The Mysterious Encounter Redux

I live in an area which has many weird inhabitants. One woman is for example locally known for going around in the neighbourhood in a winter jacket all year and always having a napkin decorated with flower-patterns covering her face. But these strange individuals are almost always completely harmless, therefore people seldom react to stories told by children about them. When I was ten years old for example my mother dismissed my account of an especially strange encounter as just a product of my childish imagination. This event took place one sunny October day when I made the choice to take an alternative road home from school. The road I used to take had some large building blocks on one side and a football field on the other, and on the other side of that football field there was a road that had a forest of oaks and maple trees on its opposite side. This was during October when almost all the red and yellow autumn leaves were still on the trees, which looked spectacularly beautiful. I therefore thought it would be nice to go nearer to this forest by taking this way home I had never walked on before. After some minutes on this alternative road home I came across a gathering of five children hysterically laughing at a person who told them not to laugh. After getting closer I saw that they were laughing at an old man who appeared to be homeless judging from his shabby clothes. His white hair was greasy and spiky at the same time, he had a white five-o-clock shadow and his tattered clothes revealed extremely thin and almost skeletal arms and legs. But both his skin and clothes were covered with irregular spots of some reddish-brown substance which I assumed was some kind of mud or paint. He stood there holding a cap with the same kind of spots while all of the children but me laughed at him. Instead I just stared at the strange man without making any sound at all. But suddenly the man started to look at me and said with a raspy voice "Finally, a person that takes a retired surgeon seriously these days! My name is Steve, and we two will go to my home in the forest" Before I could even react to these words, he grabbed my arm and ran into the forest with me. The man smelled like rotten leaves and something iron-like that I couldn’t identify at the moment. After having been running for what seemed like fifteen minutes we came to a small, cave-like opening in a cliff. There he stopped running while I fell to the ground which was covered my something reddish that I could not identify. Then, without showing any sign of being exhausted, the man said "My insides have started to disappear since my retirement so I have to do a surgery on you. I hope your heart will not be rejected by my body like the hearts I have tried to insert during the preceding days" Then I suddenly understood why the ground was red and what the irregular spots on the man’s clothes and body were made of. He took of his jacket and opened his shirt which revealed a black cavity where his stomach and chest should otherwise have been. From one of his pockets the man now took up a scalpel and drew it over my chest. This gave me a small cut on the part of my body where my heart is. But before the surgery could go any further, I managed to get out of his grip and ran as fast as I could from the place without ever looking back. After about a half-hour I came home to my mother who had been worried if something had happened to me during my way home. But when I told her about my experience and showed her my cut, she just dismissed it as a product of my imagination and said that I just got the cut from a thorn bush. After that I never took that way home from school again, and after I had finished primary school, I started to theorize that the man had drugged me and that all that I had seen during that afternoon was just hallucinations. But yesterday, about seventeen years after the encounter, I met an old friend of mine when I was out walking my dog in my old neighbourhood. We then preceded to talk about our lives since we finished primary school, but suddenly she said "It’s a bit sad that no one has seen Crazy Steve for so many years now!" When I asked who this “Crazy Steve” was she answered "Oh, he was a homeless street magician that claimed to be a retired surgeon. Steve showed up outside the forest every day there and was laughed at by almost everybody for his failed magic tricks. And I can remember you saw him one time if I don’t misremember it entirely?" I then confirmed for her that I had really met him, but then just said "Yes, he was a real original" to her. She then replied "Whenever a person didn’t laugh at Crazy Steve, they were always taken into the forest by him. I’m not entirely sure I saw many of the people again after that happened, but since I saw you after he took you into the forest, I guess the others also came back" But when I heard these words my face fell and I felt the need to throw up. Because now I did not just understand that what I experienced there was indeed real, but also what happened to all those who didn’t laugh at Crazy Steve’s failed magic tricks.