Scary/Horror Stories.

Watchmen Woods

My name isn't really important...but for the sake of this story, let's just say I'm Ruby. Yeah, that works. In any case, I'm currently a junior in high school, I've got a lot of friends, and I'm happy with life. But all of this happened during my sophomore year, and trust me, nothing has ever been the same since.

I'll start with the town lore. A few hundred years back, there was a huge spike in the number of missing people around the area we call Watchmen Woods. It's a fairly large forest, and it's dense too. The limbs are so tightly woven together and the trunks are so close it's like a maze. No daylight reaches that place. But back then I guess there were a lot less trees and a lot more valuable resources other than just a squishy swamp. And well, the people that went in there sometimes, didn't come back out. And the ones that did were never, ever the same. They'd become mute most of the time, their eyes glued to those woods. Then the people started coming back.

I know, the usual set up for a creepy story. But these people weren't the same either. They all had a dead look in their eyes, but they smiled as if the forest was the most wonderful place on earth. Now, they were always so obvious when you saw them, but somehow they were still able to lure people in behind them. That's how the majority of people around here went missing, because they saw their loved ones and wanted to bring them home. There hadn't been a missing persons report in town since like 1950, but people still listened to this "bedtime story" because, well, those woods were fucking creepy. Until January of my sophomore year though, and news spread that Chloe was gone. Just up and vanished.

"What if she went into the woods?" My friend Trevor asked me one day. "You know how interested she was in the folklore. That girl could have gotten herself killed for all we know."

"Take it down a notch Trevor." I hissed, pulling him to the side. "We can't just go saying things like that. There hasn't been a Watchmen Woods incident in decades!"

"Don't you think it's about time there was?"

That last sentence chilled me to the bone. The rest of the day I was pretty shaken up, so was everyone else in school. I was pretty quiet until I got home to find that my mom was out shopping and my dad was still at work. I kicked back in the recliner and watched some television until I saw a news report about Chloe. Five-two, seventeen, wavy black hair and blue eyes. They had a pretty picture of her up on the screen and it sort of hurt to see her there. I went to turn off the TV, and that's when I heard it. Someone was outside my god damn house. And they were calling my name.

"Ruby!" The silky female tone appeared to be coming from my back door. "Ruby, come here! It's me, Chlo-"

That's all I heard before I was up and off the couch, sprinting towards the back door. When I got there I practically tossed it off of its hinges and whipped my head from side to side, looking for the girl. There was no way in hell she knew where I lived. We weren't even that close, but she was still my friend.

At the time we had one of those old wooden peg-styled fences, where there were two vertical posts and there'd be circular gouges cut in the sides to put in two horizontal wooden posts with tapered ends to fit the holes. The latch on the back gate was nothing more than a pin and two circles, so I pulled the pin and ran to the edge of the woods. Oh, I forgot to mention that didn't I? We lived right on the edge of Watchmen Woods. So close that I could almost smell the wafting scent of death from the bogs and the broken carcasses from animals and whatever else that got trapped in them.

"Chloe?!" I shouted, looking around. "Chloe, are you there?!"

No answer. I took a deep breath and pretty much gagged from the lungful I got. Deciding that enough was enough I went back inside to wait for my parents to get home, but I didn't tell them about it. What would I say? "Oh yeah, the girl who went missing was at our back door and she was sucked up into the woods like everyone else who goes missing around here"? No. That wouldn't do anyone good.