CHAPTER 1/2

                                    

                                          
December 21st, 2009:
    The dead-bark of the murky trees crowded the forest that day. It was eerily silent, mumbles and cries from every corner of Samridge Pines, Illinois becoming the only source of sound. A fragile, small town, it was. Only under 2,400 people lived there–even less their whole lives. It contained a mostly old and young population–elders cooped up inside their broken houses, children wandering the sidewalks with chalk in between their fingers, some of them scurrying with their bikes around the block to the only local park of Southside. 
    Although it was mostly quiet, there was something that had occurred one fateful evening; exposing the hidden lies. It horrified those who wanted a ticket to peace, to protect their kids–but they had not known of the man who lived just next door, and his petrifying obsession with the blood of children and the sound of their fearful screams.
    Her name was Alicia Sparks–a young 12-year-old child who never understood the concept of the man who stalked her every move. She never noticed his peering through his window when she'd explore the town on her own, scouting the woods and traveling through pines and vines growing recklessly onto dying branches. 
    She never once remembered the taste of his mouth when he kissed her that day, she had forgotten it–thought nothing of it, as her Daddy did the same thing, so did Mommy. They both always smooched her lips, or her cheeks, although they never really used their tongue. But it never bothered her.
    She hadn't noticed the way he glared at her with his sharp eyes, Alicia didn't comprehend the way his fingers quivered when they'd reach for her thigh. It was all nonsense to her–she was too innocent for her own good. 
    When he approached her on December 17th, 2009, she grinned and beamed, she giggled and chuckled, facing her head up to his shadowy body, towering over her like a skyscraper. When he reached his hand out to her, she believed he wanted to play, to feel like a kid again. To see her, to color with her, to tickle her, to kiss her, to rub her thigh. But when her own hand placed itself in the wrinkles engraved onto the softness of his palms, her heart dropped, and it was quickly realized that she had made a mistake.
    After the 17th of December, young Alicia Sparks shocked locals, terrified children, whispers going through one another–"the Boogeyman caught her!" or something along the lines of, "the man in the haunted house ate her!" 
    The man children spoke of was Raphael Baxter, the Samridge Pines Middle School's janitor. Some of them even made up stories; "I saw Alicia Sparks shouting through his window, a mop pierced right through her head!" while other kids spoke, "No, I saw her bloody body squished inside his mop-bucket!" 
    Police never took it seriously, they knew kids made things up, to stir each other into fear.
    However, there was one boy who intrigued their investigation on the whereabouts for Alicia Sparks, and her shocking vanishing at Southside Park. His name was Tanner Archer, a young male who found himself in a world full of confusion, his practically-naked body standing in the middle of the road the same night she had disappeared, but not even himself can remember where he was. 
    As new details begin to arise, the old-tales children mutter, or elder, gossiping people who had nothing better to do than theorize about the untold things in Samridge Pines finally became heard and taken more seriously. Much of it is not a theory anymore. 
    Then, it was December 21st, three days before the holiday of Christmas. It was then when the world went silent, news stations boomed, news reporters shoving their way through the bristles of shrubs and bushes, a poison ivy branch brushing against one their forearms. 
    Others were pulled and tugged behind the forest, numerous of officer's vehicles stationed just outside the woods on the damp grass. Lights blinded those who were there at that moment–or watched on TV. When a Dutch Shepherd howled its great bark, it led them deeper inside–the officer's who were the prime investigators of Alicia Sparks disappearance and the rotten, unidentified 'bundle of bones boy's' body.
    Then they approached the steep slide of a cliff, leading into a pit of sorrow. A boy's body sat beside a lump of dead flesh, his pupils lost in trauma. Deborah Barley herself, the deputy of the Samridge Pines Police Department, broke herself down in horror, Lester Jackson, the Chief, joining in on her grief.
    That same boy was no other than Tanner Archer himself, and he wailed in cries, salty liquid gushing from his waterlines. What he sat beside stung not only the police and the boy's heart, but everyone who watched on from the comfort of their home–and tore apart the quiet town of Samridge Pines. 
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