Joey Fisher disappeared on July 4th, 1985.
I was twelve. It happened under the watch of my own parents. Joey was one of four friends I brought along on a family camping trip to the Four Pines Campground outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
He was just-simply-gone.
There were thirty-five people across five families, including the young friends each family brought along, and nobody saw what happened. We had hiked on a trail, played badminton in a field and splashed around in the campground pool. By mid-morning, the adults started prepping food for the nightly barbeque, and we all held a sense of excitement knowing a fireworks show or two would surely be put on by the dads down by the campground lake later that night.
But things didn’t go that way. I was the first to notice he was missing. I thought maybe he had gone to the bathhouse or laid down for a nap. I scanned the area. I asked my buddies and they too realized he just wasn’t there.
We told the girls from the other families. Nobody could find him. The adults got involved, and of course, were not initially worried. But Joey was under my parents’ care, so even amid taunts from the other parents that he’d show up, they finally started looking too. Then families we didn’t know started looking. Then it was dusk.
The police lights and spotlights stayed on throughout the night. I slept some, but the foreboding excitement had me awake in fits-and-spurts. We were set to leave the next day, yet clearly we couldn’t return home without someone’s son.
But we did.
My memory of those days is of my mother crying and my father on the telephone, constantly—and then, my father crying. He could have been talking to Joey’s parents or maybe the other parents who were camping with us. Maybe it was even police or investigators. I’ve never asked. I carried on into high school. It was always there, but I never felt blame was put on my family. We were—and still are—good people. A family lost a son, but in our little hometown—a few hours away from Four Pines Campground—I suppose people simply understood that bad things happen, and any anger caused by a missing boy was properly transformed into sorrow and hope. But hope faded.
Joey was never seen again.
By 2013, I was long married with three kids of my own. My parents came down for the usual Christmas visit, toting along yet another batch of items they’d been storing in their attic for 30 or 40 years, passing it down to me to likely do just the same. I didn’t have time to sort through it all, but a few months later, I caught a break in my schedule and decided to pour over it. The prize was the old movie projector that took actual film rolls.
I remember many days being on the other side of that film. And the box was full of reels. I found a white wall in our basement and started reliving my youth.
And then—Four Pines Campground. Joey had only gone with us once, and I couldn’t imagine it was the same trip. We’d been there plenty of times. The police back then or whoever those men in suits were would surely have kept anything related to that trip as evidence.
There we were. Mike. Brandon. Aaron.
And Joey.
The film was jumpy. Summertime fun. A hike, some badminton and pool time. Then a group photo, it seemed. I only vaguely recall it. But there we were, thirty-five people lined up at the edge of the woods, smiling and laughing. There was no audio on the reels, but I heard it in my head.
And that’s when I saw him.
Not Joey.
HIM.
He lurked. And the name just came to me.
He was The Lurker.
How we hadn’t seen such a man at the campground is a mystery, because he was something anyone would never forget. He seemed halfway between six and seven feet tall and held a look of undernourishment. His face wasn’t clear, which made the sunken eyes and bald head more haunting. The torn overalls over his shirtless torso, and perhaps even body scars—he was there, in the shadows of the trees, just behind little Jenny Cassidy.
I rewound the old reel two or three times, then recalled burning a hole through the film from the heat of the lamp with this very same machine decades ago.
I shut it off and just sat there, heart pounding. I had to know more. I rewound, set up my phone and videotaped the scene playing out on my basement wall.
I spent the better part of the night—much to the chagrin of my wife—in my home office studying the tape. No, I didn’t see The Lurker grab Joey. But he was there. Joey was there. And then they both were gone.
This was fresh information suddenly burning at me from the inside to be let out. But let out to where? And to who? Was it time to bring back horrible memories and call my father and mother, now in their seventies? What about Joey’s family? They were still around – I’d see his siblings on Facebook now and again.
And it was horror, this man – this thing. Joey was dead and gone in everyone’s minds. Some semblance of peace had surely taken hold. For me to reach out and showcase a monstrous thing lurking around at the point of Joey’s disappearance - what would it prove? What if The Lurker in those shadows was instead a pretty lady in pigtails? Would my alarm have been the same? As chilling as it was, I realized I couldn’t tell anyone. I realized it could only hurt.
And it did hurt. Me. Badly.
For months, The Lurker was my last thought before going to bed and my first though upon waking. I saw his face in the morning shadows under sun-lit trees as I paused as stoplights. He was in my dreams.
He had come to me through just a few seconds of 28-year-old video footage, but my mind was filling in the blanks and this monster was growing stronger by the day. He was no longer malnourished but instead, ripped with wicked muscle, enough to break down my front door. I have three children and a beautiful wife.
I scoured the Internet for any cases of abductions or missing persons in the vicinity of the campground or local area. None. But I couldn’t avoid Joey’s face, scanned decades ago in dot-matrix as it appeared in our local paper after he went missing and now available eternally via Google search.
I hadn’t seen that picture in decades. Our copy yellowed over the years on the side of my parent’s refrigerator.
There was nothing left to do. The monster was growing. I had to share him. But before I did, I had to be armed with due-diligence. Like some strange self-flagellation, I had to take extra effort before sharing. Even if I failed, if I could at least show that I tried just once more to find another answer to explain-away The Lurker, then maybe the pain of telling Joey’s parents—or the pain in them listening—would be easier.
It was time to go camping.
Four Pines Campground looked about as I remembered it. 28 years of visitors, improvements and landscaping changes gave it a different feel. But there are some memories you don’t forget.
I found our camping spots, and even the spot where the group photo was taken. Other young families had pitched their tents here as had hundreds had before them, blissfully ignorant to the meaning of this place. I nodded politely, and walked into the woods.
Certainly, police or investigators would have scoured the entire area–even nearby towns. But that was 1985 in rural Pennsylvania. Maybe not. I continued deeper. I had only a moral compass, feeling that something might guide me, telling me it was right to share The Lurker with the people who had suffered so much already.
It was wilderness. I had carefully scanned every online map and every view for any clue of roads, buildings or anything that might now be or have ever been out behind our campground. But there was nothing – just about eight miles of forest, and then a bump of Appalachian mountain running across a long ridge and boxing it all in for 40 or 50 miles.
Walking at about three miles-per-hour through the woods, I figured I could make the ridge in a few hours. I’d be able to cover the flatlands well, and perhaps find whatever it was I was looking for, even if that was only a testimonial that I went to all lengths before unleashing this monster upon its unsuspecting victims.
Exhausted, I came to the foot of the ridge, sat on a log and asked myself what I was doing here. I didn’t come out to climb a mountain. My family was 800 miles away and I was in the middle of the woods looking for something–guidance, perhaps. My legs ached and my winded lungs burned. I pictured those rangers or police or even the local volunteers, perhaps sitting upon a log like this 28 years earlier, desperate to find a missing boy, but giving up hope.
Up. It was really hard to do. That’s why I suspected none of the searchers did it. Exhaustion beat them down, and perhaps that clouded their view of the merit in going up. But I had come this far. Others would move mountains to see a lost child again. So I’d have to climb one. Up. Serious fear set in with each step. I didn’t expect to find The Lurker. Even if I did, he’d be 28 years older. But I was moving farther away from everything I loved. My family–my life. I could fall or get hurt. I’d survive the night out here if I needed to. But each step forward brought a growing sense of danger where I felt as if each step back towards the campground—about an 8 mile hike through raw forest–would relieve it. Up. And there it was. I hadn’t spotted a single path, track or even a broken branch on the way up. Yet here stood this ramshackle building, a shanty-hut pieced together from the forage of the forest and pieces of trash collected from places unknown. Then I noticed the smell. Seems the flies had, too.
Maybe it was an old forest watch or hunter’s hut from the 1930s, repurposed for unknown means. But here it was in front of me, and I had had my new mission.
I took the Glock 9MM out of my pack, cocked it and placed it into my waistband. I went inside.
Then unmistakably—the hat. That green Russ’s Electric hat. The sponsor of my Little League team–and also Joey Fisher’s. It was the last thing I remembered about him. The Lurker lived here.
I raced around the place, looking for more clues. I found them. Everywhere.
Then The Lurker came home. He stood at the doorway, backlit by the sunshine. I couldn’t see his face–only the dark shadows of his eyes. 28 years later and I had solved the mystery. I was right. And armed.
I held my gun high and asked him, “why?” In a low, grumbling voice, The Lurker said, “ask yourself”.
He stepped towards me, and I shot him dead.
I soon found myself sitting on a rock and covered in dirt with a badly decayed, green Russ’s Electric hat in my hand.
I sat for a long, long time.
When I finally returned home, I reviewed the tape a final time.
As I knew it would be, there was nobody in the woods behind little Jenny Cassidy.
11/30/2016 Mrs. Fisher, Joey fell into a narrow ravine and I tried to save him. I tried as hard as I could. I tried and tried and tried. But he died. I buried him there, and I don’t know why. I’m so sorry. For all these years, I have not known. I could not remember. I did not remember. I don’t know why I did it. For all these years, I’ve lived a lie I did not remember telling and had no recollection of until now. I killed the monster that stopped me from knowing. There are no words. Please forgive me. I am so sorry.
Submitted November 30, 2016 at 05:53AM by breckenfall http://ift.tt/2ghoHb6 nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment