It was a strange sight, really. A pocket of mist amidst the trees, swirling about in one small spot. I looked away for just a moment to take out her phone for a picture of the oddity, but before I could even aim the camera at it, it was gone. Vanished.
With a furrowed brow, I looked around with a spin, one way, then the other.
“What?” I asked aloud, confused.
After all, that sort of thing generally didn’t disappear so quickly. Maybe I was seeing things; my imagination could get a little out of hand sometimes. I gave my head a shake, then continued on my hike.
For what must have been another twenty minutes, I continued on my trek and reveled in how far away I felt only being a few kilometers outside of town. I had the sounds of birdsong and wind through the leaves, the bubbling of a creek somewhere in the distance to keep me company. Occasionally though, there was the feeling of being watched, the sort of feeling that gives you chills and makes your hairs stand on end. In those times I would look around and see nothing, but I was regretting my decision to go alone more and more. When everyone I asked said no to accompanying me, maybe I should have just sucked it up and tried again some other time. Unfortunately, the little voice in my head told me that I had a point to prove. I never quite figured out precisely what that point was.
My thoughts were suddenly invaded and halted by a single, whispered word:
“Wait.”
Everything halted. My moving, my thinking, my breathing. Everything stopped. Hell, for a moment I thought my heart had stopped. Did the birds stop their singing? Did the breeze stop blowing?
First, it was my eyes that moved to the side, then my head slowly followed suit to look toward what I believed was the sound’s origin.
Again, there was a small pocket of thin mist weaving itself around the pines. Once more I froze as I stared at it. I was sure it wasn’t there just moments ago, and worse? The longer I stared, the more I began to discern its shape. The last thing I saw was a pair of pale white eyes staring at me in that mist before it dispersed in a puff, quicker than one could even blink.
“This way,” whispered the same voice only a moment after the mist had vanished again.
I don’t know how long I stood there staring into the empty air the mist had once been flowing in, but my mind told me it was too long. Much too long.
“It wasn’t real,” I shakily told myself. “It wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real.”
As though my shoes were made of lead I cautiously continued along the hiking trail. It surely wasn’t the way the voice had wanted me to walk in, but the voice was all in my imagination. It must have been. I felt prickled, and every instinct was telling me to run. But that would have been crazy, right? I’d be trying to run from my imagination.
I walked for another ten minutes, inwardly hoping my hike would round back to the car soon despite knowing well it would be a while yet. The more I went on, the more uncertain I was. The air grew so still, the birds had grown quiet like they were growing farther and farther away. Entering a world of silence, and I could still feel the eyes — the eyes of earlier on, but so much more intense. I shouldn’t have come here alone, I shouldn’t have —
“I said THIS WAY.”
There was the whisper again, but much harsher, like a crackling hiss.
I whipped around to see that strange, horrible mist again, only now it was taking on a much more distinct shape. I could see the form of a human body, something that resembled the flow of wispy, unruly hair on its head, the formation of facial features, and those big, incessantly-staring eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked. The apparition’s face seemed to darken.
“This,” it whispered, calmer now, “Way.”
A semi-transparent, very thin arm extended and beckoned me with a single finger before disappearing once more.
I gulped and discreetly gave my arm a hard pinch to test the waters of reality. The spirit was still ever-present, those eyes staring, and beckoning fingers still ominously curling. Before I knew what I was doing I was taking a cautious step forward, then another, walking off the beaten path and into the woods.
“I must be mad,” I said to myself.
I had to ignore the horrible trembling in my knees and arms as I carefully picked my way over roots and around shrubs, and I jumped with a start any time I accidentally stepped on a twig. It was like the silence made each crunch and crack amplify. My surroundings demanded my attention, by sound, sight, and… Smell?
I stopped briefly to sniff the air, and immediately regretted it. Something wasn’t right. Decay? Rot? It was faint, perhaps a long fallen tree somewhere, but I couldn’t see any sort of cause. With slow, increasingly cautious steps, I continued to move forward. Fear sweats slicked my forehead and back, impending doom crawled over my skin like a whole colony of ants. The smell was getting to be unbearable.
The mist appeared once more, and I jumped back, but it was at least three yards in front of me. Unlike before though, the apparition had completely taken to a proper shape and detail; it was the form of a boy. Shaggy hair, a dirty face, and although his blue-white translucence made it difficult to tell for sure, he may have only been around sixteen years old. What caught me off-guard was his torn clothes: they were a design of the modern, current age. Recent.
Slowly, as though too quick of a movement would scare me off again, the ghost boy looked down and to the side of one of the many clusters of bushes. He looked up again and held out his hand to me, then slowly waved it over and down to where he had been looking like he was attempting to welcome me through an open doorway.
From my distance, I stared at the bushes, uncertain as to what the ghost boy was trying to tell me. It was clear something was there, but whether or not I wanted to find out what it was? That was another question entirely. Still, I approached, but very slow, and still under that ever-watchful and unblinking stare. As I drew closer, the stench of rot grew worse, and upon inspecting the bushes I realized something was off. Parts of it were snapped, and there was a rather large, bent-out-of-shape gap. My stomach twisted and churned in knots and tumbles as I reached for the shrub branches, and with how desperately I wanted to pull my hands away you’d think they were red hot against my fingers. Yet still, I moved them, and I peeked beneath. The ghost disappeared then, and it took me a moment to register what exactly I was looking at. Once I processed it though, the image was burned into my memory.
It was the decomposing corpse of a teenage boy.
With a shriek, I fell back and landed hard on some exposed roots. I’m sure it would have hurt more if I was in the right mind to register physical pain, but I was in shock. It was difficult to breathe, I could feel my stomach attempting to purge that morning’s breakfast, I felt like I was going to cry but all that surfaced were these strained, dry sobs. And yet, when I eventually struggled my way back up to my feet, I chanced another look at the concealed corpse.
I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth in an attempt to block out the smell of death (which didn’t do much to help at all), and I cautiously, fearfully, took in the sight. His curled-up frame looked frail and was covered in huge bruises. His clothes were torn, one of his arms looked terribly twisted, and I couldn’t see more than just a part of his face. It looked like he had died with his head tucked away in his other arm, but from what I could tell there was more bruising on his face as well. It was then that the tears came. It was then that it had all become so real for me, so terribly, horribly real. The poor boy was left for dead and hadn’t been found. I backed away, more carefully this time, and I bawled. I sobbed and I cried, I fumbled for my phone so shakily I nearly dropped it. There was almost no service.
I dialed 911, and I waited. And I waited. They didn’t answer nearly as quickly as Hollywood made it look.
“911, what’s your emergency?” a woman asked.
My breath caught as I tried to form the words I needed without another sob escaping.
“I found a — ” I choked, and began sobbing again. “There’s this dead kid, here, I don’t know what happened, I — ”
And there it was, another breakdown. I was crying, and talking unintelligibly to the operator on the other end.
“It’s okay, ma’am. Breathe. Where are you?”
“I’m… I’m…” Shit, where the hell was I? “I’m on this trail, a very light one. I think it’s called Park Hills? I parked in this spot along the road right before you get to the beach, and there are trails that go up, and… and…” I was desperately trying to stop the crying at that point, angrily wiping at my eyes forgetting all about the makeup I was wearing. “I have a 2009 blue sedan parked. It’s in plain sight.”
Needless to say, the police and ambulance showed up, and I showed them where the body was. No one believed me when I told them a ghost had led me to him, and they all chalked it up to luck. “There was always another explanation,” they would tell me.
The boy’s name was Elijah Crevitt, and he was beaten to near death and abandoned by a couple of boys from his school. As it turned out, the bullying had been going on for a few years according to school records and Elijah’s parents, but nothing was actually done besides throwing him into therapy, giving him a suspension for retaliating one day, and one single, verbal reprimand to one of the boys that were giving Elijah verbal grief.
To this day, I’m not sure what hurt him more: was it the bruises and defamation he suffered, or was it the system and people that continue to fail millions of students every single day? How many cries for help can one make before they simply give up hope? How many more victims of bullying need to die before there is change?