So Jonathan decided to stare into the abyss some more. While Michael rifled beers in the front, Jonathan began searching through children who went missing further in the past than any of them had bothered looking. He found websites that preserved old missing files from decades before the internet and transferred them into searchable data. He pushed further and further into the past – news articles, bulletins, photographs of ‘missing’ posters, grainy, pixilated photos on the back of milk cartons. His eyes sagged from the beer and the early morning. The images blurred. He kept scrolling and scrolling; the pictures flashed by like television commercials.
And then, like a dream, the moment came to him – the moment that had eluded him for so long. A flash of recognition, a clenching in his gut before his mind could even register the tiny image on the screen. His face. Young and flesh-colored and whole. Jonathan saw him smiling with small white teeth, boyish hands soft and curled in his lap of corduroy pants. His plaid shirt in muted, earthy colors, born out of the Seventies when every color seemed a shade of yellow and brown. It was a school photo of Thomas Terrywile, and it was attached to a newspaper article from the Desmond Dispatch out of Pennsylvania, dated 1985. The headline read, ‘Local Boy Missing, Police Find Signs of Cult Activity’.
Thomas disappeared after school on April 28 over thirty years ago. He was last seen walking home from school, setting out across the football field behind the Edward McNally Middle School in Desmond, PA. His home was a short quarter-mile walk on a path through a small, crooked finger of trees connected to an expansive forest to the north. He took the path to and from school every day, not uncommon at the time. Several other schoolchildren took the same path, all hailing from the same small neighborhood, but this day he was walking alone. Some kids noticed him leaving but paid little attention, a small figure disappearing down the path, nothing out of the ordinary. But by eight o’clock that night, his mother, Candace Terrywile, called the school, friends, neighbors and finally the police.
A search party with flashlights turned up nothing that night. The next morning came the dogs that followed his scent from the school, along the path through the woods and then somehow lost the trail. The search expanded into a massive town-wide undertaking by the third day. Helicopters brought in by the Pennsylvania State Police hovered low over the forest, and police were taking tips from anybody and everybody who could offer some kind of information.
Rumors and whispers started trickling into the police and washed like a flood across the town – people in the forest at night, the sound of chanting carried on the wind, strange glowing lights that emanated out from the trees, strange individuals clad all in black with wide eyes and ugly skin seen roaming through parking lots at the edge of the trees. It was a dark time during the history of the nation. The papers and television were rife with claims of killer cults, Satanists who would kidnap children and sacrifice them in occult rituals. The rumors and stories reached the blood-sucking media, and soon national news helicopters joined the Pennsylvania police search and ran over miles of forested land that stretched out beyond the town. Headlines splashed fantastic rumors and speculation; special detectives were called in from other counties.
The hysteria of Thomas Terrywile’s disappearance finally culminated in some grainy photos of a clearing in those woods. The supposed site of some kind of cult ritual. The leaves were clearly raked out of a circular area. Rocks, partially set in the ground, were arranged in a circle surrounding a rather elaborate geometric design, and then formed a series of crisscrossing lines – some of which extended beyond the edge of the circle, with a final, rectangular space in the center. The detectives were at a loss to explain the design. It was not the typical pentagram found on heavy-metal album covers and spray-painted on abandoned bridges. An altar was set to the side, built with stones placed one atop another and stained with a dark brown substance. Supposedly occult symbols were carved in the trees, small animal bones were piled together to form particular, peculiar designs, and there was evidence of a fire. The police found a small, ramshackle cabin beyond the clearing. Syringes on the ground, more strange symbols spray-painted on the plywood walls, candles dripping dark wax. There was children’s clothing on the floor of the cabin, but none of it matched up to Thomas Terrywile. Fingernails had carved deep gouges in the wood walls. The police did the usual for the time – rousted some of the local teenagers and weirdos with long hair and black T-shirts and questioned them, revealing sordid tales of marijuana use and rebellion against the moral majority. But there was no sign of Thomas Terrywile anywhere. No one the cops questioned could explain the symbols in the woods. None of them had any connection together, despite a desperate search for a larger conspiracy. In the end, there was nothing. Thomas Terrywile was gone without a trace.
And then, like a shooting star, the story disappeared. The media moved on to the next big headline, satisfied with an answer that was not an answer at all. Jonathan
