Don't go into the woods alone

P State Park

I live in a sad tourist hot spot called Deaths Door by the locals. Growing up you start to become desensitized by the weird things that happen here, but i'll get to that later. The county that I live in recently was featured as the best vacation spot in 2019 for some magazine I don't remember that my boss told me. It's true, my home town gets as many as two million visitors that its sad population of 1,000 something barely covers the minimum amount of workers needed to maintain its popularity. As a kid I had a job to do before I could even process it. But that's just how it works, we maintain this life style until we become the old people who retire and decide to succumb to god's siren call that is death in this shitty waste land. Don't get me wrong, this place is pretty great---if you can drink and enjoy your 500th sunset in a row, but for bored high schooler's like me, it gets old pretty quick. Especially when everyone leaves in the fall and you are left with nothing to do and no one to talk to.
That leaves me to that start of my story. Being a kid in high school is hard, especially when your the only girl in a set of triplets. I'll spare you the details, but I decided to stray away from my usual cleaning of hotel rooms for my aunt and look for a different job to get away from my life. That's what led me to my current job, an outdoor staff at my local bike store. I had seen commercials of the place at the local outdoor theater and it was only a five minute walk from my house. (Three minutes are for the walk down my driveway)I had met the owners at a job fair in my school and after an interview was hired. Many weird things have happened at the shop, but for the sake of the story i'll only explain some of the things in the woods.
My job consisted of setting people up on the right size bikes, connecting burly carts, and attaching these damn things called tag-a-longs that are a pain in the ass to use. I usually had two other outdoor staff with me, and we liked to hide away in the bike garage and goof off. Now, being a relatively small young girl going into my sophomore year in high school, it really didn't seem like I would be a good fit for the job---but I loved it. I had always been a active kid and being around my brothers my whole life gave me an advantage when conversing with my mostly male coworkers.
One coworker in particular that I was close to, i'll name him E, had recently got accepted to a college my cousins went to, so we would talk to each other about that and other things. I had met E during school, the play, and sports, but never really TALKED to him, just a friendly hello or occasional question. Now, the thing to remember about E is that he is more than a foot taller than me. He's a 6'8, kind of a skinny kid with a messy head of blond hair to top it off. I once walked into the garage when the lights were off and almost shit myself when I saw him in the door frame. Despite his stature though, this kid can run. I sometimes work at a wood yard in the park after work and he ran there to say hi. It was almost four fucking miles in and less than half an hour after his shift.
Our athletic abilities and need for competition is I guess what led to the bet. E had biked the whole bike route in 35 minutes. Most of our customers take around an hour in a half or two hours to finish the trails considering that it's a ten mile loop. My need to be the best took over, and I spent the whole summer trying to beat his record. Long story short it was a tie, but it did lead to my eventual love of biking.
The trails that we advertise to bikers are usually a type of crushed limestone, and run either along the side of a cliff near a road or by the shore. I usually take some back roads before entering the park, but the weird things always happen in or around the park. When I would bike in the summer, it was always small things. A black squirrel almost running into your bike, a chewed up snake in the path, deer with weird marks on their body. The most unsettling would be the vanishing footprints. When it would rain, the trails would become mush and you would be able to make indents and footprints easily. Sometimes, after a big rain storm, you could see these random footprints that would start out of nowhere and end the same way. I try to convince myself that they probably just got caught in the rain and that's why they just start, but it doesn't explain why they end suddenly or why I saw them at the beginning of the loop when for sure I didn't see them when I entered. Most of the time I didn't think anything about it because there were always people near by. In the summer the trails were never empty. That was until the fall came and all shit went loose.
At first it was the cats. On the side roads by the park one day biking I could see a lump on the side with flies swarming around it. Roadkill wasn't unusual, but the huge chunk of the cat missing was. It looked like something huge must have taken a bite of it, but it wasn't clean. Most animal bites have some level of cleanliness due to coyotes or whatever predators having sharp teeth, but no, this thing or whatever it was seemed to have a hard time chewing through. You could see multiple bite marks like it kept biting down till it came off. As unsettling as that was already, I wish I could say that was the last time I saw them.
Out of all the weird things biking though, the smiling people are what made me quit. They come in different forms I've noticed. My first time was a tourist looking for directions in the woods, but by far the scariest encounter was by the graveyard. It was around early October when it had just started to get dark around five o'clock. I had wanted to get in one last bike ride before it would be crowded again for Halloween and because it was my last day of work for the season. As tribute to the bike shop I was going to bike the trails again. Even E had come back from college for the weekend to celebrate the end of the season. My normal trail brought me back by the local graveyard. I usually took this route because it was faster and because it had a hill going up that I liked to challenge myself with. I was never really bothered by the graveyard as both my grandparents and other relatives were buried there. Even some of E's relatives were buried there as he had once told me he goes to visit them on his runs.
It was getting darker so I had decided to turn on my bike light, but it was still light enough that I could see vague figures and shapes. Most people like to put these solar powered little lights by their families graves, and I was looking through the rows to see if I could spot the one I had put by my Grandma. I was still on the road looking over when around fifty feet away I could see a tall skinny figure standing at the end of the row starring into the treeline. From where I was, it kind of looked like E. I mean, the height was about right, maybe a little bit taller, but who else could it be? I knew most of the locals and none of them looked like that, so I just kind of assumed maybe he was here to visit a gravesite. Mistake number one.
"Hey E! What are you doing here? I thought you had to go back?"
Mistake number two. It was like something clicked in my mind as I said those words. I was broken out of some sort of trance. Whatever those fuckers are, for some reason they always seem familiar. It's like they want you to talk to them, acknowledge them. Invite them. I didn't even realize how ridiculous I was being until it was too late. Why the fuck would E be out here this late in the first place? He sometimes visits his relatives but why wouldn't he come with family, especially if it was a big enough deal that he had to stay back from returning to college? Where was his car? I knew personally that he hated to run at night. It was like I was numb to all the warning signs until I had opened my mouth. Then it all came rushing back with a new sense of fear.
I had always been the one to not get scared easily. I would smile at the jump scares in horror movies, but the amount of sheer panic I felt as that thing turned around could kill a man. If my mind was fuzzy before, it had now become hyper focused at what was happening before me. It still haunts me to this day. From what I could make out in the dark, it had an exaggerated grin, stretching so wide it looked painful. Its mouth looked almost fake, like one of those photos dentists show their clients on pamphlets, but instead of a mouth full of healthy teeth, it's teeth were yellow and rotting. Its eyes were glassed over--grey. Like the kind that only appear when a body has been dead for a while. You could see them reflecting in the light of my bike light, but they never blinked. They stared strait forward at me.
I don't know how to describe these things. Sometimes they look like normal people, but once you talk to them, its like they lose the facade. You start to notice the flaws in their disguise. I started to notice that whatever was in front of me was definitely not human.
"Hey E!"
At this point I was so scared I didn't even think about running away. Whatever this thing is just copied what I had said. It didn't even say it in its own way. It copied MY voice. I could smell the stench of its breath as it repeated that phrase over and over, like it was mocking me. Its breath was so horrid it caused tears to form in my eyes. I could taste the bile at the back of my throat but I forced it down and kept staring back, afraid of what would happen if I looked away. Its breath smelled like death, even from a distance I could smell the putrid stench of rotten meat. I can still taste the metallic aftertaste it left in your mouth.
Nonetheless I stared it down. It felt as though I was trapped in place, petrified with fear.
Finally it stopped yelling. Instead it took a step toward me. In that single step it moved around ten feet. I think it moving broke the some kind of spell in me because in an instant I started pedaling away as fast as I could. I think my survival instincts took over as I pealed my gaze to the trail and pedaled away, but I was still far away from the park reads and more than a mile away from the main road. The hill on the way out of the cemetery didn't help. Once I got to the top I finally turned around still pedaling to see if it was following me. I shit you not, I turn around and this thing is fucking sprinting at me. I could see its arms moving back and forth as it moved at an impossible pace. If I hadn't been on a bike I would have been caught by then. I don't want to think about what would have happened then.
Seeing this thing sprint at me made me go into overdrive, I don't ever think I have biked that fast In my life. Just as I went down the hill that led to the park road I saw a car headed for me. I didn't even have time to react as my bosses pulled by and shoved me in the car. At this point I didn't even care that my bike was still in the middle of the road as we turned around and booked it. Through the window I could see the thing standing at the top of the hill I had came down, still smiling.
On the drive back I didn't even care how my Bosses knew to come get me, or what that thing was. They told me that they would go get my bike for me in the morning and that I should never bike alone again, and when my bike was parked in front of my house the next day, I didn't question it. Sometimes I feel like its better to not know. I'm still recovering from the whole ordeal. but one thing is for sure. Do not go biking alone at night.