Goats In The Woods
Short Story : Goats In The Woods.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2018
When I was very little my parents abandoned me, leaving me in the care of my maternal grandparents, and I say abandoned because they didn't even have the basic decency to explain anything to me, they simply told me they would be visiting for a weekend, so I even remember that I didn't pack everything that was important to me and since I only got to see them a few times throughout my life, I was never able to get them back.
And although I remember that at first it was very confusing for me and I suppose I behaved a bit badly trying to cope with the situation, my grandparents were always loving and understanding with me, and I would even dare to say that, if I had not been raised by them, who knows what would have become of my life.
My grandmother and grandfather always put it in my head that a university degree would open more doors for me in life, so they always motivated me to broaden my horizons and always aim as high as I could.
So they were the happiest people in the world when, having just finished high school, I managed to get into a university in Mexico City, and although at first I was a little sad to leave my grandparents, they both assured me that they would be fine, but that it was the best thing for me, so I went to live in the city. And very soon I managed to make enough friends to not feel so alone.
Halfway through our studies, one of our teachers assigned us the task of finding a rural location. I won't bore you with all the details of the project, let's just say that it was basically to determine what could be built there. Although at first I suggested going to my town to do it, telling them that my grandparents could even give them accommodation for the days we stayed there, my best friend Lucio told us that his town was a better place to do it since there were some really good places there. Plus, his great-uncle had a camper that he could lend us without any problems and that way we could camp for a few days while investigating the place better and thus deliver a better job.
Honestly, his whole idea was way better than mine, so we all decided to go on a camping trip with my group of friends. On the way, my friend told us that he had more or less located the place we could go to, it was a place near a river, about fifteen or twenty minutes from the town started.
And the more he told us about the locations and even some ideas for the project, the more convinced we were that we had made the right decision to carry out our project, however, in retrospect, we should not have boarded any bus to that place.
We arrived at my friend's village late at night, so we stayed at his house the first night, but the next morning after eating a good breakfast that his father kindly prepared for us, Lucio went to get the camper and we all went into the forest.
We spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon doing the project, and when it started to get dark, we all decided that the best thing to do was to light a campfire, drink some beers and eat something. The spark of the fire illuminated our faces as we shared laughter and animated conversations.
At some point during the night we started telling some legends or paranormal things that had happened to us. And that was when Lucio decided to tell us a legend he had heard since he was a child, a macabre story that had tormented the nights of his town.
According to legend, a local farmer, known for his alcoholism and mistreatment of his wife and children, always claimed that if God existed, his farm would be more prosperous. One day, in a fit of drunken rage, he brutally beat his family to death.
The story went that the souls of their loved ones had entered the goats on the farm, and weeks after the family was not seen in the village by the neighbors, they made a gruesome discovery .
When the locals entered the abandoned farm, they found an unimaginable horror. Three goats were feeding on the farmer's decomposing body, as if possessed by an insatiable hunger.
The farmer's body was so mangled that it looked like he had been mauled to death by the goats themselves. Since then, the goats were said to have roamed the forest, eager to taste human flesh once more.
At first, we all listened to the story with skepticism and nervous laughter. To me, it sounded a bit crazy, although somewhat original, as I had never heard anything like it, and I dare say that we all thought it was just a spooky story to add excitement to our camping night.
But our friend told us that in fact the oldest people in the village claimed that it was real, because they said that they were children when it happened, and not only that, but there was indeed an abandoned and spooky farm in the village and that he had even gone to see it with his friends during his adolescence but had not seen anything out of the ordinary.
So we assumed that maybe something similar happened a long time ago and over the years people had exaggerated it or added a few more gruesome details to scare the town's children for years, so I remember that after a while we started laughing at the flaws the story had and as the night progressed, we ended up forgetting about it.
We stayed out until about two in the morning, and were planning to stay for some time longer, when suddenly some strange noises began to fill the forest.
A chill ran down my spine as I listened to the creaking of branches and the eerie whispers of the wind.
Although I tried to convince myself that they were just the usual sounds of nature, uneasiness began to take hold of me and I suppose it did to the others as well, because soon we stopped laughing and talking, and soon we found ourselves in total silence, watching the fire in the campfire move in the wind.
Suddenly, one of the tents we had set up for two of us to spend the night there, so we wouldn't be so cramped in the camper, began to shake violently.
Lucio said it must just be the wind, but everyone else could tell the tent was shaking from the inside. Trying to figure out what was going on, Lucio and I went over to see. Unzipping it, we were greeted by a terrifying scene: the inside of the tent was in ruins, as if some evil force had been stirring everything up.
We decided to take refuge inside the camper and sleep, convinced that our nerves were simply due to the disturbing story Lucio had told us. We thought that a restful night's sleep would dispel all our worries. But we were wrong.
The night continued with increasingly strange incidents. Whenever we looked out of the windows I can say that I at least could make out shadows moving through the trees, and we can all attest to this day that the wind sounded more like sinister fading laughter and incomprehensible whispers that seemed to whisper our names.
The atmosphere was already very tense, even though we hadn't seen anything outside the tent. In fact, I remember Lucio trying to convince us that it was the wind that had caused everything inside the tent to shake, but it really seemed like he was saying it because he wanted to convince himself that it had been like that. And even though most of us knew that, and that the air could hardly do that, we really started to believe it too.
We started saying among ourselves that we were just suggesting ourselves and that maybe the best thing was to go back to my friend's parents' house and come back the next day in daylight so we could continue with the project. We all agreed and Lucio left the camper to go to the driver's area so we could leave at once. However, for some reason unknown to me, the camper wouldn't start. It was very strange because Lucio's relative had checked it just so that wouldn't happen to us, but no matter how many times he tried to start it, he couldn't and it was too early in the morning to go on foot, so we thought the best thing was to stay there for a few hours while the sun rose.
I remember that before going to bed, I looked out the window. It was very dark outside, and it was very difficult to see anything outside. However, little by little my eyes got used to the darkness and through the thicket, I saw a dark figure moving among the trees.
It was a long, misshapen shadow. My voice caught in my throat as I pointed shakily at the figure. My friends saw it too. A mixture of horror flashed across their faces, the more we looked at it, the more it seemed to have a humanoid shape.
We closed the curtain and said that most likely it was a tree that because of the darkness and the wind looked like a person, we thought that we should try to sleep so that the night would pass faster and with the daylight we could return to my friend's parents' house or maybe go get someone to fix the trailer, because this happened at a time when telephones were not very common and even if you had one, the signal was very bad and you had to stand in very high places and even if we had had one, I'm sure there would have been no signal.
I remember that in the middle of the night, I woke up because of some murmurs that could be heard inside the camper, because the bathroom in the camper was not working, two of the girls on our team, Rosaura and Ana, were considering going to the bathroom. The truth is that none of us wanted them to go, not even them, who were evaluating the pros and cons of going out. However, as I said before, we were all in a kind of denial, no one wanted to admit that something very strange was happening, because that would be admitting that we should be panicking.
So, not finding a reason why they shouldn't go, they both went out, my companions and I were shining some flashlights, hoping that they would be a little less afraid of the light from them. I think about three or maybe five minutes passed, and both the light in the RV and the flashlights went out, leaving us in total darkness. At first we tried to get the flashlights to turn back on, but nothing we did worked, leaving us with the only option of waiting in the dark for our friends to return.
But the minutes passed and there didn't seem to be a single trace of Rosaura or Ana outside, they were taking longer than usual. And there was no sound either, not even normal forest sounds, like crickets or branches moving in the wind, it was as if when the light went out we had all been left in nothingness and not even our eyes could get used to the darkness. Several more minutes passed and as they didn't respond even when we shouted their names, we started making plans to go looking for them.
Honestly, none of us wanted to go, although I guess Lucio felt somewhat responsible so he said he would go look for her and since he was my best friend, I couldn't leave him alone, so I told him I would go with him.
However, as we were fumbling with our backpacks to leave, a chill ran through my body as I heard a faint knock on the RV door.
Followed by a calm and dare I say somewhat cheerful familiar voice, which seemed to be Ana's, asking us to open the door. However, something deep inside me warned me that, although it sounded like Ana, it wasn't really her.
A feeling of danger took hold of me and although I couldn't see my other companions, something told me that they believed it too, since none of them had opened the door yet.
However, after Ana insisted a little more, Lucio said he would open the door, and in an attempt to stop her, I asked Ana where Rosaura was and at that moment a second voice was heard, this time, similar to Rosaura.
Something wasn't right, they both sounded very calm and it was very strange that they hadn't answered us when we tried to call them, but suddenly they were both outside the camper, at least to me the whole situation seemed very strange and before anyone thought of opening the door I let the others know.
Those who agreed with me, I remember that even Ramiro, who was closest to Rosaura, asked her where they had met, but before she could answer anything, the light came back as if by magic, we tried to look out the window but from where they were standing you couldn't see if it was them, because it looked very dark even with the light from the camper, so since we couldn't see them, we insisted that Rosaura answer the question.
However, instead of answering the question, they started knocking much louder and more aggressively, as well as starting to say that if we didn't open the door right then and there, they would kill us all, and the angrier they got, the more their voices seemed to change as well, now sounding a little deeper and a little raspier, and they were pounding on the trailer so hard that it seemed like it could flip over at any moment.
Terror gripped us all. The lights in the RV began to flicker and the temperature dropped sharply.
I remember that suddenly one of the windows broke and although it was too small for anything to get in, we could all see a goat standing on two legs, but in a strange way, it wasn't like the goats that normally appear in videos, which even seem to wobble and fall back on their four legs at any moment, this one looked more humanoid, as if its body was designed to walk on two legs, its fur was dark brown and it also had yellow eyes, its pupils also looked very human.
Seeing that is one of the things I would like to forget, but unfortunately for me, I remember every miserable detail of his appearance as if it were yesterday.
To this day, I'm not sure if they left just because we couldn't open the RV or because of something else, I only know that after a few hellish minutes of them ordering us to open the RV and not stopping hitting and ramming the RV, they just left, however we were all so scared that we couldn't sleep for the rest of the night, and we were very alert to any noise, no matter how small, outside.
Not even when the sun began to rise were we calm, I don't remember well, but I think we still stayed in the camper until around noon, where armed with what we could find in the motorhome we went down, everything seemed to be normal outside, although the tent that we had left behind because we had entered the camper in such a hurry was completely destroyed, as was the camper on the outside, it was full of dents and dried mud everywhere.
I will never forget that we argued for a while about whether we should look for Ana and Rosaura or whether we should all leave and ask the people in the town for help. The argument between those of us who wanted to go get help and those who wanted to go look for them got so heated that we came to blows among ourselves, and Lucio, another friend, and I ended up telling them to do whatever they wanted but not to count on us, we would go ask for help, and I guess they were afraid of being alone because they started following us too.
Nothing happened to us on the way to the village, I remember that we even picked up wood and stones in case those goats appeared to us again, but nothing of the sort happened, it was as if that forest was nothing more than an ordinary, common forest.
We arrived at the village and told them everything that had happened to us the night before. I don't know if people believed us completely or not, but a very large group of people offered to go to the forest to look for our friends.
Honestly, after what we had experienced the night before, I don't think any of us expected an encouraging result, but we did have one: they were both alive. They were found up in a tree. They were so traumatized that they couldn't get down from the tree. They had to be helped, but at that moment they couldn't say what they had experienced or seen the night before. They were all covered in scrapes all over their bodies, and Rosaura was even missing some of her fingernails.
None of them ever went back to school, and over time we lost all contact with them, however, Ramiro said that Ana told him about it once, she told him that when they were about to go back, they saw two goats standing on two legs, approaching the trailer, and before the light went out completely, they saw a third one standing right next to them, so terrified they ran into the woods to try to escape from whatever that thing was, she also told him that that goat imitated his voice perfectly and when he managed to climb the tree, that thing attacked him for a while until it got bored and left.
I'll never know if those goats or whatever they were, were actually the ones from the legend or maybe something else that lives in that forest and takes the form of what people fear, I guess I'll never know, I just know that I would never go back there, not for all the money in the world.
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