I wasn't anything but walking forwards. I just couldn't stop.

And when I hit the end of the hammock, I wasn't the least bit surprised that I was in another pine forest. Only the trees weren't lined up in rows like in the timber lands. These were the giants, swaying in the cool breeze under the glittering stars. I recognized them immediately.

Up ahead there in the fading light was the little house, glowing like a million candles behind glass. And it was strange but as soon as I saw that house, it was like I got snapped back to reality. I stopped walking and looked at the house and realized what I'd just done for the first time since stepping onto the path back at the trail head.

And then in an instant the lights went out and it was pitch dark night. No evening or dusk. Just right to dark like someone flicked a switch.

And so I was out in those woods in the pitch dark, terrified, feeling so horribly naked and alone. The sounds of night started droning in, very slow at first like the way a diesel train engine goes from a whisper to roar. The frogs and crickets started out low and soft but then they were getting louder and there was some kind of pattern there and I swear to god and my own grave that all of the millions of groaning sounds came together in unison and formed a single steady sound, like a voice—and it was laughing.

The cool air on my neck was like finger nails on my skin and all it had to do was blow a little before, without warning, I emptied my bladder right there. I ain't never done that before.

I ran.

I turned and ran as fast as I could away from that house, back the way I seemed to have come. Now it was really dark and I couldn't see much of anything but so help me there were animals all along the trail watching me. I could see their horrible yellow glowing eyes reflecting the pale moonlight. Hissing snakes and snarling bobcat that didn't run or skitter away when I passed but more seemed to curse me like I was something they'd never seen before. A big old black bear in the middle of the trail just standing there. It looked at me and snarled and then turned tail and crashed off into the brush, making all sorts of racket, like I was death chasing his soul.

I got back to the car in a daze. I'm not sure how I got home because I have no memory of the drive back. Even as I write this absurdity now, the memory fades.

November 3

Claire isn't home and she hasn't been since I went out there. I woke up on the couch the next morning and she was gone. The bed was unmade. Her car was still in the drive way. No note. No phone call. Nothing.

I've been sitting here, drinking the rest of this Jameson, trying to figure where she got off to.

I think I'll go out there again and see if that's where she went. I'm writing this entry to let anyone know who might come looking for us that that's where I am—out in the woods.