The Idiot Mile
That’s what we called it. The idiot mile. We used to think it sounded cool, but the adults talked about it and hyped it up so much that we just got a bit sick of the idea, and started calling it that. I grew up in a small village, secluded in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere down in Mississippi, I think. Or was it Alabama? I’m not sure. It was definitely somewhere deep in the south, and despite the very small population we were a diverse bunch. Kids of all ethnicities. I don’t remember ever going to another settlement in my youth, and I don’t remember the name of the village I grew up in. In fact, I can’t remember a lot of things about it. But I remember the walk. It’s hard to explain to someone what the walk really is. To most people, it might sound insane, maybe even cruel. But to us, it was just a part of growing up. It’s a rite of passage. The Walk marks the day you stop being a boy and start being a man. It was like a line in the sand. Every boy who’s old enough has to do it. It’s expected. When you turn thirteen, you go on your Walk. You get your time, you get your route, and you walk. It’s not something we talked about, really. Growing up, my friends and I had heard about it many, many times from our parents and some of the older boys in the village. How great it would be for us, how we’d come back as young men. We’d always scoffed at it – maybe this isn’t something many people will relate to, but when we were younger, we didn’t care much for the idea of growing up. Being a kid was enough. As we got closer to the point in time when it’d be our turn, though, our dismissal turned into real anticipation. I guess we’d just unanimously decided that now, we were ready to be men. Anyway, the point I’m making is that when you’re younger, you didn’t ask that many questions. You didn’t even think about it much. You just knew that when your time came, you’d do it too. It’s a tradition, like everything else in the village. And traditions, well… traditions just are. When my turn arrived it’d been decided by the adults that for the first time, all the thirteen-year-old boys in the village would go together. A group. A shared experience. Maybe it was supposed to be as a sort of bonding exercise. Maybe they thought it’d make the Walk easier. But I don’t think it worked out that way. In fact, I think it made it worse. The group was five in total – like I said, it was a small village – and we were all good friends. We were the only boys in the village of the same general age bracket, so it made sense. Myself, Sam, Jonah, Robbie and Christopher. We set off the day after Jonah’s birthday, since he was the last one in the group to turn thirteen. And, contrary to how we’d mocked the adults’ constant reminders about the walk when we were younger, we were really excited. We were ready to grow up, to be men, to reach our potential and be what we were destined to be. Despite my excitement, I was still nervous, but I didn’t show it. That’d be a bad start to becoming a man. My dad had warned me, but not in a way that scared me or anything, just with a quiet seriousness. “It’s only a walk, son,” he said when I asked him how it went for him. “It’ll feel weird, maybe, but that’s just the way things go.” We stood there together at dusk, at the corner of the only shop, where the edge of the village meets the country roads. The sun hung low in the sky, and there was a slight chill in the air that I didn’t like. The whole place seemed oddly quiet, like everyone was holding their breath. The older boys, the ones who had already gone, were watching from the porches, their faces unreadable. Christopher’s dad was the one who ushered us along our way. “Time to get going, boys. Make the most of it – you’re about to be new young men!” he said with passion in his voice. “You have the start of the route, that’s all you’ll need. You’ll come back when you’re ready.” He stepped aside, and we exchanged a last few words with our families before we got going. “You all set?” my dad asked with an encouraging smile. I nodded. I was sure I was. I looked down the road. It stretched out ahead of us—just the same old country road we’d seen a hundred times before. There was nothing special about it. Nothing scary. Just a road, with long patches of grass on either side. A few houses dotted the way out of the village, spaced far apart like everything else in the place. I couldn’t really see what could possibly go wrong on a road like this. My dad gave me a small, hard pat on the shoulder before turning back to other adults. “You’ll be fine,” he said, and that was it. And so, we set off. At first, I felt nothing. The road was as it always was. The houses, the fields stretching out beside me, everything was familiar. It was just a walk. Just like Dad had said. Sam and I were cracking jokes, Christopher was already trying to push Jonah around, and Robbie was just walking alongside us, zoning out as he tended to do. It was just like any other time we hung out. About an hour later, the sun had all but set. It was a cloudless night, though, so we could still see where we were going reasonably well. It was around this time that our usual joking and dicking about stopped. Instead, for the first time, we began to feel real excitement. We were going to be men after this was done. We cheered, laughed, slapped each other on the backs. I can’t remember ever feeling such thrill or comradery. The road we walked was simple. Not a single noteworthy thing about it. We passed a few houses, some right by the road and some we could see off in the horizon, a couple of barns scattered here and there, and fields that seemed to stretch on forever. But eventually, something about the road itself started to seem off. It was me that noticed it first, at a point where the road went straight ahead for a long distance, no bends or turns in sight. The road seemed to be continuously shrinking inward as it went on – the edges of it were perpendicular, closing inward, and yet as we continued forward, it never seemed to get any smaller like it should have. When I pointed this out, Sam agreed that it didn’t make any sense, but the others seemed to think we were crazy and didn’t see it at all. I couldn’t understand – you have to believe me when I say that by this point, it was more than obvious that the metrics of the road made no sense at all. I even crouched down to inspect both sides, confirming my suspicion, but the other three boys just shrugged it off and told us to stop being weird. The thing is, Sam had a look on his face by this point saying that maybe, he wasn’t so sure himself. Sam was my closest friend in the group and tended to take my side whenever a debate broke out, and I guess in hindsight, I find myself wondering if he’d just been doing the same thing then, while inwardly thinking I was crazy too. I don’t know if I prefer that to the other possibility, that the road had become some sort of fugitive to the laws of geometry. I decided to just move on from it and try my best to ignore the bizarre detail, however much it nagged at the back of my mind. Things shifted back to normal between us fairly quickly, as we went back to all our excited predictions for what it’d be like to finally be growing up. The road was no longer familiar to us, not at all. We’d walked along many, many bends and turns at this stage, although somehow, not once had we come across a fork in the road. We’d been walking for what felt like hours by this point and, to be honest, I was starting to wonder when we’d actually come to the point at which we were “ready” to return. The others were all so focused on the journey and their anticipation of becoming men, though, that I thought it better not to ask, so I just bottled it up and focused on the walk. At one point, I noticed Robbie was quiet. Not in his usual way, though—he looked uneasy. The kind of look you get when you know something’s wrong but can’t figure out what. He kept glancing over his shoulder, like he was worried about something behind us, but when I turned around, I didn’t see anything. Just the long stretch of road and trees. “You good, Robbie?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood. “Yeah, yeah, just… I don’t know, man,” he muttered, his voice tight. But before I could ask him what he meant, Sam, being Sam, cracked a joke. “You hear those twigs snapping just now? Old man Terrence is probably hiding out somewhere watching us. He’s always got his eyes on the new kids. Think he’s still hiding that shotgun?” That got a laugh out of Robbie, and for a second, it felt like things were okay again, but the feeling didn’t last long. As we passed the first house we’d seen for quite a while, we noticed something strange. A figure standing by the mailbox, just off the road. I squinted. It was a boy. He looked to be pretty young, probably seven or eight. He had a kind of dopey look on his face, with his eyes wide and staring, and his mouth hanging open, mouth breather style. He didn’t move, didn’t speak. He just watched us. We had all stopped walking to stare back at the kid. Jonah took it upon himself to break the tension. “Uh…hey?” The kid didn’t give any verbal response, but his eyes quickly went more normal and he beamed a smile at us. It wasn’t a mocking or malicious smile, either – he honestly just looked like a pretty normal kid now. It was a smile of politeness. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. We just started walking once more, though our pace was a bit faster. I could feel the kid’s eyes on my back like a dead weight. I told myself it was nothing to fret about, that it was simply nerves. Just a weird kid that had snuck outside at night for whatever reason. But then, we saw another person. Just past the bend, a woman standing by her front gate, looking out at us with that same, honest and polite smile. And it didn’t stop. They were everywhere now. People—mostly old men, women, and a few boys—just standing in their front yards, watching, saying nothing. Why were there so many damn houses? We hadn’t seen one before this for almost an hour! They didn’t move. They didn’t speak. They didn’t blink. Just flashed us those compassionate smiles. And soon, they weren’t out in their porches. There were no more houses in sight after a while, but for a few minutes, I could’ve sworn I could still see people staring down at us from the fields on both sides of the road, faces rising just above the hedges on the perimeter. Eventually, it seemed like whatever that had been was over. We didn’t talk for a while afterwards. After ten or so minute of next to no conversation, Jonah stopped walking. Just froze. No reason. No explanation. “Jonah?” Sam called, walking back a few steps. “What’s up with you?” Jonah didn’t answer. His eyes were wide, his face pale. He was staring at something ahead of us, but there was nothing there—just empty road. After a long moment, he blinked and slowly shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said, but there was something off about his voice. He wasn’t looking at any of us anymore. His eyes were far off, like he was seeing something else entirely. Christopher stepped forward, “Hey, come on, Jonah. Let’s keep moving.” Jonah didn’t respond. After that, we all seemingly realised in unison that suddenly, there was something deeply wrong. I was overcome with the pressing feeling that I was in terrible danger. The air felt thick and heavy, like the kind that had been trapped in an old house for far too long, and it smelt and tasted like there was a heavy storm on the way. Ozone. “You guys feel that?” Robbie asked, his voice unsteady. I nodded, but I couldn’t explain it. Something was changing. Something was shifting. We weren’t just walking anymore. We were being watched, followed, toyed with, I was certain of it. More certain than I’ve ever been of something. I could feel eyes on the back of my neck, like someone or something was following us. But when I turned around, there was nothing there. We kept walking, but the silence between us deepened. Robbie’s eyes never left the distance, and Christopher started muttering to himself, his words incoherent. Jonah kept looking back, his movements jerky, like he was trying to catch a glimpse of something just out of view. The further we went, the more I was sure I could hear some kind of whispering in the air—soft and quiet, but unmistakeable, as though it was coming from the very ground beneath my feet. “You hear that?” I whispered. Sam shook his head. “It’s just the wind. It’s nothing.” But I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t believe it. None of us did. We walked on for what felt like days. The road twisted and bent in ways a country road shouldn’t have, like it was changing, actively altering itself. I remember us taking three sharp U-turns straight after one another, seemingly passing by the exact same dilapidated shack at each of the three curves. The buildings we passed looked different, too. Their windows were dark, and some of them looked like they were rotting. I don’t just mean that they looked old and forsaken, either – they looked as though every material they’d been built from was in a state of heavy decomposition. The wood of the barns was warped, the paint peeling, the lawns beyond overgrown. It was like the whole world was slowly falling apart around us, as if the road was all that was left in reality. At one point, I distinctly remember feeling someone breathing right down my neck. Hot and clammy, as if they were stooped right behind me. I screamed out in fear and fell to my feet, spinning to look behind myself, but what I saw baffled me. I was facing up at the rest of the boys, their faces fighting between fear and concern. What the fuck? Had I somehow been walking backwards for some length of time without realising it? How come no one had said anything? “Hey, come on dude, it’s okay, we’re here. I’m here.” Sam knelt down to help me to my feet, his voice comforting despite the shock I must have put him. I was hyperventilating by now. “Let’s go.” He got up and held out a hand, inviting me to do the same. I grasped it tight and pulled myself up. For reasons I can’t explain, I remember wishing I could have held Sam’s hand longer. Another hour or so passed, and the air was thick with tension. Christopher was staring at his shoes, his hands clenched at his sides. Jonah was breathing in short bursts, and Robbie had started to trail even further behind, his eyes hollow. I felt it, too, even if I wasn’t fully aware of it. The madness creeping in, the pressure building behind my eyes. Then, the first real fight started. I hadn’t been paying attention to whatever preceded it, but Jonah snapped at Christopher, his voice full of rage. “Stop acting like you’re fine! You’re not fine. None of us are fine. Something’s wrong, damn it!” Christopher’s face reddened. “I’m not the one acting weird. You’re the one who’s—” But Jonah cut him off. “I’m fine! I’m fine, you’re the one—” He broke off, his eyes wild. Then, as though in a trance, he turned and started walking faster, ahead of all of us. “Jonah!” Robbie called, but Jonah didn’t stop. His hands were shaking now, and his breath was coming in short, ragged bursts, intertwined with sudden bouts of screaming that came and went. We watched him go, but none of us moved. There was something wrong him, something seriously unnatural about the way he was walking. His body jerked with every step, like he was trying to pull himself free from some invisible force. “Jonah, stop!” Sam shouted, but it was like the words didn’t reach him. He was moving farther and farther away, vanishing into the horizon. We stood there for a while, no idea what do to do. Eventually, we just wordlessly came to the agreement that we had to keep walking. There was nothing else to be done. As we went, the air went from thick and oppressive to suddenly crisp, the kind of crisp that made your breath visible. It was so instantaneous, that we exchanged a few looks between each other before pressing on. There was no real value in questioning or even talking about things at this point. Just as I’d started to get used to the now frigid temperature, the wind picked up. Not much at first, but after a short while it howled and made it difficult to press on, as it was pressing forcefully against us. I was quite scrawny in my youth, so I had an especially rough time. Soon after, the road grew to be surrounded on both sides by a dense forest. The long branches seemed to reach down to grab us, twisting and coiling around themselves. There was something wrong about them, too. In spite of how long some of their branches and twigs grew outward, they didn’t sway in the increasingly heavy wind – not even slightly. I could’ve sworn there was some lifelike quality to them, like they were welcoming us forward, to what exactly I didn’t know. Then, the wind stopped and the air felt thick and muggy again. It happened as suddenly as the first change. We exchanged another look of bewildered terror, and continued. The farther we went, the more the silence pressed on me. The world felt too quiet, too still. Our footsteps were the only sound I could hear, and each one seemed louder than the last. I was about to say something, anything, just to break the long enduring silence, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye, at the edge of the treeline. It was the boy from earlier, the first person we’d seen standing outside a house earlier, but now his face wasn’t displaying that friendly, neighbourly smile. It was twisted in a look of pure, unadulterated hate. My breath caught up in my throat. It should’ve been funny, a harmless little kid putting on such a strong look of anger and hatred, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t funny at all. Again, I stumbled back and cried out in fear, shouting jumbled nonsense and pointing at the spot in the forest for the others to see the cause for my terror. My voice hitched and I desperately scooted backwards to be closer to the group, eyes all but screwed shut. Just as he’d done before, it was Sam that came to my aid. His hands lightly slapped my cheeks, trying to get me to pay attention to his voice, clearly panicked but doing his best to soothe my horror. “Snap out of it, there’s nothing over there! Please, just calm down, you’re gonna be fine, nothing’s there! Just relax man, jesus, breathe! Deep breaths, dude, deep breaths.” I stole a glance around Sam, back at the treeline. The boy was gone. I focused my attention back to Sam as he grabbed me under the armpits and hauled me upwards. He was breathing heavily too now. I stared at his face, and finally, I eased back out of whatever panic attack I was experiencing. Instead, a feeling washed over me of deep appreciation for Sam, for my best friend. I realised that I wanted him to grab my hand again like he’d done earlier on. I think… I think that I loved him in that moment. And I hated it. I hated it more than I’d hated anything else we’d experienced on the walk. I hated how I felt, and I hated him for making me feel that way. So I shoved him back. A startled sound came from his mouth, but I hit him. I hit him harder than I thought myself capable of, and he fell back, clutching his face, gasping with pain and surprise. I threw him onto the ground and started swinging more punches at him. He tried to block me, tried to say something, maybe to reason with me, but I didn’t care. I rested my forearm on his neck, pinning him down, and grabbed a rock lying on the road next to us. I don’t know why, but neither Robbie or Christopher said anything, or made any attempt to break me away. They just watched. With a savage cry, the rock swung through the air, propelled by all the rage boiling inside me, slamming into Sam’s face with a sickening crack. Blood exploded from his nose and mouth, his whole body jerking from the blow. He gasped, struggled to breathe, but I raised the rock once more, swinging it downward with all the madness within my body. The impact shattered his cheekbone, the rock sinking into the soft flesh with a horrifying squelch. Sam tried to scream, but it came out as a gurgling rasp, blood spilling from his lips as his hand reached meekly towards me. But I was relentless. I hit him again and again, crashing the rock into his skull with a sickening rhythm, rendering his face into a grotesque pulpy mess. He went almost entirely limp, fingers twitching before falling still. His face was practically unrecognisable, a twisted, bloody mask of torn flesh and exposed bone. He laid there, gasping for air that would not come, choking on blood he could not spit. And then he died. I knelt over him, chest heaving, the rock falling from my hand, slick with blood. My breathing was ragged as though I’d just run a marathon. I hated him still, and I was satisfied with what I’d done. I finally looked up. Robbie and Christopher were still doing nothing more than taking in the sight of what just occurred. After a few seconds, they just turned around and continued down the road. All I did was catch up with them, my anger cooling away, forgetting about the act I’d just committed. And you know what? I realise now that I’ve never given any thought to what I did. I shut it away in some box in my head, forgot about it. Honestly, I think I forgot entirely about Sam, or the friendship I once had with him. It all only came back to me now, as I’ve been writing this. It’s like he never even existed or something. The three of us remaining walked in silence for about a minute before one after the other, Robbie and Christopher began to fall behind. They glanced over their shoulders, eyes wide, shoulders tense, and then shuffled away into the woods, alone. I tried to call out to them, but they ignored me, vanishing like shadows, swallowed by the darkness that seemed to creep in from every corner. Soon, I was walking alone. At first, I thought it was my imagination, but the quiet was suffocating. The longer I walked, the more wrong everything felt. The trees seemed to lean in closer and I felt eyes on my back, watching me from the deep shadows between the trunks. The road twisted and turned, looping in impossible directions, as if the forest around it was shifting, playing with me. I tried to retrace my steps, but it was like the trees were watching me, moving to block my way. I tried to ignore my fear. I focused on the road, on getting to the end. But as I walked farther, it got harder. I wanted to turn back, but I knew I couldn’t. Not now. It was part of the Walk. You don’t turn back. The air was laced with the smell of rot, and it began to feel as though the road was shifting beneath my feet. I tripped, tumbling down onto the asphalt, my arms scraping against the rough earth. When I finally stopped, I lay there gasping for breath, the world spinning around me. When I managed to get to my feet, I saw Christopher. He stood ahead of me, eyes empty and distant. His face was pale, his mouth slack, as though he’d been walking through that forest for days without rest in the time since they’d left me. He seemed to be looking past me. He didn’t move or even blink. I tried to get his attention. “Chris! Chris, come on, please, talk to me! What’s going on? You’re scaring me man, please!” He seemingly came to his senses at that, and looked at me. He sighed softly. “There’s nothing to be scared of dude, just do what we’ve all been doing. We’re becoming men, remember? Men aren’t scared of stuff like this. You’re gonna be fine, just keep walking. And don’t look behind you. They hate when you do that.” I wanted to scream, but my voice wouldn’t come out. I took a step forward. Christopher didn’t react. I took another step. I listened to him, though. I didn’t look behind me. He never caught back up with me, and I wasn’t about to risk a look back to check if he was even there anymore. I saw Robbie soon after. I saw the outline of his body coming from opposite end of the road, walking towards me, and as soon as he was close enough that I could recognise him as Robbie, his face twisted into a look of primal fear. His eyes bulged, his mouth open in a silent scream. He was standing in the middle of the road, but when I reached for him, he screeched. “Don’t hurt me! Oh god, please don’t hurt me, please! I don’t want to die! I want to stay young! Please, don’t hurt me anymore!” I was lost for words, and before I came up with the ones I needed to try and calm him down, he bolted past me, going in the direction I’d came from. He screamed all the way. As a matter of fact, I don’t know how far away he went, but I didn’t stop hearing his intermittent screams for at least the next ten minutes. They sounded full of pain. I stumbled forward, heart pounding. Sweat trickled down my forehead. My legs were shaking, but I couldn’t stop walking. I realised that Sam was walking beside me. I didn’t really react to that, just continued to walk alongside him. His face was the same disfigured canvas of ruined skin and bone. I could barely make out where the individual parts of a human skull resided on his. His face was the anatomical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. He paused after a few minutes, and turned to hold his hand out to me. I didn’t take it. “I think I’m ready now. Bye, dude.” “Bye,” I responded, then he turned forward again, and walked away down a fork in the road – the first we’d ever encountered on the walk. I blinked and the fork was gone, Sam gone with it. The air felt thicker than ever before, so thick it was almost suffocating me. I steeled myself and continued down the road’s remaining path. As I rounded the curve, I stared down the road at the figure waiting for me. It was… me. A perfect double, like looking in a mirror. No expression. No movement. Just stillness. My heart started hammering in my chest. I stopped in my tracks, unsure what to do. “You’re almost there,” he said, his voice flat, emotionless, but unmistakeably mine. The words sent a chill down my spine, but before I could react, he spoke again, his voice a little louder, a little more urgent. “You’re almost there. Almost you.” I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. It was like something had taken hold of me, frozen me in place. I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. But something told me that wasn’t allowed. Not now. He smiled politely. “You’re almost me. Almost you,” he repeated. “Just a little farther… and you’ll know.” The road ahead of me began to blur. My thoughts spun, tangled, like I was in some kind of dream. I sprinted forward, desperate to finish the walk. The people were still watching me, I realised. Or had they been all along? They were all around now, the figures from the houses, from the mailboxes, standing just off the sides of the road, smiling kindly. They were waiting. And I realized then, with a sickening clarity, that I wasn’t walking toward the end of the road. I was walking toward something else. Something I couldn’t see, but I could feel. Something that had been waiting for me my whole life. I don’t remember anything past that point, only that I didn’t get back to the village. Someone out for a drive found me days later, wandering in circles, muttering to myself, my eyes wide and unseeing. I was taken to the police, then after that a foster home. Of course no one believed me. What good could the have really done for me? I couldn’t produce a name for my village, or for my parents, or practically anything about the place. I’d somehow forgotten it all. And I knew there was no point even trying to explain the walk to them, so I just kept it to myself. Many times, I’ve reflected on the words said to me before we embarked on our journey that day. “You’ll come back when you’re ready.” I sure as hell feel ready. I have for a long time. But how the fuck am I supposed to go back to a place I could barely even remember the existence of? I spent months after I got my license driving throughout those south-eastern states, scouring maps for anything worthwhile, and I’ve never been able to find any village like what I can remember. Not even a road that looks like the one we walked. I’ve kept my story to myself for over a decade now, and I guess that’s why I wrote all this here. Everyone will think I’m loony of course, but at this point, I just needed to get it off my chest and tell someone about it. I’m done giving myself headaches and other mental pain over the idiot mile. After all, I’m a man now. Credit: Swagemandbagem Reddit Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.