Chapter One: In the Woods

It was destiny. I was supposed to find him on that day, at that time. There’s no other possible explanation...

I run about three miles everyday, through the park that’s near my house, and around my neighborhood. Where I live, there’s a lot of big trees and it’s usually, almost always quiet. The houses are spread apart. I rarely see any of my neighbors, and they rarely ever see me. Mostly I run in the morning, around five o’ clock, just when the sun is starting to come up and the air is still really fresh and cold. I like running in the middle of the streets, "cause mostly there’s no cars that go up and down my road. I live in a pretty private area, so the people I see are mostly people I know. 

Sunday morning, I woke up later than usual, around eight-thirty. There was a whole lot of sunshine coming through the window, burning my face. I didn’t want to get out of bed, I just wanted to lay there and go back to sleep. So I did, for a little while, just close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. But then I got this sudden thought in my head that I needed to get up, get into my workout clothes, and go running. I had already run everyday that week, and I had wanted one day to myself where I could just hang out in bed all day if I wanted. But that nagging feeling in my head wouldn’t go away, so reluctantly, I got out of bed, slowly put on my jogging shorts and my running shoes, and a sleeveless T-shirt. 

Before I left my room, I checked my reflection in the full length mirror attached to my bedroom door. My arms looked good, not too thick, not too skinny; they were definitely toned. I lifted the tail of my shirt and checked out of my stomach. My abs were cool too. I had a nice tight six-pack. I slid my hand over the hard muscular ridges of my stomach and I was satisfied. I brought my Discman with me, because it was easier for me to run when I had something good to listen to.

It was really warm outside, especially since it was the middle of January. Past couple of weeks, it had been raining non-stop, but now there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. It was kinda weird. Right after I locked the door to my house, I broke out into a run. My street was completely silent, and the only thing I heard was the sound of breath. I turned on my cd player and started to go a little bit faster. 

When I came to the end of the block, where the road diverges into two different paths, I started to go down Grace Road, the right path, as I usually did when I ran, because it had less hills and winding paths than Greenwood Road. Yet as I approached closer to the fork, for some unknown reason I decided to go down Greenwood instead of Grace. I hadn’t prepared to do so, because that track was twice as longer than Grace and I had never been able to completely finish more than a mile before I had to turn around and, tired as hell, walk back home defeated. It wasn’t that today I had more energy than I had yesterday or the day before, or that I was determined to actually complete the three miles, because I figured I would only make it halfway, like I usually did, and stop, but because, I don’t know why, I felt compelled to go down that road. 

The more I ran, the less houses I began to see and the more trees seemed to appear, almost from nowhere. I went up a small hill, which wasn’t too bad, but as soon as I got finished with that one, I saw another incline, a lot larger and steeper than the one I had just ran, and my heart began to speed a little bit faster. I slowed down a little, so I could save my strength. As I came closer to the large hill, I noticed a house on the left side of the street, mostly surrounded with impossibly large, almost scary-looking trees. It was an old wooden house, dilapidated mostly, with broken porch steps and a few shattered windows. 

There were three numbers, written in thick red ink on a small wooden board, dangling by chains from the top beam of the house: 389. It didn’t seem like anybody lived in that house - it didn’t seem like the kind of house that anybody could live in. My stomach churned and grumbled as I passed by that house, and a cold chill, despite the sun shining on me, zipped downward from the back of my neck to the base of my spine. As I ran by, I had the strange feeling that somebody from that house was watching me. That feeling didn’t go away as I ran past that house. In fact, it seemed to grow stronger the further away I was from it.

I started up the hill a little more quickly than I should’ve. Every part of my lower body, my calves, hamstrings, and ass started aching really bad, and I wasn’t even a quarter of a way up the hill. I could hear my hard breathing over the song that blared in my ears. Again, I thought about just turning around and going the usual track I usually ran instead of this one. I wasn’t that far away from it. But since I was the kind of person that hated to quit something when I started it, I stopped complaining and kept on going. By the time I reached the top, every part of my body was drenched in sweat, I could barely breathe, my chest felt like it was ready to explode, and I felt like I was seconds away from being paralyzed. 

I wanted to collapse on the dirt ground and just lay there, but I didn’t. I walked, well more like staggered along, for the next couple of minutes as I tried to recuperate. I had never been able to successfully run that entire hill without stopping and turning back around, so I kinda felt proud of myself. I gazed at the road ahead of me. None of it looked familiar to me. I walked and walked, and it seemed like the more I walked, the closer I was getting to nowhere. I had lived around this area for about seven years, since I was about eleven, and I had never been on this road before. The trees looked like they were too tall, and there was so many of them, so much that it nearly blocked out the sunlight. 

I thought of that old, fucked-up looking house I past about half a mile back. I really wondered if someone lived in there, and if so, than who was it. I started to run again, not too quickly, but at a good steady pace. The more I ran, the colder it seemed to become. The road kept going on straight, with no curves and no indication that it was going to end soon. I looked on both sides of the road, at the massively intimidating trees. There was way too fuckin’ many of them. I stopped running and turned around. The road I had just run looked exactly like the road in front of me. 

“Fuck this, I’m goin’ back home,” I said aloud.

My cd player stopped. Everything was silent. I couldn’t even hear myself breathing. I tried turning the cd player on again and it wouldn’t come on. I don’t know why that was happening, since I had changed the batteries just a couple of days ago. But it wouldn’t even come on. 

“Shit,” I muttered.

I turned back in the direction of home - and I saw something on the ground, something I hadn’t saw before. It was a bunch of ID cards bundled together by a rubber band. A bit interested, I bent down to pick them up. The stack was thick; there had to be at least twenty ID cards. I removed the rubber band and started to look through them. I browsed through all of them quickly. The only two things I noticed when looking through them the first time, was that there were all males, and all of them were young adult males, about my age or so. For the most part, all of them were good looking, even though many of them took bad pictures. But then I looked through them carefully and realized something a lot more odd.

All these guys had the same birthday. I looked through all of them and they were the same: Joseph Wright, born January 15, 1980; Adrian Harris, January 15, 1982; Troy Channing, January 15, 1984; Matthew Moore, January 15, 1986...and it kept going with all twenty of them. 

Today was the fifteenth of January. 

I continued to examine each of the identification cards to see if there were any other similarities between them. There was one; they all were from Oakdale, the city I live in. None of these guys looked familiar to me. Oakdale wasn’t the smallest place in the world, but it wasn’t the large either. I looked through the addresses to see if I knew any of them: Brian Fordham lived on 758 Tilman Avenue; Derrick Johnson lived on 527 Freedom Avenue, which was close to the high school I went to; Troy Channing lived on...when I read the address, a shiver ran through my whole body again: 389 Greenwood Road - he lived in that house, that old wooden house that I had seen on my way up the big hill. 

“How the fuck can anybody live there?” I asked myself. The house looked like it was two seconds from falling down. I stared at Troy Channing’s face for a few moments. I noticed that his middle name, Jeremy, was the same as my first name. He had a handsome face, but the picture he took didn’t really capture him too well. Troy had an agitated grimace on his face that it made it seem that it was a mug shot instead of an ID shot. I read the rest of his stats: Six foot two, 195 pounds. In the picture, Troy was nearly bald, but the information read that he had black hair. His eyes were piercing in the photo; rectangular shaped and very intense. The stats said that his eyes were gray. 

I wanted to keep Troy’s ID card. I wanted to take it home with me and just stare at it. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I just did. The whole time I had been looking through those IDs, it never occurred to me, until later, that why were these ID cards directly in the middle of the road to begin with. Someone had to have stolen them from these guys somehow, but that explanation was a bit off to, because how could someone have stolen twenty different IDs from guys whose birthdays were all the same? Maybe he (or even she) had selected those guys cards in particular, but then there was the question of why those cards were in the middle of the road. Had someone left them there on purpose? None of it made sense to me. What was I supposed to do with them? Put them back on the road where I found them? Take them home? 

“...Help...”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. The ID cards as well as my cd player dropped from my hands, hitting the ground with a loud thud. That voice had come from my earphones. It wasn’t from the cd I had been listening to - it was a voice I had never heard before. A guy’s voice, deep but it sounded more like a terrified whisper. I looked all around me. There was nobody around who could’ve said that. I know I couldn’t have imagined it, because it sounded like someone had just quietly whispered that word into my ear. 

I picked up the cd player and put my earphones back on. Maybe the voice I heard had come from one of the songs on my cd, but that didn’t seem right. I tried turning on the player again, but it wouldn’t work. I removed the batteries to check if anything was wrong with them. They looked fine to me. As I as about to place them back into the Discman, I heard the voice again, a little bit louder this time, but still having that same quiet terror as before. “...You gotta come find me...” 

The voice was definitely coming from my earphones. I just stood there, frozen in the middle of the road, not knowing what to do or really how to react to all of this. I looked to my left, at the endless rows of trees that seemed to stretch out to eternity. I finally decided that the best thing for me to do was to go home and just go back to sleep. 

“...The woods...” the voice said. “...Hurry up...”

“What the fuck is this?” I screamed out loud. My voice echoed a couple of times. In response, a cold wind came out of nowhere, making me shiver and making the leaves of the trees rustle noisily. I looked down at the ID cards on the ground, and my eyes immediately focused on Troy Channing’s picture. I reached down and picked it up. The card felt really cold in my hand, as though it had been placed in a freezer for a really long time, even though when I had held it before, it felt warm and normal.

Again, I looked at the front row of trees on the left side of the road, and the rows and rows of tress behind them. For a moment, I thought I saw a tall person move really quickly behind one of the trees. But I figured it was just my imagination.

“Just go home,” I told myself. 

I turned and began to trek back in the direction I had originally come. I wasn’t about to start running again, because I was still too tired, and I really wasn’t in the mood to run. I took the earphones off of my head and allowed them to hang around my neck. I still had Troy Channing’s ID card in my hand. I looked at it again and wondered what he would look like in person. It was his birthday, as well as the other nineteen boys. I thought about if he was in that old house right now, and I wondered if he had been the one I felt staring at me when I was running by. 

Maybe it was him. If it was, did he live there alone or with someone else? If he did live with someone, who did he live with, a parent, a friend, girlfriend...boyfriend?....of all those things, probably not a boyfriend. Glancing at his picture again, I didn’t see him as the kind of guy that might be into other guys. Though at the same time, I’m not the best judge of people, so I could’ve been wrong. 

I heard a crackling sound coming from my earphones. I stopped walking. A part of me wanted to put the earphones on again to see if I would hear anything else, but another part of me was scared to do so. I didn’t see how it was possible that I could be hearing someone speaking through my earphones. All of it had of it had to be my mind playing tricks on me, except I wasn’t completely sure and I wanted to know. So I placed the earphones back over my ears again. The crackling sound was still there, though not as loud as it had been before. 

“...Close...” The male voice said. “...You’re close...”

From the corner of my eye I saw a sharp movement coming from behind the trees on my left. I jumped again, startled. Looking over in that direction, I didn’t see anything strange. Just a whole lot of trees. Some weird-ass shit was happening in those woods, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be apart of it. I wanted to burst out running, but I couldn’t get that guy’s voice out of my head. “You’re close,” he had said. But close to where? Close to what? I wasn’t about to go into those woods. I’d never been in them before, and really didn’t think that today needed to be any different. But I had the strongest feeling inside of me that something was in those woods, something that I was supposed to find. I’d always trusted my intuition, every since I was little. While I was intimidated by going into those woods, I knew that my mind wouldn’t let me rest until I surrendered. 

“...You have to come,” the voice whispered. I waited for anymore messages, but there were none. My earphones had gone completely silent. Cautiously, I walked toward the left side of the road, near the first row of towering trees.