I turn to look at the pile, the smell of rotting meat clinging to my nose. I realised as I turned that it was not just a pile of random meat, but the half-eaten remains of a person. As I walked over to get a closer look, I noticed that the carcass still had a name tag on them, and as we walked closer, I realised it was Ryder. Who had disappeared only a few weeks earlier. The body 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 a neighbour's bucket had been beaten up and was collecting the blood as it dripped off the string of bones. The body and clothes were 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 wet grass. The gaping holes left by what had been consuming the person were much larger and deeper than what a normal human could make. The ground around the corpse was wet and sticky from all the blood.
"My god what is that." Jess exclaimed gaging.
"Guy's I'm starting to believe some of those rumours." I stepped back slowly.
"I don't like how this is going."
"Don't be such a wuss river, I'm sure there's some logical explanation for this." I tried to comfort river though I don't think it's working very well.
"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 mourning terrified, but no one believed them, so they went back into the forest to get evidence but never retuned and that night the town heard a bloodcurdling scream coming from the forest girls had entered." Jess explained terrifying river to the point where they were pale in the face.
"I can't do this. I'm going to go back to the school."
Jess and I tried to stop them from going back before we could say anything river had already disappeared into the dark forest, leaving the two of us to navigate the forest on our own.