Mistake

I was in a forest, thickly wooded and dark. Two friends were with me, neither of which I recognized from real life. I was young, a teenager and I had the distinct feeling that I was in a time far before this one.

We were hiding in the bushes all around a wide oak tree, peeking out at a stone house. The building was old, the stones covered over with thick green moss. We were all scared of the house, but in that way that teenage boys are, where they want to get as close as possible to what scares them, so as to see who is the bravest of the group.

I leaned out from the tree one last time to look once more at the house. As I looked at the right side of the house, a black figure appeared suddenly, as if conjured from the air itself. Before I could react with anything but surprise, the figure disappeared and then, in the same instant, reappeared closer, then again, and again, covering the distance between us in less than a second, but without walking or even physically moving at all. As the figure appeared directly in front of our tree, my friends shrieked and I was filled with utter terror. All I could see before I tore off into the forest were black eyes and long black hair and a pitch black mouth, permanently fixed in a scream.

Fast forward. I'm walking through the same forest with a girl, dressed in the same old sort of clothes I and my friends were dressed in before. The terror of the dark figure has deserted me and I feel as though it's only a memory, nothing more than a hallucination. My friends are lost, having run in different directions as I and now I'm searching for them with this girl. I carry a gun with me, and walk in front of the girl, in a protective position. The dark figure is merely a myth from the town in which we live, and we're sure we will find my friends. The gun is there for assurance, nothing else.

Something is disturbed in the bushes to my side and the girl behind me screams, I turn, leveling the gun at the brush. A dark figure appears and I fire at it in the same instant that I turn, grabbing the girl by the hand and retreating back to town, terrified that my hallucination from before had returned to me.


One of my lost friends returns to town a day later, dirty and scared. He's in a state of shock, completely terrified. He'd found our other friend in the midst of bushes drenched in dried red blood, a fatal gunshot to the chest.

I wake up.