Inferno

A Story by L

Horror. Feels like an introduction to a long and complex story, which i do not have time to write right now.

I woke up as suddenly as if somebody had screamed. After a few seconds passed by, I realized that somebody actually had screamed. I sat up, looked around and saw that the others were slowly starting to wake. Everyone had the same expression on his or her face: fear.

When everyone had awoken, a blonde girl with pink pyjamas said:

“Did everyone hear that? Who scre…?”

Her sentence was cut short by the sound of another scream.

Everyone looked around, searching for the source of the scream.

A young boy began to sob and an older girl (probably his sister) put an arm around him.

It was no wonder he was scared. Being in a dark forest in the middle of the night and hearing screams from nowhere. I was not feeling to good myself.

The sound of a third scream brought me from my thoughts and back to reality.

“Eric! Eric!”

Someone was trying to wake the camp leader who apparently had not awoken from the sounds of screaming.

“Eric! E... He’s not here. He isn’t here! Where is he?”

The person was holding an empty sleeping bag and had a look of confusion and fear on their face. Nobody said it but we all knew that at least one of us had to get up and wonder into the darkness to find the source of the screams. At last one of the oldest boys got up and said with a shaky voice:

“I’m… I’ll just go check it out.”

He stood there for a second, like he was waiting for one of us to say that this was too dangerous and that he should just sit down again. When nobody did, he took a deep sigh and stepped out of his sleeping bag. Everybody waited in silence. Suddenly a fourth scream came out of the darkness. This was a different scream though. This scream was more high-pitched than the others. Everyone was holding his or her breaths. A figure was beginning to materialize in the darkness. The older boy came running towards us, screaming at the top of his lungs. When he came closer he suddenly stopped, bent over and through up all over his feet which made the scream turn into a wrenching noise. You could see on everybody’s faces that the sight of him disgusted them.

“What… What happened Timothy?”

The boy, still bent over, began to sob.

“It… I can’t… He’s chewed.”

“Chewed? Like how… chewed?”

“Like somebody f*****g chewed and ate parts of him Jimmy! I can’t believe this is happening.”

Nobody said anything.

“We have to get out of here. We can’t stay. What if that… thing… Whatever did this comes back?”

“I have a phone! I’ll call the police,” the blonde girl said.

“Don’t be stupid. There’s no way you’re getting any reception out here,” Jimmy said.

I was beginning to see what was coming and I did not like it.

“We’ll have to get out of here by ourselves,” Tim said.

After this statement things began to move quickly. We only took the most necessary stuff with us in our backpacks. Stepping out of the clearing seemed to be tougher than we had anticipated. The clearing had been our safe spot. Now that we were moving into the dark dense forest we somehow seemed more vulnerable. We walked. We kept on walking until we were forced to stop. The blonde girl had fallen over a tree trunk and was now sitting on it complaining about her entire life.

“I hate this. Why do we have to walk? When are we out of this godforsaken place? Have none of you got any idea of where we are?”

“That is just to many annoying questions Jane! I know just as much as you do,” Tim said.

Jane retorted and they started arguing. I turned around, not seeing the point in this argument at all. Jane did have one question I shared though. When would we get out of this forest? It seemed like we had been walking for miles. Suddenly I heard a swiping noise and a crack. I turned around and saw, to my horror, Jane’s heard, turned 180 degrees with elongated shiny black hands wrapped around it. In one quick motion the hands retracted into the darkness with Jane’s head still clutched between the fingers, her body lying motionless on the ground before us.

We ran. We ran like death was right behind us (literally). The ground became steeper and we realized that we were running up a hill. When we reached the top, a horrifying sight laid before us. From heights like that, we could see the entire forest. And that was all we could see. Nothing but the dark, dense forest filled with things that crept up behind you and snatched your head off. With misery filling my heart I said:

“This is where I die. We’re never getting out.”