Last one for tonight....a very long one but good.
It was summer, 2001. I can't remember exactly, but it was probably June, maybe July. I wasn't taking any summer classes that year, and neither was my best friend “John,” who had been my best buddy since middle school. We went to a southern college that's known for football and partying, but there's a few of those, and that's as specific as I'll get.
John and I decided that it'd be fun to go camping. The weather that weekend was gonna be relatively cool for summer, so I prodded my not-very-outdoorsy girlfriend “Lauren” into coming along, and John got his girlfriend “Lisa” on board too.
Now Lauren and I had been going out for almost two years, so we were pretty close. John had only been dating Lisa for a month at most, and Lauren and I didn't know her very well. It seemed like they were getting serious, so we figured it'd be a good chance to get more closely acquainted.
Anyway, John's family is pretty country. They all fish and hunt and camp all the time. They also owned a boat, just a little fiberglass skiff with a center console. We decided that it'd be pretty cool to take the boat out offshore a bit (into saltwater, mind you) because there were lots of small islands nearby that we could have to ourselves for the weekend.
The island we decided on is known by two names. The first is what you'll generally see on charts or maps, and that's “Osprey Island.” There's probably a hundred “Osprey Islands” out there, so I'm not too worried about anybody figuring out which one I'm talking about. That being said, all the locals called it “Crab Key.” Once it was part of a small archipelago, but all of the other islands around it had washed away in a hurricane back in the 80's.
So Crab Key was a cool little island. Sand, obviously, with lots of pine trees and low scrub. It wasn't very big, but it was big enough that from one end, you certainly couldn't see through the woods to the other side. It was probably two miles long at the most, and only a few thousand feet wide.
We loaded up the boat with our tents, sleeping bags, a couple of coolers (my older brother bought us some beer, which was pretty exciting at the time,) and other necessities and set out on Friday afternoon. Crab Key wasn't far offshore, so we got there with plenty of daylight left.
We just ran the skiff up on the sand. It was high-tide, and since the boat was pretty light ,we could push it out into the surf easily. John tossed the anchor out on to the beach anyway, just to be safe. John and I had been to the island a few times before, always during the day, to fish from shore or just explore a bit, so we knew to pull the boat up near a trail that led into the palmettos. We grabbed the gear and started hiking on in. Like I said, the island wasn't very thick, so it was only about a third of a mile or so from where we beached to the spot we were planning on setting up camp.
Now, in hindsight, I really regret the spot we decided to post up, but at the time, we didn't think twice about it. You see, the island had been inhabited a looong time ago, by Indians. I can't tell you the name of the tribe, that's not what I studied in school, but there were actually quite a lot of Indian tribes throughout the southeastern US in the past, and a lot of them lived on the coast. One of the common archaeological features they left behind are called Oyster mounds.
Basically, it's exactly what it sounds like. They ate a lot of oysters, and oysters have shells. When Indians lived in one place for a long time, they tended to make huge piles of the old oyster shells. So that's what people had found there in the middle of Crab Key.
This mound wasn't huge. As an uneducated person, I'd suspect that the tribe that lived on the island probably didn't live there full-time. Like I said, it wasn't far offshore, so it might've been a seasonal settlement. Anyway, the mound was about seven feet high and big enough that the four of us, holding hands, only got maybe a quarter of the way around the perimeter. It was in the center of a clearing, and it seemed like a cool place to camp, so that's where we set up.
Now like I said, I don't know much about the Indians that made the mound. According to the older kids I knew, like our elder siblings, back in the “old days,” when they were young, you could still sometimes find neat little artifacts out on Crab Key, like arrow heads or pottery shards, but apparently so many generations of teens had gone out to the island to drink or screw that all the cool stuff had been found. I know we never saw any relics other than the shells.
We basically set up camp right next to the mound. John and I each had our own little dome tent, so it was essentially just two tents around a fire-pit we dug and the coolers. Pretty bare-bones. It was very early summer dusk, maybe eight o'clock, when we finished up our preparations. We had a big pile of fallen pine boughs and a fire going, we had the tents up, and John and Lisa had already popped a couple of Bud Lites. We were just about to settle in for a night of underage drinking when Lauren realized she had left her inhaler in the boat.
Understand that Lauren had pretty bad asthma. It wasn't bad pollen season, at least, but she still didn't like to duck around, especially on an island, a good three hours away from an emergency room or nebulizer, so we had to make sure her rescue inhaler was handy. Being the man, I told her I'd go get it, but she insisted she wanted to tag along. I was fine with that, as I figured it'd give us some alone time, so we set off down the trail to shore.
It took less than ten minutes to stroll from the campsite back to shore. We grabbed her inhaler from the console in the boat, along with her cellphone (none of us had a signal, but whatever.) I tried to put some moves down and get something going, but I didn't get any further than second base before she suddenly said she was feeling creeped out and wanted to head back to camp. I sighed and accepted it – like I said, she was not an outdoorsy kind of girl, it was edging toward dark, and it was utterly quiet out there except for a few bug chirps and the lapping of the waves.
We get about halfway back, right at the point where we can't see the shore or camp, and it's pretty dim under the trees. Lauren was wearing a t-shirt over a bikini, so to be honest, I was just watching her butt the entire walk back. All of a sudden she stops and turns around, her face all scrunched up. Just as she starts to open her mouth, the smell hits me too.
Now, I've read all the goat-man stuff, and it's always described as a weird coppery smell. This wasn't anything like that. A lot of times it's hard to describe a weird smell, but this one was pretty clear-cut. BO and death. It was as if that fat kid we all knew in school, who didn't shower or understand what deodorant was, had found a dead raccoon on the side of the road and rolled around in it. Lauren is moaning “What the duck IS that?” and I'm trying to take shallow breaths and not look like a pussy for gagging in front of her.
I look around and say “It must be something dead in the bushes.”
“God, I'm gonna barf. Why didn't we smell this when we came by the last couple times?” Lauren said. I shrugged and pulled my shirt collar up over my nose. She did the same.
Want to look for it?” I said. “It might be a deer or something, they swim out to the islands sometimes.” Lauren shook her head violently.
“duck that, lets just get out of here,” she said. She started jogging away toward camp and I began to follow. Suddenly there was a violent rustling in the palmetto and scrub, not far from the trail. We both froze, staring toward the shaking plants. Whatever it was, it was quick and retreating, and the sound faded into the brush. “What the hell was that?” Lauren said.
“Probably something eating whatever we're smelling. A opossum or something,” I said. We stood there for a few seconds, still trying to beat back the heebie-jeebies, and then without saying anything else, we resumed our jog back to camp.
After a few minutes, we rounded a bend in the trail and entered the clearing. John, who was standing by the campfire with his arms akimbo, whirled as we came up on him. We were both panting from the trot we'd maintained all the way back.
“Where the duck were you guys?” He said. We were taken aback by how agitated he seemed.
“What's your problem?” Lauren said. John looked at both of us for a second, probably wondering why we were both sweaty and assuming we had been doing something we hadn't, and then he turned back in the direction he had been facing a moment ago.
“I don't know where Lisa went. She said she needed to pee right after you guys left.” He was taking half steps in a circle, looking out into the now-dark woods. “It's probably been a half hour by now. Didn't you guys hear me hollering?”
I hadn't even thought about it until just now, writing this, but we hadn't. We hadn't heard anybody shouting anything at the time, and the island is small enough that you could hear somebody really shouting from anywhere. So that's something weird I hadn't even realized for the past twelve years.
Anyway, I asked John why he hadn't gone and looked for her, and he just shrugged. By now, I'd gotten over the creeps of the event back on the trail, so I suggested that Lauren stay in camp, and I'd go with John to find Lisa. It was only a little spit of sand, we could “Amish Search” the whole place by midnight, if we had to.
Luckily, we didn't have to. We'd barely left camp in the direction that Lisa had left in when we spotted her, her white t-shirt easily visible even in the twilight. She was standing in a thicket of palmetto, which was pretty dumb, considering how much a diamondback rattler might appreciate such a hiding place. She was facing away from us, toward the opposite shore. John called out to her, but she didn't respond. I called out to her, and nothing. We walked toward her, calling at her with rising apprehension, until we were on the edge of the thick shrubs. She was just standing there, back to us, staring into the dark.
John and I looked at each other, thoroughly freaked out, and then he waded into the palmetto.
He said her name once more, softly, just before slowly reaching his arm toward her. The moment his hand touched her shoulder, she jolted, and spun toward him, breathing hard. John jumped backwards.
“John?” She shouted at him, seeming to be genuinely surprised. “What the duck, you scared the crap out of me!”
“What?” John said. “We've been calling your name for thirty minutes and you're standing here like a freak, and WE scared YOU?” She creased her eyebrows, confused, and shook her head.
“I did not, I just came out here to pee--” She looked down. It was only barely noticeable in the dark, but there was an obvious wet stain in her khaki short shorts. “I – I...” she stuttered, clapping her hands over her mouth. She'd pissed herself.
We all stood stunned for a few seconds, and then John snapped to sense and walked back to her, taking her into a hug.
“Hey,” he said, “I don't know what the heck happened, but it's not big deal. Okay?” Lisa was speechless. So was I. It was the weirdest thing I'd even seen. I was thinking to myself about seizures or something. Meanwhile, Lisa starts crying softly into John's shoulder, and he turns to look at me with this “Go back to camp while I take care of this” look. So I did just that.
I only had a minute or two to explain to Lauren what had happened before they reappeared at the edge of light from the camp fire. Lisa was looking at her feet, her face still deeply red, but John, without a word, went into their tent and came back out a moment later with some fresh clothes for her. She went to the other side of the oyster mound, and when she came back, she was wearing some jean shorts and a yellow tank top. I guess she'd thrown everything else she was wearing out into the woods, because she wasn't carrying any of her old clothes. The three of us had taken seats around the campfire, still silent, and similarly silent, she joined us.
It took some time, but after we'd all had a few beers, things lightened back up. The mood turned fun, we all got a buzz, and the rest of the night was what we had been hoping for. Jokes, making out, just a lot of bullshitting. We turned in sometime in the early morning, I got laid, and all was at peace with the world.
Until, of course, the sun came up.
I was awoken most unpleasantly by John shouting my name. I jerked upright from the deep, black sleep of the drunk and hungover, gasping for breath the way a drowning man does when pulled above water. John had unzipped our tent and was yelling at me from the circular entry. Lauren was pressed against me in the sleeping bag, nude, and moaning for John to “shut the duck up.” I couldn't even get a word out through my dry mouth, so I waved him off while nodding, trying to signal that I was getting up.
John backed off, finally quiet, leaving me to extricate myself from the arms of my naked girlfriend and the nice, comfy sleeping bag. I pulled on some shorts and a shirt, and groggily climbed out of the tent in the humid morning air.
John was frantically pacing around the blackened remains of our campfire. He whirled toward me as soon as I was out of the tent.
“Dude,” he said frantically, “Lisa is ducking gone.”
Nothing was registering with me yet. I yawned and stretched. “What?”
“Lisa is ducking gone. When I woke up, she wasn't there. I've been ducking shouting. How the hell did you not wake up?”
I shrugged, still not fully invested in the conversation. “I don't know... what?” It was starting to crystallize in my head. Lisa was gone. “Lisa is gone?” I said.
“YES!”
I said something intelligent like “What the duck is her problem?” John had already turned around and started into the brush.
“Come on man, we've got to find her.”
I hesitated for a second, and then turned to poke my head back in to the tent. I doubt Lauren even heard me, but I told her I was going to help John find Lisa. She murmured something in her sleep.
It took me a minute to catch up with John, who was moving at a pretty frantic pace through the underbrush, calling for Lisa all the while. I didn't bother trying to talk when I caught up, just followed along, looking around us. The island is pretty wide open, nothing but straight-trunked pine trees and low scrub, so you can see a pretty long way. It isn't some twisted, gnarled old-growth forest, and it isn't claustrophobic at all.
“Liiiiiiiiiiissaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” John was shouting. It seemed pretty silly, when I think about it. Like I said, the island is so small that a person standing at one end could probably hear a loud cry from the other end without a problem. How did this girl keep getting lost? John was shouting, and I was worried that she'd had another seizure or something and was busy choking on her own tongue in a bush somewhere.
This went on for an hour, at least. We reach one shore, followed it to one tip of the island, then cut back into the woods and followed an over-grown trail all the way to the far tip.
It was on that far end of the island that we made our unpleasant discovery. At the fringe of the underbrush, right where the bush meets the sand of the beach, we found a big swath of flattened foliage, as if something big had rolled around there to make a bed. But all of the green brush was covered in a fan-spray of tacky, reddish brown blood.
There was no doubt about what it was. John and I had both hunted, him a lot more than I. But we'd gutted deer and hog. There was no doubt that something BIG had been completely mutilated here. But there was nothing but the tacky spray of blood. No fur, no bones, no half-eaten carcass.
We were completely mute. We were both thinking the same thing, but neither could think of anything to say. I'm sure his brain was running the same routine as mine – rationalize! It was a deer. There's a bobcat or maybe a panther out here? Sure, there's an adult panther on this tiny island who eats a deer and doesn't leave a scrap of bone okay okay okay okay. The air smelled awful. It was already hot, much hotter than the weather report had predicted, and the smell was exactly like what you'd expect from a goat-man story. But there was no mystical reason for it. No question. It was the coppery twang of blood. John gulped down a gag from next to me.
So we left. There was no reason to stay. We hiked through the woods, past the gore-covered matted clearing, back toward the camp. John grew more and more frantic, and I grew more and more annoyed. I'm not going to say I wasn't worried, I was. I really was worried about Lisa, but I barely knew her, and in the past twelve hours she had mysteriously disappeared twice and was pissing up what was supposed to be a fun weekend, and to top it off, was royally freaking me the duck out.
So we get back to camp, and guess what we see? I'm sure you already have. Lisa and Lauren are sitting next to the campfire, which is burning again, cooking up some bacon from the cooler. I sigh and mutter something profane under my breath, but John ducking loses it. He runs into the clearing, gibbering like a madman, yelling at Lisa.
“Where have you been!? We've been shouting for you all ducking morning! The duck is your problem!?” And so on. Lisa and Lauren look utterly stunned. Lisa just stares at him silently, eyes wide. But Lauren takes it for a couple seconds, and then jumps up and starts giving it right back
“duck you ****, why don't you settle the duck down? We haven't heard you shouting anything. Why don't you just relax!?” About halfway through her counter-assault, she starts glaring at me, like I had anything to do with it. So I walk up, put a hand on John's shoulder, and give him the kind of quick “calm the duck down” lecture that only a close friend can give. Afterwards, he shuts up, and sits down next to Lisa.
“Sorry... I was just really worried,” he mutters. Lisa just nods. So we sit around the fire for a bit. We eat some bacon, except for Lisa, who takes her share just stares at it. Some more awkward silence, and then Lauren grabs my shoulder and gives me a “let's go somewhere private” look. We make our excuses to John and Lisa, and head into the woods on the far side of oyster mound.
We get a few hundred yards down a trail, when Lauren spins around to face me.
“What the duck is up with them?” she says. I'm unprepared, and just throw up my hands in a “what, me worry?” gesture.
“First she disappears last night, then YOU GUYS disappear this morning, and she hasn't said a word since I got her out of the tent!”
I'm just shaking my head, having no idea what's going on. “Hang on,” I say, “John woke ME up because Lisa was missing this morning, and we've just spent the last couple hours tromping around trying to find her. Then we find you guys making breakfast like nothing ever happened. What do you mean she was in the tent?”
Now it was Lauren's turn to look confused for a second. “I got up after you left, and she was in their tent. I woke her up, got the fire going again, and we've been sitting there, awkward as hell because she won't SAY anything, waiting for you two to...”
We just looked at each other for a long moment.
“This is ducked up,” I said. Another long silence.
She nodded, digesting her own thoughts. “I want to go home,” Lauren said. Part of me wanted to disagree, wanted to man up and chalk it all up to silliness and get our weekend back on track. But all I did was nod.
“Okay,” I said. We headed back to camp. John and Lisa are still sitting right where we left them, still silent. For some reason, I feel like I need to explain to John what Lauren and I have been discussing, so I ask John if he can come down to the boat with me to get some stuff we left there, while giving Lauren an “I know what I'm doing” look. John agrees and we head off. Ten minutes later and we're standing by the boat, which is resting completely on the damp, low-tide shore, a good ten feet from the shallow, lapping waves.
“So John,” I say. “Lauren and I think we should leave as soon as we can.”
“Huh?” John responds. “How come?”
“How come? Seriously? How come your girlfriend frigging keeps disappearing?”
John starts shaking his head. “duck you man, that's not cool.”
“Look, I don't know what happened last night. I'm thinking she's a secret epileptic or something. I don't know, but it doesn't matter.” We stare at each other for a few seconds. “Lauren says she was in your tent after we left.”
“What?” John stammers.
“Are you sure she was... you know...gone?” I ask, trying to make some sense of the situation.
“Are you kidding? I think I can tell if there's a second person in my ducking tent dude!”
“Okay, okay,” I say, raising my hands in a “settle down” gesture. “Lauren just said that after we left, she got up, and Lisa was asleep in your tent. I don't know what the duck is going on, but I agree with Lauren that we should just call this a weekend and head back.”
John was shaking his head, trying to figure out what he wanted to say, when I saw his eyes focus on something behind me, and widen. I turned, and immediately saw what had caught his attention.
The plastic housing had been yanked off of the outboard motor of the boat. It was laying in the boat, the clips that held it in place snapped off. The motor had been brutalized. Vandalized, really. The spark plug wires were yanked out, ripped and torn apart from the plug heads. Most of the other wiring was ripped to pieces. The prop was completely gone, as well as the pin. It took a few seconds to sink in, just how ducked we suddenly were.
“What... the... duck.” We both said at the same time. Before either of us had had a chance to fully internalize what we were seeing, a piercing scream echoed out of the woods behind us, coming from the camp. Without a thought, we set off down the trail at a dead sprint. We found Lauren sitting in the middle of the trail, a hundred feet or so from the bend that entered the clearing. She was on her knees, knuckles in her mouth, hyperventilati ng. She looked at us as we ran up to her, eyes confused and panicked.
“Baby!” I said as I fell to my own knees next to her, putting my hands on her shoulders. I shook her and called her name. She blinked a few times, her eyes seeming to focus on mine. “What is it, baby?” I said again. She just shook her head and pointed. John and I turned to look. In a pile at the base of a palmetto plant, just on the edge of the trail, were a pair of jean shorts and a yellow tank top. They were stained dark red
“What the duck,” John said, moving toward them for a closer look.
“I-I...” Lauren stammered. “I was coming out to...” she leaned in close, whispering, “I had to poop,” she said into my ear. “I was coming back to camp and... and... goddamnit!” she shouted. She started hitting me, softly, in the chest, her hands balled into fists. “What the duck are you guys doing? What the duck is going on?”
“Dude,” John said from behind me, “These are Lisa's...” We stared at each other. None of us could think of anything better to do.
“I want to go home,” Lauren said. I promised her that we were, soon, but we had to go pack up. She looked very unhappy, but nodded. I helped her back to her feet, and we tromped through the pine-needles back to camp. I didn't have the heart to tell her about the boat.
We get back to camp, and there's Lisa, sitting calm as can be by the almost dead campfire. John runs over to her, almost as if he's surprised to see her still in one piece, and he takes her in his arms and starts whispering into her ear. Lauren and I can see from his face that he's going to pieces, but he seems to be doing his best (in a crazy way, at least) to comfort and get through to Lisa. We're both just glad that she is, in fact, in one piece.
We stand awkwardly at the edge of camp for a bit, watching John whisper reassurances to Lisa. Eventually I decide I need to fill Lauren in on the boat situation, so I lead her a bit away and tell her what we'd seen. I was expecting a Lisa-level freak out, but she took it more calmly than John or I probably had.
“It must've been an animal,” she said, completely matter-of-fact. “Raccoons tear stuff up all the time.” There was no questioning in her voice. I nodded.
“You're probably right.” It only took a few second to convince myself. “It was probably a frigging raccoon.” Keep in mind that I had, in fact, experienced raccoon mayhem many times in my life. They can actually cause some pretty serious damage if they want to get in to or out of something, and it wasn't hard to make myself believe it. I debated with myself whether to tell Lauren about the blood stained clearing, but decided that she was taking things way too well, and there was no reason to duck that up. So we spent a few minutes discussing strategies for getting home. She asked if John and I could fix the boat – I said probably not. She asked if we could swim to shore – I said probably, if we were really desperate. She checked her phone for signal – she didn't have any. None of us did. We were still brainstorming options, none all the well thought-out, when John found us.
“Guys,” he said, “I'm worried about Lisa.” That got our attention. “She won't say anything,” he said. He was looking at the ground, brow knitted. “I don't know what to do.”
Lauren nodded. “She wouldn't talk to me this morning. I'm worried too. Maybe she really did have some kind of seizure or something. Has she ever said anything to you about... anything like that? Medical stuff?” Lauren sounded almost... hopeful. Hopeful for an answer that made sense.
“Nah,” John said, shaking his head. “I mean... nothing like this. I don't know what to do,” he repeated. We spent some time in a little circle, discussing “escape” plans, but nothing great came to mind. To reiterate, the island wasn't far terribly far from shore, and John and I were strong swimmers, so if we got REALLY desperate, we could make it for help. Still, the water was shallow in places, full of sharp-as-hell oyster bars, and potentially swarming with bull sharks, so that was a resort that we weren't freaked out enough to use just yet.
Anyway, we end up going back to camp. It's probably about eleven o'clock, maybe closer to noon. It's hot as hell, there's tons of biting flies and no-see ums, and there's no spirit of fun. Nobody wants to go swimming to cool off, nobody wants to tell jokes. It's just the three of us trying to make stiff conversation, while little miss sunshine is sitting there, still dead silent. Occasionally Lisa would look up at one of us, suddenly, and stare. Mostly she'd just keep her eyes locked on the dead fire.
At one point John left to go work on the boat. I was going to go too, but Lauren made it clear that she didn't want to be “alone.” There was no reason to point out that she wasn't alone – she was with Lisa. But that didn't need to be said. John was gone for an hour or two, and he came back looking dejected. I knew that was coming – the motor was trashed.
So the afternoon passes by, with the three of us basically stunned into inaction. I mean, looking back, I'm thinking the same thing anybody reading this is – why weren't you guys building a raft, or making a shelter, or tying up Lisa? I know, I know. But we were young, and, again, nothing outright crazy was going on. We were caught somewhere in the doldrums between calm and panic.
Twilight starts to come on, and we've spent the entire day doing basically nothing. At one point Lauren and I went and gathered more firewood, so we were set for the night. Around six o'clock, John led Lisa by the hands into the tent, and laid her down. I remember looking at her through the round door, just before John zipped it up. She was laying on her back, like a corpse, eyes wide open staring at the roof of the tent.
With Lisa in the tent, we started conversing somewhat normally again. We got the fire going again as twilight was coming on, popped a few more beers, and, for a little while, we forgot about the obvious problems and started having some fun. I mean, again, the boat was weird, but it probably WAS just a raccoon. We were easily within reach of land if it came to that, and it probably wouldn't, because there was usually a lot of boat traffic around the bay, checking crab traps, or fishing, or even coming to the island to hang out. The blood, I convinced myself, was just from some predation event. And Lisa, although acting weird as duck, was probably asleep in the tent and not actively bringing us down.
The good mood lasted until well past full dark. I don't know what time exactly, but it had been dark awhile. John got up to piss, but he'd only gone a few paces before he stopped.
“Um, guys...” I remember he muttered. Lauren and I turned, both mid-laugh. The smiles drained from our faces like something you'd see in a movie. The door to John's tent was unzipped, wide open. And the tent was empty.
“You've got to be ducking kidding me,” Lauren hissed. We were both up instantly. John was in his tent, rifling for a flashlight. A moment later, I was in my backpack, grabbing the battery-lanterns I'd brought. I handed one to Lauren, who took it with hesitation. She obviously knew what it meant, and didn't like it.
“We've got to find her,” I said. Lauren just stared at me, wide-eyed, and shook her head.
“We've got to find her,” I said. Lauren just stared at me, wide-eyed, and shook her head.
“How the hell did she unzip the tent and leave without any of us noticing? Or hearing her?” John said. His voice was tinged with panic, kind of high pitched. He was shining his mag-light beam in random directions, the white light cutting through the dark pine woods. “Let's split up,” he said.
“Fuuuuuuck that,” was my instant reply. “I don't know if you've never seen a horror movie, but there is no way I'm leaving Lauren alone, and there's no way I'M going out there, alone, right now.” My speech might not have been that sensible, but it was something very similar. Lauren obviously agreed, so John formed up with us, and as a small triangle of bodies and flashlights, we set out down the weedy trail that started nearest to the tent.
To re-use the phrase, we went about this “Amish Search” for awhile. Arms pretty much linked, eyes and lights facing in every direction. We'd grown up on Scooby-Doo, we weren't letting anybody fall through a trap-door, or a reversible book-shelf. When we'd first left camp, we'd been shouting Lisa's name, but after about ten minutes, we gave up. She absolutely would have heard us, but she absolutely wasn't answering. So we searched in silence, girding ourselves against the seemingly inevitable horror movie moment where the cat leaps out of the closet while the guy with the hatchet is under the bed.
Anyway, we work our way around pretty much the entire island. If it was, hypothetically, midnight when we started looking, it was probably three or four in the morning now. I could tell from the sky that dawn was a while off. Suddenly we realize we've come around to the boat. Lauren breaks from the group a bit, and goes over to the boat. John and I, who are still peering into the woods, hear her gasp.
We both whirl around. I mean, our nerves are raw, and Lauren's gasp is probably the first human sound we've heard in two hours. She raises an arm to shield her eyes from the flashlight beams we've leveled on her, then gestures toward the boat.
“No way...” I remember John groaning.
The fiberglass had been scratched to hell. Deep gouges and shallow lines were etched into every surface of the boat. The cushions of the seats were shredded, fiber padding strewn from, literally, bow to stern. We ran the lights over the exterior of the hull, looking at the frantic, deep gouges in the material. It seemed, in hindsight, that there were ALMOST patterns there, but there weren't. I wish I could say something really 2-spooky, like they were cave drawings of mastodons, or 666, or skulls and cross-bones or something. But it wasn't. It was like a three year old scribbling in a coloring book.
And then we noticed the broken oyster shells spread around the boat. It was somewhere between low and high tide, so water was lapping at the stern of the boat, but the bow was high and dry. And in the damp sand were dozens of broken shells, many with curls of plastic and fiberglass still stuck to the sharp tips.
I remember Lauren stifled a moan, and then started crying. I put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.
“I want to go home,” she cried. I remember her face, turning red. Her eyes, pink, tears pooling and running down her cheeks. John wasn't doing any better. He had returned his flashlight beam to the woods, and he was whipping it around without any purpose. Panic was obviously setting in. It was nipping at me, but I guess I was just in a slightly better place than my friends. I started to say:
“Guys, let's just take a few deep breaths and rel--”
And then John screamed, and then Lauren screamed. John's flashlight beam had stopped, and was illuminating Lisa. She was on the edge of the trees, her face pale and her hair a messy tangle of pine straw and twigs. As in response to John and Lauren's ejaculations, Lisa began screaming as well. I don't know how the duck I managed to hold it together, but I recall thinking something kind of silly. I thought “At least Lisa is talking again.”
So I started shaking Lauren by her shoulders. She dropped her lantern to the ground. John had gotten himself under control, as had Lisa apparently, because silence descended over the beach. The only sound, as usual, was the lapping of wavelets against the shore.
At this point, I'd like to make another hindsight observation. I can't believe I didn't think about it then, but I also realize my mind wasn't exactly functioning in a logical way right then. Maybe John or Lauren noticed it, but they never mentioned it to me. Lisa was, at this point, wearing the same khaki shorts and white t-shirt she had been wearing when we'd first arrived. The shorts she'd pissed in. The outfit she'd changed out of that very first night. And only now, looking back, do I realize that she'd been wearing that when John and I had first come back from the boat. The bloody clothes we'd found on the trail? Those were the clothes she'd changed in to that first night in the woods.
Sorry if this seems a bit contrived, but some of this is only just now seeming obvious to me, too. So, back to the story.
Now, Lisa starts gasping and crying, and then she starts sobbing John's name. John runs over to her, and wraps his arms around her. She does the same. They're wrapped in each other's embrace, and Lisa starts panting “What's happening what's happening what's happening” over and over. Lauren and I turn to face each other, both speechless, when from the woods nearby rips this utterly terrifying howl.
Again, John and I are both pretty woodsy. John more than I, but we're both campers, we're both hikers. He hunts with his family a lot. We were both stricken by this sound. The smell from before I could describe, but this sound I really can't. If you've ever heard raccoons mating, they make this wild, high-pitched ululating sort of screech. That's the base. Put on top of that a helping of fake bigfoot groans from those awful Animal Planet specials and a maybe some T-Rex from Jurassic Park, and you can kinda imagine what I'm talking about.
The four of us freeze. John and I, the only two still holding flashlights, spin to face the sound, but there's nothing there. I hear Lauren mutter “Oh god” from beside me. I reach out an arm sideways, the way a dad does to hold his kid back when he slams on the brakes in the car. The howl comes again, this time seemingly closer. John, who's still holding Lisa by the shoulder, starts to back up toward Lauren and I, who are nearer the boat. I hear John muttering “duck duck duck duck” under his breath.
Finally, the howl bursts out once more, this time WAY too close, and there's a frantic commotion from the underbrush. Something is definitely come toward us now, and fast. John twirls Lisa around by her shoulder and starts to run, trying to close the fifty odd feet between us. As he does so, I do the same to Lauren, spinning her and running for the boat.
Now, I have no idea WHY we all instinctively ran for the boat. It was a third beached still, and the motor was dead as dirt. But, hey, we weren't really thinking at that moment. So I'm basically throwing Lauren into the boat, when I hear the muffled scuff of something hitting beach sand, and a curse from behind me. I turn to see that John and Lisa have fallen onto the beach, and John's flashlight has tumbled away from him. At the same time, Lauren slips on the wet fiberglass of the boat, and falls down into the bow, taking my flashlight with her.
This is the point that I still find hard to believe or remember, but I'm going to type out the first things that come to mind, and trust it to be as accurate as possible.
I'm looking at the vague, dark forms of John and Lisa laying the sand, maybe twenty feet away from the boat. The moon is pretty dark, maybe a quarter moon. From the brush and scrub emerges this... shape. It's human, but it's not right. It'd be hard to describe, except...
Well, Lauren and I saw a movie a year later that really “helped.” I remember when he appeared on screen for the first time, the character. I felt cold, and then a bit nauseous. Lauren simply stood up and left the theater. I followed a shortly after. It was actually one of the last times Lauren and I saw each other.
It was Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. And of course, the character was gollum.
The shape was, like I said, humanoid. Very pale. It almost shimmered in the faint moonlight. It padded across the sand four-legged, like an animal, but awkwardly. Its body was obviously not designed for quadruped locomotion.
I watched with wide eyes as it bee-lined for John's fallen flashlight. It leapt upon it like a cat on a bird, and began thrashing it against the sand, grasping it and beating it into the shore again and again. This all happened in the blink of an eye, really. John, staring at this occurring only a few feet from where he lay, managed to pull himself together and dragged Lisa back up, half running and half crawling toward the boat.
I helped him toss Lisa in, and together we began shoving at the bow of the boat, trying to get it back into the deeper water. I didn't look back at whatever was happening on the shore just behind me. The thing was squealing now, like a pig in shit, as the saying goes. I could still hear the thumping of the light hitting the dense, wet sand. And there was the light itself, of course. The beam of light was slicing up and down toward us, illuminating the boat, then up into the sky, then back down.
And then nothing. It went dark. Immediately the thumping stopped. John and I had succeeded in getting the entire boat back into the water, but it was still very shallow. Our feet were wet, but the water wasn't even up to our ankles. The girls were now screaming from where they were laying in the bow of the boat.
And then the thing screamed from behind us. If it was terrifying before, from the woods, it was far worse when the thing was screeching down the backs of our shirts. I turned to look, and what I saw... well, I don't have any trouble remembering. THAT part of the story, I don't need any help to describe.
It was like a silver back gorilla. Not so thick and muscular, but the same pose. It rested on its legs, hunched low. Two stringy, muscular arms beat the sand around it in a rage. I couldn't see the face that clearly, after all, it was dark. But I was struck by a sense of humanity. There were two eyes, there was a nose, there was a mouth. Perhaps a bit distorted, but not so noticeably as the body. At least not in the shadows of the sliver of a moon.
Anyway, it howled again and seemed poised to charge at us. What I did next was purely reflex. I reached down into the bow, and yanked from beneath the prone body of my terrified girlfriend the lantern she had pulled from my hands.
At the time, I meant to throw it AT the thing. But I missed. I missed bad. The lantern whirled past its shoulder, and landed with a puff of sand at the edge of the beach, just short of the palmettos.
The thing seemed surprised, it sniffed the air. Then it turned, and in an instant, it was after the light.
John and I couldn't move for a few moments, but the urgency of the moment took over again. We were shoving at the boat, using every ounce of ability. Finally there was a squeak, and the boat was free of the sand. We pushed more, forcing it into hip deep water. Then we both climbed in, and turned, and watched.
We could still see the frantic movement of the lantern, just a beam of light, being pounded against the sand. Occasionally we would hear a squeal or a groan from the thing on the beach. Finally, after thirty or forty seconds, the light flickered and went black. Then there was silence. The only sound was the lapping of the water against the side of the boat.
The current, luckily, was taking us away from the island. We drifted for a few hours before the sun started to come up. By then, we were close enough to the mainland to entertain the idea of swimming in. Lisa, though, was still pretty much out of it. She was talking, and crying, but nobody thought it was a good idea to put her in the water. So we waited.
Eventually we drifted near another boat, a charter fishing guide out with a client. We babbled some story to him. I'm sure he assumed we were just some dumb, drunk kids who got lost and almost died of heatstroke. Either way, he towed us in.
And that's about the entire story. Like I said, we told plenty of people. It wasn't some great secret among us, but nobody believed it. Lisa and John broke up almost instantly. They didn't even really break up, John just never saw or spoke to her again.
Lauren and I lasted a bit longer – we just stopped talking about the event one day, until that night at the movies. I drove her home. We talked a few times on Trillian, but we never saw each other again.
And then eleven years go by, and some stupid stories on the Internet stir all this shit back up, and I get a bug up my butt to write it down. Sorry to add another creepy-pasta to the pile. Even sitting here, re-reading this, I keep telling myself it must've just been some cracked out homeless island bum, or even one of our older siblings playing the king of pranks. But I just don't know. And I guess I never will.
