Horror - Strange Things Reside in Blackriver Point

I'm guessing none of you wanna read a bunch of bullshit about who I was and what led me to end up in the situation I am about to describe, so I'll keep it to the stuff that matters.

My name's Ted. About a month ago me and the boys went on a camping trip to a place called Blackriver Point up in the Pacific Northwest. Don't bother trying to Google it, you wont find anything, and I'm sure as shit not gonna tell anyone how I heard about the place. All you "here's a video of my visiting this crazy haunted site" types can look elsewhere, cuz this place is the real deal and I won't have the blood of idiots on my hands.

So anyway right off the bat a whole buncha shit seems fucked up about this place from the moment we arrive. There are no signs for it until you're five miles off of paved roads, and when we get there, we find that not only is the lot empty, but there's not even a building to buy your camping pass. Only thing that even lets you know you're in the right place was this wooden sign that looked like it belonged in some kind of old-timey colonial town with the words “Welcome to Blackriver Point: Follow the red trail to reach the campgrounds. Enjoy your stay.” with the last sentence barely legible from a long rust colored smudge running across it.

Now I'll admit that this was not the most auspicious sign to greet you when you arrive at a campground. I'm sure all you armchair survivalists are sitting there thinking “I woulda been outta there the moment I saw that shit.” Thing was, me and my friends arn't exactly new to these kinds of trips, and part of the reason we went there in the first place was that we wanted someplace as far out of the way as possible. The kind of place where you don't find 75 year old Winnebago warriors dragging three generations of children down the trail, and what could be more out of the way than a place that's totally empty? Plus we weren't exactly heartbroken about not having to pay for a pass.

The biggest problem was that, while the sign told us to take the red trail, neither of the two paths had any markings on them. After some deliberation we decided to take the trail that was wider and had a more prominent entrance. In any case, its not like we didn't come prepared to spend the night out in the wild. Worse case scenario we just set up in a clearing somewhere.

Well the plan made sense on paper, but after an hour of going through terrain way too steep and rocky and uneven to even get a stake in the ground, never mind fall asleep on, we were starting to reconsider our wisdom. It was already getting dark (like I said it took us a while to find the place) and nothing sucks more than trying to set up camp when you can't see shit. We were all in a foul mood and the discussion about what to do quickly turned into an argument, with my friends Ed and Todd wanting to just eat the hour trip back to the lot and try the other trail, while me, Jesse, Mitch, and Al wanted to keep pushing forward til we found a place that was flat and soft enough to get our tents up. In the end we couldn't agree, so Ed and Todd went back on their own while we continued moving forward. We agreed to keep in touch on our phones and meet back up in the morning.

It was another hour before we finally found a place to set up. By then it was almost nine and we could barely see anything. We had to tie our tent's stake holes to rocks with paracord because the ground was too hard to be penetrated by the stakes themselves, but it was at least a flat, level surface and for that alone we were grateful.

We tried calling Ed and Todd on their phones but all we got was thus weird thumping noise that just kept repeating over and over. We had planned on setting up a campfire and having a few beers on the first night but we were so exhausted and pissy that nobody felt like doing the work, so we retired to our tents and called it a night.

I woke up to Mitch shaking the side of my tent and yelling something I couldn't quite make out. As I crawled out into the daylight, it didn't take me long to see what upset him. It seemed that we were not the first people to find the clearing useful, but whoever it was that had been here before wasn't singing campfire songs and roasting franks. The whole area we had placed our tents in was within a massive red circle painted on the ground with foreign writing all over it. If this were a movie the egghead of the group would have chimed in right around then saying that he knew a bit of Latin and then given a rough translation, but we didn't think to invite the local bishop on our trip.

What we could make out were the pictures painted in regular intervals around the circle, and if the words bore anything in common with them they weren't a recipe for a really good Goulash. There were drawings of bones laid out in specific patterns, people with gaping chest wounds that had fire coming out of them, and a whole bunch of weird looking creatures that seemed to be rising out of the ground. Of course the first thing we tried doing was looking the stuff up on Google, but we were too deep in the forst to get any data. We also tried calling Ed and Todd again, but found that instead of thumping there was just that weird static-y silence without their phones even rining.

All of sudden we heard Al freaking out down past the clearing. As we clawed through the overgrowth we came across a giant slab of marble that had somehow been lugged this far into the woods. It had those same strange symbols all over it, but also something else, a coating of a sticky, dark red substance that anyone whose gutted a deer and forgot to clean their knife could tell you was dried blood.

Well obviously this was the end of our little excursion. We packed up our shit as quick as we could and then started heading back towards the parking area, frantically trying Todd and Ed's phones the whole time so we could tell thek to be there waiting. There was no reason for anyone to be super nervous about phones not working deep in the forest, but for some reason I think all of us had a suspicion things were a whole lot worse than even we realized at that point. It didn't take long before we were going around a sharp bend in the trail and our suspicions were suddenly confirmed.

As we turned the corner, we damned near walked into two heads dangling from trees with their spinal columns still attached. It was them. Their faces bore these focused stares that made you think they were still conscious enough to see you and their mouths dangled agape as if they were trying to cry out the horrors that had witnessed from beyond the grave.

Needless to say the whole group fell to pieces at the sight of our friend's mutilated corpses. We were all just screaming over one another gibbering like lunatics until Jesse finally grabbed Al (who was in the worst condition out of all of us) by the collar and screamed out:

“Look I know this is fucked up as hell, but we can't be freaking out. It won't do them any good to die out here with them. What we gotta do now is make it back to the car, get out of here, and report this shit to the cops. Fortunately for you I came prepared, though I doubt that those cowards are gonna have the balls to try anything in broad daylight.”

As he said that, Jesse opened up his pack and began to dig something out. Crazy S.O.B. had brought his hunting rifle on the trip. All of us rode his ass about how dangerous and illegal it was to go hunting in public campgrounds, but I've never been happier to see someone ignore me then when he pulled out the ridiculous Mosin he uses.

The boost in confidence Jesse's gun brought to our hopes of survival, however, lasted maybe an hour. The trail that had appeared to be a single passage the previous night was actually a network of forked paths all joined with each other to form a single path if you were walking away from the parking lot, but turned into a complex course of branching and re-branching routes if you headed back. It was as if it had been designed to trap anything that was foolish enough to wander in.

It was around this time that I first started getting this powerful sense that there was something I needed to remember, but could not quite get to the front of my mind. I asked everyone else if they had any idea what it might be, but they were too caught up in how to navigate the trail to bother with me. I was still trying to work through what it could be when Mitch told everyone to shut up for a second.

“You here that. It sounds like a river in the distance.” he said.

Now this probably doesn't come as a shock to any of you readers who remember the name of the campgrounds, but it was to us. You see, the area where the site was located is about 100 miles from the nearest river. We had sat there on Google Maps before the trip trying to find even a small tributary that might have given the place its name, but there was literally nothing nearby that was even close. We ended up assuming that some early prospector found a muddy stream, and in a desperate bid to get himself into the history books, tried passing it off as the real deal.

Now the sound of rushing water we heard was faint, but it was definitely a river. Needless to say this confused the hell out of us. Jesse even wanted to leave the trail to go see if he could get a view of it, but we convinced him that having the only armed member of our group go wandering away from an already confusing network of trails was just a recipe for disaster.

We wandered all morning and well into the afternoon, making no progress as far as we could tell, before certain urges began to become unbearable. I think that all of us had expected to hold it in until we got outta hear and then blow up the first McDonalds we found as a group. That possibility now seemed incredibly distant, so we had to do something about dropping the kids off.

We decided we would stop and take a rest break, with each of us taking turns going behind this particularly large Grand Fir, while Jesse stood with his gun at the ready. I volunteered to go first, and I took care of my business without any issues. By the time I had gotten back and passed the torch to Al, Jesse and Mitch were already deep in conversation.

“But that doesn't make any sense.” Jesse said.

“I never said it did, but neither do altars in the middle of the woods, Ed and Todd getting murdered, or spending over six hours heading in the direction of the lot and not crossing either it or the road. At this point things making sense just isn't something we can count on.” Mitch replied.

“Dude there's no possible way we could have been going downhill this entire time.” Jesse said.

“Most of the time the ground has been relatively flat, but there have been a number of steep downhill stretches as well, but can you think of a single time we were going uphill for more than a handful of yards?” Mitch asked.

“No, I can't. So what do you suggest we do?”

“Instead of trying to navigate in the direction of the campground, when Al's finished up and we head back out, we should focus on taking the path that brings us higher whenever we encounter a fork.”

“What the fuck is taking him so long?” Jesse asked, calling his name a few times and getting no reply.

We went down behind the fir and found that he was gone. We walked around, calling his name for about half an hour before deciding it was too dangerous to go any further into the trackless wilderness, and so we returned to the trail. Now, Jesse had been deep in conversation while Al was shitting, but I was looking at him, and and I know he had not taken his eyes off the tree the entire time they were talking.

We were all really worried for Al, but at the same time all of us were terrified of the same thing happening to us. I don't feel proud about moving on, but at the time I felt like I had done everything I could to find him, and like Jesse said before, it wasn't gonna do him any good for us to wind up wherever he was. At least if we made our way out of there, we could get a search party and/or law enforcement to find/get justice for him.

We tried putting Mitch's plan into action, but it was easier said than done. Like earlier, I got this weird sense that this trail had been designed to deliberately obscure anyone who had the misfortune of walking on it. We would get to a fork and one way would lead slightly uphill and the other down, but as soon as we started following the uphill one it would curve into a steep descent. We would then go back and give the other branch a shot, only to find that it went downhill too. But the really strange thing happened when we decided to try backtracking instead. As we retraced our steps in reverse along the path we had just been on, we found that it too was on a downward course. While all this was happening the sensation that I had forgotten something important never went away, and I spent much of the time Mitch and Jesse were arguing contemplating just what it might be that felt so important.

It was close to sunset when Mitch began to yell that he saw what looked like a clearing in the distance. For a brief moment we allowed to idea that we were finally done with our ordeal to take root in our minds, sprinting like playful schoolchildren towards the end of the treeline. What we found was not the parking lot, though it did answer our questions about the sound of rushing water which had been growing louder and louder as we continued our journey.

We found ourselves standing on the edge of a shear cliff probably five hundred feet tall. At the bottom was a wide river as dark as it's name suggested. The trail we had followed turned into the cliff and formed into a switchback that appeared to lead to it's base. In the distance the Larches, Yews, and Redwoods that made up most of the forest seemed to slowly fade from a vibrant green to various shades of gray.

“It ain't the parking lot, but it's sure as shit a way out of here.” Jesse yelled.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Dude it's a fucking river. How many rivers do you know that don't have any settlements somewhere along the banks? We'll have to write off Mitch's car as a loss, but I know how to make a raft that'll keep us afloat from just the shit around here.”

“Yeah I'm long past the point of worrying about that Grand Am.” Mitch said.

I had this strange sense that something wasn't right, but there didn't seem to be any other options, so I went along.

The trail did indeed lead down the side of the cliffs, but now that we wanted to go downwards, it seemed like it was deliberately trying to take as straight a course as possible. We had walked for about half a mile and had only dropped thirty feet, when Mitch put his hand to his head like he had just felt a raindrop.

As a group we looked up and saw something that will be burned into my memory until the day I die. It was Al, and he was alive. He was dangling from the top of the cliffs about half the distance between them and us from twenty or so hooks that were pierced through various parts of his skin. He seemed to be trying to scream something to us, but the severed stump where his tongue had been just kicked droplets of blood into the air.

All of us froze, not sure how to handle this newest horror. Our uncertainty only increased when we saw the creature responsible for our friend's tormented state appear over the edge of the cliff. It stood upright, roughly seven or eight feet tall, and it's body was covered in the darkest fur I had ever seen on a living being. It had these sharp hooked claws on both it's hands an feet that extended outward at least a foot, and three tails danced around each other behind him. By far the most disturbing thing about this creature though, was it's head. It's skull was shaped almost like an alligator's, but with a longer, thinner snout, and covered with the same black fur as it's body. On the top of it's head were two horns that started out going forwards before making a hairpin turn and shooting straight back at an angle almost perpendicular to it's body. It's eyes were bulging white and empty save the black vertical slit that each one possessed.

Jesse was the first to break the stunned silence, firing at the creature and doing no visible damage but causing it to step back from the ledge out of his line of sight. He fired his second shot into Al's head, causing a shower of gooey brain matter and small shards of skull to rain down on us.

“Run! Now!” he shouted, and we obeyed unquestioningly.

We sprinted as fast as we could for a quite a while, I wish I could be more specific but when you have that much adrenaline in your system it messes up your perception of time. I could tell you it felt like 10 miles but a smart man would probably cut that into fifths for a more accurate estimate. Even when you got your body in overdrive mode, you will eventually reach the limits of what it can endure. I've heard of small mothers lifting up cars in the heat of the moment to rescue their kids, but I've never heard of one lifting a semi. By the time our bodies were ready to give out on us we were less than two thirds of the way down the cliff, and there was no end in sight.

The sun was now totally gone, and it was a miracle that we had been able to make it as far down that rocky causeway as we did without any of us tripping, but we knew that even if we were able to get a fifth wind going, the chances of us safely navigating around the cliffs in total darkness was all but zero, we were gonna have to camp out for the night.

We found a small alcove in the side of the cliff that was too steep to allow anything to come at us from above, so we sat down with our backs to the wall and pooled our supplies. Now some of you may be surprised to think that we would be able to sleep after everything that happened, but if you don't think such a thing is possible I would suggest going outside a few hours before you normally go to bed and sprint until your legs literally fail to support your body any more than try to see how long you can stay up. I guarantee that even if your pants-shittingly terrified your body will still go down faster than Spinks did when he fought Tyson.

The first obvious call was that we were going to have to have at least one person awake on guard duty, and that person would have the Mosin. Second, we were not going to sleep in our tents. It was like what Quint talked about in Jaws after the Indianapolis sank, if your up against something tougher than yourself and your only advantage is superior numbers, you want to make sure that as soon as one person starts shooting and hollering, the other two are gonna be able to get his back as soon as possible, so having to squeeze through a tent flap was a nuisance we could not afford to deal with.

Though we each had high powered flashlights, there was some debate over whether we should keep them set up pointing up and down the trail or not. On the one hand it would give us a warning if the creature were coming, but on the other it would announce our presence to it and any other awful thing that might be lurking about. We weren't sure if we had lost it or whether Jesse's shot had injured it enough that it didn't wanna mess with us, so we decided to play it safe. Each of us would keep or lights at arms reach and the moment we heard anything suspicious we would all turn them on and try and get the thing illuminated for the gunner to have a clear shot.

We placed the tent poles along both ends of the trail in the hope that the creature might accidentally disturb them and give us a bit of warning, and we rigged the last of our paracord into ankle-high trip-wires. I lay down right on the rocks while Jesse took the first round of guard duty. The last thing that came to my mind as I drifted off to sleep was the thought that it was of the upmost importance to recall that weird thing that had been at the tip of my tongue all day.

I woke to the sound of gunshots and Mitch's screams. Evidently he had already changed shifts with Jesse, who was laying beside me, and he seemed to be firing frantically up the causeway, but I couldn't see anything. After a minute or two of total chaos he stopped.

“What happened?” Jesse asked.

“I heard a couple of those tent poles we set up slip loose down the trail. I shined my light down there by I couldn't see anything. I don't know where it went.” Mitch replied.

“Dude I told you those things were a stopgap measure and that they might come loose on their own if there was a strong wind. How many rounds did you fire?” Jesse asked.

“Three or four.” Mitch replied.

“Here.” Jesse said, reaching into his bag and pulled out a cartridge, tossing it over. Mitch opened the magazine housing and before we realized what was happening a black figure was upon him and the empty screams of a man with punctured lungs filled the air. Then, just as quickly as it happened, both Mitch and the creature, along with Jesse's rifle, were gone.

In the hours that followed we were both sure that any second now the creature would be upon us. We sat there side by side with our knives in our hands, just waiting for the thing to come back. While we didn't say it out loud, I don't think either of us thought there was any chance of being able to fight something like that off with hunting knives, but if we were quick we might be able to deprive it of the opportunity to play the same games with us that it had with the rest of our friends.

But the creature did not come back for us that night, and when the sun first broke we got up and started making our way down the cliffs. We had not gone far before we saw why it had been too busy to bother with us. Mitch's corpse had been set up right in the middle of the trail, the tentpoles that had been around the campsite had been assembled into long stakes which had somehow been plunged into the rocks and then used to impale Mitch's body from a number of different angles. The barrel of the Mosin had been snapped off and had been jammed into his back, emerging from his eye socket like some kind of perverse telescope.

I feel guilty for saying this, but by that point we hadn't held out any hope for his survival, nor did the creature's horrors have the same impact they had earlier that day. We stepped around the body and continued making our way down the trail.

When we arrived at the bottom of the cliff we were finally able to get a good look at the river. The shoreline looked like something that would be more at home in a desert than in the Northeast United States, with the wind sending a mist of sand flying about layers of bleached bones. The river itself was so black that we couldn't see an inch beyond the water's edge. A row boat sat in the sand just outside the reach of the rushing waters.

“God damn, luck is finally on our side.” Jesse said, but I wasn't so sure. The voice saying that something was wrong was now screaming at full volume, and I had the distinct sensation that the reason was tied to the thing I could not remember.

I bent my will on trying to pull up the memory that seemed so important as Jesse prepared the craft. Then, in an instant, piles of insight began to stack on top of one another. Memories came poring out out the floodgates: images of my grandmother, a kind but perpetually nervous woman who I had always regarded as ridiculously superstitious sitting me on her lap and telling me tales of when this land was still fresh and unconquered, forcing me to draw a series of patterns over and over again until the shape was burnt into my mind. I suddenly realized where we were.

“You can't get into that boat.” I told Jesse.

“What the fuck do you mean? After all the shit that happened a way out appears before us and you want to tell me not to use the first good thing we've found to our advantage? Do you think we should just sit here and wait for that creature to come back for us?” he said.

“That boat is not a good thing. The river before you is the Acheron, the ancient channel into the gates of hell itself. You will not find things any easier if you continue to follow it.” I said.

“Dude you can do whatever the fuck you want, but I'm getting out of here. I've lost too many friends in the past two days to fuck my own survival up over one more.” Jesse said.

“I'm sorry you feel that way, but I know how we get out of here now, and it's not through that river. Do you really think that creature would let us slip away so easily? He could've stopped us long ago if he wanted to.”

“Well good luck man, I wish you the best.” he said as he pushed the boat into the inky waters and was carried off by the river.

I had left all my gear at the last campsite, and even in my pack I wasn't sure if I had brought a pen, but I did have the knife. I dug the tip of the blade into my arm and began carving a spiral up and down each of my limbs, then, calling up the shapes my grandmother had me memorize, I sliced them perfectly at eight different points in my body, and then started making my way back up the cliff.

The creature was standing there waiting for me not far from where we had made camp, but as I closed in I began to detect a certain apprehension in it's mannerisms. It would dart up the precipice and emerge a few hundred feet up the banks, constantly staring at me but never getting close. When I finally reached the heights I walked straight into the woods, ignoring the twisting trails and walking in as straight a line as I could back towards where we had initially come. Mitch had been right about that much, and I still feel guilty for not having remembered sooner not to trust those looping paths.

The creature stayed in my wake for some time as I cut through the untamed brush, but he never got close enough to actively interfere, and after an hour or so he returned to whatever horrible den spawned him. After another hour and I found my way onto the road we had taken in.

As soon as I hit civilization it was like all the weight of what I had endured came down on my at once. I passed out on the roadside and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital. There was obviously extensive police questioning. I told them everything that happened exactly as it happened and I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear they did not find my story particularly believable. They sent me to a psychiatric facility for eval and I told those people the same thing I told the cops. They made an effort to try and search for my friends but of course they could not even locate the parking lot, never mind their bodies.

In the end I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, in addition to Stockholm Syndrome and stress induced hallucinations. The best explanation they could come up with was that someone had lured us out into the middle of nowhere with lies about a campsight and then proceeded to kill us one by one. The scars on my arms and legs ended up being a huge help, as nobody believed a human being would voluntarily inflict such injuries on themselves. Mitch and Todd's wives, along with most of my friend's families are still deeply suspicious of my story, and obviously none of them are talking to me, but it doesn't really matter, none of them are going to find Blackriver Point, and if they do, I certainly won't have to worry about them bringing charges against me.