Working the night shift at the park is boring, but bearable. I'm all alone in my little hut by the parking lot gate, with no one to bother me; I usually just bring a game with me to pass the time. Nothing happens at night. Usually. I do have to throw out the occasional troublemaking teens or wandering crack head looking for a place to sleep, but that's no big deal. On that night, though, while I was cycling through the cameras, I could just barely make out a white glow in the black-and-white feed: a campfire. My adrenaline immediately spiked. I had just finished my first patrol; How long had that been out there? When did they get in? Where did they get in? I gathered my flashlight and radio and left the warmth of my hut to go out into the night. Woods are spooky enough at night, but I'd been at this job for three years; I knew every tree and root and knot in this forest, and because of that familiarity, I rarely used my flashlight. Out here, at night, I was the spooky thing in the woods. Without the distraction of a flashlight, my eyes could adjust to the dark, and I would see any intruders long before they saw me.
The campfire's glow stood out among the dark trees; small and flickering, barely alive. I couldn't hear any voices, so I assumed my trespassers must have gone to sleep. I crept closer to the makeshift campsite to find three sleeping bags, all empty. Discarded beer cans, food wrappers, and cigarette butts littered the site. So they were inconsiderate as well as stupidly dangerous -- leaving the fire unattended could easily have ballooned into a wildfire if no one had caught it. I decided to wait at the campsite and catch the idiots upon their return; they had to come back for their stuff eventually. I decided to busy myself by snooping in a notebook left lying on one of the sleeping bags. Reading by firelight, I read the notes they'd made about Shadow Cave, an area of the park which had always been the subject of local rumors: weird figures seen at sunset, odd noises in the night. Nonsense. I didn't put any stock into ghost stories, but this group of idiots whose camp I was in clearly did. There were notes about the various "sightings" people wrote about online; a crude drawing of some kind of maze; and a printed-out picture of the petroglyphs outside the cave, showing some basic human figures lying on the ground, and another standing over them. The standing figure was... tall, thin, with arms outstretched that seemed to be longer than its own height. Definitely odd, but I'd always heard that it was probably a depiction of some ancient chief or warrior or whatever.
I waited another ten minutes, but they never showed up, and the dark sky was beginning to lighten with the first blue hues of sunrise, which meant I had to finish my rounds and get back to the hut to end my shift. With one last glance around the camp, I smothered the dying embers of the fire with handfuls of dirt, then rolled up the sleeping bags and stuffed their garbage into the backpacks, and hauled it all back to the guard hut. If they wanted to get their crap back, they'd have to talk to the day shift guard.
It's an unfortunate fact that people litter in the park all the time. That's just human nature, I guess: to be inconsiderate. My point is that the abandoned sleeping bags and trash weren't unusual, but the backpacks and notebook left a weird feeling in my stomach. Those things were personal, they had more than just monetary value to their owners, right? It didn't sit right with me; even after I'd had time to sleep through the morning and go about my day, I couldn't stop thinking about it. As my evening call time neared, I headed in to the park a little early to touch base with the day guard. I asked him if he'd seen anybody in the sector where I'd found the camp, and he said he hadn't. I asked if anyone had come by to claim the backpacks and sleeping bags, which were still sitting in the breakroom; he said no one had. The pit in my stomach grew, but I tried to ignore it. They'd come around eventually, or they wouldn't. There was no sign of a struggle or injury at the scene, and nothing to really identify the trespassers, so there wasn't much I could really do about it, legally. I was a security guard, not a detective. Even still, something nagged at me: Shadow Cave. I'd had to break up more than one clandestine party or thrill-seeking hookup in the cave, but those kinds of visitors didn't typically plan it out like those campers had, with notes and sketches. You didn't need an itinerary for a secret make-out session in a cave.
I clocked in and did my usual beginning-of-shift duties: checking the cameras, cursory inventory inspection; then, when it was time for my hourly rounds, I took a golf cart and headed down the forest trail to the edge of the property; the southern boundary of the park was a cliff face, maybe 30 feet tall, that rose up from the forest floor to create a natural wall around this part of the park; in this cliff face was a crag, a recess big enough to walk into; and within this crag was a hole, just big enough for one person at a time to slip through. This hole was the entrance to Shadow Cave. It wasn't very big, but could comfortably fit a small group of people. Summer camp groups sometimes used it to tell spooky stories in. Upon sidling through the cave entrance, I flicked on my flashlight. There was a crushed beer can on the stony floor; the same kind of cheap, bland beer as was at the campsite -- but the shine of dull metal was what really caught my eye: a sledgehammer, laying discarded on the ground.
Shadow Cave had a unique feature that always fascinated guests, and sparked all of those internet rumors: a two-foot-square section that, unlike the rest of the naturally rocky cave walls, was flat and smooth, as if it had been sanded down, or like a slab that had been set into the rock. Normally, this odd "slab" was adorned with an ancient petroglyph, barely visible after hundreds of years. It was a circular maze with crisscrossing paths, dead ends, and no entrance or exit, no goal at the center: an endless labyrinth.
This slab had been smashed to pieces using that damn sledgehammer.
Where the slab used to be, I could now see a yawning black hole, boring back into the cliff rock. My mouth suddenly felt very dry, my flashlight beam wobbling from the shaking of my hand. I crept closer to the hole and shone my light inside, expecting to see some undiscovered burial chamber or another section of the cave. I felt my stomach turn as I saw that there was no chamber, just a small tunnel stretching on and on and on into the rock, so deep that the inky blackness ate my light. The walls of the tunnel were black and shiny like obsidian. As much as my brain screamed for me to run, I looked down at the broken shards of the slab and picked one up. On one side were the etched lines of the labyrinth, and on the opposite site... deep, long scratches dug into the back side of the rock, as if some animal had desperately tried to claw its way out. There was a sound outside the cave, like a long rattling wheeze through a wooden flute. I immediately killed my flashlight and crept to the cave entrance, opening my eyes wide to adjust to the darkness. Why did I use my damn light??
"hheeeeee..." the sound came again, piercing and hollow like a cold wind. The pitch black of night slowly became gray-blue as my eyes adjusted. From the cave mouth I could only see the opposite wall of the crag. I poked my head out, followed by one arm and leg, moving slowly to try and stay silent.
"hheeeee..." It sounded further away that time, just barely. I was now more than halfway out of the cave, staring into the forest for signs of movement. I knew exactly how to get back to the guard hut from here; I could make a break for the golf cart, but surely it would take too long to start before whoever was making that noise found me. Plus, I could run faster than it could drive. I waited, bracing myself with both hands against the crag walls as I listened for breaking twigs or rustling leaves, or that damn whistle. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. I had to be quick. I took a few fast, deep breaths to get the blood flowing, before pushing off from the rock walls, propelling myself forward to sprint through the woods. I was the night hunter. I knew every tree and root and knot in this forest-- until I hit something new. My foot caught and I hit the ground hard, curling up in pain as my mouth suddenly filled with blood. I'd landed on my chin and bit off the end of my tongue. Pain jolted through my head, I saw stars, keeping a hand over my mouth to contain the scream I so desperately wanted to let out. It was then that I saw what I'd tripped over: a shoe, wedged in between the roots. No, there was a whole leg, a knee, a hand! And then we made eye contact. There was a girl in the roots. The girl was the roots. Her blue eyes gaped at me in the dark, ants crawling out of her open mouth as she managed to croak out "we're... sorrryyy...". She wasn't alone. Her two friends, two boys, were the bark. Their fingers swayed uselessly as branches above my head, dark golden sap oozed from their eyes down to their open, petrified mouths.
"hheeeeee..." came the wheezing sound from somewhere behind me. I scrambled to my feet and whipped around, staring into the woods. The first thing I saw was its maybe-face: in the darkness between the tree trunks I saw a bone white head with a gaping, elongated mouth, stretched into something resembling a wail, and two black, hollow holes where eyes should have been. Its body looked like a huge, emaciated hare; crouching on two long, twig-like legs, spine curled forward like a pathetic baby bird, and a bony tail that scraped the ground as it sized me up.
"hheeeee..." it sighed like wind through a pinhole, and then it stood. I ran faster than I ever have before, screaming for help with blood pouring down my chin and my tongue searing with pain. I ran so fast and so long that my lungs burned, until I slammed into the guard hut at full speed and pushed off to redirect myself to the parking lot. I scraped my keys around the lock until it finally went in; I fell into the car and sped off away from the park at full speed. The cops who pulled me over thought I must have bitten my tongue off while high on drugs -- which also explained my driving and rambling about things in the woods -- despite my labs coming back clean at the hospital. They charged me with a DUI anyway, and after an investigation at the park, I was promptly fired. They never did find those missing kids, even with the search party. I work in a bank now, and I've never gone back in the woods.