Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28788859-20160619210516

I am writing this under an apparent and ever more increasing mental strain, for I feel my mind has been corrupted by a maddening foulness which I am still unable to comprehend. I might just as well take a blade and run it up and along my arm. That would be the kinder thing to do, the better thing for me and for those reading these scrawny scribblings. What keeps me from doing this, I cannot quite put my finger on, but I would assume it is natural, even for me after what I have seen, to fear death.

Great Birchwood was a rather unremarkable place. The rural little campsite lay some five miles from the beach’s overhanging cliffs and ancient monoliths, surrounded by woodland spanning miles in every direction, then divided by vast green fields in which the tents resided, little came of this place. The green was then blotched by cement block structures, acting as the facilities, and dotted by withered, wooden beams marking the camping spots. A few country turnpikes cut through the silence once in a while when lost cars would come trundling through this forgotten country. It was unlikely that many of these weary travellers had the slightest intention of staying at the park, or were even aware that it existed. When travellers had the intention of making this their holiday relief, I would be aware as they pulled off from the somewhat wider country turnpike into a tight dirt road where I resided in a little plywood shack perched on a mound able to see the four green fields which were specked around.

Prior to the ‘September incident’ I received pay from a small family consisting of a mother, father and their little girl who I assumed was no older than nine years. I had seen a number of families come and go over the many years I remained parkie. The busiest it would get was in July, even then there were no more than a few hundred people. In August, the numbers declined and September was a barren month with little business. Maintenance wasn’t due for another month, but the hundred people, mostly comprising of drunken teens who had come for a good time, which had spent their summer here, had left a putrid mess to clean. This was, by no shadow of doubt, the dullest time of year and I was left wondering why anybody would come knowingly in such times.

The morning was devoid of any activity, apart from the family which had by now set up a medium size tent across on one of the fields next to a cement block building which was most probably in a foul state. As the sun glided up into the sky, eventually reaching its zenith, a few more travellers came to claim their spot in the rolling green. The dark came early, five o’ clock, the sun sinking back from where it came. There was little to no activity, as far as I could see, which was a change from the previous months of loud, obnoxious teenagers and banging music.

There were a number of conveniently situated bells, used in case of fire and other emergences at the four corners of each field. At this point I had retired to a hut where I would sit in a rocking chair, with my Sony Walkman, unable to sleep. The rangers had come to reside in a separate dimly lit building, not far from mine, playing cards or checkers. It came as a surprise, due to the amount of inactivity I experienced when covering my shift, when the piercing sound of one of those fire bells penetrated my ear. We scrambled relatively quickly, gathering materials necessary for a fire or domestic emergency and started, in the pickup we kept outback for occasions such as this, for field number two where the small family of three were situated.

A brisk drive was followed by a short walk to the bell, still hysterically ringing at a frantic pace. I shouted over to a fazed women, the mother who I had seen when receiving payment, crying and screaming hysterically. It was apparent to me now, after some comforting words and questions about what exactly was happening, that their daughter had gone missing after she went into the bathrooms, and upon further investigation was no longer in their. The father of the child had gone out into the woods looking, while he ordered his wife to alert someone as there was no phone service. The closest thing we had to a phone was a radio we used to communicate locally with the emergency services. I had one of my colleagues call the police and launched a search party to go looking for both the man and the child.

The toilets which she had entered were more rancid than I originally anticipated. Sick and faeces were smothered on the floor and one of the doors of the cubical block was hanging by only a singular hinge. Two of the toilets were unimaginably fetid. One of the toilets doors was locked when I entered. The parents said they hadn’t been to the bathroom and had no knowledge of the locked door. They called out to the child assuming she would answer and dismissed the locked door as ‘out of order’. She must have used the soiled toilets if she went back out into the woods. With this, I peered into the dimly lit stall to discover that the toilet inside had chunks of indescribable things on both the seat and clogging up a small hole which gave way to a narrow pipe which would deposit waste backwards in an effort to keep the excrement, that resided in the cavity, out of sight. It was not until my disbelief was disrupted by whimpering.

My colleagues had located the child's father but it seemed we now faced a terror of much greater magnitude. Their is a panel on which the toilets sit which allow access to the concealed chamber of foulness. Three men budged the small seat covered in what could only describe as blood. Retaining this information was important at this point. The police had been called but the worst was assumable. The panel gave way to the cavity where the terrible region lie. A flash light then reveals a swimming mass of faeces and a scrawny figure, its anatomy out of place, it lay slumped in the black and brown rotting fluid facing away from us preoccupied, doing something. I think I went mad then. The creature began to arise revealing what it was doing. The flashlight then went to reveal a body drowned and shrouded by the waste. Whether this poor poor soul was the girl we has been searching for, I deny that possibility, I must to keep me from going insane. Before that thing slithered back into the heaving mass of excreta it stared at me with those eyes. Those terrible eyes. I see them now. Outside my hut, dragging me into the foul mass. Its here. Its come for me. I should have ended it. The Knife! The Knife! 