It Finds You

We heard the stories. Everyone has. And just like everyone else, we didn’t believe them. In fairness, can you blame us? The tales, spun by frightened hikers and nature geeks, were always three degrees beyond absurd. How could we have believed them? Even in retrospect, after seeing it for myself, there’s a part of me that wants to blame my exhaustion, the firelight, sheer delirium.

But I can’t explain away what I saw that night in Cypress Park. I can’t explain it. I just pray that when you read this, you are wiser than we were.

When we arrived at Cypress Park that afternoon, fear wasn’t even a ghost of a thought in our minds. The sun was shining down bright and warm from the heavens, and with the way the emerald leaves of the trees seemed to dance in the spring breeze, it was hard to believe the world had any evil left in it at all. We were sure the stories were just that: stories. Legends whispered for a thrill around a campfire. Fables told to keep people from wandering off at night. They were words, and nothing more. There was nothing to fear. Or so we thought.

We set up camp, just like we always do. Tarps, poles, and layers of mesh turned into two tents that stood out in stark contrast to the muted browns of the foliage and underbrush. We hauled sleeping bags out of my friend Jim’s Outback and laid them out inside. Then all it took was a few folding chairs and the spark of a fire, and the wild, unforgiving wilderness was tamed into something almost cozy.

As the sun set, we talked and laughed and shared old stories we’ve both heard a thousand times over. Somehow, the repetition never made such tales lose their humor, rather it seemed to age them like the finest of wines. The moon shone full and bright, reaching out its pale, silver tendrils to touch all the places where the warm glow of our fire couldn’t reach. It was late, but we were young. Nighttime was when we truly felt alive.

Besides, to find what we were looking for, we had no choice but to brave sleeplessness. We heard you have to wait past midnight.

That was the easy part. No one ever falls asleep on time at Cypress Park. The hours slipped by with little to report beyond the sigh of the wind, the ceaseless drone of the cicadas, and the crackling sound of our campfire nearing the end of its life. As it began to grow late, our conversation faded to silence, both of us mesmerized by the swirling, glittering oranges and reds of the embers in the firepit. That was until a sudden noise stole both our attention.

Despite the fact that the temperature was comfortable, a violent shiver ran down my spine. I turned to make sure Jim heard the same thing I did. When I saw his eyes trained on the same spot in the woods, just to our left, that was all the confirmation I needed.

Thump, thump, thump.

Footsteps, loud and heavy, came from the woods, and began to circle around our camp. I shot to my feet, heart pounding in my chest, and spun on my heel as the steady march of unseen feet came around behind us. Jim followed my action, his brow furrowed as his gaze flicked across the impenetrable wall of trees before us.

It didn’t soothe my fear any when he took his knife from his pocket, the steel blade glittering in the light of our dying fire.

“There aren’t bears in this part of the country, right?” I asked in a frantic whisper.

“I don’t think so. Maybe it’s just a rabbit.”

But I didn’t believe that, and I knew he didn’t believe it either. He had been a wilderness connoisseur since boyhood. If he was unsure enough to draw a knife, it was nothing so friendly as a rabbit. “Bunk. You’re jumpy all of a sudden. What is this thing?”

“That’s the issue. I have no idea.”

And that was the moment when the stories we’d heard began to stir in the recesses of my memory. But surely it couldn’t be… They were campfire stories, they weren’t true…

But I was having my doubts. They were unfounded and frankly irrational, but maybe, just maybe, the stories were true. I could’ve sworn I felt the spine tingling unease of something watching us from the trees.

“Jim,” I whispered slowly, my voice barely enough to even stir the air. “Do you think it’s-”

“Shhh!” He looked at me, eyes wide with intensity. The deep scowl on his face, which was much more frequently painted with a grin, delivered the message his words didn’t: Be quiet, I’m trying to figure out what’s going on.

I can’t help but smile at his frustration. I always got a profound sense of enjoyment from getting under his skin. My amusement, however, was quick to fade.

I had to do a double take. I thought I saw something behind him. At a glance, it looked like the shadow of a tree, but as I shouldered past my friend to see more clearly, I realized with a rush of terror that it was no tree. Trees don’t move.

This isn’t real. My own thoughts were drowned out by the blood roaring in my ears. It can’t be. It’s just a shadow, it’s just a shadow…

If Jim protested me shoving him out of the way, I couldn’t hear it. The entirety of my concentration, my attention, even my vision, had tunneled down to a single point. A single black mass lurking just behind the tree-line.

It’s just a shadow…

But it simply wasn’t.

It was tall. Incredibly tall, taller and more slender than any man could be. I couldn’t make out a face, or any finer details, except for the shape of what might have been a head. The only thing I could perceive of it, in fact, was its color.

I had never seen anything so oppressively dark before, nor have I seen anything match that color since. It was like staring down the throat of the deepest black hole the universe had to offer. The void of space had been plucked from the cosmos and condensed down into one being: a creature that swallowed moonlight and crawled through the forest.

And it was staring right at me.

I wasn’t sure how I knew, but that thing — whatever it was — was staring me right in the eyes, and it brought with it such a suffocating sense of dread and terror that I still shudder to think about it. Every hair on my arms and my neck stood on end as waves of goosebumps spread over my skin. My chest felt tight. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even tear my gaze from the being in front of me. All I knew was that my tensed, quivering muscles screamed at me to run, but I was frozen. Paralyzed.

That’s no shadow.

Then all at once, with no explanation, the spell was broken. I could’ve been in that terrified trance for a second, a minute, a month, or a year and I wouldn’t have known the difference, but in a blink, the thing moved. In the space between heartbeats it shot out from behind its tree trunk, only to slip behind another one. I waited for it to come out the other side, and there was a morbidly curious side of me that was dying to see it more clearly, but it never did. It was simply gone.

I was dimly aware of my feet propelling me towards where the thing had vanished, almost of their own accord, but my consciousness lingered where I was for just a moment too long before catching up. The image of that black mass was scorched into my eyelids, and there was no getting it out.

I came back to myself when my boots hit foliage and I crunched my way over to where it had been standing. When I got there, nothing.

The heavy footsteps retreated further into the forest. The desire to confirm what my eyes saw burned in my chest, urging me to follow, but Jim grabbed me by my sweater before I could run and yanked my back towards the safety of the campsite.

“Elizabeth!” he hissed, “What are you doing?”

“It was just a shadow from the fire, right?” I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince: him or me. “It had to be!”

“So then why were you about to chase after it!?”

“I-” My voice faltered, and I realized it was shaking. “The footsteps-”

Even if I had had the bandwidth to formulate a coherent response, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I wasn’t sure what I thought I had seen. My mind was being split down the middle. I couldn’t reconcile what I had seen with my firm belief that the stories that started this whole thing were false.

Jim sighed, and the severe lines of his face softened. “Listen, Elizabeth. You’re tired, I’m tired, and we’re not going to do anything tonight besides worry ourselves sick. Let’s get some rest, ok?”

“But that thing-!” I began.

“That thing is gone. It’s time we get some sleep.”

I watched as he lumbered over to his tent. I thought for a moment that he was going to crawl inside of it, but after a moment, he seemed to think better of the notion and grabbed his sleeping bag. Just the fact that he popped the trunk of his Subaru Outback and opted to sleep there instead was enough to tell me that he was as disturbed as I was.

“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”

My heart wouldn’t stop pounding as I went back to the fire, stoking the fading embers into a small flame that devoured the leftover kindling I tossed at it. I sat, unable to sleep. My eyelids kept growing heavier, but my feet were bouncing a brisk rhythm against the forest floor. I had too much nervous energy to even consider resting.

The moon slowly drifted across the sky, steady in its course across the black backdrop of the heavens. Since my other option was to anxiously watch the woods, I tilted my head back and stared up at it. It was just so peaceful, so uncaring. Here I was, too on edge to sleep, while that beautiful, pale ball in the sky just kept moving on its path. The moon wasn’t concerned about living ghost stories. It was a comforting thought.

Eventually my body calmed. Sounds came and went, but they were normal sounds. Every day sounds. Sounds that one can expect to hear from a forest, like frogs and cicadas and the wind in the leaves. Sounds I could put a name to. Sounds that slowly lulled me into drowsiness, and gave me the assurance I needed to grab my sleeping bag and join Jim in the trunk of the car, ready to get some much needed sleep.

Tap, tap, tap.

Sleep was just about to take me away when Jim started knocking on the car. Why, I don’t know. I just turned over, hoping to block it out. But for whatever reason, he didn’t stop, so I sat up with the intention of giving him a well deserved smack in the head with my pillow.

Except he hadn’t moved. I looked for signs of him possibly knocking, but he was sound asleep.

For just a moment, I thought I saw something move by outside the car window.

The incessant tapping had apparently awoken Jim from his light slumber, because he rolled over and groaned. “Elizabeth, stop messing around.”

“That’s not me. I thought that was you!”

Immense dread filled my chest, making it hard to breathe, hard to think. I felt the familiar burn of a pair of eyes on the back of my head, and with my trepidation mounting, I turned my gaze towards the window.

There it was, bent over the Outback.

I think it realized it had been spotted, because no sooner did I lay eyes upon the dark figure on the other side of the glass than it stood up straight.

It was three, maybe four times taller than the car, but the fire was too small to light its face, if there was even one to reveal. The thing loomed, tall and imposing over us, blocking out the sky and the stars and the full moon. It was a being full of shadows. Its edges were blurry, like it was not fully there, but I knew it was. I was staring at something.

We continued to stare each other down, it and me. The longer I looked, the further towards the floor my stomach seemed to sink. Such a sense of terror overwhelmed me that my lungs forgot how to move, how to push air. It was as if they thought they could keep me from being noticed if they kept me from making the noise of breathing.

I often wonder, in quiet moments where I happen to be alone with my thoughts, what death will feel like when it finally comes. And looking directly at that thing in the woods, I thought I had finally found an answer to what that sensation will be.

But at the same time, I needed to prove that what I was seeing was real. I needed to grab that creature and shake it for all its worth until the answers I wanted fell out of its pockets. I needed to catch it, touch it with my own two hands. I needed to know it wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

So, before I could consider the wisdom of it, I leapt out of the car and dashed after it, just as it took off into the woods.

As I ran, a pair of much more sporadic, tired footsteps pounded after me. I knew they belonged to Jim.

“Elizabeth! What are you doing!? Do you have a death wish?!”

I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. Turning my head might give it the chance to slip away from me, and I was not losing it again.

Following it down the trail was like chasing a phantom. It didn’t move properly. Its head didn’t bob with the rhythm of feet moving, nor did it duck or sway as it navigated around trees. It glided, sliding or jumping from one place to the next.

“Elizabeth!” Jim shouted again.

I whipped around and shushed him, hoping if I moved quick enough, it wouldn't have time to vanish. But it was too late. When I turned back around, it was gone.

The light of the moon in the campsite was enough to see by, but under the tree canopy, it was hard to make out much of anything. My run slowed to a jog, then to a walk. Jim caught up with me, and I could see in his eyes that he had every intention of telling me off for my recklessness.

But he never had a chance to start. Another wash of dread filled us both simultaneously and I stopped in my tracks. Whatever words he was intending to say died on his tongue.

I felt its presence return before I saw it. The dark and the cold seized me all at once, and I couldn’t even bring myself to move. Even as it materialized out of the trees, I stayed rooted in place by terror alone. It slowly inched towards us, flickering and gliding, and yet I still couldn’t move. Couldn’t shout at it or tell Jim to run. Nothing. The weight on my chest increased and panic filled my brain so entirely that I was almost blinded. I wanted to scream, to run, but I couldn’t. My body had failed me.

And it was there in the midst of that fearful moment that I heard a faint whisper beside me.

“Jesus.”

It was strange to hear Jim say, as he’s commonly known not to curse.

“Jesus,” He repeated, his building conviction covering the tremble in his voice, “Jesus.”

I turned my head, and I realized that he wasn’t cursing.

Now, I’m not religious, but there was something about the way he spoke that eased the tension from my muscles. My heart still fluttered, but the fear began to ease. The thing began fading back into the forest, melting away into the dark, and just as quickly as it had arrived, it was gone.

For a moment, we just stood there, floored. But as soon as we got our wits about us, we raced back to the safety and light of the campsite. We clambered into the Outback, locked all the doors and turned all the lights on full blast.

I closed my eyes and focused on slowing my breath, trying to wrap my mind around the events transpired.

I didn’t understand it. I didn’t have an explanation for it. All I knew was that it had happened. The stories were true.

I turned to look at Jim, and as soon as he caught my eye, I knew he was as rattled as me. “You know,” I breathed. “I think we should go home.”

He didn’t argue. He just fished his keys from his pocket and started up the engine. After hunting that thing — rather, being hunted by it — there was no chance of rest. The lingering knowledge that we came so close to harm assured it. We just wanted to be out of the woods.

We’d heard the stories, and we didn’t listen. We know now what happens. So please, please heed my warning:

Do not go looking for the Cypress Park Creature.

Because when you try to find it, you never do. It finds you instead. And there are some things in this world — evil things — you’re better off not finding at all.