This story begins like many fairy tales, with a deep, dark wood. The thing about this particular section of woods was that it wasn't really that deep. It was maybe twenty acres, which is the size of a mall or maybe a massive parking lot like those theme parks use. You know, the ones where you have to ride a shuttle bus to get to the gates. The point is, while twenty acres is big, it's not huge. You could walk across it in an hour.

But, while not a large area, this particular stretch of wood was dark. Very dark.

They were also where my brother, Lucas, and three of his friends went missing. 

Back then, five years ago, I was thirteen. Lucas was eighteen and finishing up his senior in high school. We didn't hang out a lot back then because five years is a pretty significant age gap between thirteen and eighteen. Of course, it's not a big deal when you're in your forties, but let's just say eighteen-year-old guys don't like hanging with their thirteen-year-old brothers. But still, when you're brother goes missing, you're pretty bummed, no matter how close you aren't.

It was at the end of Lucas's senior year. It was the senior cut day. You know, the day all the seniors cut school and go to some big party and act like nobody notices.

After high school, he was going to spend the summer working at some rinky-dink job – I don't even remember now what the job was, before heading off to college in the fall. 

That was the last day anyone ever saw him. 

I remembered him sometimes. Even if he was a dick that never let me hang out with him and his friends, he was actually a good brother. He at least didn't hold me down and pee on me like my best friend Charlie's brother did to him.

Lucas had been strong and muscular and played football and baseball during high school. However, he hadn't been good enough to get any scholarships for those sports – he ran about as fast as a one-legged old lady with a walker -no, seriously, his coaches were always amazed at how such an athletic kid could be so slow. It was an issue. 

But he was going to college in the fall on an academic scholarship, and I remember my parents being very proud of that.

I wish that would have been how things worked out. But life is constantly cruel, right?

So instead, he and three of his friends vanished without a trace. 

I know the story so well because I've heard it recounted by my parents so many times. 

Lucas -my brother - and his best friend, Michael – who was at our house so much he might as well have been a part of our family too, met two girls at the local swimming hole on the shallow river that runs on the outskirts of town to hang with all of their fellow seniors. 

Senior Skip day was rocking and rolling that day. All the seniors were there swimming, making out, smoking, drinking, and doing all the shit high school kids do. 

The girls they met that day were - Sarah Beth, who always insisted on being called by both names and would correct anyone when they just called her Sarah - and her friend Harper. Sarah Beth was my brother's girlfriend, and she'd brought Harper along because she and my brother were trying to hook Harper and Michael up that day. Guess we'll never know how that love connection turned out.  

All four of them were at the river for three hours that day. All the seniors there that afternoon swear to it. 

The problems started when they left. 

Harper was the only one with a car. Back then, middle-class parents still had some sense and didn't run out and buy their kids cars the second they turned sixteen like they do today.

One of the problems that contributed to this mess was that Harper was a horrible driver – no, seriously, a blind grandmother could drive better than her – and had wrecked her car the week before, leaving them with no ride. 

Sarah Beth and my brother could borrow their parents' cars on the weekends, but not for a random Friday when they should have been in school, giving away the big 'secret' they were skipping. After he went missing, my parents would have financed a car for any amount if they thought it would bring him back.

So with no car, they walked to the river, but more fatally, they walked away from that river. And through the woods

After they went missing, several kids there that day swore on everything holy they had been offered too many rides to count, and all four of them had declined. 

Who knows… It doesn't matter now. 

What does matter is that after the swimming, the making out, and the doing of stupid high school shit, all four – Lucas, Michael, Sarah Beth, and Harper- cut through the woods and were never seen again. 

That's the only thing that matters. 

The story was that instead of walking down the road and home like normal people, the four of them had decided to cut through the woods between the river and town. Supposedly because it was faster and they were running late since they needed to get home before getting caught skipping. Again, like everyone on earth didn't know already. 

So they cut through the woods. Those damn woods.   

It was like those woods just swallowed up their whole existence. 

#

Now here I was five years later, at my own Senior Skip day, sitting next to my best friend Charlie on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette and watching all my classmates have fun.

Lucas had been the social butterfly of the family. Popular and well-liked. Everyone always wanted to be around him.

I was the complete opposite of that. Charlie and I were outcasts. We were strange and weird, so the other kids whispered behind our backs. Sometimes it wasn't even behind our backs.

The brothers of the missing. And the overprotected. I was, at least.

It's hard losing a child. It was hard on my parents. After my brother went missing, they were, understandably, out of their minds.

The first few months were chaotic. Police detectives and news reporters were all asking questions while my parents were sick with worry but still full of hope.

Lucas was strong and smart. They were all strong, smart young adults. It wasn't like they were ten years old. There were four of them together. Sure they were missing, but they weren't alone.

Then a month went by. Then two. Three. Hope was something my parents clung to.

They put up fliers and called hospitals. Anything they could think of. The other parents did too.

Nothing.

After a year, my mother broke down. My father started drinking. They overcompensated with me.

Try being the kid who was still around—no sleepovers, no going out with friends—never being allowed to be out of their sight for more than an hour. My childhood was loads of boring.

I can't say I blame them. But I made it through. And now it was almost over. I would be free.

Even if I hadn't been so sheltered, I don't think it would have made a difference in my attitude. I didn't like people. I looked down at my classmates swimming and having fun. I didn't like any of those assholes.

Except for Charlie. We were two peas in a pod. Michael was his brother. Had been. And I guess, even if Michael was the asshole that pee'd on him, Charlie missed him and was as miserable as I was after our brothers went missing.

Charlie's mom had gone off the deep end after the disappearance of her oldest son. Who was I kidding, she was there before, but she'd used Michael's disappearance to climb further into the bottle, which made Charlie's life even worse than it already was.

From there, he bounced back and forth between living with his mother and living with his grandmother whenever his mom was in rehab or jail. Until grandma died. He returned to his mom's house with trash bags full of clothes and his grandma's car.

A Buick Regal.

It was ugly as sin, brown and rusted, but he loved it. We both did. It was our escape. The only place we didn't feel the pressure of the whole world on us. The only place we could be ourselves. No parents, no questions, no one worrying about how we were doing. Just kids being kids. 

Oh, I'm Jack, by the way. And all of this was before I saw a giant rip a man in half or saw an ogre get his head chopped off… Or saw a beautiful princess naked. But we'll get to that. 

We stared out at the kids swimming and generally fucking off in the shallow river. Charlie took a swig of one of the wine coolers I'd managed to relieve the local convenience store of while he was distracting the cashier. Did I say we were misanthropes? 

"You couldn't steal something other than strawberry?" Charlie said, taking a swig of the wine cooler and making a face about it.

I shrugged. "I just grabbed the first thing I saw." 

Charlie scowled at me. "Well, next time, see some beer, will ya?"

I shrugged again and took a swig of mine. I liked the taste of strawberry wine cooler. I didn't feel like I needed to impress anyone by drinking some beer that tasted like horse piss. Nope, if I was going to drink, it should at least have some flavor. 

As we looked out at our classmates having fun in the river, I saw three guys pointing our way and laughing. I flipped them off. 

"Don't do that," Charlie said. 

I shrugged again. "Fuck them." I was thinking Fuck them all. I hated them. All these kids with perfect lives whose families hadn't been ripped apart by tragedy and who had gotten to live a normal childhood. 

"You ever think about them?" Charlie asked. 

I took another sip of my wine cooler. "Who?" I knew who he meant. I thought about them every day in some way. Mostly about how much different my life would be if they had just walked down the stupid road instead of the woods or taken one of the many rides that had supposedly been offered. "Yeah, I think about them," I said so I wouldn't hurt Charlie's feelings.

"Think they're dead?" He looked at me, shaggy hair hanging down his face. Charlie was small, and while we probably would have been friends anyway, our shared tragedy had brought us together. That and I had been a big kid when we were thirteen. I'd started sticking up for him when kids started to pick on him. Now I was over six feet tall. "If you're missing for five years without a trace, you're dead," I said coldly. 

Charlie nodded. "Yeah, I guess so." We sat there for a while, watching the girls in their bathing suits splash around. After a while, Charlie said, "I just wish I knew what happened to them." 

I shrugged. It was about the only thing I was good at. "Yeah, me too." 

"Those woods, man," Charlie said, looking back at the deep woods that ran between the river and our town. "Everyone's scared of them."

"With good reason." The police had searched the woods back then, all spread out in a line with dogs and flashlights, volunteers walking six feet apart with their eyes on the ground. None of the police or volunteers had seen anything. They were just gone. 

You might think they searched the woods like that because it was the most likely way to find clues, every inch of ground being covered. Sure, that's the official story.

The real reason was that everyone who had spent more than five minutes living here knew those woods were haunted. 

There'd been stories about them for years, going back to when the town had been established, nothing more than a logging camp then. The loggers would cut trees and float them down the river. 

Except for one patch of woods. They never cut those trees. 

Five lumber jacks went in - I always imagined full-grown men with long beards and wearing flannel -  and never came out again.

There have been stories ever since. Stories of voices, noises, missing people, and generally strange things happening in those woods. For decades. Every kid grew up hearing those stories and stayed away.  

I guess by my brother's time, because everyone had cell phones and modern technology, and things could be explained and understood way better than they ever had in the one-hundred and fifty years before, people just blew that stuff off. But still, no one ever really went into the woods. 

My parents had tried to find out who owned the woods after my brother went missing and had run into some corporation that wouldn't return their calls. No one had any answers.

"Just wish we knew what happened, is all," Charlie mused more to himself than me as we drank our wine coolers. So did I. 

I shrugged again. "We could go look ourselves," I said. 

Charlie spit out the sip of wine cooler he was in the middle of taking. "Are you crazy!" he demanded. "Us? Go into those woods?" He looked nervously at them like something might come running from the trees and eat us.

I knew it was crazy, my parents would kill me if they found out, but I was curious. I'd been curious since I was thirteen. 

I'd never been allowed anywhere near those woods, not when they were searching for the missing kids, and most definitely not after. And truthfully, I hadn't wanted to. But for some reason I couldn't explain, I wanted desperately to search those woods for my brother. 

"We could just take a quick peek," I said. "See if we see anything. Anything the cops might have missed. They went in right here." 

Charlie looked horrified, like I'd just suggested he eat his cat. "After five years? There's nothing to find." 

"Maybe not," I said. "But aren't you curious?" 

He shook his head. "I can't, Jack. My mom's already hanging by a thread. Me going into those woods would put her in the nuthouse." 

Mine too. 

I looked at the woods. Thick, tall trees; pines and oaks and elms, and whatever else there was. It was like they were calling to me, beckoning me. 

I stared at them for what seemed like a long time, a dark green spot between two trees opening up. 

We need you, Jack. Come to us, Jack.

Charlie punched my arm. "Earth to Jack. What are you doing?"

I'd been staring at the trees. I shook the cobwebs out of my brain. 

"I just need to see for myself," I told Charlie. "Stay here and wait for me." 

Charlie turned pale. He was a lot smaller than me, and we'd become friends when I'd stood up for him when other kids picked on him. I was over six feet and would have played football if my mom had let me.

I headed towards the woods, despite the thick knot of dread tightening in my stomach. Was I really going to go in? What did I think I would find? My brother's body? Did I even want to? Absolutely not, but what if I did find him…  At least my parents would know the truth. 

It was the not knowing that hurt the most. I had to know.

"Jack…" Charlie called to me, then looked nervously between our classmates swimming in the river and me. 

Safety or uncertainty? 

He decided and ran to catch up to me. "Let's fucking go," he said with forced determination. "But if we die, I'm going to kick your ass."