A Late Night jog

If you want a single reason to not go for a late night jog, this one's for you.

There is a forest close to my house, which also happens to be my childhood home. When my grandparents passed away, me and my husband took over and have been living here since. The forest has several jogging tracks, and I use them more or less every day. If I couldn’t start my day with a good jog, I’d finish it with a run on one of the tracks. There has always been something freeing with feeling the wind in my hair while my feet carried me over logs and rocks. The fresh forest air had a simultaneously relaxing and brisk feel to it.  My aching muscles and rushing heart couldn’t slow me down as I kept going faster. If anything, it pushed me to my limits, just to see how fast I could run. However, no matter how addicted I am to running, I will never ever go for a late night run during the dark fall and winter nights. To understand why, I have to mention the abandoned village a few kilometers from my house. If you choose the ten kilometer track, you will about halfway through come across a bunch of old worn down houses. My grandmother used to tell me the story behind the village and it’s abandonment, which took place when she was just a child. There was a girl who lived in the village. She was about sixteen when she was affiliated with the greatest shame of getting pregnant out of wedlock. She claimed that she had been raped by the priest, and thus he was the father. No one believed her of course and she was forced to give up her child for adoption. After the incident, she was considered an outcast by the other villagers, which made her deeply resentful and bitter by hate. Months and years passed and life went on, except for this very unlucky girl. Then during the harvest moon, the villagers threw a party to celebrate the unusually good yield that year. It’s said that the girl replaced the ordinary edible mushroom with poisonous ones, and thus poisoned the whole village. The aftermath wasn’t discovered until a few days later, when a hunter found all of the villagers dead. The frightening part was that a good portion of the population hadn’t succumbed to the poisoning itself. Instead many of them had injuries from brutal violence, either inflicted by themselves or by others. The most widespread theory was that the mushrooms they had consumed had made them go mad and starting to hurt each other. The culprit, the castaway girl, was never seen or heard from again. My granny said that if you dare to pass by the village during the harvest moon, you can still see the poor spirits from the deceased, still raging from madness. I can still remember how the story used to make me shiver as I sat in granny’s lap and held tight onto my bowl of candy. Now as an adult, I viewed it as nothing else but another one of my grandmother’s many scary stories. Well, at least I did.

So, let me tell you what happened. It was in the late of September, during the full moon. This day had been hectic to say the least, with lots of things at work. As a result, I came home much later than I anticipated. It didn’t bother me that much. I just put on my jogging gear and after saying a quick goodbye to my husband, I headed out in the woods. The first half passed by in relative uneventful manner. With some good music in my earbuds and the cool fall air in my lungs, I felt as light as a feather. Thanks to the lights, I could easily see the track in front of me. However, the trees surrounding me remained dark, reaching towards the cloudy night sky. If you wonder, I’ve never minded the dark. Animals tend to keep to themselves and statistically it's more likely that I would be murdered by my husband than some random stranger in the woods. Soon enough, I caught a glimpse of the tiny little cabins between the trees. Despite my skepticism towards everything supernatural, even I could feel a small shiver down my spine. After all, there is something eerie about a place that is supposed to be inhabited by humans, but there is no sign of life. I only looked at the houses for a short while, before moving my focus back to my running session. Every now and then, I’d throw a glance at the village. Sometimes I’d believe myself to see a humanoid shape, only for it to be gone when I looked a second time. I wrote it off as a combination of the darkness and a slight anxiety due to the dark. After a while, I could decipher a sound coming from the woods. At first, I thought that it was just the wind, but as I ran closer to the source, I realized that it wasn’t wind at all. I slowed down and lowered the volume in my earbuds. It sounded like someone moaning in pain. This was both parts frightening and concerning, since I’d usually be alone at this time in the night. My first thought was that it was either some odd ass camper or a neighbor who had decided to go for a late night walk and hurt themselves. That was when I made the dire mistake of deciding that I should head into the woods and check if the person was okey, and if needed, help them call an ambulance or something. Since it was pitch black, I turned on the flashlight on my phone and headed with determined steps into the trees. While walking, I could hear the sound of branches snapping and leaves rustling underneath my feet. As I got closer to the edge of the village, I could make out a white shape laying on the ground in a fetal position. There was no doubt that that was the person behind the moans. Once I was able to make out the details, the shape took form of a young girl. She was dressed in the same type of clothes my grandma used to wear as a kid and her hair was out into a messy braid. 

“Hello?”I shouted. “Are you alright?”

There was no response, only the ragged breathing and whimpering moans. Something didn’t feel right, but at this point I couldn’t tell what. Maybe it was the dirty old fashioned clothes? Maybe it was the odd sounds emitting from the little girl? Maybe it was just the lack of response? I pushed my feelings aside, as I told myself that this was not the time for superstition. There was child hurt in the woods in the middle of the night. What kind of a human would I be if I didn’t at least lend a helping hand? Therefore I moved even closer to the girl, now noticing the moss being dark with blood. Worried out of my mind as I realized the little girl was more injured than I had thought, I sprinted to her and grabbed her body to flip her over. 

“What happened?”I shouted. “Are you hurt-”

That was when I interrupted myself with a scream and let go of her ice cold body. When I had approached the girl, she had her back turned towards me, which was most likely the reason why I didn’t notice it at first. Her stomach was cut open from her breastbone to the hem of her panties, intestines spilling all over her and staining the dress red. Yet somehow this girl was still alive. Strained breaths passed over her blue lips. The pale skin was covered by a layer of sweat, which glistened in the light from my phone. Her eyes were staring out into thin air, looking glassy like a porcelain doll. I was about to call the cops, when she slowly turned her head to face me. Her pupils were blown wide, not even shrinking once when she looked into the blinding light. There was no doubt that this girl was deep into some kind drugged state. With her crazed gaze fixated at me, she moved her lips to speak with a strained voice:

“The….g-ghosts….d-did….this…..”

Then I noticed the other sounds coming from the village. Branches snapping under running feet. Shrieks of fear, howling yells and maniacal laughter echoed through the trees in the most horrifying symphony I’ve ever heard. If I listened even more closely, I could make out a sound that reminded me of my brother when he had his asthma attacks. I should have turned away and headed straight back to the track. Instead I looked up. The macabre scenery in front of me made me freeze in place. There were people running around everywhere in the old village. Some of them held different weapons in their hands, axes, knives, scythes, hammers. They used to inflict harm upon others, all while having the same lunatic gaze as the girl laying on the moss in front of me. Their victims tried to shield themselves from the blows and strikes, but to no avail. They were cut down and killed while screaming and begging for their lives. Their blood stained the ground underneath them and painted it in the most hideous shade of red. Others were laying on the ground, struggling to breath. Their eyes rolled in the sockets as they tried to drag down air into their lungs, their lips blue and foaming spit spilling out from their mouths. Never in my life had I ever felt this kind of terror. I wanted to run, but every single muscle felt as if they had locked themselves into place, making it impossible to even move. Suddenly I became aware of the crawling feeling you only get when you feel someone staring at you. When I looked back at the girl, she wasn’t alone. A man stood over her, with a bloodied scythe in his hand. His eyes were wide open and pupils dilated to the point of making his irises disappear, his gaze glossy of pure madness. His smile was so wide that it seemed like his face was going to split in two and huge drops of saliva ran down his beard. His dirty skin was deathly pale, glossy from sweat that ran in droplets over his forehead. He breathed heavily like a dog as he spoke in a grim voice:

“Come here little witch. Come here and I’ll slice your head off.”

That was when I finally broke from the spell and fled. I ran like I had never ran before. I could hear him shout at me to stop, that he was going to kill me and send my soul back to hell. I didn’t stop once, not even when my muscles started to feel like they were on fire. Those countless hours spent on the running tracks made me able to just run all the way home. I didn’t slow down until I had slammed the door behind me and sunken down on the floor. I laid there and just wept, my overworked muscles just shivering from lactic acid. My husband found me and asked me what had happened. In my state of shock, I wasn’t even able to speak. I just wept and wept. He realized that I was definitely not going to tell him anything that night. Instead he picked me up and carried me to the bathroom, before filling the bathtub to the brim. Once I had relaxed in the hot water for half an hour, I had gained enough strength to tell him what had happened. I’m not sure if he believed me. If he didn’t, he never mentioned it. Instead he held my hand and let me finish my story. Afterwards he gave me a kiss and said that it sounded terrible. He also promised that he would follow me to the village the next day, to check if anything had changed. At this point I was too tired, and once I headed to bed, I fell into a deep but troubled sleep.

Once the sun was up, we headed out into the woods and to the village, only to find it as empty as it always had been. Together we walked around the village for at least half an hour, finding no trace of any human life. What we did find however, was remnants of the horrific Harvest moon feast that had resulted in such a tragedy. Brown stains of dried blood were still visible on the floors and walls of some of the houses. Many windows were shattered and blood had stained the glass. Some of the weapons could still be found, lidden with rust. The thing that utterly destroyed me however, was the discovery of a family portrait, dating back to 1936, the same year the tragedy had taken place. I recognized the girl as the one I had found the night before, hair in a braid and in the same white dress. I had a harder time recognizing the man, but as I tried to imagine him without a lunatic gaze in his eyes and without a foaming mouth, I figured that it had to be the man with a scythe. I could feel a few tears run down my face as I looked at the family. They looked so happy, and everything had been taken from them in the most cruel manner. For most of my life, I had always thought the villagers to be the villains in my granny’s tale. But with the scenery still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but feel for them. They had been cruel to the poor girl for sure, but did they really deserve such a horrid fate? Did that little girl with the braid deserve to take the punishment for her parents’ sins? I wondered what had happened to the girl behind the whole incident. Had she left before anyone would suspect her, or had she watched the carnage unfold before her eyes? If she had kept on living after the incident, did she even give it a second thought? Or did she have nightmares from the guilt alone? As I put down the portrait on the table, I looked out through the window and caught a glimpse of a white figure between the trees. However, when I threw a second glance, the figure had already vanished.