No Turning Back [REWRITTEN]

Chapter 4

[257 hours, 29 minutes]

[Dilla]

Two days. Two days since Blake found Tyson ripped in two and disemboweled in a tree. It was a gruesome thing, yes, but kind of along the lines of what I draw sometimes, so I'm not too unsettled.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sad about Tyson's death. We weren't that close, but we were good friends. I just know how to see past the emotion and realize that nothing that lives around here could've possibly slaughtered Tyson like that. I didn't know what it was. But it wasn't some animal, that's for sure. I went to see the body myself. He was cut clean through the stomach. Like a... large blade had been used, perhaps. Something much larger than a knife, and much less messy and bloody than a chainsaw.

But the question is: who could've done something like that? And how?

Luckily for me, Tyson was a hunter. And like most hunters, he had trail cameras in the woods. Including an area in quite close proximity to the clearing he'd been found dead in.

I'd gone back out to the clearing and popped the memory chip from the camera, and now I sat in front of my computer. I plugged the chip into the side. When the pictures popped up, it took me a moment to find the right ones - the camera took pictures of every animal that passed its lens, and the woods had lots of deer and rabbits and raccoons. There was a possum or two as well. Eventually, though, I found the correct date and looked through the images.

The first few were just the same. Animals. Deer, mostly, with noses that sniffed at the lens and inquisitive eyes. Until I finally got to about the time Tyson must've been killed.

3/28/24. Camera 3. 12:58 P.M.

My earlier guess about the killer being human? Well, that was immediately proven incorrect by what I saw.

What I saw was a creature that I could only guess must've been of demonic origin. A grey-skinned, demonlike being with crimson horns and wings, a grey tail swaying from beneath a white lab coat that fell to just above its ankles. It was turned and talking to another being, its skin an orange color, with three dark red horns instead of two on its head. Unlike the more sophisticated outfit the demon wore, the orange creature wore a simple dark green hoodie and had pale, yellow scleras with white pupils.

I wasn't really expecting anything in particular, but what the hell am I looking at here?

The pictures weren't videos, but I could tell that the grey demon was talking to the orange one, to see if I could catch anything else that was happening, I kept clicking through the pictures until the orange one seemed to have turned around and left. The grey one was alone now, and it glanced around the clearing. Suddenly a large looking weapon appeared in its hand - a deadly-looking, red bladed scythe with a black handle.

And there's the murder weapon.

Then there seemed to be a gap in the pictures taken. The demon must've walked offscreen. Where Tyson must've been.

Then suddenly there was another picture there.

The demon was back, holding the scythe, which was covered in dark red blood. It was staring directly at the camera. Not like it'd turned around and noticed the camera there - it seemed to have known the whole time that it was being recorded.

In the next image, the demon was smiling. The next, it was gone.

I stared at the empty image for a bit, trying to process the content of the pictures I'd just seen. I've always been a believer in the supernatural. I'd just never expected anything of the sort to be the cause of the death of one of my own friends.