Haley’s Monster

Everybody in town had a story about The Pit.

Animals going missing. Hunters coming out of the tree-line pale as grave wax. Dogs vanishing into the woods and never coming back. People blamed coyotes for a while. Black bears too. But after enough years, even the skeptics stopped sounding sure of themselves.

Everybody knew there was something wrong with those woods.

Nobody wanted to be the one to say it.

A couple years before my own encounter, my friend Henry lost his Labrador, Haley. The whole town loved that dog. She wandered from yard to yard like every porch belonged to her. Kids slipped her scraps beneath picnic tables. Old men sitting outside the tavern called her over just to scratch behind her ears while they smoked.

When Haley ran into the woods behind The Pit, half the town went looking.

A few men pushed farther in than most people were willing to go.

They found her all right.

Just not all of her.

Henry changed after that. So did everybody else. Sightings around The Pit started picking up not long afterward, and before long people began calling the thing out there Haley’s Monster.

Henry stopped coming around whenever we played manhunt near the edge of the woods, where the tree-line dropped into the pit. Most of the hunters’ stories came from that stretch of forest. People claimed they heard movement out there after dark. Branches cracking. Heavy footsteps pacing them from deeper in the trees. Sometimes even a dog barking from somewhere no dog should have been.

Nothing bad ever happened to us while we played.

At least not if we stayed near the front.

The problems started whenever somebody wandered too far in.

Kids claimed they could hear voices deeper in the woods calling them by name. Not loud. Not aggressive. Just faint enough to make your stomach tighten while you stood there trying to convince yourself you imagined it.

I never had any stories of my own back then.

Truthfully, I was too scared to go looking for one.

Kids used to dare each other to travel farther into The Pit than the last person. They carried sharpened sticks with strips of ripped cloth tied near the tops like homemade flags.

The goal was simple.

Plant your flag deeper into the woods than everybody else.

Proof you weren’t afraid.

I always thought the whole thing was idiotic.

As long as we stayed near the front of The Pit, we could still have fun out there at night. Our parents hated it, of course, but who could blame them? Everybody in town lived with the fear of losing someone to those woods.

Some families eventually packed up and left.

Most couldn’t afford to.

The houses were cheap. The town was poor. People worked whatever jobs they could get and tried not to think too hard about the forest sitting at the edge of everything.

Most of us felt trapped there.

It was one of the coldest fall seasons I can remember. Maybe that’s why those memories still feel frozen in my head all these years later. Every image from that time comes back sharp as broken glass. Breath fogging in the air. Wet leaves plastered to the road. Wind dragging through dead branches overhead like somebody pacing across the rooftops.

Around that time, I started bussing tables at the local tavern. I spent most afternoons hauling bus pans, wiping tables, and listening to every conversation drifting through the place. In a small town like ours, the tavern was the closest thing people had to a community center, so by the end of every shift I’d heard enough ghost stories to poison my sleep.

Hunters swore on God Himself they’d seen figures moving through the woods at night.

Fishermen talked about hearing cries somewhere beyond the waterline after midnight.

Other people laughed the stories off and blamed coyotes or black bears.

A few claimed the hunters were going half crazy from exhaustion and too much time alone in the wilderness.

Nobody laughed very hard though.

Not really.

There was one local everybody respected.

Charlie Harding.

Every evening around five o’clock, Charlie walked into the tavern and sat in the same booth near the far corner wall. He was a frail old man with hollow cheeks and tired eyes that never seemed fully fixed on the room around him. His clothes were filthy most nights, and he carried the smell of damp earth and old cigarette smoke everywhere he went.

He looked like he belonged out in those woods more than he belonged around people.

The room always changed when Charlie arrived.

Conversations lowered.

Pool cues stopped clacking.

Even the drunks reeled themselves in whenever he came through the door.

I eventually learned why.

One of the fishermen told me Charlie had gone hunting years earlier with his son, Jacob. According to the story, they wandered too far beyond The Pit and Charlie disappeared for three days.

When he finally came back, he came stumbling out of the woods soaked in blood.

The hunter who found him thought he’d been gutted open and rushed him straight to the medic.

They never found a scratch on him.

The blood covering Charlie’s clothes belonged to Jacob.

The authorities searched those woods for three straight days and never recovered the boy’s body.

Charlie claimed they were attacked by a massive creature shaped vaguely like a man but thin as a dead tree, with the head of a rotting deer. He said the thing grabbed Jacob right in front of him and tore the boy apart before dragging what was left of him into the woods.

Charlie admitted he ran.

Said fear overtook him.

Said he left his son behind to save himself.

People wanted to believe Charlie had lost his mind from grief, but the problem was he never changed his story. Not once. They even brought in a polygraph examiner from two towns over.

Charlie passed every question they asked him.

After that, people stopped bringing the incident up around him.

Truthfully, I think everybody in town already knew there was truth buried somewhere inside Charlie’s story. We just tried our best to live around it. Pretend life was still normal.

Even if we had to lie to ourselves to do it.

My shift ended around five-thirty most nights, so I’d usually catch Charlie sitting alone with a cup of coffee before I left. What always confused me was how much coffee the man drank at night.

Cup after cup.

Like he was afraid to fall asleep.

I remember joking about it once during the dinner rush.

“Doesn’t that guy ever sleep?”

Most people shrugged it off.

Not Betty.

Betty was the kind of waitress who enjoyed stirring the pot whenever she got bored.

That night, she drove her elbow into my shoulder and nodded toward Charlie’s booth.

“Why don’t you go ask him yourself, honey?”

She laughed while I rubbed my shoulder and glanced toward Charlie’s table.

That was when I noticed him staring at me.

Not casually either.

He was grinning at me from ear to ear without blinking.

Just sitting there smiling.

My pulse stumbled.

I turned away fast and pretended to organize plates near the order window, but every time I looked back, Charlie was still watching me with that same stretched grin nailed across his face.

No movement.

No expression in his eyes.

Just that grin.

What unsettled me most were the tears.

His eyes had started watering from how long he’d gone without blinking, and thin streams were crawling down both cheeks while he smiled at me.

Even Betty noticed. She walked over carrying the coffee pot.

“You need a refill, Charlie?”

The grin vanished.

No transition.

One second it was there.

The next it was gone.

“No,” he said quietly. “Wouldn’t want to damage my biological clock any further.”

He reached into his pocket, placed money on the table, and stood up.

Betty frowned.

“You’ve been coming here six years now, Mr. Harding. You know your money’s no good here.”

Charlie slowly picked the bills back up and stared directly into her eyes.

“I’m sick of your pity.”

Then he walked out.

Betty looked over at me after the door shut behind him.

“How strange was that?”

I didn’t really know how to answer.

“Yeah.”

That single word felt about as useful as I could manage.

I watched Charlie disappear down the road for another minute before remembering I still had five minutes left in my shift. I hurried around cleaning my station before Hank, the night busser, showed up and started bitching at me for leaving work behind.

While wiping down Charlie’s booth, I noticed a fifty-cent piece sitting on the cushion where he’d been moments earlier.

The coin caught the halogen light overhead when I picked it up.

For some reason, that bothered me more than it should have.

The metal was warm.

Not body-temperature warm.

Hot.

I glanced around to make sure nobody was paying attention, then slipped the coin into my pocket.

I was in a hurry to leave that night because most of my friends were meeting near The Pit for another game of manhunt. I originally wasn’t planning on going, but Tony mentioned Sherry would be there.

Back then, Sherry was everybody’s crush.

Worst part was she knew it.

The moment I stepped outside the tavern, a bad feeling settled over me.

The kind that crawls across your skin and refuses to leave.

I kept catching myself looking toward the woods while walking home, like I expected to see somebody standing between the trees watching me.

The road was poorly lit, with old street lamps spaced every fifty feet apart. Every time I stepped beneath one, the brightness wrecked my vision for a few seconds before darkness swallowed the road again.

I was about halfway home when I spotted a figure standing beneath the next street lamp ahead.

The light above him flickered violently.

I slowed down.

“Sir?”

No response.

“Hey… you okay?”

The figure didn’t move.

As I got closer, I realized the man was staring directly at me.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”

Another few steps and I recognized him.

Charlie Harding.

“Jesus Christ, Charlie. You scared the hell out of me. What’re you doing out here?”

He didn’t answer.

He just stood beneath the broken light staring at me with the saddest look I’d ever seen on another human being.

I decided right then that I wanted nothing to do with whatever was wrong with him that night.

“Take it easy, Charlie.”

I started walking again.

About ten feet later, I heard his shoes scraping along the pavement behind me.

I turned around.

Charlie stopped.

“What the hell is your problem?”

Nothing.

“Look, man… knock your shit off.”

Charlie kept staring.

Then his expression changed.

The sadness left his face all at once.

What replaced it looked closer to hatred.

He glanced toward the woods beside the road a couple times before turning and walking directly into the trees without the slightest hesitation.

I stood there listening to branches crack deeper and deeper into the darkness until the sound finally disappeared.

The second I couldn’t hear him anymore, I ran the rest of the way home.

By the time I reached my house, daylight was long gone. I stormed into my bedroom, locked the door, flipped on the television for cover noise, changed clothes, and climbed out my window before my mother realized I was heading back out after dark.

I grabbed my BMX and tore off toward The Pit.

By the time I reached the outskirts of the woods, it was obvious the game had already started without me. I coasted down the hill fast, jumped off the pedals while the bike was still moving, and ghost-rode it straight into the tangled pile of bikes scattered near the entrance.

Todd—easily my least favorite person in our entire group—clicked on his flashlight and blasted the beam directly into my eyes.

“Your out, shithead.”

“Get outta here,” I snapped, shielding my face. “I literally just got here.”

“Nope. Your out, ass-hat, and no amount of crying’s gonna change it. Go sit by the bikes your cheap-ass Huffy just annihilated while you came rolling in late like a jackass.”

“Take it easy, Todd.”

The voice came softly from the tree-line.

Sherry.

My stomach flipped the second I realized it was her.

Todd spit off to the side and rolled his eyes.

“Awe… look at that. Rescue squad showed up. Guess your out too now. There’s no pause button in manhunt.”

“Fine,” Sherry shot back. “You’re such a skilled seeker. Loser.”

Todd laughed to himself and disappeared back into the woods toward a burst of cracking brush somewhere deeper in the trees.

Sherry turned toward me and shook her head.

“Come sit down, Julian.”

Honestly, I was shocked she even knew my name—let alone cared enough to involve herself in the situation.

“Thanks for stepping in back there.”

She folded herself down beside the bike pile, pulling her knees up.

“You’re a big boy. You can handle yourself. Todd’s just a prick who needs reminding every now and then.”

I laughed under my breath just as another flashlight beam started bouncing toward us through the dark.

Tony.

“I was wondering if you were gonna flake out again,” he said, grinning. “But apparently I was mistaken. Wonder why?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, dick.”

He smirked and looked toward Sherry.

“Well hello there. Looks like you fell victim to Todd’s amazing detective skills too.”

“Save it,” she said immediately. “Where is Mr. tough guy?”

Tony pointed deeper into the woods.

“Hunting the last two survivors. Looks like the others are helping him too. Typical.”

A few more kids drifted back toward the entrance after getting caught, and everybody started talking over each other about how they got found. Most of it was bullshit excuses and fake near escapes, but after a few minutes, I realized something felt off.

Todd should’ve been back already.

Normally he’d come sprinting out of the woods soaking in the attention.

Tony noticed it too.

“What the hell’s taking him so long?”

Right as he said it, a violent burst of cracking branches exploded from the tree-line.

Before I could react, somebody lunged out of the darkness and tackled me straight to the ground.

It was Todd.

“What the hell, dude?!”

He rolled off me laughing.

“Grow some balls, pansy.”

“Go to hell, Todd.”

He stared down at me with that smug little grin he always wore whenever he thought he had an audience.

“What’s wrong, Juliet? Hurt your feelings? Thought you were a badass all a sudden.”

“Chill out, bro,” Tony muttered.

Tony reached over and put a hand on Todd’s shoulder, but Todd instantly jerked away from him and stepped toward me again.

“Take The Walk then.”

The entire group went quiet.

Even the woods felt different after he said it.

Sherry stood up immediately.

“You two are being ridiculous.”

Todd ignored her completely.

“He’s a chump. He won’t make it anywhere near my flag. I planted that thing farther out than anybody ever has.”

“Watch me.”

The words came out before I really thought about them.

Todd grinned.

“There it is.”

Sherry looked at me like I’d completely lost my mind.

“Seriously, don’t.”

But Todd already knew he had me. I couldn’t stand the thought of backing down in front of everybody—especially her—and he could see it written all over my face.

Todd folded his arms.

“No flashlight. No turning back. You come back before reaching my flag, the attempt’s over. No retries until next week.”

“I know the rules.”

He smirked.

“Good luck, Juliana.”

I stormed toward the woods before anybody could say another word.

The second I crossed the tree-line, the air felt colder.

I found a straight branch near the edge of the trail and snapped it free from a low hanging limb. After ripping away the smaller stems and twigs, I pulled off my undershirt and tied it tightly around the top like a flag.

Behind me, the group started shouting and laughing as the reality of what I was doing settled in.

Nobody had taken The Walk since Todd claimed he planted his flag weeks earlier. According to him, nobody had even come close to beating his distance.

I pulled my hoodie back on and tightened my grip around the branch.

Then I turned toward the entrance to The Pit.

And started walking.

Setting off into the darkness, I immediately noticed the trail beginning to change.

The farther I walked into The Pit, the more rotten everything looked. Shrubs sagged inward like they were dying from the soil beneath them, and the ground itself darkened beneath my feet, damp and spoiled-looking, as if the entire path had started decomposing years earlier and nobody had bothered to tell the rest of the woods.

I regretted agreeing to The Walk almost immediately.

Still, I kept moving.

Behind me, the crew’s flashlight beams faded between the thick branches until the forest swallowed them completely. Every step I took sounded too loud. Branches snapping beneath my shoes. Leaves crunching. My own breathing growing sharper the farther I went.

That was when it really hit me how alone I was.

About two minutes into the walk, the first flag came into view.

Dustin’s.

The sight of it standing there in the darkness unsettled me more than I expected. The original flag. The one that started everything.

Dustin created The Walk years earlier before his parents packed up and moved away from town. Ten feet farther ahead stood Thomas’s flag. Thomas was the youngest kid in our group, but probably the bravest out of all of us. He was the first person to challenge Dustin’s distance, and after that the whole thing evolved into its own twisted little ritual.

Another twenty feet ahead stood Tony’s flag.

For a while, Tony held the record. Everybody talked about it back then too. He never bragged much though, which honestly made people respect him more.

Then I saw Henry’s flag.

The second my eyes landed on the faded strands of his old shirt hanging from the branch, my chest tightened hard enough to hurt.

All I could think about was Haley.

What they found out there.

I stopped walking.

The cloth swayed gently in the wind while I stared at it, and before long I found myself scanning the woods around me in quick frantic bursts, expecting something to rush me from the darkness.

“Get it together, Julian.”

My own voice sounded small out there.

“Top Todd’s flag. It’s just a walk.”

I kept moving.

A few seconds later, I heard branches crack somewhere deep ahead in the woods.

I froze… instantly.

The sound stopped roughly thirty feet ahead of me, but the darkness between the trees was so thick I couldn’t see anything beyond the pale flashes of moonlight leaking through the branches overhead.

Then the wind shifted.

A cold gust rolled directly down the trail into my face carrying a smell so foul my stomach nearly folded in half.

Rot.

Not normal decay either.

Roadkill left cooking in summer heat.

I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed through my nose, trying not to gag as the taste settled across my tongue. Tears gathered in my eyes from the stench. My entire body kept twitching with nervous little shivers I couldn’t control anymore.

Right there was the closest I came to turning back.

I was fully ready to accept defeat.

Then I pictured Sherry watching me walk out of those woods embarrassed and beaten in front of everybody else.

So I stayed.

Funny thing is, looking back now, pride was probably the dumbest possible reason to keep walking toward death.

I moved farther down the trail while my heart hammered hard enough to make my chest ache. I knew the rules, but nobody was around to stop me anymore, so I finally tore the mag light from my hoodie pocket and clicked it on.

The beam shook violently.

My hands were trembling so badly the batteries rattled inside the flashlight handle while the light bounced all over the trees around me.

There was still no sign of Todd’s flag ahead.

Only darkness.

“This is bullshit,” I muttered. “Why the fuck did I agree to this?”

A loud clatter exploded somewhere behind me.

I spun around instantly, swinging the flashlight through the trees.

Nothing.

I stood there listening while the echo faded through the woods. My breathing had gotten so loud it sounded like somebody else standing beside me.

When I turned back around, somebody was standing directly in front of me.

I stumbled backward so hard I nearly fell.

Charlie Harding.

The flashlight beam landed across his face, and my stomach dropped.

He was crying.

Not loudly.

Not dramatically.

Just standing there with tears rolling down his cheeks while he stared at his hands like he barely understood what they were.

“What the hell are you doing out here, Charlie?”

No answer.

His eyes kept bouncing across his fingers while he slowly flexed them open and shut.

That was when I realized his hands were covered in blood.

Fresh blood.

My pulse exploded.

“What the hell is going on right now?”

Charlie suddenly looked up at me like he’d forgotten I was standing there.

“It won’t take me,” he muttered.

“What?”

“It wants me to live with that night forever.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Charlie?”

I took another slow step backward without even realizing I was doing it.

The woods around us felt wrong now.

Too tight.

Too close.

I flipped the flashlight around in my hand, gripping it near the beam so I could swing the heavy end if I had to.

“You got blood on your hands, Charlie.”

He looked at me with the saddest expression I’d ever seen.

“Yes… I do.”

His voice cracked.

“In more ways than you could ever understand.”

“What did you do?”

Charlie broke apart right in front of me.

His eyes widened. His breathing hitched. He touched trembling fingers against his lips before suddenly realizing his hands were bloody all over again.

“Did you hurt somebody?”

Charlie looked directly into my eyes.

“No.”

His voice dropped lower.

“But all my pain is my own doing. My son is gone because of me.”

“Charlie, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

I kept glancing past him into the woods.

“Everybody’s waiting for me back there. Somebody’s gonna report me missing.”

“You stay in these woods too long,” Charlie whispered, “you will go missing, boy.”

The wind rolled through the trees again.

Charlie slowly raised one of his bloody hands and patted the top of my head without blinking once.

“Run along home before you catch sight of what lurks downwind.”

Then he turned and staggered back down the trail toward the darkness.

I listened to branches snapping beneath his feet until eventually the woods swallowed the sound completely.

The fear inside me faded a little after he disappeared.

My confidence didn’t.

I should’ve turned back right then.

Instead, I convinced myself Charlie was just a broken old man trying to scare me away from The Walk.

So I kept going.

I moved faster this time.

Every minute without finding Todd’s flag made the panic inside my chest worse. Before long I was nearly jogging through the woods, desperate to find the marker and get the hell out of there.

Then the ground vanished beneath my feet.

The trail dropped sharply without warning, and suddenly I was crashing downhill through thorn bushes and dead brush with no control over my body at all.

Branches whipped across my face.

Thorns ripped through my hoodie.

The flashlight flew from my hand while I rolled violently down the slope like a rag doll.

Then my back slammed into a massive tree hard enough to knock the air from my lungs completely.

The trail… was gone.

No flag.

Nothing.

Todd never planted one.

That lying sack of shit probably never even took The Walk himself.

I struggled to get my bearings after the fall. My back ached so badly it hurt to breathe, but I knew I had to climb out of whatever hellhole I’d landed in before something else found me down there.

The problem was the walls surrounding me were packed with thick thorn bushes.

Every attempt to climb ended the same way.

Pain.

The jagged thorns ripped into my hands and clothes every time I tried forcing my way upward. I finally started circling the perimeter searching for another way out and quickly realized something far worse.

Nothing lived down there.

No insects.

No animal sounds.

No movement.

The ground looked almost gray beneath the darkness, like the soil had turned to ash years earlier. The smell of death still hung thick in the air too, coating the back of my throat every time I inhaled.

Then something slammed into the ground somewhere deep in the darkness.

The impact shook the entire pit.

It sounded like a tree collapsing from a massive height.

My entire body locked up.

A few seconds later, a low animalistic grunt rolled through the clearing.

The sound echoed so far across the darkness that my mind finally grasped how enormous the place actually was.

I couldn’t see whatever made the noise.

But I could hear it moving.

And it was big.

Very big.

Another heavy thud shook the ground.

Then another.

The vibrations beneath my feet became stronger with each step the creature took, throwing off my balance while I stumbled backward through the dark trying to figure out where the sounds were coming from.

Then it screamed.

The cry started low and guttural before twisting upward into something almost human. Something shrill and horrible and completely wrong.

It sounded less like an animal and more like a woman being tortured somewhere deep underground.

I ran.

I tore along the perimeter searching desperately for any opening through the thorn walls, but the entire edge of the pit was packed tight with twisted brush and jagged vines.

Behind me, the creature crashed through the darkness toward my position.

The ground trembled beneath every step it took.

I didn’t have a choice anymore.

I dove straight into the thorns.

Pain exploded through my entire body instantly.

The razor-sharp barbs shredded through my hoodie and tore open my skin like paper while I forced myself deeper into the brush. I grabbed branches barehanded and pulled myself upward through the vines while blood streamed down both forearms.

I could hear the thing closing in behind me.

Branches snapping.

Heavy breathing.

Wet snarling sounds.

That’s when I looked back.

Massive deer-like horns burst violently through the vines behind me while the creature forced its way toward the slope. The noises pouring from it no longer sounded fully animal.

There was rage in those screams.

Hatred.

The second I saw those horns, I knew exactly what was chasing me.

Haley’s Monster.

The stories were real.

Every last one of them.

Even now, years later, I still struggle understanding how something that horrific could possibly exist.

I finally reached the top of the slope just as somebody grabbed my arm.

Charlie.

He hooked one arm beneath my shoulder and practically ripped me through the remaining thorns while dragging me away from the edge of the pit.

I stumbled hard trying to regain my footing.

As I looked back, a massive skeletal hand slammed onto the edge of the slope behind us with enough force to shake the ground.

The creature started pulling itself upward.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Its eyes rose into view first.

The rest of its head followed.

The sight of it froze me solid.

It looked like a rotting deer carcass dragged back to life by something evil. Flesh hung loose across its skull in wet strips while enormous antlers twisted upward into the darkness above the trees. Its body was impossibly thin beneath patches of matted fur and exposed ribs, but somehow still massive—easily three times larger than any creature I’d ever seen.

It screamed directly at me.

The sound hit my chest like a physical force.

Charlie yanked me hard enough to nearly pull my arm from the socket.

“Run, son!”

We took off through the woods.

“Run like your soul depends on it!”

Behind us, the creature crashed through the trees so violently the entire forest shook around us.

At first the ground trembled beneath its footsteps.

The tremors became violent enough to rattle my teeth.

It was gaining on us impossibly fast.

Charlie suddenly shoved me forward with every ounce of strength he had.

I staggered ahead trying not to fall.

That’s when I heard him scream.

I turned just in time to see the creature grab him.

It lifted Charlie completely off the ground like he weighed nothing.

And it tore him apart.

The sound still lives in my head.

Wet ripping noises.

Charlie’s body separating in the air while blood sprayed across the trees behind him. His entrails spilled downward into the leaves in steaming heaps while the creature shrieked over top of him.

I couldn’t process what I was seeing.

My mind simply broke.

I turned and ran blindly through the woods until distant flashlight beams finally appeared ahead near the tree-line.

Everybody was screaming for me to hurry.

They could hear the thing behind me now.

But they still had no idea what was actually coming.

That realization snapped something loose inside me and adrenaline exploded through my body all over again.

“RUN!” I screamed. “JUST RUN!”

The others immediately scattered toward the bikes without even looking back.

I burst from the tree-line seconds later and sprinted toward the tangled bike pile while everybody desperately tried untwisting handlebars and tires from one another.

I heard Sherry’s chaotic scream.

I turned back toward the woods.

The creature stood at the edge of the tree-line violently wrenching entire trunks back and forth beneath its claws. Trees bent and cracked while it shrieked into the darkness at us.

The sound drove straight through my chest.

I collapsed into uncontrollable sobbing right there beside the bikes.

I have never known fear like that before or since.

And like it was a figment of my imagination—

it stopped.

The creature backed away into the darkness just as quickly as it had appeared.

The woods became still again.

The most horrifying part wasn’t the screaming.

It wasn’t Charlie death.

It was what came afterward.

The wind moving through the treetops while the forest pretended nothing had happened at all.

Like the creature had never been there.

But we knew better.

It was still out there.

Watching us.

Remembering us.

Wanting us.

For whatever reason, it wouldn’t cross the tree-line.

And for whatever reason, it had been trapped there a very long time.

Some of the others fled immediately.

Todd, Tony, Sherry, and I stayed frozen near the bikes listening for movement in the woods.

Tony finally broke the quiet with a trembling whisper.

“What the hell was that?”

I stared into the darkness.

“Haley’s Monster.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Sherry wrapped herself against my side trying to comfort me, but honestly I was shaking too badly to even think straight anymore.

I looked toward Todd.

“Your flag wasn’t there.”

Todd kept staring at the woods.

“You never took The Walk.”

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I heard stories before but… Jesus Christ… never like that…”

“Charlie Harding is dead now because of a fucking lie.”

“What?!”

“He saved me in there,” I said. “It killed him.”

Sherry immediately spoke up.

“We have to go to the police.”

“And tell them what?” Tony snapped. “That we got chased by a monster? They’d lock every one of us up… forever.”

Todd nodded immediately.

Sherry started arguing again, but I cut her off.

“They’re right.”

I kept staring at the woods.

“None of the others stayed long enough to see what we saw. Charlie already knew the truth. He wanted it to end.”

The wind stirred through the trees again.

“It knows we come near the tree-line now. We can’t come back here.”

Then Sherry noticed my hands.

Blood soaked both sleeves nearly to my elbows.

“Oh my God… Julian…”

As if her words held power, the pain hit me all at once.

My hands started throbbing so badly I nearly dropped to my knees again.

“We need to get you home.”

I nodded weakly.

“Yeah.”

We jumped on our bikes and tore away from The Pit as fast as we could.

Nobody spoke during the ride home.

Nobody looked back either.

From that night forward, everything changed.

Sherry and I became inseparable.

Todd admitted to everybody that he never actually took The Walk.

Nobody else ever attempted it again.

Tony still talks about that night constantly and swears the story will haunt this town forever.

As for me—

my name started spreading through the school halls alongside the story itself. Some people believed me. Others thought I made the entire thing up.

Every now and then somebody still calls my bluff.

And every single time, I give them the same answer.

“Then take The Walk.”