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William Wisp remembered the fall.
He remembered following the wisps into the forest that surrounded Deadwood. He remembered how the deeper he went in the more the woods seemed to shift around him. He remembered muddy ground and blue light.
He remembered slipping.
That feeling of weightlessness, one single moment of pure clarity.
And then he fell.
He remembered wind rushing through his hair as his limbs flailed uselessly.
He remembered as that bright blue light vanished, leaving him plunged into darkness.
He fell, but then he woke up.
That first time he awoke, he wasn’t truly there.
He remembered his vision being muddled, black dots dipping in and out of his peripheral. It was all he could remember: the ringing in his ears, the numbness crawling up his limbs.
He remembered the tears as they formed in his eyes, slowly falling down his chin and mixing with the dirt below him.
His clothes were heavy on his body, weighed down by the mud that was caked into the fabric. It was just mud, he told himself. He was fine. William Wisp wasn’t bleeding out at the bottom of a cliff; he was fine. It was fine.
He couldn’t even move, seemingly paralyzed as he slowly died.
He remembered being afraid to die. He hadn’t really thought about it before. People went missing all the time in Deadwood…
William didn’t want to become just another forgotten lost teen.
He remembered fading in and out of consciousness. Trying so hard to cling to what little sense of life he had, but almost as quickly as he had fallen, he was plunged back into the darkness.
And William remembered waking up in a forest. And suddenly he was better.
There was no mud weighing down his clothes. His hair was dry, fingers and toes slowly regaining feeling. His head didn’t hurt, vision was fine.
He wiped the tears from his eyes. Where was he?
Surely he wasn’t still in Deadwood. The forest around his hometown stretched out for miles. He could see as birch shifted into pine into elm as the trees grew overtop each other.
William knew what the Deadwood forests were like. The trees were dead year-round, they shifted but if you knew what you were doing they were easy to navigate. The ground was littered with jagged rocks and sudden cliffs.
This was not the Deadwood forests.
This had shifted as he walked, traced paths disappearing when he tried to loop back around. The trees were a dull, almost grey color. Deadwood was dull sure, but not so dull that the local wildlife was literally coated over in grey.
It was wrong. There were no animals. No squirrels, no rabbits, no foxes or deer. Not even birds flying overhead or fish in the river. He didn’t even notice the bugs. Those were all over Deadwood.
This place was lifeless.
He stood up on shaky legs, observing his surroundings and trying to not panic. He was fine. He was fine…
He sighed, picking a random direction to start walking in. If he didn’t even know where he was, how could he expect anyone to fine him. William just hoped that he could find a river or any other type of landmark, maybe even a house or a road. He wanted to think he was still in Deadwood.
He started vaguely straight, taking the chalk from his backpack (which he thankfully still had) and marking up the trees as he walked. He checked his phone, no service. William guessed he was just going to have to do this the hard way.
Nearly twenty minutes of travel later and William still felt lost.
The trees twisted as he walked. Night slowly approached as the sky grew darker. Man, William was really over his head.
His chalk stick was starting to get a little to small to be comforting, his hands shaking as he held his flashlight.
The darker it got, the more alive the forest seemed to get. Fireflies darted around him, the local wildlife getting significantly more active as he walked. He could hear chirping and buzzing. But it all felt wrong. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but he swore there was a low, growling undertone to all the forest life.
The clouds overhead were thick. He could barely see through the tree-line as it was, the clouds above blocking whatever little moon light there was.
It was so weird. It was as if it had been day and then night, with no transition sunset in between.
William hated this. He knew that later he would have a good story to tell Isacc and Norah, but God did he just want to be home.
He wandered in this dark forest, eyes catching on every light, lingering on every shadow.
Thats when he saw it; a faint blue specter, that darted behind a path of trees as soon as the light reflected in his brown eyes.
He followed it, slowly at first, keeping his distance in case it was a ghost or ghoul or demon. But the sphere just kept moving. It matching his pace as it darted between trees and behind the brush. Walking turning into jogging into full on sprinting. He gasped for breath as he ran, desperate to keep up with it.
Maybe thats why he didn’t see it, the cliff-face that is. Because William ran and ran and ran, until his feet dug into the muddy ground and his lungs burned with every breath. The wind blew his messy black hair back, it picked up the loose fabric of his too big hoodie.
And he was running. As fast as he could go. Feet hitting the ground with a painful impact, until there was nothing under his feet. Until he was falling headfirst down a cliff.
And a strange sense of déjà vu came over his body.
His arm was bent beneath him at an odd angle, his head ached something fierce, his hair was wet, his side hurt. And William Wisp lay dead at the bottom of a cliff.