Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26705150-20150820030722

Every year during summer break, Jake and I would go hiking through the nearby countryside. It was a very well forested area with plenty of hills and mountainous regions by which to walk through. There were even some waters, ponds, and lakes in a few spots. So needless to say, it was a very beautiful place to visit and hang out at. We enjoyed the view and the fresh air that it always us brought every year.

We couldn’t help but lose ourselves in the vastness of the forest that we are now in. Jake I had ran far ahead of me and I struggled to keep up.

“Jake, where are you going?,” I yelled.

But he just kept running in a straight line and I got response from him at all. From the distance I could he was going pretty fast and he seemed very excited. This of course, was no surprise to me as he usually had that demeanor every time we went hiking and running was another one of his hobbies. I didn’t mind it but I usually had to keep up with him as he did so. Normally he would slow down or wait up for me if I fell too far behind, but today was not one of those times.

Eventually I lost sight of him as the dark forest seemed to have engulfed his figure. I didn’t see him go anywhere else other than straight, so I just kept heading in that direction. Eventually I ended up going down a clearly defined dirt trail, which led into a clearing.

There I could see a lake in front of me and the outline of a person standing in front of it. It took me a minute of getting closer before I realized it was Jake again. But then I noticed some more people inside the water. At least a dozen people were floating on the surface and they were all facing Jake. Their gaze seemed to have been fixed on him. Neither Jake nor did any of the swimmers do or saying anything else. They just floated silently still in the water and I thought it was very odd.

“Jake, did you make some friends or something?,”, I asked.

Once again, no response and I decided to get a little closer. But then Jake did the same, only he approached the lake. He was at the edge and I wondered if he was about go in. Of course, that wouldn’t make sense considering he wasn’t even dressed in swimming trunks and going in his clothes didn’t seem like a good idea. That, combined with the fact, that nobody was responding to anything that I was saying, troubled me a little.

As I looked more closely, it looked like the lake’s water just barely met the edge of Jake’s shoes and it wouldn’t take much to push him in. A simple nudge or the brushing of wind would easily knock him down and I couldn’t understand why he was standing so close to the water.

I looked around some more, but the swimmers hadn’t done anything still. Their gaze had never averted and they hadn’t moved at all in the water.

“Are you guys alright?,” I asked.

Of course, I got no response.

Then Jake just jumped into the water and it splashed in a circle, momentarily obscuring the view of the lake and its occupants. But when the water settled I still couldn’t see any of them and Billy wasn’t there either. So I waited for a minute but they didn’t come up.

   I debated going into the water myself, to check on them, but I thought that maybe it was just a prank or they were just screwing around underwater. But then a minute became a few minutes and now I was in a full panic mode. I couldn’t see Jake or anybody else floating on the surface of the water so I thought maybe he drowned, along with whoever else I had seen. I ripped off as much of my excess clothing as quickly as I could and then I jumped into the water. I completely submerged myself and I began swimming around to try and see if I could find Billy and/or the swimmers underneath. But I couldn’t see any of them, anywhere.

After another few minutes I decided to jump out of the water and call 911, from the phone in my spare pants pocket on the ground near the lake. I tried to show them location of the lake and the clearing to the operator and it took a awhile before anybody actually got there. When they did I tried to explain that Jake and the people I had seen in the water, never came out of the lake, and I never found them when I searched for them myself.

Not long afterwards, the lake was searched for any bodies or traces of the people I had described. But they never found anyone or any trace pointing to the whereabouts of them. They were just gone and there was no reasoning for it.

<p class="MsoNormal">To this day, Jake has never been found and the memory has never left me since. <ac_metadata title="The Hike (unreviewed)"> </ac_metadata>