I slowly start to turn to look at the pile, dreading what I may see. The smell of rotting flesh clings to everything around, the stench filling the air with no escape. When I finally see what Jess was looking at, I freeze.
"That's… wha… oh god…"
I see that it's not just a pile of random meat, or maybe an animal carcass as I was hoping, but the half-eaten remains of a person. A small person at that, possibly even a child. As I approach it to get a closer look, I notice that the carcass still has a name tag on them, but we're too far to read it. We walk closer, and I realise it's Ryder, who had disappeared only a few weeks earlier. The body is past the point of recognition, with the only piece of ID being a slightly smudged name badge.
The spine was visibly ripped out and strung over a tree branch, still in one piece. What looked like my neighbour's bucket had been beaten up and was collecting the blood as it dripped off the string of bones. The body and clothes look ripped and chewed with bits of bone and organ sticking out of the gaps. The arms had been almost entirely devoured, with just the bones and a little bit of flesh left scattered on the sticky, wet grass. The gaping holes left by what had been consuming the person were much larger and deeper than what any normal creature could make. The ground around the corpse is still stained red with the wet, sticky blood.
"Oh my god- What is that." Jess exclaimed, gagging.
"… I'm starting to believe some of those rumours might be at least a little accurate…"
I step back slowly.
"I don't like how this is going." River speaks quietly, clearly terrified and disgusted by our new discovery.
I take a deep breath, trying to act like this is even semi-normal.
"Don't be such a wuss River. I'm sure there's some logical explanation for this." I try to comfort them, although I don't think it's working very well.
Jess decides that this is the best time to explain a legend about the next town over that she read online.
"Oh, I read a story on the internet about something similar to this that happened only a few years ago in a town not too far from here. I think it went like this- One day two young girls went into to a forest late at night, and claimed to have seen a pale faceless creature eating a person, starting by pulling out the spine. They came back the next morning, terrified, but no one believed them, so they went back into the forest to get evidence. They never returned."
River freezes, turning practically white as a ghost.
"I can't do this. I'm going to go back to the school."
They barely manage to get the words out, stuttering as they speak.
Jess and I try to stop them from going back, but before we can say anything, River disappears into the dark forest, leaving the two of us to navigate the path on our own.
"At least we have a flashlight."
As I say that I just really hope I didn't jinx it.