The Dead Forest
Short Story : The Dead Forest.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ( Horror Story)
By Prabir Rai Chaudhuri . All Copyright Reserved 2018
What I am going to narrate happened to me in 2012. In the Dead Forest , a cursed place, a forest that is not a forest, a place so sinister and so dark that rather than seeming like an environment full of life, it seems like a dead place, the dead forest.
Back then I spent most of my free time on Facebook, looking for people from all over the world to add, you know, if you meet new people you can learn new things.
And by chance I became good friends with a guy from Spain who lived in Denmark. We were both fans of a metal band from Sweden.
So one day this band went on a big tour across the European continent, and in a fit of madness I got together with the Spanish guy and we went for several days following the band's tour.
On the fifth day of the tour the concerts took a 2-day break, we decided to go to the next city and wait there until the band arrived for the concert.
We stayed in a cheap hostel, one of those where you have to share a room with several random people.
That night we were talking with some of the people we shared the room with, they were people from all over Europe, fortunately they all spoke English, I have never been very good at learning languages, but I was good at Spanish, so what I didn't understand he translated for me.
One topic led to another, and at some point we went from talking about movies to talking about paranormal things and strange places.
Everyone started talking about a particular forest that was in the city we were in, a forest that only foreigners dared to enter, even the locals were very afraid of it.
They said the name, but it was in another language, it was one of those weird languages that are impossible to pronounce, so I don't remember it. But someone said that it literally translated as The Dead Forest.
One by one they began to tell little stories that were told about that forest, I remember them mentioning that the trees had strange shapes, also something about how when you are inside you can see that the Sun behaves differently.
Someone said that cell phones and compasses didn't work very well in that forest, I remember a redhead commenting that time worked differently.
Of course they said all that because someone else had told them, the reality was that none of them had been in that forest.
Anyway, that's how it ended, but the Spanish guy and I convinced each other that it would be a great experience that we couldn't miss.
So the next morning we packed some water bottles and some chips and cookies, put everything in our backpacks and headed out into the famous forest. We weren't planning on doing a big 8 hour trek, plus the forest wasn't that big, we just wanted to get in a little bit and then get out, that was all.
When we arrived at the area my first impression was a little disappointing, the forest did not look as imposing or as dark as it had been described to me.
Between jokes and jokes, my companion and I slowly entered the forest. We had barely walked for 5 minutes, if not less, when we came across the strangest tree I had ever seen.
It was quite tall, taller than a palm or a pine, thin, but what caught my attention about that tree was the shape of its trunk, it was curved, it literally looked like an arch coming out of the ground, even today I cannot understand how that is possible, but I affirm it because I was able to see it with my own eyes.
It wasn't the only tree we saw, there were more, I don't know how many , obviously I wasn't counting them, but there were quite a few.
We kept walking, about 60 meters or so , when we saw something that was even more out of place than the curved trees. A tire rolled by, it went a good distance until it lost its balance and fell between the ground and the trees.
It was impossible to ignore that striking peculiarity, of course we went closer to look, but with each step we took the tire was getting lost, as if it were an optical illusion, and indeed, when we got to where it was supposed to be, there was absolutely nothing.
That gave me a bad feeling, I felt as if the forest wanted to play with our minds so that we would get lost in there and feed on us, on our energy, on our flesh.
I told my colleague that we should go back, he agreed, the problem was that after walking for an hour and a half, according to my watch, we couldn't get out of the forest.
We leaned against some trees to try to find our way. At that moment, the Spaniard told me that we were going around in circles. I replied that that was absurd and that it couldn't be like that.
To prove he was right, he emptied a bottle of water at the foot of a tree, causing a little mud to form. He told us to keep walking and that we would surely come across that tree with mud on it again.
I decided to count my steps, I don't know why I thought that would help in any way, well, before reaching 500 steps we came across that tree again that had mud at the foot of its trunk.
It didn't make any sense, whatever was happening there was beyond my understanding, logical explanations were slipping through my fingers.
I tried to calm down, I inhaled deeply and exhaled calmly, I looked at the sky, and I suggested to my colleague that we walk following the Sun, so we wouldn't be able to go around in circles anymore.
He agreed, so that's what we did.
An hour later we saw something different that we had not seen until then, in the distance we could see an area free of trees, as if nature did not grow there for some reason.
My survival instinct, or perhaps my cowardice, made me decide not to go any further.
I looked around, wondering which direction to take, and we decided to go around that treeless area without getting too close, just keeping it in sight to get around it.
No matter how much we walked, we couldn't get around it, the area seemed endless. Exhausted, I decided to look at my watch. It said 11 pm, but the sun was still above us.
I mentioned this to my Spanish colleague and he reminded me of what we had been told about some things not working well in that area.
We continued walking, then in the distance we saw a person, we both felt a little suspicious, so we stopped.
We started making signs and shouting at him to see his reaction, but he didn't respond, it seemed like he didn't even notice we were there.
I, half jokingly, told my colleague that it was probably an illusion, just like the tire. He looked at me coldly and said that we should go closer to be sure.
As I walked in its direction, the same thing happened as with the tire, its figure seemed to fade into the surroundings, like when you think there is water at the end of the road, but when you get closer you discover that there is nothing.
We turned around, but something changed. In the distance we could see a person hanging from a tree. We had passed by there a few minutes ago, and that person wasn't there. We were definitely not going to get close to them, so our situation was to have a corpse in front of us, a fake person behind us, and a mysterious endless area to the right.
The only thing left for us to do was to go to the left. We started running after hearing branches snapping, as if someone was approaching us. Fortunately, we managed to get out safe and sound.
We were in the forest for less than half an hour, because I know what time we left the hotel, and if I add the time it takes to go to and from the forest, and compare it with the time on the hotel clock, it was about 20 minutes different,
I felt like it was hours, but no, just as we had been told, time works differently in there.
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