“We are here.” He said, his voice so quiet that it would perfectly blend with the forest’s breathing. Instead of moving my eyes in the direction he was looking, I stared at one of his gray-blue eyes; it reflected the forest’s green-brown pillars and the sparkling of a large water body.

“It’s beautiful…” He said.

And so is the black auburn-hair boy, standing next to me.

His eyebrows twitched, and he said, “Wait, this word is not enough to describe the lake, but I don’t know what could be a proper word to describe the lake...But it’s…” His gaze turned towards me. He continued, “…lovely.”

I am stunned for a second; he must have realized that I was staring at him for too long. I quickly averted my eyes towards the front and just nod in agreement, “Yes, but we cannot exactly frame words for everything we want to describe in the perfect way.”

Can’t you try to make it a perfect score? How will you make it to the top if you cannot do this?

I frowned. “No, nothing can be perfect. We can always be our best and improve it later on.” I threw the thoughts out of my mind, which no one asked for, and continued, “But there are poets who can describe a lake in a better way.”

He said, “Yeah, so we could now stick to ‘beautiful’ or ‘more than beautiful’.”

I hummed in response. He asked me if we could stroll around the lake for a while, and I happily complied with it. We were walking in harmony across the lake. The lake reflected the forest upside down and in darker shade, and the sky was taking its colors into red-orange. The sunset was nearing. Compared to the pictures I have seen on social media, the lake was bigger than I had thought. There was pier some distance away. We were walking towards it in harmony.

“This place feels familiar.” Chris had broken the silence this time to my surprise.

I turned towards him. “You have been here before?” The pier was near us now. I guess we were near the dense part of forest that we saw earlier.

“No, I have seen it…” He stared somewhere away from the lake. “That building looks similar to the one in the painting at your house.”

It took a moment to catch on to what painting he was referring to. “You mean the painting in the living room?” Grandpa has many paintings in the room.

He looked around in all eight directions as if trying to put a matching puzzle somewhere in his photographic memory to the ones he was seeing right now. He began to walk near the pier but then headed away from it upon reaching the pier. The pier had fungi growing in between the wooden gaps. No boat had paid a visit to this place. But then again, when was the last time any boat had floated on the lake’s surface?

I saw Chris staring deep into the forest as if he were waiting for something to pop out of it. Then his gray-blue eyes widened when his eyes lay upon the rusty old sign board covered with bushes from below. “What does it say?” I asked him.

He moved closer to the sign board and moved some of the bushes and dust off it.

RESEARCH FACILITY, HALCYON LAKE. 

Is it all that it says? I glanced around and tapped on Chris’s shoulders and pointed towards the trail leading into the forest. “In mood to see where would this hidden trail lead to?”

He thought for a while and then said, “Ok, but the moment it begins to darken, we take a turn back to camp.”

That’s a surprise. Given the fact he prefers to stay inside his apartment majority of the time. I smirked. “I thought you would have said no.”

“I would have, but this whole scenery and view looks similar to that painting I saw.” He said while carefully taking a step into the dense forest’s trail.

He was right; this whole lake area felt similar. But now I began feeling nervous. I think I regret asking him that question about exploring dense forest, but he was there with me, so my fear was at ease. Unknowingly, I took a hold of his hand. He gave it a quick glance but did not retrieve it back. It was not even five minutes of walking when we encountered a fenced area.

The fencing was broken; it was some wooden planks standing or tilting to one side due to the wires wound around it. Beyond the fence, there was a two-story building. Its first floor half part was shambled; the railing of that balcony was broken and some part rusted, and so were the glass windows. The whole building was surrounded by tiny plants growing off its wall. The area inside the fence area covered in tall bushy grasses. The building’s structure looked exactly like the building in the painting in my home’s living room. Newly built, fresh paint, cleared view. But, the building which we were seeing right before us was not like that. It was broken, the forest had took over it as the time went by and will eventually consume it.

“It’s abandoned.” Chris spoke in a whisper in fear of attracting any living being lurking in the vicinity we were in.

“Yeah, my grandpa mentioned that his great grandfather or someone like that used to work in here, in there time.” I said while staring into the building’s broken window. The door was sealed shut. But I bet a little force would open it.

Chris looked at me in surprise. “What? Well, no wonder that painting was your family heirloom.” He chuckled softly. Under the evening sky covered with the dense forest, in looming coldness of upcoming night time, my heart felt warm.

“You wanna explore inside?” I asked him.

He seemed uncertain and looked down. “No, it’s getting late.” He shook his head. “But we can still check it out. This place is something you kind of are connected to given your family history and all that.”

I wanted to bang my head against the tree for the suggestion I had put up. I am here getting nervous, and yet I plan to head inside it. “No, it’s alright. Plus, this looks like our one step into it and then the roof or some planck would fall over our head.”

He squeezed his eyes. “Yes, I guess we should head back, or our guide would have already declared to the entire forest staff about two college boys missing.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, she would. She is wary of these things.” We began walking back in the direction we came from. I felt the leaves crunching as we stepped onto the trail we had used before. We both were walking together in deathly silence, hand in hand. The woodpeckers breaking some wood with its beak and our light steps, sometimes crunching sticks on the path. Chris and I turned our heads back when we heard another sound of some stick cracking, not by us but from somewhere behind us.

I squinted my eyes, trying to look pinpoint to where I heard that sound. Chris kept looking around in between the trail and dense towering trees.

“We should head back as soon as we can.” Chris said in a low whisper, probably this time it is the fear of something actually lurking in the woods.

“Yeah”. I tighten my grip around his hand. He did not mind it all.

We speed walked back to the pier. Our steps were as quiet as the cat walking through the jungle. We were back at the pier in no time. I let out a relieved sigh. That sound we heard must have been some kind of animal. We both must have got paranoid over nothing. The sky was beginning to darken.

“You alright?” I asked him.

“Yes.” His expression was the same as usual, but something about his tone did not sound genuine.

“I guess this is all for today’s exploration.” I told him while nudging his shoulder.

The walk back to the campsite was not as paranoid as I thought it would be. But I would not say the same for Chris. He kept looking back and around us after every 5 minutes.

He smiled. “Yes, so let’s help others with dinner. Shall we?”

I said, “Yeah, I am very hungry. Plus, this hiking thing took a lot of my energy.” I knew one thing for sure that Chris’s smile was not a sincere one like the one he gave before. He still anxiously kept looking back from the way we came back from before.

We could hear the bickering of Clara and Mason over some chips when we were some feet away from the campsite. I noticed Chris was fiddling with his shirt’s ends. He has been doing that a lot lately. I don't know what I was thinking back. But whatever I did, as childish as it sounds, was something my mom told me to do when I was 5 years old, whenever someone we cared for was worried or gloomy.

So I did. I pulled him closer to me, wrapped my arms around him, and gave him a hug.