A Flash in The Woods

“Hey, slow down!”

When I agreed to come with Michelle, I didn’t know it involved trekking through the woods for over an hour.

“We have to get somewhere over there, I know it was here!’’ She’s yelling back to me since I’m practically fifty feet behind.

I know she’s in better shape than me, but this is ridiculous. We aren’t kids anymore. As I’m getting closer to her, I can she she’s eyeing the wall of rocks in front of us.

“There’s NO way I can climb that.”

“Well we have to get up there somehow. I know this had to be where it happened, I saw it!”

This morning she called me and explained what happened. Michelle was in her room getting ready for bed when she started feeling uneasy, but she had no idea why. She went to her window and while she was looking around her ears started ringing. Minutes later she saw something bright flash far in the woods at the top of the tree line, and then silence, no more ringing. Of course we both wanted to see what it was, but she left out the part that it was probably at the highest point we know of back here. It isn’t far from where we live, these woods are practically our backyard, but we’ve still never hiked this area.

“Alright, alright, let’s at least walk around it and see if we can find a spot that’s not so steep for me.”

It’s mid afternoon in late May so the sunlight is as bright as it can be, but there’s still a lot of shade and shadows from the thick of the trees. As we’re walking around this hill I realize it’s a little odd that there’s a mountain of rocks in this one clearing. They’re not concrete, kind of like boulders that lifted up out of the ground to make it. There’s nothing on top that I can see either. It looks like there’s only tall grass and the sun is hitting it perfectly like a movie.

We get what I think is more than halfway around when she sees just a plank of wood on the ground against the base of the hill.

“Hey look!” she jogs up to it, “it looks like someone hangs out over here, they moved some rocks around to get up!”

I look at it uneasy because it does look like someone did.

“I hope there’s nothing weird up there.” I say as I start following behind her.

“I hope there is because I don’t know what would be normal about what I saw.”

The hill isn’t that high, maybe a bit more than four times my height so it only takes a minute or two for us to climb. I quietly note to myself that it doesn’t look like these “stairs” have been used in a while considering they’re covered in moss and plants.

“Well it’s pretty flat up here; I’m going to start looking around. Yell out if you see anything,” Michelle walks away, eyes planted on the ground.

It’s way nicer up here than I thought it would be. The woods are on an incline where we came from, so I can see some of the neighborhood. Looking the other way it just seems the woods get darker and darker. I can’t believe we never found this spot when we were younger, it would’ve make our exploring a lot more fun. This hill is a lot bigger than I thought, too. It kind of expands more on the side we didn’t walk around, like a whole block long. There are some little bushes and a few trees trying to grow. Maybe the rocks don’t let them grow much bigger.

As I’m taking everything in I realize one of the trees looks really dark, but there’s nothing shading it. I start going in that direction and notice the grass is getting a little shorter and there’s some bigger rocks sticking out of the ground, too. I get up to it and it doesn’t look dead or burnt, but I’ve never seen this kind before. There are buds on the branches, no leaves, and it looks super out of place. There’s no way it’s from here, someone had to have planted it maybe.

“People have definitely been up here,” I mumble to myself. I can still see Michelle but she’s way too far away to call her over just to look at a weird tree. I sit down on a rock next to the tree facing her, examining the area in between us and I see it. I jump up and run out into the open grass in front of me. A few seconds later I’m yelling out her name and staring into what looks like a fire pit, but there are rocks scattered around and no wood. None of the grass is burnt either, just this huge practically perfect circle.

“This had to be what you saw!”

Out of breath she says, “I guess so, but I didn’t see a fire when I first looked outside…”

We kind of stare at each other and the ground back and forth. I start picking up rocks and my hands get ashy.

“There had to be a fire, maybe this is an old spot then?”

“Yeah maybe, I don’t know what could’ve flashed though. There’s no glass, everything’s flat, no light was hitting up here…it was the middle of the night.”

She sits down and stares around the circle. We look around in silence for a while.

“What’s that?” she points over to a piece of metal.

I look over and my heart kind of flips in excitement.

“I’ll check it out.”

I walk through the burnt ground to a beat up safe box looking thing.

“You’re not going to believe this.” I say over my shoulder as she gets close.

The box is mangled, no corners in existence, and it’s half imbedded in the ground covered in ash like the rocks.

“Do you think it’s from…the circle?” she says tense now.

“Has to be.”

“It had to bounce or something to get this far from it then, but how did it get buried like that?”

We both blankly look at each other and slowly look up. I don’t know what to say so I kneel down and start digging around it to try to wiggle it out.

“Could it actually have-“

“I have no idea,” I say. “Help me out.”

We’re both scooping around the rocky dirt in silence, wiggling this hunk of metal until it finally gives.

“Maybe it fell from a plane?”

“Could have,” but I know it probably didn’t.

I yank it up. It landed face down on a rock and the door bent in half. I’m able to jerk what’s left of it open and dump everything out.

“Well that’s weird,” Michelle picks up some coins, “maybe these are collectors or something.”

There are a few odd things like beads and a chain necklace. I pick up a little black notebook.

“What’s in it?”

I flip through the pages slowly and stop at the end, “…nothing actually, it’s blank.”

“Should we call someone about this?”

“Nah, nobody would believe us let alone come out to check if we were telling the truth.”

“Yeah I guess. We have a cool spot to come out to now though.”

“Oh yeah we’re totally coming here again.”

It’s close to sunset, so we start heading home. I get back at dark, clean up, and head to my room.

I pull out the black book I tucked in my pocket. There’s no way I could show her this. I flip through the book again shaking. It’s filled with symbols and sketches and nothing I can understand except one thing.

Tucked in the pages is a signed blank check for $20,000.