Monsters Among Us

By Liz Zemlicka

Four teenagers discover something terrifying living in the woods surrounding their tiny town.  Twenty years later they uncover the horrifying lengths the town will go to to keep their secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Zemlicka
• Release date: Jun 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201296612

Liz Zemlicka

Liz started writing as a teenager, over the years she had gone more in the genre of Blogging than storytelling, but has always stayed an avid reader. With inspiration from great writers of horror fiction like Stephen King, Anne Rice, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allen Poe and many more, she has improved her writing style and found her niche in storytelling and entertaining. Born and raised in the Midwest, with a fascination with the unseen, because there is nothing scarier than something that can play with your mind and terrify you beyond the reach of your 5 senses.

Book preview

Epigraph

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too.  They live inside us, and sometimes they win.

-Stephen King

The Beginning

Chapter 1

The scariest monsters are the ones we can't see. They hide among us in plain sight, and humans can't see their proper form. But, until one fixes its eyes on you, instinct kicks in, and you will see more than you ever have before, like taking off a blindfold you've worn since birth. The only problem is, you can't unsee it.

All small towns have their secrets; with ours, no one would ever believe us, so we keep it to ourselves and create stories to keep the truth from getting out. Our little town has the highest number of hunting accidents, car accidents, or boating accidents per year in the whole state. We can't exactly write down monster attack or ripped apart by some animal then eaten.

All kids grew up hearing the warnings and ghost stories of the thing in the woods. But then, when we all got older, we stopped believing the rumors. We thought they were trying to scare us away from those woods. I mean, come on, if there were a shape-shifting monster living in our town, we would have seen it by now, right?

I haven't told this story to any outsider, so to understand the event, you should know the history. According to the legend, a family lived out in the woods in a log cabin, which allegedly is still there. The father went out hunting one day; when he came home, it was utterly dark, and he found his family murdered in the cabin. Now that is what he said happened. For reasons unknown, he continued to live there another month until someone came to check on him and found the bodies of the guy's family, all partially eaten. After that, they say a windigo possessed him and caused him to crave human flesh.

There are many other stories about kids and adults going into those woods and never returning, any trace of them anywhere. I never believed all those stories; how come no one has gone missing in the past few years?

Well, I went to find answers, and I took my three best friends with me.

The morning we left, it was the first day of summer vacation; we all packed lunch and water bottles, and we made our trek into the forbidden forest.

The first couple of hours went by without any issues. We walked in silence most of the way, following Max. Max is always the leader; we wandered the forbidden forest most of the evening until darkness slowly blanketed everything. Then, finally, we turned around to go back the way we came in.

Only it wasn't; it was different in every way. It wasn't until we started passing things we had never seen before that we began to panic. I then could make out a clearing up ahead and suggested we go there and see if we can see the lights from our town. So we hurried over there, and when we broke into the clearing, we instantly forgot about looking for the lights.

There it was, looming dark and foreboding, almost like it was smiling at us. We looked at each other with wide-eyed stares; nobody could speak.

We had found the log cabin.

Truth In Legends

Chapter 2

The old log cabin had seen better days; the door was barely hanging on, swinging lightly in the breeze with a high-pitched squeak, then thump against the outside wall. We stood there, mouths open in utter shock. None of us ever believed it existed, but here it was in all its dilapidated glory. Then reality hit every one of us right between the eyes.

If this is real, could it be possible the thing guarding these woods is real too? We are in the middle of monster territory with no idea which way was town.

We were dumb kids, barely 15, and thought we knew everything and nothing could ever hurt us. But then, that one moment, 20 years ago, changed everything. Without intending to, that night, we unleashed an evil we never dreamed possible. That little country town and all its secrets will never forget that summer (and most likely will never forgive us, stupid kids).

See, our parents and grandparents told us stories our whole lives, stories of The Guardian of the Forest. According to legend, it had the head and antlers of an Elk, with long, skinny arms and sharp, pointed talon-like claws.  Its body so thin that its rib cage was well defined. It walked hunched over but moved smoothly and swiftly. By all accounts, it was a Windigo, only it wasn't, not exactly. See, this creature was also a shapeshifter; it would turn into someone you know and trust and lure you into its grasp and make you do things horrible, terrible things. If that didn't drive you to the most literal form of insanity, then you would turn into a creature yourself and guard the forest for years and years.

Pretty unbelievable, right? We thought so, up until that fateful summer that changed our lives forever.

Here we were, in the last purple light of sunset, standing in the middle of the clearing, gaping at this skeleton of a log cabin that, up until that very moment, didn't exist in our minds. We all looked at each other silently. Then, finally, Max said, might as well take a look Luke shrugged, I'm in. Becca looked terrified; her eyes were the size of saucers. Come on, Becca, I said quietly, we don't want to be standing around out here alone when it gets completely dark I reached for her arm and gently pulled her along. Gabby? She said quietly. Hmm? I was staring at that cabin and barely paying