"We should probably get out of here" breathed Stephen. "Like right now."

But Nora was curious. She was determined that whatever had caused her father to be traumatized in his early days was all either a hallucination, or some maniac determined to ruin other people's normal lives. And she was going to prove it. She took out her phone and tapped on the camera app, which was quickly becoming useless in the approaching darkness.

"No." Her voice shook when she said it, and it was then that she noticed that she was scared as well.

"No!?" Stephen was going into hysterics. "Your mom said not to get near the forest!"

"C'mon Stephen!" She pleaded, "We need to help whoever screamed right now, no matter what's in there."

"I am not doing this!"

"Stephen, seriously? I'm not even scared." That was a lie, but she just had to find out what was in that forest.

"We don't even have a light!"

"I have this pocket light."

Stephen hesitated. "Okay, we'll do a quick look-around, and then turn back."

"Yes! Let's go!"

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Mrs. Casey had just finished making dinner when she heard a thump from the living room.

"John." She whispered, her heartbeat already racing as she thought what he could've done to himself. She ran out into the dining room, and turned right to go into the living room.

"John?" She called as she walked down the couple steps into the living room. Where was he? The room was empty.

Thump.

Now the sound had come from above her, on the second floor.

"John?" She called louder this time, her voice trembling. "Honey where are you?"

She ran up the thirteen steps to the second floor, and turned left into the master bedroom, which was directly above the living room.

Empty.

Thump.

That had come from the kitchen now. Now Mrs. Casey was terrified. What was going on? She ran into Nora's room and picked up her softball bat. As she ran towards the kitchen, she started turning on all the lights. If someone had broken in, she wanted to make sure that she'd be able to memorize his or her face.

She went in through the kitchen entrance and turned on the light. Nothing. All she could see was her shadow, elongated in front of her across the floor. Mrs. Casey started crying. Where was her husband?

"John?" She sobbed. Her vision was blurring from the tears, so she grabbed a kitchen towel and wiped her eyes with it. As her vision cleared, she gasped. Her shadow had gotten twice as tall, and her arms were almost a lot longer as well.

"John?" She barely whispered. And then the lights went out.

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The forest was a lot darker than Nora had expected. The heavy tree cover made her pathetic pocket light only light up about three feet in front of them, and her phone's camera was barely picking up shadows. Then she noticed she had no service in here. She decided not to mention it to Stephen, who was already begging to turn around.

"Man up Stephen." She scolded. But however much she wanted to mask it, she was visibly scared.

There was a small, barely visible path that they had been following. After about ten minutes of walking in the same direction, they came upon a fork. In the middle of the split, there was one of those park information boards that contained a map of the paths running through the forest. On top of this, someone had stapled a collage of newspaper clippings. Nora was studying it as Stephen looked around the board. She noticed that all the clippings had to do with one thing, the forest disappearances. Nora looked through the dates. The most recent one, in 2001, was a 26 year old woman named Katherine Banks. She dissapeared when she had gone into the forest on a dare one night.

"Hey look, I found some kind of paper" Stephen said, as he walked back to Nora. "Here give me the light."

Nora handed it to him, her hands shaking, as she pointed the camera at the paper. Stephen quickly shone the light on the paper. What they saw made them shudder. Scrawled on what seemed to be college ruled notebook paper was a crude drawing of a very tall, faceless figure with unnaturally long arms. Next to the figure the drawer had scribbled "always watches - NO EYES".

"Okay let's leave now." said Stephen, his voice barely audible.

"Yeah, I agree." replied Nora.

As they turned around to retrace their steps, Nora noticed her camera was starting to blur and was suffering from some static.

"That's weird." she said.

"What is!?" Stephen almost yelled at her.

"It's like, my phone. The screen goes static every now and then."

"Okay, well you can work that out once we get out of here."

Nora continued walking, looking down at her phone's now constantly static screen. She fiddled with the camera options until all of a sudden the static stopped. She looked up.

"Hey look I fixed-"

She stopped short. Stephen was gone.