Chapter 1 – Chap 1

I wasn’t there for the beginning. My story doesn’t begin with the passing of an urban legend or some sort of hellspawn coming into this world like other “real” stories of this nature tend to do. I’m sorry if that’s what you were expecting, but I’m here to set the record straight with the truth and nothing else. My tale isn’t fortunate enough to begin with the hushed whispers of a ghost story. It begins with something far worse.

Although I wasn’t present for the first part, the beginning of my story, I feel it is necessary to first tell you about myself. As human beings, we are always seeking to gather more information. We are curious creatures that want to find things that are almost beyond the point of mankind’s comprehension, things that we will certainly never understand. Proof of another world, of a great deity, of life beyond death. Something more.

Theories pollute the internet and media of modern day. Extremists now use the outlets provided to them to try and tell us just why theirs are correct. In truth, though, they are also only looking onward for answers, using these outlets to find others that agree to them in a vain attempt to grasp onto something that they can hold on to, something that they can believe in. Yet they too end up only reaching out, longing for more.

See, I was one of these people. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself an “extremist”, though, I was worse: I was a teenager, going through that inevitable phase of wanting, no, needing to find proof of something greater than mankind. At the time, that meant something supernatural. And the opportunity presented itself in the early spring of my junior year of highschool. That was when Ronnie Ferguson’s body was found in the woods of (redacted).

It was a cool Sunday morning. A man, whose name I can unfortunately no longer recall, was out walking his dog as he did every morning. He’d maybe been walking for fifteen minutes when he found it, laying in the middle of the trail that he walked daily.

The most shocking thing about it, or so he thought at the time, was that there was no attempt to hide the body. It wasn’t located in or behind a bush or meticulously shoved into the inside of a tree. It lay out in the open for the world to see. Ronnie’s anguish permanently marked onto his face, haunting the first living soul to gaze their eyes upon his own. That curse fell onto the man and his dog.

It seemed to him as though the killer was taunting the community, unafraid to be found. At the time, however, there was no killer identified, nor was one even suspected, for that matter. The official report stated that Ronnie froze to death in the cold, early spring night. He hadn’t been dressed accordingly, got lost, and fell to the ground as he breathed his last, freezing breath into the biting forest air around him.

As I said, I wasn’t there for any of that. I heard of Ronnie’s death on the news that Sunday evening like everyone else. I’ll be the first to admit that Ronnie and I didn’t know each other very well. Hardly at all. He was in the year above me, a senior, and we didn’t exactly run with the same crowd.

Ronnie was friends with all the jocks and, though he wasn’t on any of the teams at the school, was athletic himself. I’m not trying to imply that I wasn’t friends with any of the “sports kids” (one of my closest friends back then was on the football team) or Ronnie for that matter. We simply just didn’t exchange many words. At most, we likely asked to borrow a pencil or what page in the textbook we were on. We were friendly, but not friends.

Still, even I felt the impact of his absence. On the morning announcements that following Monday, the principal, after reciting the pledge of allegiance, came over the intercom for a moment of silence to “honor” our departed classmate. I knew that, in all likelihood, the principal had to double check the boy’s name. She only gave a vague statement that he was a “good student and a good friend to many.” It was a nice sentiment nonetheless.

With that announcement came the promise of therapy sessions with the counselors for those who needed it. This meant that the few people that felt comfortable enough to seek help grieving would be pushed to the side by those who wanted attention. The attention seekers would put on a fake facade of mourning while “wishing that they’d talked more” or saying “just how much their friendship meant to them.” If they were lucky, or good enough at acting, they would even be able to conjure up a few tears in the process, or make their lip quiver. It was a disgusting act of desperation for attention, but not nearly as disgusting as what we were about to find out in the following weeks.

Three days after his body was discovered in the woods, Ronnie Ferguson was laid to rest. I didn’t go, as I said, we weren’t close, but I heard from a friend that “it was a nice funeral.”

In the student bodies grief, no one seemed to ask why he was in those woods that night. We were all more concerned with the fact that a classmate was dead. Ronnie was fairly athletic after all. It could be easily reasoned that he had been jogging in the woods that evening, got lost, and perished out in the cold night air. That wasn’t set in stone though, it was simply speculation. His parents were grieving. No one felt it appropriate to ask the mourning family if they knew why their son was out there that night, especially when there was an explanation that we were all comfortable with.

Regardless of the speculation, I remember what happened next quite vividly.

I was sitting in the lunchroom before the first bell that Friday, only one day after Ronnie’s funeral, when my friend, Josh, approached me. Things between Josh and I were what I would call “complicated” at that time. We hadn’t talked much, hardly at all since the previous school year, yet we still remained friendly towards one another.

“Have you seen this?” He asked before I could get a greeting out, sliding a group of papers across the table towards me. The papers, I could tell, had been printed out by him and hastily stapled together, in the school’s library if I had to guess.

Little did I know then, that those papers would change the course of my life. This would be the first of the many events that spring that would shape me into the man I am today.

I’ve searched hours for that article by now. I’m sorry to say that I am not able to find any trace of it on the internet. I’ve done countless google searches, and every other web browser I can think of for that matter, for Ronnie’s name, date of death, obituary, and even the name of our small, midwestern town but nothing regarding these events can be found online. At least not by me. Nothing leads to the article that I’m about to summarize to the best of my ability.

It was true that the man had been walking his dog when he found Ronnie, but the details had been skewed. I’d come to find as well in the article that in the official report Ronnie had died from exposure: freezing to death. In the early spring of a town in the midwestern United States that was believable. Sure, it was unlikely, but still possible nonetheless. What the man said in his report, however, contradicted that completely.

He said that Ronnie’s clothes had been notably wrinkled, though not torn, as though he had been off trail for quite some time. Running through the trees and his clothing having gotten caught on the limbs and shrubbery of the forest perhaps. The main thing that he noted was left out of the report was the black stains around his eyes, nose, and mouth.

“It wasn’t a liquid,” he said. Not by the time the body was found, anyways. By then, it wasn’t coming off of his skin. Whatever this substance was, it had stained the boy’s face. The family and those who attended his funeral made no mention of this. Either the man was lying about it, or it had been covered up by the police department.