u/Jakxta

It’s funny how your brain can just erase a bunch of your memories, block them out for years and years, and then one day you hear, see, or smell something and they all come rushing back.

It was a wooden elephant that did it for me. It was the first thing I noticed as I stepped into Uncle Rick’s living room, seemingly for the first time, but it appears I have been here before. The sight of it resting on the mantelpiece, above the open fireplace, made the whole room feel familiar.

My dad shuffled past me and began to assemble the stack of flat-pack moving boxes I’d carried in from the van, while I just stood there, staring at the elephant. He wasn’t in a talkative mood. His brother, my Uncle Rick, died of a heart attack last week, and with my dad being the elder of the two, I guess it had him thinking about how long he had left.

I never knew my Uncle Rick very well. Growing up, I saw him once a year if that. He came round for Christmas a handful of times when I was a kid. I saw him at a couple of weddings over the years, a couple of funerals, and for the final time last year, on his seventieth birthday.

He kept to himself at family gatherings. Always the first to crack open a beer or pour himself something a little stronger. Always the first to leave as well. He was the walking embodiment of being worn out, both physically and mentally. The deep, darkened bags under his eyes had been there since I was a kid, some thirty-odd years ago.

The few times I did interact with him he often got my name wrong. He’d call me Ben, then quickly correct himself. I always found that quite odd, it’s not remotely similar to my name.

“William,” my dad snapped, “are you going to give me a hand or what?”

“Yeah… sorry. I was in a world of my own.”

He grunted in response. He’d already filled two boxes. I grabbed a box and took it over to the fireplace. The mantelpiece was covered in little trinkets, mostly carved from wood. I studied them as I packed them carefully away; an acorn, a hand, a dragon, a skull, a pig, all made from the same wood, probably by the same hand.

I picked up the elephant last, and as I held it, my uncle’s voice came rushing back to me.

“Ben! —William, that’s not a toy, put it down.”

I remember him lurching out of his armchair and stumbling across the room towards me, his hand outstretched before him.

“Sorry,” I had said, as I scrambled to put it back before he reached me.

“Why don’t you play outside, in the garden?” he suggested, his face full of worry.

He led me through the kitchen and opened the back door.

The memory faded. As I came back to my senses, I realised I had placed the elephant back on the mantel. I kept thinking about it as I carried on packing. I had this nagging feeling that there was someone else there too, but I couldn’t quite recall who.

I thought about asking my dad about it, but he looked to be in a terrible state. He doesn’t deal with death too well, not after Mum died. Uncle Rick was our last remaining relative.

That was another thing my brain had blocked out. I remember my mum alive and well, and I remember her funeral. But I’ve got nothing in between.

She died of breast cancer when I was ten. By the time they’d found it, it was far too late, and she’d deteriorated rapidly over a couple of weeks. Anyone who’d visited her in her final moments described her end as a blessing, a mercy.

I have always been thankful that my brain had allowed me to forget.

We finished up the living room and piled it all into the van. My dad poured us both a mug of coffee from his thermos and we sat in silence on the tailgate, the summer breeze cooling my sweat-stained t-shirt.

“Well,” Dad said, patting my knee as he rose to his feet. He finished his sentence with a wordless grumble as we began to head back inside.

I gulped down the rest of my lukewarm coffee and followed after him. He was disappearing up the stairs with an armful of flat-packed boxes as I stepped through the front door. I grabbed a few myself, then wandered through to the kitchen.

Even with the lights on, the room felt oppressive. The only window was on the side of the house, and pointed directly at the neighbours’ garden fence. The sink was piled high with dishes, so I had to wash and dry them all by hand before I could pack them away. It was the most basic kitchen I’d seen in a while; no kettle, no toaster, no microwave. The fridge appeared to be the only thing plugged into the wall.

Once all of the cupboards were empty, I unrolled a black bin bag and opened the fridge. I took a step back as the smell reached my nostrils.

Each shelf was stacked high with shrink-wrapped cuts of steak. The door pockets were stuffed full of pig ears, trotters and various other cured offcuts. I pulled my t-shirt up over my nose, trying to block out mental images of Uncle Rick eating pig snouts for dinner, as I emptied the contents of the fridge into the bag. Some of the steak must have gone off long before he had died. I hoped he had been feeding a whole pack of stray dogs or something.

I wrapped a second bin bag around the first and tied them both tight to contain the smell. I would not be putting that in the van, the bin men could deal with it on their next round. I lugged the bag over to the back door, turned the latch, and stepped out into the garden. I caught a glimpse of the shed at the far end, and it all came rushing back to me.

I was ten years old when I last visited my uncle’s house; I am sure of that now. I remember my dad dropping me at the door on his way back to hospital, I remember my uncle saying:

“I’m sorry about your mother, I truly am. You have to stay strong for your father, and for yourself.”

I remember crying on his doorstep, him awkwardly patting my shoulder. Worst of all, I remember my mum, my last true memory of her, lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to tubes, a skeleton of her former self, the colour drained from her skin, the warmth drained from her eyes.

I wish this version of her had remained forgotten, but instead it overwrote every other image I could bring to mind.

I dropped the bag of rancid meat into the grey bin and looked back towards the shed, the small pond.

I remember ten-year-old me sulking through the garden, crouching down by the pond, staring vacantly into the water. I had been looking down into the murky, green abyss when the shed door slowly creaked open. I watched as someone stepped out onto the grass, with bare feet: A little boy, much younger and smaller than me.

He wore only a baggy, tattered t-shirt, far too big for him, trailing down to his ankles. His skin was almost paper-white, and he didn’t have a single hair on his head. His face lit up with pure glee when he saw me. He scampered towards me holding a wooden aeroplane above his head, trying his best to sound like one.

I remember playing with him in the garden, chasing after him as he giggled to himself, running away when he tried to catch me. I’m not sure how long we played in the garden for, but I recall that he never spoke a word. He wouldn’t let me play with the wooden plane either.

I remember him snatching it from me as I picked it up off the grass. I remember there was something not quite right with his hands, something strange about them, but I’m not sure exactly what.

After a while he led me to the shed. He opened the door but there was nothing inside. He got down on his knees and lifted a panel on the floor. The hinges groaned as the trapdoor opened, revealing a wooden staircase that went down into darkness.

“Ben!” Uncle Rick called from the back door. “Sorry—William, your dad’s here.”

The boy scuttled down the stairs and the trapdoor slammed shut behind him.

I remember the feeling of dread resurfacing. My dad standing in the living room with red, puffy eyes. His choking wail as the words spilled out of him.

“It’s your mother… she’s… she’s gone.”

Fresh tears rolled down my cheeks as I stood frozen in the garden, my eyes locked on the shed, my hand still holding up the lid of the grey bin. My feet started carrying me towards the shed before I’d even made the thought to move, my subconscious mind prioritising curiosity as my conscious mind overwhelmed itself with feelings I had not yet processed.

I pulled open the creaky door. The shed was empty, except for an old, ragged rug that covered most of the floor. I rolled the rug back, exposing the well-worn edges of the trapdoor. The hinges must have corroded long ago, the entire panel came free in my hands. I stacked it against the wall of the shed and looked down into the dark. I pulled my phone from my pocket, turned on the torch and descended the stairs.

The first thing I laid my eyes on in the dim light from my phone, was a wooden elephant. Not just one of them but a whole pile of them, all almost identical to the one in Uncle Rick’s living room.

The space down there was much bigger than I had expected. The ground, walls, and ceiling looked to be raw earth, like the whole place had been dug out, yet had somehow not collapsed. My phone only illuminated a few metres ahead of me, leaving a black void up ahead, the silence unsettling.

I walked further along, dragging my feet. There were piles upon piles of wooden carvings littered about, some similar to the ones I’d packed, some like nothing I’d seen before. I continued on.

My light caught the edge of a bright white branch or tree root, gnarled and twisted, spanning the length of the space up ahead. I shone the light from one end to the other.

It appeared to sway a little, then it folded in the centre, and the end of it reached out towards me. It stopped just a foot shy of my face then came to rest on the ground, and I suddenly realised what I was looking at. That strange hand with too many fingers, too many thumbs, some fingers thicker than others, some bending the wrong way.

The boy’s hand.

His face drifted towards me from the darkness, his cheeks gaunt, his skin sallow, his eyes sunken. His head lifted towards the ceiling, turning at a right angle on his neck when he ran out of space. His other arm clawed into the wall on my right as he dragged his foot beneath him, his knee almost reaching the ceiling too.

I turned to run and he shrieked, sending a jolt of pain through my ringing ears, turning my legs to jelly. Lumps of earth rained down on me as he forced himself through the space behind me. Adrenaline took over and I ran faster than I had in years, the narrow rectangle of light on the stairs getting closer and closer with every step. I could hear his rasping breath following closely.

My foot made contact with the bottom step, then his hand squeezed tight around my waist. He lifted me effortlessly towards his face, he sniffed at me and his expression shifted. He looked into my eyes and smiled a crooked, haggard smile, faintly reminiscent of when he was young.

I heard clumsy footsteps coming down the stairs. His smile faded as he looked beyond me. I craned my neck to see my dad standing on the bottom step, his arm juddering uncontrollably as he pointed at me.

“Ben! You put him down now!” he shouted with false confidence in his voice.

The next few seconds were a blur.

I heard the sound of bones cracking, saw my dad rush past me like a rag doll in Ben’s other hand as I fell from his grip. Pain burned through my wrist from my awkward landing.

I looked up from the floor in horror. My dad hung limp, his arms at his sides, his head fully enveloped in Ben’s mouth, a strangled groan coming from within. Ben wrapped a hand around my dad’s feet and pulled down as his head tugged up, ripping my dad’s neck from his body.

He chewed noisily as I dragged myself to the stairs, fighting the urge to gag. His long arm reached over my shoulder, his hand opened in front of my face. A wooden aeroplane lay in his palm, he jerked it closer to my face, as if he was offering it to me.

Without thinking, I took it and looked back at him. He smiled, entrails hanging from his teeth, blood pouring down his chin, then went back to eating.

I climbed up the stairs and replaced the trapdoor, then the rug, and drove home in silence.

I don’t know what’s come over me, but tomorrow… I’m going to buy as much steak as I can.

I had never done the school run before. Work took up practically all of my time from Monday to Friday, but in the last week of the summer holidays my wife’s mother passed away. She had gone down south to support her father, and help with the funeral arrangements. Which left me to hold the fort.

As much as I miss her, it’s been nice to spend so much one-on-one time with Hilda. She is the spitting image of her mother, and her likeness doesn’t stop there. She has the same sharp wit, and an emotional intelligence way beyond her six years. I suppose with me always being at work and Hilda being an only child, it makes a lot of sense. They spend a lot of time together, especially over the holidays.

Hilda was happy to give me directions as I drove her to school. I do know the way of course, but I enjoyed playing along with the idea that I didn’t.

“So, first day of year two,” I teased.

She turned and frowned at me. I could tell exactly what face she was pulling without taking my eyes off the road.

“What?” I laughed.

“It’s year three actually,” she said matter-of-factly.

“No way! When did you get old?”

She just smiled and turned to look out the window.

“Daddy?”

Whenever she had anything to say, Hilda always had to say my name first, then wait for my response. I’d told her many times that she could just start talking, and I would know that she was talking to me, but it didn’t seem to ever sink in. It was cute, if not a little frustrating sometimes.

“Yes?”

“Was it dangerous when you went to school?”

That caught me off guard.

“Dangerous?”

“Yeah. Because of the dinosaurs!”

She erupted into laughter at her own joke; the sound of it was so infectious.

“Very funny,” I chuckled, “are you looking forward to your first day back?”

“Yeah.”

Kids - brilliant at carrying conversations.

“What are you looking forward to the most?”

She didn’t answer right away, I could almost hear the cogs ticking.

“Playing with my friends. Oh, and my new teacher is Mrs Gibson. Layla says she’s the best!”

Layla is Hilda’s cousin, on my wife’s side. She’s in the year above.

“Won’t you miss your old teacher?”

“No,” she responded, so quickly that she must have felt strongly about it. “She was the *worst* teacher.”

I felt a sudden pang of guilt. My own daughter had suffered a year with ‘the worst teacher’ and I’d had no idea.

“How was she the worst?” I prodded.

“She was always cross. She didn’t like fun. She told me off when I cried.”

“Oh, that’s not very nice.”

“On the last day of school I played a trick on her.”

Hilda giggled to herself, and shot me a mischievous smile. That’s my girl, I thought.

“It was Charlie’s idea,” she continued, “we were in the art hut, and she went in the cupboard where the pens and paper are, and I locked the door!”

I laughed. I remembered doing something similar back in my school days.

“That way!” Hilda shouted, leaning forward in her seat, pointing down the road that led to her school. I had seen it coming a mile off, but had chosen to pretend that I hadn’t. Hilda was looking very pleased with herself.

I parked as close as I could to the school gates, which was not close at all. My wife had complained about the school drop-off before, but it was even worse than I’d imagined. I walked Hilda down the pavement and to the school gate. I gave her a big hug and kissed her on the forehead.

“Have a great day.”

“I will!” She chirped, then ran off to join a line of other kids about her size.

I watched her for a while, finding her friends, talking about whatever little kids talk about, always smiling.

My attention turned to the teachers. They all looked stressed, they weren’t even pretending to be happy about being back at work. Hilda glanced over at me, I gave her a wave and made my way back down the pavement.

A group of mums filled the pavement ahead, two pushchairs causing a barricade. They seemed engrossed in serious conversation, or serious gossip, I couldn’t tell which at a distance. As I got closer, I overheard little snippets of information.

“Mrs Baker didn’t show up to teach the year twos, she’s not answering her phone or anything.”

“I heard she wasn’t at the teacher training day either.”

“A friend of mine is her neighbour, and she says she hasn’t seen her all summer.”

I stopped in my tracks, a wave of dread rushed over me. Mrs Baker, the year two teacher, Hilda’s teacher last year. I turned back towards the school, and marched up to the gates on wobbly legs. The children had all gone inside. I walked up to reception, and tried to calm my breathing.

“H-hi, I’m Hilda’s dad… Um sh-she left her coat in the art hut before the summer holidays. My wife asked me to get it b-back,” I just about managed to get the words out.

“Yes, of course,” the chirpy receptionist replied. “It’s just around the left side of the building, it’s not been opened yet so here’s the key. Just drop it back when you’re done. You can leave it open.”

She smiled a bright, over-friendly smile and returned to her work.

It’s a coincidence, I kept telling myself as I walked around the left side of the building.

The art hut was one of those temporary classrooms, almost like a static caravan but more basic. The walls were a rough texture, painted navy blue, and it had a flat, felt roof.

My stomach was in knots as I approached the door. The keys jingled in my unsteady hand. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Dust motes swirled in the sunlight, casting long rectangles across the room. My eyes swept about the place, then focused on the desk. A handbag sat upon its surface. Hilda’s words echoed through my mind.

*…I played a trick on her…*

*…I locked the door…*

My heart raced as I looked to what I assumed was the storage cupboard. I walked slowly towards it, my feet barely leaving the floor, my mind expecting the worst and trying to reassure me at the same time.

I tried the door. Locked.

“Please, no,” I whispered to myself.

I turned the latch. The door swung open by itself.

The sound came first, the wet thwack against the carpet. Then the smell.

I leapt back, gagging, covering my face with my hands as my breakfast sprayed out from between my fingers. As much as I didn’t want to look, I couldn’t look away.

She was curled in a ball, holding her knees to her chest. I guessed she had been leaning against the door. Her skin was brown and leathery, wrapped tightly around her bones. Her white summer dress was stained with large, wet blotches of yellow and brown.

She was dead, because of my poor, sweet, innocent Hilda. A childish joke, with severe consequences.

I sobbed uncontrollably as I burst back outside. What would I say? What would it do to Hilda if she ever found out? If I tell the truth, everyone will know. If I lie, if I just so happened to discover the body while looking for Hilda’s coat, then what? It wouldn’t take long for questions to be asked. Who locked the cupboard?

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I had never done the school run before. Work took up practically all of my time from Monday to Friday, but in the last week of the summer holidays my wife’s mother passed away. She had gone down south to support her father, and help with the funeral arrangements. Which left me to hold the fort.

As much as I miss her, it’s been nice to spend so much one-on-one time with Hilda. She is the spitting image of her mother, and her likeness doesn’t stop there. She has the same sharp wit, and an emotional intelligence way beyond her six years. I suppose with me always being at work and Hilda being an only child, it makes a lot of sense. They spend a lot of time together, especially over the holidays.

Hilda was happy to give me directions as I drove her to school. I do know the way of course, but I enjoyed playing along with the idea that I didn’t.

“So, first day of year two,” I teased.

She turned and frowned at me. I could tell exactly what face she was pulling without taking my eyes off the road.

“What?” I laughed.

“It’s year three actually,” she said matter-of-factly.

“No way! When did you get old?”

She just smiled and turned to look out the window.

“Daddy?”

Whenever she had anything to say, Hilda always had to say my name first, then wait for my response. I’d told her many times that she could just start talking, and I would know that she was talking to me, but it didn’t seem to ever sink in. It was cute, if not a little frustrating sometimes.

“Yes?”

“Was it dangerous when you went to school?”

That caught me off guard.

“Dangerous?”

“Yeah. Because of the dinosaurs!”

She erupted into laughter at her own joke; the sound of it was so infectious.

“Very funny,” I chuckled, “are you looking forward to your first day back?”

“Yeah.”

Kids - brilliant at carrying conversations.

“What are you looking forward to the most?”

She didn’t answer right away, I could almost hear the cogs ticking.

“Playing with my friends. Oh, and my new teacher is Mrs Gibson. Layla says she’s the best!”

Layla is Hilda’s cousin, on my wife’s side. She’s in the year above.

“Won’t you miss your old teacher?”

“No,” she responded, so quickly that she must have felt strongly about it. “She was the worst teacher.”

I felt a sudden pang of guilt. My own daughter had suffered a year with ‘the worst teacher’ and I’d had no idea.

“How was she the worst?” I prodded.

“She was always cross. She didn’t like fun. She told me off when I cried.”

“Oh, that’s not very nice.”

“On the last day of school I played a trick on her.”

Hilda giggled to herself, and shot me a mischievous smile. That’s my girl, I thought.

“It was Charlie’s idea,” she continued, “we were in the art hut, and she went in the cupboard where the pens and paper are, and I locked the door!”

I laughed. I remembered doing something similar back in my school days.

“That way!” Hilda shouted, leaning forward in her seat, pointing down the road that led to her school. I had seen it coming a mile off, but had chosen to pretend that I hadn’t. Hilda was looking very pleased with herself.

I parked as close as I could to the school gates, which was not close at all. My wife had complained about the school drop-off before, but it was even worse than I’d imagined. I walked Hilda down the pavement and to the school gate. I gave her a big hug and kissed her on the forehead.

“Have a great day.”

“I will!” She chirped, then ran off to join a line of other kids about her size.

I watched her for a while, finding her friends, talking about whatever little kids talk about, always smiling.

My attention turned to the teachers. They all looked stressed, they weren’t even pretending to be happy about being back at work. Hilda glanced over at me, I gave her a wave and made my way back down the pavement.

A group of mums filled the pavement ahead, two pushchairs causing a barricade. They seemed engrossed in serious conversation, or serious gossip, I couldn’t tell which at a distance. As I got closer, I overheard little snippets of information.

“Mrs Baker didn’t show up to teach the year twos, she’s not answering her phone or anything.”

“I heard she wasn’t at the teacher training day either.”

“A friend of mine is her neighbour, and she says she hasn’t seen her all summer.”

I stopped in my tracks, a wave of dread rushed over me. Mrs Baker, the year two teacher, Hilda’s teacher last year. I turned back towards the school, and marched up to the gates on wobbly legs. The children had all gone inside. I walked up to reception, and tried to calm my breathing.

“H-hi, I’m Hilda’s dad… Um sh-she left her coat in the art hut before the summer holidays. My wife asked me to get it b-back,” I just about managed to get the words out.

“Yes, of course,” the chirpy receptionist replied. “It’s just around the left side of the building, it’s not been opened yet so here’s the key. Just drop it back when you’re done. You can leave it open.”

She smiled a bright, over-friendly smile and returned to her work.

It’s a coincidence, I kept telling myself as I walked around the left side of the building.

The art hut was one of those temporary classrooms, almost like a static caravan but more basic. The walls were a rough texture, painted navy blue, and it had a flat, felt roof.

My stomach was in knots as I approached the door. The keys jingled in my unsteady hand. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Dust motes swirled in the sunlight, casting long rectangles across the room. My eyes swept about the place, then focused on the desk. A handbag sat upon its surface. Hilda’s words echoed through my mind.

…I played a trick on her…

…I locked the door…

My heart raced as I looked to what I assumed was the storage cupboard. I walked slowly towards it, my feet barely leaving the floor, my mind expecting the worst and trying to reassure me at the same time.

I tried the door. Locked.

“Please, no,” I whispered to myself.

I turned the latch. The door swung open by itself.

The sound came first, the wet thwack against the carpet. Then the smell.

I leapt back, gagging, covering my face with my hands as my breakfast sprayed out from between my fingers. As much as I didn’t want to look, I couldn’t look away.

She was curled in a ball, holding her knees to her chest. I guessed she had been leaning against the door. Her skin was brown and leathery, wrapped tightly around her bones. Her white summer dress was stained with large, wet blotches of yellow and brown.

She was dead, because of my poor, sweet, innocent Hilda. A childish joke, with severe consequences.

I sobbed uncontrollably as I burst back outside. What would I say? What would it do to Hilda if she ever found out? If I tell the truth, everyone will know. If I lie, if I just so happened to discover the body while looking for Hilda’s coat, then what? It wouldn’t take long for questions to be asked. Who locked the cupboard?

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

I don’t know what to do.

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me. 

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor  had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance. 

I walked the fence line once again. It was my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that was when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle, there’s no way I would have seen it. 

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat: a mobile phone—surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind; it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself. 

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know. 

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment. 

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective. He had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing. 

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs, Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends. Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White. 

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story. They had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside. Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole. 

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life-or-death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life. 

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time. 

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine, and then power steering. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me. 

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home. I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief. 

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look. 

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange-looking fungus growing from the charging port. 

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost. 

“Dude!” he beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it,” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables. 

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands. 

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk. 

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated. 

“No harm in trying,” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk. 

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector. 

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up. 

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh. 

“Piece of shit,” he muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button. 

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen. 

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files. 

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath. 

Chris pressed play. 

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone. 

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk. 

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play. 

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk. 

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside. 

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. We heard a faint chuckle from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. 

Ryan didn’t climb back out. After around ten seconds, the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby called, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on its edge, and aimed the camera inside. 

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath. 

“He was telling the truth,” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side. 

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes. 

“Ryan!?” He shouted. You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run. The phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black. 

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried-sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow; the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper-left corner turned black and glitched out a little. 

“This is insane,” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement. 

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone. 

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing.  I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen. 

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen. He was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself,” he announced, then rushed to the bathroom. 

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen. 

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text. 

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out. 

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch, and light came flooding back in. 

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer. 

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out. 

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breathe. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came. 

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed. 

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside. 

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms. 

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below. 

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!” 

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. 

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand. 

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder. 

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony. 

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces. 

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me. 

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor  had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance. 

I walked the fence line once again. It was my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that was when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle, there’s no way I would have seen it. 

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat: a mobile phone—surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind; it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself. 

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know. 

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment. 

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective. He had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing. 

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs, Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends. Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White. 

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story. They had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside. Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole. 

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life-or-death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life. 

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time. 

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine, and then power steering. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me. 

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home. I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief. 

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look. 

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange-looking fungus growing from the charging port. 

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost. 

“Dude!” he beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it,” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables. 

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands. 

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk. 

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated. 

“No harm in trying,” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk. 

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector. 

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up. 

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh. 

“Piece of shit,” he muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button. 

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen. 

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files. 

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath. 

Chris pressed play. 

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone. 

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk. 

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play. 

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk. 

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside. 

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. We heard a faint chuckle from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. 

Ryan didn’t climb back out. After around ten seconds, the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby called, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on its edge, and aimed the camera inside. 

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath. 

“He was telling the truth,” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side. 

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes. 

“Ryan!?” He shouted. You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run. The phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black. 

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried-sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow; the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper-left corner turned black and glitched out a little. 

“This is insane,” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement. 

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone. 

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing.  I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen. 

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen. He was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself,” he announced, then rushed to the bathroom. 

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen. 

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text. 

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out. 

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch, and light came flooding back in. 

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer. 

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out. 

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breathe. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came. 

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed. 

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside. 

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms. 

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below. 

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!” 

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. 

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand. 

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder. 

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony. 

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces. 

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me. 

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor  had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance. 

I walked the fence line once again. It was my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that was when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle, there’s no way I would have seen it. 

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat: a mobile phone—surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind; it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself. 

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know. 

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment. 

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective. He had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing. 

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs, Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends. Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White. 

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story. They had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside. Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole. 

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life-or-death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life. 

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time. 

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine, and then power steering. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me. 

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home. I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief. 

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look. 

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange-looking fungus growing from the charging port. 

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost. 

“Dude!” he beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it,” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables. 

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands. 

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk. 

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated. 

“No harm in trying,” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk. 

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector. 

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up. 

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh. 

“Piece of shit,” he muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button. 

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen. 

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files. 

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath. 

Chris pressed play. 

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone. 

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk. 

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play. 

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk. 

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside. 

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. We heard a faint chuckle from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. 

Ryan didn’t climb back out. After around ten seconds, the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby called, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on its edge, and aimed the camera inside. 

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath. 

“He was telling the truth,” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side. 

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes. 

“Ryan!?” He shouted. You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run. The phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black. 

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried-sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow; the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper-left corner turned black and glitched out a little. 

“This is insane,” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement. 

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone. 

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing.  I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen. 

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen. He was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself,” he announced, then rushed to the bathroom. 

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen. 

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text. 

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out. 

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch, and light came flooding back in. 

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer. 

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out. 

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breathe. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came. 

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed. 

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside. 

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms. 

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below. 

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!” 

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. 

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand. 

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder. 

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony. 

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces. 

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me. 

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor  had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance. 

I walked the fence line once again. It was my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that was when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle, there’s no way I would have seen it. 

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat: a mobile phone—surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind; it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself. 

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know. 

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment. 

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective. He had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing. 

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs, Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends. Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White. 

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story. They had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside. Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole. 

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life-or-death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life. 

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time. 

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine, and then power steering. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me. 

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home. I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief. 

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look. 

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange-looking fungus growing from the charging port. 

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost. 

“Dude!” he beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it,” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables. 

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands. 

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk. 

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated. 

“No harm in trying,” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk. 

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector. 

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up. 

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh. 

“Piece of shit,” he muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button. 

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen. 

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files. 

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath. 

Chris pressed play. 

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone. 

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk. 

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play. 

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk. 

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside. 

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. We heard a faint chuckle from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. 

Ryan didn’t climb back out. After around ten seconds, the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby called, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on its edge, and aimed the camera inside. 

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath. 

“He was telling the truth,” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side. 

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes. 

“Ryan!?” He shouted. You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run. The phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black. 

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried-sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow; the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper-left corner turned black and glitched out a little. 

“This is insane,” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement. 

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone. 

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing.  I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen. 

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen. He was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself,” he announced, then rushed to the bathroom. 

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen. 

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text. 

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out. 

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch, and light came flooding back in. 

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer. 

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out. 

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breathe. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came. 

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed. 

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside. 

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms. 

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below. 

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!” 

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. 

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand. 

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder. 

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony. 

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces. 

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me. 

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor  had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance. 

I walked the fence line once again. It was my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that was when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle, there’s no way I would have seen it. 

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat: a mobile phone—surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind; it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself. 

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know. 

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment. 

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective. He had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing. 

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs, Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends. Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White. 

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story. They had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside. Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole. 

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life-or-death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life. 

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time. 

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine, and then power steering. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me. 

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home. I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief. 

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look. 

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange-looking fungus growing from the charging port. 

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost. 

“Dude!” he beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it,” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables. 

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands. 

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk. 

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated. 

“No harm in trying,” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk. 

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector. 

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up. 

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh. 

“Piece of shit,” he muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button. 

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen. 

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files. 

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath. 

Chris pressed play. 

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone. 

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk. 

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play. 

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk. 

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside. 

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. We heard a faint chuckle from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. 

Ryan didn’t climb back out. After around ten seconds, the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby called, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on its edge, and aimed the camera inside. 

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath. 

“He was telling the truth,” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side. 

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes. 

“Ryan!?” He shouted. You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run. The phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black. 

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried-sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow; the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper-left corner turned black and glitched out a little. 

“This is insane,” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement. 

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone. 

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing.  I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen. 

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen. He was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself,” he announced, then rushed to the bathroom. 

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen. 

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text. 

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out. 

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch, and light came flooding back in. 

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer. 

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out. 

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breathe. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came. 

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed. 

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside. 

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms. 

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below. 

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!” 

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless. 

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand. 

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder. 

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony. 

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces. 

The sun was beginning to set, and my patience was wearing thin. I had walked that exact patch of grass three times already, looking for the same thing that nobody had managed to find before me.

The forensics team hadn’t found it, nor had a few bloggers who had taken an interest in the case, but I had managed to convince myself that maybe I would stand a chance.

I walked the fence line once again, my final attempt before I would run out of light, and that’s when I saw it. The sun’s rays had reflected off the very edge, which immediately caught my attention. It was on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, covered by leaves. If it wasn’t for the sun hitting it at just the right angle there’s no way I would have seen it.

My heart raced as I came to a stop, my hand shaking as I reached through the fence and brushed the leaves aside. There it sat, a mobile phone, surely the mobile phone. As expected, the battery was dead, but I didn’t mind, it just prolonged the excitement of finding out the truth for myself.

I should have called the police and handed the phone in immediately, but then I’d never know.

I wish I had.

The two-hour drive home gave me a lot of time to think. I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. A number of people had visited Gorsewood holiday park since the case was officially closed six months ago. The professionals hadn’t found it, and neither had anyone else who’d tried, and here I was driving home with the phone in my glove compartment.

One of the guys I had been following on the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was a retired police detective, he had been to the site twice in search of the phone. I stack shelves for a living, and was there for only three hours. I guess I must just have a knack for that sort of thing.

Everyone on the blog writes about the importance of finding the phone, of learning the truth. Toby Gibbs - Ryan’s dad, had sworn on his life that his phone would prove his innocence, and help to make sense of his absurd story. If only they had managed to find it sooner.

Just over a year ago, three men were arrested for the murder of eleven-year-old Ryan Gibbs. Toby had taken his son, without the permission of his ex-wife, to stay at Gorsewood holiday park with a couple of his friends.

Due to custody restrictions, Toby was only allowed to have Ryan to stay for the weekend. But instead of taking him home on Sunday evening, Toby drove him across the country to Gorsewood holiday park. Toby had booked a lodge for a week, and invited his two best friends, George Taylor and Tom White.

The very next day, Ryan had gone missing. Toby, George and Tom had all told the same story, and they had stuck with it right up to their conviction. According to the three of them, they had been playing catch with Ryan in one of the many fields at Gorsewood holiday park. Ryan had missed a catch and the ball had bounced into a hollow tree trunk which lay in the grass. Ryan had crawled into the tree trunk and for a joke, George and Tom had rolled it along with him inside.

Toby had claimed that he had filmed this on his phone, and that when Ryan didn’t come back out they all went over to check on him. The hollow of the log had been empty, with Ryan nowhere to be seen. In his panic, Toby claimed to have dropped his phone.

The police had searched the entire campsite for Ryan, but it wasn’t until the following morning that his body was discovered - stuffed into the centre of the hollowed log, in six pieces.

Toby, George and Tom’s insistence to stick with their unlikely story, coupled with their previous convictions, led to their arrests. George had only been out of prison for a few months following a manslaughter charge and was still on parole.

Toby and Tom had both served time previously. Toby had severed his own brother’s hand in what he had described as a life or death situation. He had been stabbed several times by his brother, and both had spent six years inside. Tom had been in and out of prison since the age of seventeen, each time for assault.

Despite his previous convictions, Toby seemed to have turned his life around. Since leaving prison he had attended many community events, volunteered for various charities and had become an active member of the church. To his ex-wife’s disappointment, he had finally become a part of his son Ryan’s life.

That’s about as much as I could learn from the information available online. When the story of Ryan’s disappearance eventually hit the local news, people from the community banded together to try to prove Toby’s innocence, and the blog ‘The truth about Ryan’ was created. Page after page of glowing personal references appeared on a daily basis, posted by those who had grown to know and love Toby Gibbs, and after a week or so the focus of the blog had changed to finding his phone.

It was my friend, Chris, who got me interested in it all. Before he moved up north and became my flatmate, he had lived just a few doors down from Toby. I was hooked from the moment Chris showed me the blog. I’ve read every post multiple times, and rooted for every planned attempt to find the phone. Little did Chris know that I would be home an hour later, the phone in my pocket.

I drove full of nervous energy, the anticipation making me so anxious I almost felt sick. I had to turn off the radio and drive in silence just to keep my focus on the road. Every now and then I’d reach over and open the glove compartment, just to prove to myself that I had actually found it. I kept imagining the scenario of getting home, charging the phone, telling Chris and then eventually watching the video, seeing the truth for myself. In hindsight I should have considered the fact that the video might not exist, that Toby could have been lying, but it never crossed my mind at the time.

I was on the final stretch, the last fifteen minutes of motorway before entering town, when my car suddenly shut down. I was driving at 85mph when the headlights cut out, then the engine and the power steering went. Everything went black, and as my eyes adjusted, the car slowing, I saw that I was headed for the centre barrier. I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel with all my strength to avoid the barrier, the steering much heavier than I had expected. The car came to a stop, and it took me a moment to fully take in what had happened. I turned the keys in the ignition, at the same time noticing the lights in my rearview, rapidly gaining on me as my heart lurched. The engine spluttered back to life, just as the approaching car held down their horn and narrowly avoided hitting me.

My car drove as normal after that, but I stayed in the slow lane all the way to my exit, and didn’t dare go over fifty.

My hands were still shaking when I got home, I dropped my keys twice while trying to unlock the door.

Chris was sitting on the sofa watching TV. I stood in front of him, blocking his view and placed the phone down on the coffee table between us. He looked up at me in disbelief.

“No way!”

He switched off the TV and sat forward on the edge of his seat for a closer look.

The phone was very discoloured from over a year of sitting outside, a strange looking fungus growing from the charging port.

Chris opened up the blog, and scrolled through looking for one of the posts about Toby’s phone. He turned his screen to me, and showed me a generic picture of the type of phone Toby had lost.

“Dude!” He beamed. “You fucking found it!”

“We need to clean it up, see if we can charge it.” I said, darting around the room, struggling to remember where I kept the spare USB cables.

Chris fumbled around in a similar fashion, and returned from his desk with a pair of tweezers. I watched as Chris carefully removed the fungus from the charging port. Our eyes met with a look of disappointment as three small chunks of rusted metal fell out onto the table.

“It’s fucked.” Chris moaned, dropping his head into his hands.

I wasn’t ready to give up. I grabbed the phone and plugged it into a charger, and set it on Chris’s desk.

“There’s no point, it’s fucked.” Chris repeated.

“No harm in trying.” I said as I sat down beside him, feeling hopeful.

We heard the crackling sound first, then there was the smell. We both raced towards Chris’s desk.

Arcs of electricity jumped from the phone to the melting charger cable, the smell of burning plastic filled the air. I yanked the cable from the phone and it stretched like melted cheese as the wires detached from the connector.

We stood for a while in silence, staring at the phone. The end of the charger was welded to the bottom of it with melted plastic, the lower part of the screen was cracked and bloated, and the plastic around the lower edges had bubbled and become brittle.

It was truly fucked.

Once the phone had cooled down, I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Chris had gone back to watching TV, defeated. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Using a flathead screwdriver I pried the back cover off. Orange water dripped out onto the desk, accompanied by an awful, stagnant smell. The motherboard was a mess of rust and oxidisation. My optimism wavered briefly, until I spotted the memory card. I gently removed it, and to my surprise it looked as good as new.

“Chris! Turn your PC on!” I shouted, nearly tripping over my own feet as I proudly held the memory card between my fingers.

Chris’s expression shifted from startled, to confused, then finally to excitement once he realised what I was holding. He scrambled to get up and turned on his PC. He sat down at his desk and I stood over his shoulder, waiting impatiently for the computer to power up.

“This is it dude.” Chris said, barely above a whisper.

He plugged in a USB memory card reader and slid it towards me. I pushed the card into the slot, the little green light flashed on the card reader, then the PC turned off. Our faces appeared in the reflection of the darkened monitor, and Chris let out a sigh.

“Piece of shit.” He muttered to himself as he leant over and hit the power button.

We waited once again, then finally the file explorer window opened up on the screen. I watched closely as Chris navigated to the camera folder. Thumbnails of photos filled the screen.

“That’s Ryan!” I exclaimed, as he scrolled through the files.

My heart raced and beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. We reached the bottom of the page, and there was the video file. I took a deep breath.

Chris pressed play.

The video took up the middle third of the screen, as it had been filmed vertically. Ryan was in the middle of the frame, standing in a field. He was holding a tennis ball and looking towards the camera. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun was shining over his shoulder.

“Right… it’s filming, go.” Toby said from behind the phone.

Ryan threw the ball, and the camera followed it through the air as George and Tom ran into each other while trying to catch it. They all erupted into laughter.

“Go long!” Tom shouted.

The camera panned round to Ryan, who ran backwards, eyes locked to the sky, hands up ready to catch. The ball flew past him, just out of his reach as he dived after it to the grass. The ball bounced further down the field, and into the open end of a hollow tree trunk.

Chris paused the video and turned to me with a knowing look. I nodded, and he pressed play.

“I’ll get it.” Ryan called as he skipped towards the tree trunk.

He got down on all fours and began to crawl inside.

“Psst… Psst.”

The camera turned to show George and Tom running quietly towards the log. Tom was pointing towards it and miming a pushing motion. George had a finger to his lips. A faint chuckle is heard from behind the camera as it turned to see Ryan’s feet disappearing inside. George and Tom started to push the log, which caused it to roll over a couple of times. They giggled like little kids. The camera panned so that the sun shone straight into the lens. After two full rotations they stopped, still laughing, Tom folded over with his hands on his knees. Ryan doesn’t climb back out. Ten seconds pass and the laughing trails off.

“Ryan?” Toby calls, “You alright?”

After a few more seconds of silence, Toby started walking towards the tree trunk. He leant down with a hand on it’s edge, and aimed the camera inside.

“Fuck…” Chris said, under his breath.

“He was telling the truth.” I replied.

You could see all the way through the hollow and out of the other side.

Ryan was gone.

“What the fuck!?” Toby yelled, no longer focused on filming, the camera pointed to his shoes.

“Ryan!?” He shouted.

You could hear the muffled sounds of the other two panicking in the background. Toby called out as he began to run, the phone tumbled out of his hand, bouncing and spinning a few times, before landing lens down. The video faded to black.

Chris skipped through the remaining twenty minutes of video. There was nothing more to see, and all that could be heard was a garbled mess of worried sounding, incoherent speech.

We watched the video again with keen eyes, looking out for any possible way that Ryan could have gotten out of the log. From the moment we could last see his feet as he crawled inside, right up until Toby pointed the camera through the hollow, the log never left the frame. I also noticed an odd moment when the sun glared into the lens, when the pixels in the upper left corner turned black and glitched out a little.

“This is insane.” I said to Chris, who only nodded in agreement.

“Pass me the mouse.”

I opened up a video editor and started going through it frame by frame. My focus was locked to the sky as the sun appeared in the upper corner. The first frame in which the image was distorted showed a neat ring of black pixels around the very edge of the sun. In the next frame the black pixels formed a straight line, running from the edge of the sun to the centre of the log. In the one following, a black triangle had formed, the tip touching the sun, then widening until the edges lined up perfectly with each end of the log. I moved on to the next frame, the black pixels were gone.

I skipped back one frame, to where the black triangle took up a third of the sky, and studied the image. When I noticed, my hair stood on end, and my stomach turned to water. George and Tom were staring into the lens, their faces completely void of any expression. I checked the frame before. In that one they were both looking at the log as they pushed it, Tom smiling, George laughing. I clicked forward a frame, and it was as if their heads had snapped around to look at me. In the next frame they were back looking at the log, smiling, laughing. I clicked back once more, leaving the unsettling image on the screen.

“Chris, what-”

I caught Chris’s reflection in the darker part of the screen, he was staring into my eyes, his face completely blank. My heart thudded so hard in my chest that it felt like it pushed me back from his desk. Chris rose to his feet.

“I’m gonna piss myself.” He announced, then rushed to the bathroom.

I stood in silence for a while, then sat down at the PC and closed everything off the screen.

Chris didn’t return from the bathroom. I’d been sitting with my own panicked thoughts for around half an hour before I’d noticed. I took my phone out of my pocket and sent Chris a text.

You’ve been in there a while, everything okay?

His phone buzzed on the coffee table, which caused me to drop my own phone on the desk, the clatter seemed too loud. I slowly got up and began to walk across the living room towards the bathroom, then the power went out.

The orange glow of the street lights striped across the room though the blinds. I stumbled on shaky legs towards the hall, my search for the breaker box growing more frantic by the second. I opened the lid, flicked on the trip switch and light came flooding back in.

I looked up the hall. The door to the bathroom was ajar and the light was off.

“Chris?” I called up the hall, to no answer.

I slowly pulled the bathroom door open and switched on the light, there was no one inside. Fear overtook me as I raced around the flat, checking every room, only to find that I was alone. The only way out was through the living room, and he couldn’t have got there without crossing my path. Something was very wrong.

I ran to the front door and as I turned the latch on the lock it clicked, then spun freely, without unlocking the door. I was trapped inside. I pulled out my phone and as I started to dial for help it shut off, and wouldn’t turn back on. The flat suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in around me. I grabbed Chris’s phone from the coffee table, but it wouldn’t work either. Then the power went out again.

I couldn’t breathe. I felt too hot, then too cold. My knees were buckling beneath me. My stomach was churning. I collapsed to the floor.

I must have blacked out.

I found myself lying on the living room floor. The sun shone through the window, and I could feel the heat of it on my skin. I felt a moment of calm before I remembered the events of last night. The memories shot through me like an arrow, puncturing my lungs, making it feel impossible to breath. As I leapt to my feet, Toby’s phone went clattering across the floor. Had I been holding it?

As I bolted for the door, I prayed that it would be unlocked, prayed that it was all just a dream, prayed that I could get those expressionless faces out of my head. The door wouldn’t budge. I kicked it, I screamed for help, but it barely even moved and no one came.

I felt a sudden, desperate urge to pee. I dashed to the bathroom, I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The bathroom door was closed.

“Chris? Are you in there?”

I had a sinking feeling that he was. I turned the door handle silently in my hand. I pulled it open, just a crack and peered inside.

Piss ran down my legs, onto the floor, mixing with the blood that spread towards my feet. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think. Chris was in there, pieces of him were scattered about the room. His head was placed on top of the toilet seat, his face contorted with fear. One of his legs hooked over the edge of the bath, the other hanging out of the sink. His torso lay on the bath mat, blood still pouring from where his limbs should have been. I never saw his arms.

I threw up, adding to the already disgusting mixture at my feet.

I didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to jump out of the window. We were on the third floor, but if I landed in the hedges I would probably be okay. I stood at the open window for a long time. I shouted and screamed for help, over and over, but no one came out of their houses, no one walked the streets below.

I was just about to jump when a man rounded the corner.

“Help!” I screamed. “He’s dead! I’m trapped! Help, please!”

His head snapped up towards me, his eyes wide, his face expressionless.

I felt a sudden violent ringing in my ears, bright lights flashed through my vision.

I was there, by the window, and then I wasn’t.

The sun shone blindingly in my eyes, but the sky was pure black. The ground twitched and trembled beneath me. I tried to stand but my leg sank down as I transferred my weight to it. After my first glance at the surface of whatever it was I sat upon, I tried not to look again. It looked fleshy - a mixture of mottled pinks, reds and greys. I could feel a patch of damp, wiry hair beneath my hand.

I cried for what seemed like hours, helplessly, pointlessly sobbing, there wasn’t much else I could do. I was fucked. They would find me in pieces in my flat by the window, I knew it. I screamed in frustration, I screamed for the sake of screaming, for the release.

My screams reverberated across the surface, echoing around me as the ground began to shudder violently. My hand sank down through the patch of hair and I felt a sharp, searing pain across my forearm. I had never known pain like it. I wrenched my arm back and blood sprayed over me, my arm just a stump below my elbow. I flailed about, as if I was swimming, desperately trying to move across that disgusting surface. I tried to crawl, as numerous circular holes gaped open beneath me, then squeezed shut. My other arm fell though, and I collapsed face first into the cold, wet flesh as it closed around my shoulder.

My body no longer responded, the pain too overwhelming. There was no room left for thoughts, all I knew was agony.

I lay motionless, as it took me to pieces.