Buoy

The Buoy is a scary story about a boy who goes camping near the seaside with his family. His brother gets injured while swimming in the ocean. It is based on a Japanese story that is supposedly true.

Three years ago, I went camping with my parents on the coast. The camp site was on a cliff and there was a set of stairs that led down to a beautiful sandy beach. It was the height of the Summer and there were a lot of other people there.

It was around noon and my brother and I were on the beach. He decided to go for a swim in the ocean while I blew up a rubber dinghy my father had brought for me. There was a buoy floating in ocean. My brother dived off the rocks beneath the cliff and swam over to it.

After a while, I heard my brother shouting something. I looked up and saw that he was at the buoy. I rowed out to him in the rubber boat and when I got closer, I could see that he was clinging tightly to the buoy. He was trembling and his face was pale. I came up beside him and tried to hold the boat steady.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did you get a cramp in your leg or something?”

“Pulled! My arm! Girl! Help!” he cried.

“What happened?” I asked, alarmed. “Did somebody do something to you?”

“Cut! Little kid! Drown! Hair!” he shouted.

I had no idea what he was saying. I pulled him into the rubber dinghy and I noticed that he was bleeding from the shoulder. I rowed back to shore, listening to my brother babbling incoherently about something or other.

On the beach, I put my arm around him and helped him up the stairs to the top of the cliff. We returned to the tent and my parents had a look at his wound. There was a small hole in the flesh on his shoulder, about 2cm wide. It was as if something had passed straight through his arm.

When my parents had dressed his wound and he had calmed down, my brother told us what he had seen.

He said he was floating in the water near the buoy, just daydreaming, when he saw a child floating next to him. It was a little girl with long black hair. At first, he didn’t pay any attention to her, but then he started to wonder what she was doing out there all alone.

She looked directly into his eyes and he got a horribly unpleasant feeling about her. He said he felt there was something evil about her. Then, she began hissing “Die! Die! Die! Die!” and all of a sudden, she wrapped her arms around his neck and started trying to pull him under the water. She was trying to drown him.

My brother struggled to get away from her, but he became tangled up in her long black hair and felt himself sinking. He thought he was going to drown, but he managed to grab onto the buoy. He couldn’t swim back to shore, so he screamed out for help and desperately clung to the buoy, trying to keep his head above water.

He tried to push the girl away with one arm, but his fingers seemed to melt into the child’s face. Her wet hair wrapped around his neck and began choking him. He felt himself losing consciousness and closed his eyes, praying that something would save him.

“If you didn’t arrive when you did,” he said, “I wouldn’t be alive right now.”

My parents and i didn’t know what to make of his story. They thought he must have fallen asleep while he was swimming and dreamed it all. I thought he was delirious from the sun and had a hallucination. None of us believed him.

Two weeks later, the wound on my brother’s arm still had not healed. On the contrary, it had become extremely swollen and looked like it was infected.

My parents brought him to the hospital and they took an X-ray. The doctor said there was some foreign material in the wound that was causing it to become infected. They decided to operate on him.

After the surgery, the doctor came in to talk to my parents.

“We removed all foreign matter,” he said. “The injury should heal now.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said my father.

“Can you tell me how our son got this wound?” asked the doctor.

“We’re not sure,” replied my mother. “he was swimming in the ocean…”

The doctor looked extremely serious.

“Is there anything the matter?” asked my father.

The doctor told us to follow him and he brought us into another room. On a table, there was a white cloth with something laid out on it.

“These are the foreign objects that were in your son’s wound…” he said.

When we saw what it was, we were horrified. It was a mass of long black hair and tiny human teeth.

Afterwards, my brother recovered from the operation, but he has never gone back to swim in the sea. I still can’t believe what my brother saw that day, but the memory of that mass of black hair, wet with blood, and those tiny children’s teeth still sends cold shivers down my spine.