Creepy - Creepaway Camp 2023 - Day 5: The Chanting in the Woods & The Deep Creek Lake Creature

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

The Chanting in the Woods***Written by: Sargumphigaus and Narrated by: Danielle Hewitt***Story Link: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chanting_in_the_Woods***The Deep Creek Lake Creature***Story Link: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Deep_Creek_Lake_Creature***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound Design by Pacific Obadiah***Title music by Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, nice to see that some of you are still taking this seriously. Wish everyone was doing so well attending our meetings, but clearly we've had a drop-off in attendance lately. Meanwhile, our list of campers keeps growing. We've got Twitch Hazel 18, Fatal Grace, Olga Lund, Eric Schwemer, Minkiff, Purple Chaos Crew, Ricky Whitlock, James Porterfield, Jacob, and evil zombie banana. Man, these kids are weird. Are you not worried about us being responsible for campers? Not really. How hard can it be?

Very hard. Extremely hard. Potentially facing a whole lot of lawsuits kind of hard? Interesting. Well, does anyone have any recommendations for things we can do to make the campers' experiences a little more enjoyable? I planned on not interacting with them at all and only making appearances to tell some scary stories since that's basically. the limit of what I'm capable of. How about some kind of air conditioners?

The cabins get stupid hot. It's like sleeping in a sargumphagus. You mean a sarcophagus? Whatever. I don't we have the time or money to outfit every cabin with air conditioners before the campers get here. Just sleep with your window cracked. I got all the bug screens patched up. Not happening.

Why not? Because of the chanting in the woods. I don't sleep with my window open. anymore. No matter how hot outside it gets, that bastard stays closed. It's been this way for a long time, since I was very young. It's not a real hit during the summertime. People usually recommend air conditioners, and I usually go with the prospect when I have company. But when it's in, I don't sleep well at all, because I can only imagine how easy it would be for anyone to bypass them. There's a single perk to the AC, though.

Well, besides the relief from the hot stickiness of the summer's humidity. And that's the steady hum which stifles the silence. I don't like the silence, you see. There was a time when it brought me in a most zen-like level of peace and tranquility. But now, I find it invasive and dangerous. Silence never comes alone. From time to time, I can still hear the chanting from my youth. I can hear them all, wordlessly, and yet with prestigious synchronicity and harmony with one another.

Their conjoined voices echo out from the woods, like the gentle and yet threatening breeze that precedes a violent hailstorm, rhythmic yet senseless. It never went away, and yet I know they've all moved on or died. I know this all very well. When I was about nine years old, my dad and I lived in this old rented two-family apartment house in a town called Bridgewater in the state of Massachusetts. We lived on the bottom floor. The second floor wasn't used. It was recently vacated by its prior residence. It was a very quiet neighborhood, very suburban, and with plenty of woods. Behind our house, there was a backyard that proceeded into the large forest that spanned from miles out.

I used to play in them. My dad and my mother were recently divorced. So there were just the three of us living here. Me, him and the dog Cash, who was named after the late country singer Johnny Cash. He was an old Scottish terrier. You know the type. Ankle biters with really ugly bearded faces. They got him as a pup when I was still in diapers and he was my lifelong friend.

He may have been something of an idiot. But at the time, he was all I had. I cried and cried when Mom tried to take him. In the end, he was left in my father's care for my sake. Cash and I would spend a lot of time playing in the woods. When you're young, your imagination is a very powerful thing. And the woods had an almost magic quality, in terms of supplementation for my imagination.

I would play army, build forts, climb trees. One time, me and Cash traveled in so far I actually got lost. We were losing daylight, as it was October and the light was fading at a much faster rate. I began to panic, afraid I'd be trapped out here in pitch black. As we walked around, frantic for landmarks, anything familiar. That's when I saw it. The clearing. With a large rock at the center.

It wasn't exactly uncommon to see graffiti and vandalism in the woods. A public forest is known quite well for trees with messages carved into them. Names, swastikas. Brad and Jen forever, and a nice cute heart. Stuff like that. Not to mention the pseudo-gang name spray painted on the rocks. That was the impression I got of this place. I hang out for older kids.

But something wasn't right. Me being only nine, my mind wasn't exactly capable of comprehending the connotations of symbols and other things. And yet there was something really off about these images. I've never seen anything like them before. The surrounding trees had crudely shaped images of what appeared to be a goat man hybrid, like a stick figure, with an unnecessarily detailed goat's head imposed over where you'd expect to see a basic stick figure face. These images were drawn over and over and over again, all over the trees that surrounded the clearing,

almost obsessively so. and not just at the basic human height level, but all up the trees, as if whoever carved them had to use a ladder. The rock itself had read markings all over it, letters that I'd never seen before. Underneath it, though, was written in black spray paint, a message I could actually read. It said, Behold the wisdom of the horned, and below that there were five painted lines. They were all the same height except for the two outer lines that were twice the height

and spiraled outward at the top. What really scared me about this place, though, were the dolls. They were hanging from the branches around the clearing. They appeared to have been woven out of sticks and poorly so. Taking a closer look, I realized what was so scary about them. While the stick dolls were clearly constructed with the grace of shitty arts and craft students,

The heads of them were dry and clean skulls of animals. I don't know what of, but they were bleached white, dry, and clean, and their hollowed sockets. I can't explain it effectively without sounding insane. There was something sentient about them, watchful and pleading. I could feel their eyes on me, though they had none to watch with. I felt fear, not my own fear, mind you. but something, an aura of emotion that made absolutely no sense. Have you ever been at an underage drinking party that got crashed by the police?

It's that kind of fear. The fear that comes synonymously with trouble. I can't explain why I did it, but I reached up and touched one. Maybe it was a child's general inquisitive nature that compelled me. Maybe it was fascination. Or an intense desire to quell my fear and convince my. that they were just dolls, and not the watchful spirits I would eventually come to believe they were. When I touched it, the skull fell off. The doll unwound itself. Only a piece of it remained attached to

the rawhide rope that it was suspended from. The skull cracked when it hit the ground. When it happened, there was a certainty that quelled inside me. As naive as a nine-year-old could be, there was also a certainty that remained with me to this day. I don't belong here. Cash immediately started barking when the doll fell, and it startled me so effectively that I let out a scream. I looked up. The sky was glowing red with the darkness not too far behind. Sun was going down, and I had to get out of here. Cash was staring at me, black eyes wide open and tail wagging violently. He was barking at me, insistently. He began to growl at. He began to growl at something, maybe air, maybe ghosts. When I approached him, he turned and ran. Cash was my only

companion in this unnatural place, and I would have been damned if I was going to let him betray me to solitude here. So I gave chase. I ran for my life. The last thing I saw before I chased Cash was something that really messed with me. All the other dolls that were hanging. When I first arrived, they were dangling. Some even spinning lazily in the breeze. And yet, as I ran after Cash, I saw every single doll on the site were completely stationary, staring and facing me directly. I was dismissive of this detail, as I was more afraid of being alone. I never let Cash out of my sight. He led me straight home. I never loved my dog more than when I realized what he had done for me. Dogs are never lost. They always know the way.

Before I went to bed, I told my dad what I saw. He laughed it off and told me it was just teenagers being punks, and that I should just let it go. I found it comforting and was almost willing to let it go. I even fell asleep without any trouble. That night was when I heard it for the first time, the noise that haunt me to this very day. I woke up and could hear noises coming through my window.

I got up and looked out to listen closer. That's when I realized it was chanting. voices, dozens maybe. They were coming from in the woods. I could hear them, loudly and rhythmically. I didn't know what they were saying, but I could tell it was ceremonious. Like a hymn you'd hear people sing in churches. Except it felt dark, violent even.

I immediately thought about the clearing with the rock, the dolls, the fear. I knew in my bones that the chanting was coming from there. What scared me the most was that it wasn't far. It wasn't far at all. The chanting went on for hours. I just lied there in bed, wide-eyed with fear, listening to it, praying that it'd stop. It wouldn't, though.

It went on until four in the morning, when the early birds began to wake up. I stopped playing in the woods. My dad noticed the behavior immediately and asked if I was all right. I told him about the chanting, and again he shrugged his shoulders and said it was probably teenagers drinking beers and having a party. I asked him, why did they drink beer and chant the same sound for five hours? He told me that they weren't chanting, and I imagined it. And then I should close the window from now on.

I probably should have listened to him. But I didn't. Curiosity got the better of me. The next night, the chanting began again at exactly seven o'clock. It seemed louder than before. I couldn't sleep hearing it, but I couldn't bring myself to close the window. I don't know why I thought this way, probably because I was a child. I dim-wittedly thought at the time that if I closed my window,

I wouldn't be able to hear them coming if they decided to break into the house. The logic is flawed, I know, that they would still be chanting as they emerge from the woods and cross my yard and not be nice and quiet about it. But that's how I thought back then. That's why I couldn't close the window. Because I had to know if they were coming. This went on for several days, every night from 11 to 4 exactly on the dot.

Sometimes I could see into the woods, way, way, way out there, a faint glow, like the light of a fire. But it was so faint and far in between that I didn't know whether to acknowledge or dismiss it as a trick of my own eyes. Other times I would successfully fall asleep due to exhaustion, only to wake up several hours later in a panic, still able to hear it. I asked my dad if Cash could sleep in my room on the third night, and he said it'd be fine. It felt better knowing I had the dog to keep me company when I would hear the noise. And better yet, if I could hear them coming, he would too. And then be a dog about it, start barking out my window at them. I anticipated a good night's sleep and even felt silly for not thinking of this solution earlier.

I fell asleep at 8 with Cash sleeping at the foot of my bed. I woke up at quarter past 11 to Cash barking. He was on his two hind legs, tail wagging spasticly, and he was barking out the window, ears pointing up. Barking, growling, howling out the window. I immediately got out of bed and looked out the window toward the woods. Nothing. Nothing at all. Cash was very agitated, growling and looking at me, then back out the window and barking. The chanting was still going on, same as the last couple days.

I remember feeling uncomfortable that Cash was barking at the noise, that if he was in danger of getting their attention, I tried to calm him down. That's when my dad came in. He stumbled in grogly and picked up the dog and turned to walk out the door with him, mumbling about shutting the hell up. I called his name. But he was so asleep.

he was practically dead on his feet. I screamed at him. Dad, the woods! That got his attention. He turned around and walked up to me, looked out the window and back at me. This again, he mumbled. Look, it's just your imagination.

No, listen. That's what Cash was going crazy about. There are people singing in the woods. Just listen! He looked carefully out the window. Cash was growling in his arms and his head was turned out the window. I listened too, but there was nothing.

No sound. Total silence. I couldn't believe it. Could this have been a coincidence? My dad told me to go to sleep and left the room, mumbling insults at cash. The silence chilled me far more than the chanting ever did.

At least when they were singing their malicious hymns, there was at least a sense of distance between them and me. But right now, I know they're out there, but I don't know where. I had no bearings whatsoever. What was even worse? What wrought unprecedented terror upon me was that there was no nighttime ambiance in the woods, no crickets. Evening brought them out in droves this time a year.

And even when they were chanting, I could still hear them. But now it was quieter than a bone-chilling winter night. Pure silence. How long did I stare out the window at those woods across my backyard? I have no idea. But when I woke up the next day, I was still sitting in the chair I planted right by it. That morning over breakfast,

I insisted that there really was chanting out there. But my dad wasn't hearing any of it. He put his foot down and told me that he wouldn't hear any more of this, that I need to grow up and take responsibility and stop being so afraid all the time. You know, typical tough guys. my dad shit. I didn't even bother to bring up the lack of crickets, knowing full well that he'd make up an explanation for that as well. So I kept quiet and ate my breakfast. Later that day, I was

waiting for my mom to pick me up at the end of my dad's driveway to bring me to my grandma's house where she was currently living. It was Friday, and my mom had me on the weekends. As I was waiting, a large black pickup truck passed the house very slowly. It came to a stop right in front of of me. There were two men in the truck, older, about my dad's age. At first I thought maybe they were friends of his. This thought didn't last. The driver rolled down his window and looked at me. He was bald and wearing abnormally slim sunglasses. He was smoking a thin cigar or a cigarillo. I remember the strong smell of it. He looked at me as if he were sizing me up, investigating for a moment until he finally smiled at me and reached over and hit his friend on the shoulder

and pointed me out to him. He too was bald and wearing the same sunglasses. They said something to each other and then the driver looked back at me with a terrible smile and drove away, waving slowly at me as he did so. They passed by me three more times before my mom finally picked me up. I didn't give those two any thought and just took comfort in the thought that I'd be sleeping somewhere else for the next couple of nights. The weekend went by without a hitch, and sleeping over at Grandma's house was such a relief. When I told her and Mom about the voices in the woods, they just looked at each other and told me to tell Dad about it.

Frustrated, I argued that I did, but it was pointless. She too used the, it's just your imagination, crap, same as Dad. Not once during the whole experience did the memory leave my mind. Of the two men in the truck were the distant chanting. Soon enough, I would have to return. Sunday night came along and I was dropped back off at my dad's house, where I would spend the whole day dreading the inevitable nightfall, dreading the answer of whether or not I could hear the chanting in the woods,

hear the strange people sing their dark songs in unison. I begged my dad to let me keep cash in the room with me tonight, but he said no, leaving me to face what happened next, alone. So, come bedtime, I was sitting on my chair by the window, staring into the darkness until the hour came. I stayed up until 11 expecting to hear it. But what I got was silence. No singing, no crickets either.

Just pure silence. I couldn't tell if I was relieved or terrified. Maybe they all moved on. Maybe they went somewhere else to play their creepy games. It took some self-convincing, but I managed to calm myself to such a state of mind where I could actually go to sleep. knowing that I was safe.

Reluctantly, I crawled into my bed and closed my eyes. I woke up to the most bone-chillingly fucked-up thing I've ever seen. It was surreal. A fucking image of it. Every time I sleep, my brain immediately surged itself into full function, beyond consciousness and straight into full-fledged fight-or-flight mode, as a cold hand forced its way over my mouth and shut up. shoved my face into my own mattress.

I felt a body much larger than mine bare down on me. I felt the jagged kneecap ram itself directly into my stomach, as I was then pulled out of my bed and wrestled into a standing position. The cold hand still holding my mouth shut. Another hand wedging my left hand directly behind my back and pulling upwards until the pain became so unbearable. I thought my arm was going to come off. A voice whispered into my ear.

His breath was ice cold, set another voice across the room. My eyes were well adjusted to the darkness as it was, and I could see, through the moonlight shining into my now-open window, a man wearing a horrible, horrible mask. At first I thought he had the head of a goat, but I knew better. The goat stared with lifeless marbles where its eyes should have been. Its head was a mask, made out of the severed head of a goat or ram. not properly stuffed and half-rodded.

Its horns curled into spirals jutting out of its head, and random patches of fur were missing, simply to show raw blistering skin. I tried to scream, but the hand over my mouth tightened its grip. My arm behind my back pulled to a near breaking point. Scream, and we will kill you. The voice whispered into my ear.

My eyes couldn't. No, they wouldn't break a wall. away from that horrible person wearing the severed goat's head as a mask. He was shirtless, wearing a necklace of what appeared to be bones. It was horribly emaciated, and there were markings all up and down his torso. In his right hand, he held a knife about the size of my forearm. Its build wasn't like any knife I'd ever seen. It took a step closer to me and pressed it up against my throat.

The steel was bitterly cold, and the tip of the blue. blade was sharper than anything I'd ever felt. It would take less than four ounces of pressure to open my throat, and they knew that I knew it. I couldn't cry. I couldn't even breathe. In its other hand, it held a basic candle. Tomorrow. The thing said, his voice muffled by the lifeless dead goat mask. You will exit your house at midnight. You will light this candle, place it on the ground in the center of your yard,

and you will sit behind it, legs crossed, right foot on top of your left knee and vice versa. If you don't do this, the voice whispered into my ear, the blood of your loved ones will be on your hands. The goat man quickly retreated the blade from my neck. I don't remember what happened next. I remember waking up at my bed, panting and crying. My dad came in to see what was wrong with me. And when I told him, he told me it was just a nightmare.

At this point, he sat down at the end of my bed. He looked very wary, like he didn't want to say what he was about to say. He rubbed his eyes with his fists and warily explained to me that this was all just me stressing out over to the divorce. That maybe we should look into talking to a therapist about these voices and hallucinations I've been having. I remember feeling so betrayed. So alone by the unfairness of that. I argued with him that everything I was seeing and hearing was true, but it was too late. He and Mom talked it out, my behavior, my claims.

They think I was losing my shit over the divorce. Their minds were made up. Nothing I was going to say would have convinced them otherwise. And of course, in hindsight, it only made perfect sense. Who would believe a nine-year-old when they say that they were voiced? I was silent the whole day. Cash sat with me in my room as I wasted the daylight playing video games. I didn't speak to my old man, not once.

I could see the weary looks on his face when he'd walked by my room, but he didn't want to press the issue. He looked just as defeated as I did. He spent most of his time on the phone. It wasn't until later that day. I found myself recalling what the goat thing said to me before everything went dark, that I had to light a candle at midnight. But when I woke up that morning, there was nothing in my room.

There was a sudden sense of hope, because when I searched around my room trying to find his candle, it was nowhere to be found. Never. Even to this day, have I searched so hard for something only to be frantically pleased by the end results. It was gone. Have I been alleviated from the duties imposed on me by these strange interlopers? The relief was unbelievable, like I was severed from a horrible burden.

Even the thought of being forced to see a shrink didn't seem so harsh compared to the prospect that maybe these attackers really were just a bad dream. A severely realistic dream. Mind you. But a dream, nevertheless. Maybe. Maybe the whole situation really was over. Maybe these horrible people did move on.

And that the goat man was simply a mental projection, of my own imaginative expectation towards whatever it was those unnatural proceedings just beyond my sights were. You know, speculation. Nightfall came, and for the first time in a week I felt no fear at the prospect of it. I felt good, like things were going back to normal. I was wrong. I was so wrong.

When I placed my head on my pillow, my eyes already closing, consciousness already drifting away. I felt a lump under my pillow. Curiously, I reached down there and felt something, something long and smooth. I pulled out a candle, a tall, thin, wax candle with a nice long wick.

It was red, just like the one the goat man was holding. My heart sank. My mouth went dry. Tears ran down my cheeks, and in that moment? I relived the entirety of last night all over, down to the very last detail where the guy holding me whispered in my ear,

how the blood of the ones I loved would be on my hands. Suddenly I was back in hell. I was back in the realm of terror. How did they get the candle under my pillow? Had I overlooked it this whole time? I lie in bed until midnight. I didn't dare close my eyes for fear of being held at knife point again. For fear of coming face to face with that horrible goat creature, the night was silent.

No crickets, no birds, nothing. Dead silence. I could see that it had turned 1201. The memory of the goat mask in my mind uttering its instructions to me over and over again. Go outside. Light the candle. Sit behind it. Do it or the blood of my loved ones will be on my hands. At the time, I didn't know what it meant to have blood on your hands. The following day, I would learn exactly what it meant.

Around ten minutes in, I mustered up the courage to walk over to my window and look out it. What I saw choked me on the spot. Side by side at the entrance of the woods. I saw men. Shadowed by the night, standing side by side. There must have been twenty of them. None of them were saying anything. They were all dead silent and I could feel their eyes on me.

It was just as strong as when I felt the eyes of the dolls on me, back at their sight. In a way, they felt like the same presence, the same intelligence. I can't explain. And then I saw him, the goat man. Or rather, the silhouette of him, standing in the center of the figures. He was still as stone, but I could make out that face shape, the jutting horns. I could make it all out. I chickened out. I couldn't go out there. I just couldn't. I hidden my bed, blankets over my head, and I shut my eyes tight, crying all night. I didn't fall asleep until I heard the early morning birds. I was awake by 11.30. Shortly after breakfast, I heard my dad shouting in the front yard. I went out to check and see what was happening. What it was that had him so upset. As I went out the front door, I could hear him more clearly. I could hear the pain in his voice.

a knot formed in my throat, and a harrowing sensation crawled across my skin. I was not ready to learn the events that transpired, and that was truly the scariest part, the moment before the actualization. These people have mentioned blood on my hands. I didn't know what it meant, but I had a very vague idea that it meant my family getting hurt. I thought they got my dad. When I got to him, I saw that he was on his knees crying. Cash was killed. He was hit by a car.

There he lay, goofy pointed ears, his absurdly silly dog beard, black eyes staring and hanging tongue, stationary, forever. I saw that his center torso had been collapsed, and I could see the openings in his rear side, his ribs jutting out, his entrails. Baby! My dad cried out as he turned to hug me. It's okay. He quickly led me back into the house away from Cash's lifeless body, away from my best friend, dead and mutilated on the side of the road. The last thing I remember seeing as I was brought into the house was a large pickup truck driving by slowly. I saw the same two bald men, as old as dad, staring at me through oddly slim sunglasses. I saw blood on their front right tire. and I saw the driver point directly at me. Cash's death was my fault. As I said it out loud, my dad held me tight and said with stone-cold certainty that it wasn't my fault,

that sometimes these things happen. He told me exactly what you would expect a father to tell his kid, when their pet is killed in a random and seemingly pointless accident. But I knew better. The people in the woods killed Cash, and was all because I didn't do what they said. It was because I was a coward.

His blood was on my hands, just as they said it would be. When I went into my room to cry, I saw outside my window, a man in the center of the backyard. A man with no shirt on. He was wearing a mask made out of a severed goat's head, hollowed out on the inside.

In the daylight, it was far more disturbing to see, because I could almost smell the lack of Santa It had to have exerted. I could see that it was surrounded by flies. But even worse than that, I saw a note it was holding up. A piece of paper with a single word written across it. Midnight. I couldn't handle it.

I ran outside to chase him down. But when I got outside, it was gone. My hate and anger somehow superseded my guilt and sadness because I ran far into the woods before realizing that this time if I got lost, I wouldn't have cash to lead me back to the house. I would be all alone. No. I would have whatever was in here with me.

I could feel eyes in here. I could feel eyes everywhere. My every move was being watched. From the autumn canopy to the bushes just yards away. I knew I was surrounded in here. And as my senses came more clear from the adrenaline-fueled rage I was experiencing, I realized that it was getting stronger by the minute. Then I noticed the smell, the stench.

At the time, I thought it smelled like bad milk, or baloney left in the refrigerator too long. It was strong, too strong. My eyes began to water and I could feel my stomach begin to turn. How could a smell be so painful to endure? Then it occurred to me. They killed my best friend. There was only one more life they could take, my dats.

The presence became stronger. I could hear whispering in the wind, and the smell grew more powerful with every breath. Any second, I was certain I would be overwhelmed by God knows what. I realized that if I didn't do what they demanded of me, I would be taken here and now. What could I have done? I shook my head and began to cry.

Okay. I'll do it. The relief was instantaneous. The woods became brighter, the smell gone, the feeling of being watched replaced with what could only be described as serene. The forest went from a den of unspeakable terror, to a place of, well, it was just woods again, just as it always was.

I came back home and helped my dad dig Cash's grave. We set our goodbyes and I buried him. He made up a cute dog bone-shaped tombstone out of leftover wood from his old workshop. and that was that. My mom came over that day and went out to dinner. The food was the best I'd ever had. We gave cash a little toast.

And that was that. In the back of my mind, midnight, midnight. I spent another silent night staring at my clock, watching the numbers transform into the next every 60 seconds. The weight was agonizing.

Each passing minute was like a minute removed from my life. That night, I was certain that I was going to die. And I was trapped. They would have killed my parents if I tried anything. Killing Kash made that entirely too clear to me. 1155. 1156. 1157.

1158. 1159. I looked out the window. There they all were, side by side, shadows of people, and the goat man in the center. All their eyes were on me. I looked at the clock. Midnight.

I looked back out the window. They were all gone. They knew. They knew I was going to come out tonight. They killed my dog, and then threatening to kill me on the spot after I followed them into the woods. They knew I was broken.

My spirits shattered. And that I was more afraid of what would happen if I didn't come out over what would happen if I did. I grabbed the candle and walked into my backyard. The darkness was thick, thicker than usual, and the smell. Sour milk, spoiled lunch meat, blood, rot, decay, shit, puke, vile, death.

My skin began to crawl and a shiver took me over. Breathing became difficult. I could scarcely make out the forest before me. It wasn't just an entrance or a boundary. It was a living, breathing thing, and it was anticipating my every movement. As I took a step into my yard, a jolt of terror shot through me

as I passed through the motion sensors and activated the backyard light. There was relief in the light, safety at least, for a little while anyways. I used my father's lighter to spark up the candle. I planted it into the cold, dewy grass and sat down nice and slowly, ready to cross my legs. I never sat in the full position that I was instructed to because I was in the process of sitting down.

I saw it. Two green eyes. Have you ever shined your light directly on an animal's face, way off in the distance in the dead of night? at a distance where it's too far away to make out what it looks like, but not far enough for their eyes not to catch and reflect the light. This was exactly what I saw. Except it seemed to be high above the ground, higher than a coyote's height,

and higher even than a human's height. It appeared to be pacing back and forth in the woods. I could hear the leaf shuffling with every step it was taking, constantly coming in and out of existence due to the unseen trees, eclipsing those glowing shards of light, those glaring eyes. They must have been reflecting off of the backyard light. I could hear it breathing. It sounded painful to me.

The air came out in short sporadic breaths, and when it did, I felt the huffs of frozen air rank with that rotten stench go right through me. I don't remember how long it paced like this, never leaving the outskirts of the woods, never breaking eye contact with me. Every now and then it would stop and lower closer to the ground, until its eyes were level with me. It would remain in that position like a cat low to the ground,

prepping to pounce on its prey. It would only stay in this position for ten seconds at a time before it would rise back up and pace more. After it did this several times, I realized something was stopping it. The light. I was dumbstruck, frozen in place. My throat was so tight the air was barely getting into me,

barely getting out of me. There was a powerful sense etched in within my, my soul that any sudden movement would have sent this unspeakable thing into a frenzy at me, light or not. I don't know if it was going to outright kill me here in the backyard, or if it was going to drag me into the woods and eat me alive there. I didn't know what the relationship was between this and the psychopaths that ordered me out here. What I did know was that with each movement it wasn't getting me.

It was getting madder. I couldn't let it get me. I couldn't let it take me away. theoretically I was safe in the light, except the thing was that this motion sensor light ran on a timer. I knew that the timer would soon run out, and when it did, the light would go and nothing would stop it from getting to me. With all my courage, all my willpower, I forced myself to stand up,

letting out a horse breath. The eyes immediately stopped moving when it saw me stand. I couldn't tell you for certain, but I was almost positive they narrowed. The prospect of me escaped. infuriated it to such a level that it began to stalk toward me. I could tell it was moving forward, threateningly, showing a willingness to brave the light. It took a step back, and when I did, it took a swift step forward.

I could almost see its shape, tall, thin, bony, too dark to distinguish any specific features, except, well, it had horns, large, curled spiral-like horns, or at least it looked like it did. I don't remember running back to the house. I don't remember making it inside. I don't remember anything after the point where the light shut off.

It was sudden, as if death caught me. The timer was up, the light shut down, and enveloped me in the darkness. And I recall hearing it scream. It sounded like a child denied its toy. Or was that me? When the light died, I fucking ran.

It was hours later when I came to my senses. My dad was holding me. My mom was there too. I was crying. Later they would tell me that I was screaming, don't let it get me, over and over again, don't let it get me. I don't remember myself.

I never saw that creature again. I never saw the man with a goat mask either. The two old men in the pickup truck, never saw them again either. That day forward, I always slept with my window shut. The next day, my dad and my mom took me outside to explain that nothing happened. We saw displaced grass mixed with mud.

We even saw gore marks on the trees. I thought this would be evidence enough to plead my case, but it wasn't. My dad immediately laughed at me telling me he figured the whole thing out. I had an encounter with a deer. Those markings in the tree were from antlers, and it charged at me because it felt threatened. This was such a convenient explanation that I fucking wish to God that it was true. But I knew otherwise. Several weeks later, I heard that there was a missing person search that took place in those woods.

But I myself haven't seen nor heard anything at the time. My dad and my therapist insisted that this knowledge would only enable my tendencies as a schizophrenic. So they stopped me from looking into it. Yes. I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia disorder. They said I got it through my inability to cope with the divorce. They told me that I had retracted into a delusion because I felt responsible for the family's collapse

and that my youthful undeveloped mind couldn't process the guilt properly. That these cultists and their beasts were just agents of personal symbolism. Something like that. For a while, I believed everything they told me. The lies felt safe. The lies were comfortable. Several years later, they would tell me that I would have made a full recovery. It was an easy process since I never had another encounter again.

At that point in time, I was so angry I just told them what they wanted to hear. When I became old enough, I severed all ties with my parents and I moved out of the state. Once I was on my own, I looked into the town archives and researched as much information as I could about that era when I was nine. The missing persons report, the manhunt in those woods lasted several days. And all they found was one man. He was torn apart, his limbs removed his organs missing. They found that he was wearing a peculiar mask. The head of a ram, but its innards were carefully carved and hollowed to fit over a human's head.

When they removed the helmet, they saw that he had died in an expression of absolute horror. I took pleasure in that. I would like to believe that these men were cultists, that they were attempting to appease some unseen unnamed God, a God that absolutely should not have existed, a God that had no right to walk among men, and that during their attempts to appease it, I had botched their ritual by breaking an important piece of the process.

The doll, and in their attempts to salvage it, they forced me into offering myself up as sacrifice, to it. But its failure to do whatever it was going to do to me that night destroyed the whole operation. I would prefer to believe that in the name of vengeance, this angry thing turned on its own worshippers, killing them all and dragging them all back to wherever it came from. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. There's just one thing I still couldn't figure out. Why is it that no matter where I go when I am all alone in quiet places in the dead of night. Why can I still hear them chanting that unholy sermon that I heard so long ago in the woods when I was nine?

Okay. Well, I'll see if I can find you a box fan. Anyone else? How about fishing? I saw some boats down by the lake. Pass. Why? You're a... In Minnesotan, aren't you required to go fishing or something? True, we are simple people, but we aren't all very fond of the water. Besides, how do you know that the lake doesn't have some kind of, I don't know, deep creek lake creature? Sounds like more cryptic tales on the way. I remember going on a fishing trip on my dad's dingy with my family around the age of nine.

I hated it. Not because we didn't catch any fish or because I was seasick. It was because my parents thought it would be a bright idea to camp out in the boat. Luckily, we weren't out on the ocean, but rather a large lake. I would have preferred a normal camp, but my parents thought this would be more fun. We fished all day, barely catching even small fish. We ended up eating the food we brought with us just in case we didn't catch anything. My dad said it was weird that the fish weren't biting, but I just blamed it on his bait.

My parents came to this lake ever since they met. They practically lived on this lake. After we ate, it started getting really dark. We lived in the suburbs, not too far from town, so we never got to see full-blown stars. Out on that lake, we saw the constellations and other astronomical anomalies. It was really a sight for sore eyes. We eventually decided to go to sleep inside the boat.

I remember the feeling of the slow-moving, waves rocking the boat and lulled me into a deep sleep. At some point the night I woke unexpectedly. It was weird because I'm usually a sound sleeper. I looked around and noticed my parents still asleep. I looked up at the ceiling for a while before I heard a soft tapping. It was coming from under the boat. I had no idea what it was when I was a kid, so I was scared half to death. I just closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. And at some point in the night, I fell back to sleep. The tapping persisted.

The next morning, I told my parents about the tapping. My dad admitted that it did sound creepy, but he assumed it was a fish or a piece of wood that had floated under the boat. Reassured, I went back to fishing. We caught one fish. It was medium-sized. After eating, I went back. outside to take a picture of the sunset before heading to sleep.

I slept suddenly this time without any disturbances. I woke the following morning to my parents getting some stuff out of a closet. From the open door, I could see what I now know is algae. I asked my mom what happened and she said algae and dead fish ended up on board. I asked what could have caused it and she answered that the waves were a bit strong last night. They may have been knocked into the boat, but she wasn't entirely sure. Trusting my parents' intuition, I tried my hardest to calm my fears. I used fishing to calm my nerves.

We caught three fish. With only one day left, I did my best to breathe through the night. That night, however, was one I wouldn't forget. I woke to the boat rocking very harshly. The waves weren't normally like this, and there wasn't a storm of any kind outside. After a while, it's besided. I exhaled in relief and went back to sleep. I opened my eyes again.

I saw a figure hunching over by the door. It was looking around and had slow movements. I was terrified because I couldn't tell who it was. My parents' snores were still going on as the spectacle intruded in our space. It seemed like it was looking for something. I rummaged through her trash and picked out a dead fish that was on board. the night before. With four crunches, it devoured the rotting fish hole.

It started walking toward my parents. Its footsteps were characterized by a sloppy, watery sound. Its short stature was nothing but a blob in the dark. I could barely make out two dark yellow dots for eyes. As it inched over them, it raised four talon-like claws on the end of each arm. I grabbed my mother first, then started slowly shambling toward the door. I soon decided that I had seen enough and yelled at my father. He shot up and saw the creature.

My mom woke up and started screaming, disturbed by what she saw. She struggled out of its grip and went to my side. My dad stood up and was ready to fight the creature despite heavy trembling. The creature quickly made its way out the door and struggled to get back into the lake. My dad chased after it and used the Swiss Army knife to stab it in the leg. The creature wailed and jumped into the water. The next day, my parents and I inspected the scene. All that was left was a trail of this greenish, reddish ooze.

My parents decided to sell the boat. Unfortunately, they've gotten into normal camping now. John, you know that there's almost certainly not a monster in this lake, right? But do you know, Rissa? Of course not. Monster in the lake. All right. How about if I lead the fishing activities and let John...

What exactly do you do all day? Sit in the dark and talk to yourself? Pretty much. Maybe we can run this like a restaurant with a day and nighttime manager? Like, someone to greet the kiddos when they get here, keep everything upbeat and happy. Oh, so basically anyone but John. Exactly.

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention. What now? Are we boring you? This was your idea, you know. No, yeah. I know, it's just that... I keep getting this weird feeling. Like we're all being watched.

You're just being paranoid. Oh, really? I don't see you wandering off alone at check on noises. Because I'm not dumb. Well, that makes one of us. Fine. If it'll help you calm down and focus, I'll show you there's nothing to worry about. It's not even that dark out yet.

Anyone notice how strange it is though?