Maya and her mother were out exploring. It was raining, just like it always was they were in the woods. They went every Saturday and of course, every Saturday it rained. Maya would have rather been somewhere else, like at the mall with her friends. They had all wanted her to go, and texted her the details for the event to her Blackberry. But her mother, Elinore, kept dragging her to West Minster woods.

“This is where my mother took me when I was your age,” she would say when I told her I didn’t want to go. “And this is where we will go together, every Saturday.” I would just sigh and keep walking. But today was different.

“Aren’t you coming with me?” I asked her at the entrance approved for trail walking. She was sitting in the truck still, even though it was turned off, and she was kind of creeping me out.

“I want to see if you can follow the trail by yourself today,” she told me, smiling, which was creeping me out even more.

“But I’ve never walked the trail by myself before.”

“I know. Just stick to the trail and you’ll be fine.”

I nodded my head OK and went on my way. It was still afternoon time, and my cell phone was fully charged. At that moment I was grateful for the technology of the twenty-first century. I walked for a really long time and soon it was getting darker. The forest was even more creepy than I remembered and the whole time I was think “Mom, why did you have to do this to me?” and I tried to reassure myself with the fact that she would be waiting for me in a nice warm truck on the other side of the woods.

But my reassurance soon went away when I heard a frightening sound. It was a scream.

I started into a faster pace than I had undergone before, making sure I avoided any areas with too many leaves that would crunch and give away my position. There was another scream and I started to run. The air got deadly cold. My feet started to go numb with what, I thought, must have been frostbite. So I stopped to rest a while near a weeping willow tree. I hadn’t heard another scream for 5 minutes, so I thought I was safe. And then, as if on a creepy cue, fog started to roll in from the north. It was so thick and so low to the ground that it looked like the trunks of the trees were floating on a ghostly cloud. The forest suddenly seemed very, very crowded.

My vision started to blur and I was wobbling to and fro, as if there had been some kind of drug in the mist around me. Before long, I felt myself going into a deep slumber. Trying to fight it, I lost all strength, and finally just succumbed to sleep. When I woke up, all the fog had gone, and the forest was light again. I noticed three things wrong; the trees were all in different places, there were some weird looking animals about, and everything was tainted a purple color. The first thought I had was “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”