The Trail of Fear

It was Friday. Everyone was anxious to get out of school. Nobody listened to the teachers, I mean it was a FRIDAY. The minute our high school was let out, everyone booked it to the nearest car and peeled out.

Now our town is fairly small. It dates back to the 1880's when it was founded by some family from New York. It's even on a small lake, which makes the town that much better.

Now, on a Friday night in a small town like this, teenagers run out of things to do. Sure, you can watch TV and sit around, but that gets REAL boring REAL fast. So, eager to free ourselves from a prison of boredom, My friends and I ventured out into the night.

We had basically been everywhere in town that there is to go. Although, we had decided to go to the woods surrounding the south end of the lake, which pretty much everyone subconsciously avoided. Since no one in our group had really explored this region, we thought "Hey, we have nothing to do we might as well, Right?" It was true that we had nothing better to do. Anyways, we parked the car by the road and followed one of the paths.

It was a long narrow path, that weaved in and out of the forests. It was a warm night, a night with that breeze that goes over your shoulder and lets you know that summer is coming your way. We walked and walked, and we came across a bridge. This bridge was fairly new and we stopped and threw stones and rocks into the water, and talked about how school was going and so on. Well, nobody really noticed this at first glance, but nearby the bridge there was an old dock, not just old, but REALLY old. The nails were so old that the rust practically deteriorated them into nothing. Also, there was an old oak tree with lanky branches hanging over the water, directly at the end of the dock.

We were all looking down at the water, and we noticed a series of bubbles. We blew them off at first, thinking they were from a frog or turtle. Then the bubbles became larger and ascended quicker and quicker. Never seeing something like this before, we had our eyes glued to it. It was pretty interesting. Until we saw what was making the bubbles. From the moment we saw what it was, to the moment we sprinted out of the woods, I had enough time to get a good look at it. It was a small human figure. It's skin was tightly wound to it's bones, and its eyes were sunken into a dead gaze. They eyes are something hard to forget. They were bulging out of its skull, like a dead fish or animal after it dies. As I ran away, I looked back at the bridge and saw a hand grab onto the railing just as it went out of sight. We never went back.