Jack Allen hanged himself. His friends and family reported to investigators that his behavior had changed drastically: hardly sleeping at night, avoiding going out in public, and he even quit his job, which he was passionate about, out of a lack of interest. Yet for as much as doctors pried for the cause of his stress, Jack refused to discuss the topic, often becoming violent if his doctor was adamant about a discussion. So none of them ever did learn what happened to him on the night of October 11th.
He had gone camping in a nearby forest with the objective of stargazing for the weekend. He found a great clearing where he pitched his tent and set up his telescope. On the windless night, Jack was left in solitude with no other surrounding life besides the coniferous tress that stretched from the mountains to the north to the river to the south. While gaping and gawking at the stars, he heard the occasional snapping twig or branch from within the confines of the forest over his radio broadcast. He didn't think much of them, suspecting the activity to be nocturnal animals going about their nightly business. They sometimes distracted him from his telescope, and he inspected the brush where the noises were coming from. With the limited light thrown by his campfire, he didn't see much beyond the first row of trees.
Jack produced a flashlight from his tent, clicked it on, and aimed the cone of light into the forest. The shadows of trees danced as he shifted his light, but he saw no signs of animal life. He thought that whatever animal that was skulking through the brush was either an expert at elusiveness or too small to detect. But then he heard more snapping noises.
“Excuse me, sir!”
Jack found the source of the call to be a man in the forest heading toward his camp.
The man shielded his eyes from the bright light and shouted, “Excuse me, sir. I'm a park ranger looking to ask you some questions.”
Jack switched off his flashlight and turned the knob on his radio to hush the volume. Once the man had stepped through the last of the brush, Jack asked, “Who are you?”
“I'm Raymond Biggs,” the man introduced himself.
“Hiking through the trees without any light?” Jack asked, noticing no source of light on his body and especially not in his arms, which carried a hunting rifle. The sight of it made Jack somewhat uneasy, even though it wasn't the usual first choice of gun for a man looking to hold up another.
“It'll alert my prey to my presence,” Ray explained. He held up his hand, and Jack shook it.
The clothing Ray wore was not the uniform of a park ranger but that of a hunter seeking to camouflage himself with the terrain. Even his face was masked with black paint that failed to hide his baggy eyes.
“What are you hunting?” Jack asked. The man, he thought, was equipped just as well for wrestling bears as he was for hunting them, for strapped to his chest was a serrated hunting knife, and holstered around his hip was a loaded magnum. Sagging from his shoulders was a backpack—camouflaged with the same fake vegetation as his hat—fat with supplies not just for camping in the wild but for surviving in it.
Ray slowly opened his mouth to speak while he thought up a believable explanation. “Difficult to explain.”
Without any hunting experience or knowledge of what lurked in the forest besides what the various trail signs warned him of, Jack found that he had no choice but to accept the man's answer with an understanding nod. “So, what did you want to ask me?”
“A few questions about what you've encountered out here tonight.”
“Like animals?”
“Yes,” Ray said with a nod. “Have you seen or heard any?”
“I heard some branches and twigs snapping in the trees, but I guess that was just you,” Jack answered.
“What about on the way here?”
As Jack thought about his hike to the clearing, he heard the light crackle of static escaping his radio speakers and said, “Just some birds and squirrels.”
“Anything else? Anything larger?” Ray asked.
Jack shook his head without much additional thought for an answer.
“There has to be something,” Ray said almost desperately.
Jack retraced his steps in his mind, but after thinking for more than a few seconds, he shared his realization with Ray: “If I had seen anything like a mountain lion, I would have remembered.”
“Right, right,” Ray mumbled to himself. He thought for a couple of seconds with his eyes aimed at the radio fizzling static and then asked, “Notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“Like?”
Ray shrugged a shoulder while saying, “Like snapped branches along the trail. Unusual footprints.”
The items mentioned reminded Ray of a documentary he had seen on television and asked, “Are you hunting Bigfoot?” Though he said it as a joke, his tone was serious.
“No, sir,” Ray replied, serious himself. “But as you might have guessed, there is a dangerous beast on the loose in the forest.”
“Like a bear or an escaped zoo animal?”
Ray accepted air into his mouth as a hiss, then he said, “It's just as I said before: difficult to explain.”
“Right,” Jack said, disappointed by Ray's answer.
“There's been several unexplained disappearances and attacks the last two weeks. I'm sure I don't need this to explain to you, because you're a grown man, but I'm going to warn you, anyway: please be careful, and don't wander into the trees for any reason. But if you feel that your life is in any sort of danger, yell loud as you can, and I will hear you.”
“Even down by the river?” Jack asked with some humor, waving a finger south.
“Yes, sir,” he said with a nod as confident as his tone. “You'd be amazed at how well sound carries in this forest.”
“Hopefully, we won't need to find out,” Jack said with a smirk.
“Hopefully,” Ray said with a small smile. “Now if you excuse me...” Then he ran off in the direction of the river—away from the thing he had been hunting. Jack watched as he blended into the darkness and waited until he couldn't hear the cushioned stomping of his boots against the pine needles carpeting the forest floor before readjusting the radio volume and returning to his telescope.
As he rotated the scope from star to constellation, he hummed the song the radio played. Just as it was getting to the chorus, the pops and crackles of static joined in for an unwelcome duet until static had stolen the limelight.
“Come on,” Jack complained, and twisted the dial. However, the sound didn't improve, so he tried other stations but discovered them all to be static. “Don't tell me a radio tower is down,” he groaned. As he continued to toy with the dial, the sound cleared, and the only static he received was from the vacant slots in between stations. He returned to his preferred station, waited to see if the static would return, and then his throat rumbled from a groan as he replaced his eye over the telescope eyepiece. His irritation drained the more absorbed he became in the nighttime sky.
Pops and crackles spattered the song, and when they had suffocated the lyrics, Jack spat, “Are you kidding me?” He spun the dial faster this time and found brief seconds of clarity. Yet when he channeled the numbers to where he had caught a weak signal, he discovered it to be missing. He banged a fist on the radio, half-expecting the impact to cure the sudden interference.
From the brush to the north, twigs and branches laying on the ground broke. Jack didn't notice the noises until they had circled to the northeast portion of the forest. He stopped fiddling with the radio dial and decreased the volume so that he could hear the noises better. They stopped then, and the radio static did as well after a few seconds. He stood still, staring into the forest, waiting for the slightest movement to betray the whereabouts of the lurking beast. But for as long as he watched and waited, he saw and heard nothing more.
Though his nerves were on edge, Jack concluded that he was being paranoid. He turned the radio up loud enough to check for any static and heard its unbearable singing. He cursed the radio and shut it off, deciding to spend the remainder of his night with it off. He mumbled his complaint about the radio, and, as he bent down to peer through his telescope, he checked the forest again and found it desolate.
One eye closed, and the other filled with brilliant salt grains. Before they could drain his irritation from the radio again, they vanished from Jack's sight, which was flooded with the telescope and ground fleeing as he rose into the air. He cursed and whipped his head around, searching for whatever had picked him up like a rag doll. In spite of feeling something coiled around his body, something that felt like a grand hand, and being able to see the wrinkles and presses in his clothing from said hand, he saw nothing lifting him up.
With his arms bound by the unseen beast, Jack could do little more than kick his feet and scream in various directions, “You'd better drop me, you son of a bitch!”
His captor did not listen and lifted him higher, turning him so that he could see his small camping setup. The telescope and tent pointed their shadows toward the forest, but there were no other shadows cast by the campfire.
“What the—?” Jack said, his breath thieved. He felt like he was seated in the gondola of a malfunctioning top spin as the world spun around in random routes. No spot was clear long enough for him to gain his bearings before the ride resumed, and the pitch of his screams rose and fell as he was whipped to and fro. Between the blurred lines the world had become and his brain being tossed about within his skull, by the time the ride had ended, Jack's head pounded, and he was too disoriented to resume his shouting.
Jack was lowered—but was still airborne—and returned to an upright position, and the constriction around his left side eased. He took full advantage of this and, after some struggling, slipped his left arm free. Fist curled, he hammed it down where he still felt the constriction. His fist landed with a faint smacking sound, and the object he had struck was soft—fleshy, even. Confused, disturbed, and overcome with the desire to wash his hands, he hesitated for a moment before raising his arm for a second strike.
However, it caught on something, and when Jack inspected, he found nothing visible suspending his fist in the air. Yet he could feel two cool fleshy objects pinching his wrist with the same delicacy someone might when handling an insect they didn't wish to harm. He tugged on his arm, but it didn't budge.
“You'd better let go of me, or else you'll regret it!”
The beast holding his arm dragged it about, pulling and twisting it as much as it could in any direction before Jack's threats turned to hollers of pain as he thought his arm would be ripped from its socket in his shoulder. When his arm dropped free after several of these pulls, he let the burning sensation in his shoulder cool. His mouth, however, did not rest: “You piece of—” he said, winded and glaring in the direction he suspected the face to be. “Just you wait until I'm free,” he said, not believing his own words.
The end of a rifle gun barrel flashed from an explosion as a bullet tore through the air and embedded itself into invisible flesh. A pain-filled yelp pierced the air, and Jack fell to the ground and onto his back, where shimmering stars splashed across his vision. Though his shoulder ached, he wasted no time in sitting up but then found gooseflesh draping his skin.
Plumes of dirt kicked up along the campground, with a trail leading back to the forest. Ray used this trail to fire at the unseen beast, but none of his bullets freed screams into the air. The brush along the forest perimeter rustled, and Ray fired another bullet but missed and struck a tree. “Damn!” He cut through the clearing to where it had entered the forest and aimed his rifle inward. Using the sounds of the terrain it trampled over, he fired a shot but didn't hear anything that sounded like a wounded creature. “Dammit!” He fired another shot but missed his target for the third time. “Dammit!” He nearly hurled his rifle at the ground, and the crunching and snapping sounds were too faded to be of any use now. Ray growled and cursed his horrible luck as he walked over to the shivering Jack, whose glazed eyes were fixated on the forest. “Are you all right?” Ray asked, knowing it was a stupid question.
Through the trembles of his lip, all Jack could muster for a response was, “W-w-wh-wha-wh-w—”
“Easy,” Ray said, and placed his fingers on Jack's shoulder. “No need to force yourself.”
Murmurs and soft squeaks leaked from Jack's mouth, and Ray looked to where the beast had fled and said, “Damn thing got another.” He sighed and hung his head. “I'm sorry,” he said to Jack. “I should have stayed.” He gritted his teeth, pounded the ground with his fist and shouted, “Why am I so damn useless?!”
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