If you live in Memphis, you probably know about Shelby Farms, where acres and acres of land are available to weekend warriors. Whether you’d like to claim one of the grassy fields for a game of Frisbee with friends, or you’d fancy a game of disc golf on the course, or you’d like to take a paddleboat on the lake, Shelby Farms is usually the first choice for locals, including Allyson and me. If the weather is right on Saturday mornings, we’d get our bikes and go for a ride on one of the many trails that snaked their way through the woods.

One morning we decided that we’d try a new path we never knew existed. It was an unpaved trail that supposedly ran alongside Wolf River. After searching for the trailhead for about ten minutes, we finally gave up thinking that it no longer existed. I speculated that one of the recent floods earlier that year had washed it away. Whatever the reason, we opted for another path that day and had another great ride.

But the rest of the day I couldn’t shake the thought of that mysterious, hidden trail. I didn’t think that we could have missed it, but maybe we had. Over the next few weeks when I drove past Shelby Farms and saw people walking along the paths, I’d think about that lost trail again. How in the world could we have missed it? And if it didn’t exist anymore, surely the mapmakers would have removed it from the most recent documents. The more I thought about it, the more shadowy the missing trail became.

Eventually I started having fun with the idea of a passage in the woods that nobody could find and mused over how a couple of teenage boys would react if they stumbled upon it. Those young adventurers would be filled with a mixture of excitement and fear as they plunged deep into the dark and barren woods. That kind of setting would be perfect for a good scare.

So I started writing with the simple idea of two kids finding a trail out of the blue while biking through the woods. I hoped that the story would be ready by Halloween 2013. I thought it would simply be a tale of the boys finding the path and whatever lurked beyond the trees, but the more I wrote, the more questions I asked about the boys. I chose to develop their backgrounds and also thought it might be interesting to show how they found this forgotten trail in the first place. Turns out, their past has direct bearing on the horror they would experience at the end of that spooky trail. As Halloween approached, I realized that the story would take some more work, so I gave up on publishing it right away.

I saw the two boys sort of as outcasts at their school, whose friendship with each other is clearly unstable. They are devoted to each other insofar as they share a history and are not part of any other social circles. One is a reckless bully who tends to take the lead on things while the other is a more introspective, shy-type who is pretty insecure about his own abilities. Their relationship grows unstable as they traverse the new path, and what they find at the end could break that friendship forever. Or it might just kill them both.

If you haven’t gotten a chance to read the Forgotten Trail, I hope you get a copy. After you read it, maybe you can give me a short review on Amazon.

Oh, and by the way, it turns out that the trail I was looking for really does exist. It was covered with weeds making it hard to see when Allyson and I searched for it before. I’ve ridden it several times since finding it, and I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t as dark and mysterious as I thought it might be.

Oh well. I’ll always have the short story.