Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Five)

The oldest officer had the others go around the house to try to find a sign of whoever it was that had managed to cause such a change in the living room, while he approached the coffee table and the bundle of papers.

Approaching the bundle, he pulled his pocket knife out and tore the string from off around the papers, letting string fall over the coffee table.

Unlike the paper that had been in the room before, all of the pages were in near-perfect condition, save for the fact that they had been used to write pages upon pages of words in a shaking hand. Although anxious to see how the other two officers were doing, the senior officer began to read the first page on top of the stack, and he shuddered as he read the bizarre description.

“A Spider man?”

The officer paused after he spoke aloud, and became suddenly very aware of the fact that he was now alone in the house. He had heard what sounded then like the other two men leaving the house through the back sliding glass door, slamming the panel shut as they raced out of the kitchen.

Uneasily, the officer continued to flip through the pile of papers. As he read a few lines from a page written like it had been a part of a diary, scrawled in shaky hand writing, the man realized that he knew what the “spider man” was.

The urban legend of the naked thing had existed in the fabric of the town's dialogue since before the police officer's parents had been born. It was something that barely anyone in town even mentioned any longer; it was such a part of the town that talking about it was like talking about the lonesome farms that existed on the fringes of the town, left to the elements.

The officer was then left with his own thoughts on what he held in his hands and how it coincided with what they were in the house for. The questions, and the only answers that he could come up with, left a nasty feeling spreading through him like the start of a cold.

Finally seceding to his fear, the officer left the collection of papers on the coffee table and went off in search of the younger men outside. It was difficult talking the two men, eager to find whoever it was that had turned the living room into what it now was, but he managed to get them back to their cars, however reluctant they were to do so.

Back at the station, the police officers all agreed that there was something definitely wrong with whatever had happened to the doctor. They all wished that they could do something about the odd phenomena that they experienced – the notes and the sudden cleanliness of the living room – but they had to reluctantly give up their active investigation.

Despite the fact that the police were forced to give up their search, the missing man's close neighbors and former clinicians felt pity for the man – no one had come to his aid when he had gone missing; no friends, no family, and no one that he could have been seeing. Nobody came to look for the man who had successfully made a hermit out of himself prior to disappearing, and many people who had known him or had seen him previously began to take up the search for him.

It happened on one icy day that the doctor's receptionist, Anna, returned with a police officer to the abandoned home, agreeing to keep some of the doctor's belongings, but secretly hoping to find something that the police may have missed. Although there had been more searching done in the house after the initial journey into the home, the week that the receptionist was adamant that she would look through the house marked the week before people were to be coming into the house and throwing away the man's belongings. It made everybody in town cringe to think of the man's belongings ending up in a dumpster, and so it was not very hard for the receptionist to talk a police officer into taking her over to the man's house to gather a few things that looked as though they were important to the missing man.

Anna had decided to begin looking for her old boss' valuables in the master bedroom. As she walked into the room, with the officer following behind her, she jumped as she became aware that her missing employer was sitting on the bed.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Four)

The three men walked into the house and were immediately taken aback by the smell of rot that emanated from inside of the house. It did nothing but add to the awful sense of gloom that hung in the atmosphere of the mud room. The men walked, hesitantly, further into the house.

The oldest of the men realized, as they began to walk to the left of the staircase that opened up from the entrance, that he had forgotten to yell for Paul. The shock of the awful smell must have made him to forget that they were there to find Paul – hopefully alive. Although he had begun to very seriously doubt that they would actually find the missing man, he began to yell for Paul, and he instructed the other men to do the same.

Walking first into the living room, the men had to be careful where they stepped – papers were scattered everywhere on the ground, as well as all over any surface that was available in the sparsely decorated room. The youngest man in the group was trailing behind the other two, and he happened to glance over at a sketch that sat, immersed in a pile of balled-up papers. The sketch was drawn in a heavy hand, with thick black lines, which made the pale inner body of the Thing all the more ghastly pale. Almost as soon as the man recognized what he was looking at as being as awful as it was, he threw his gaze from off of it and fixed it ahead of him. His hands shook, and worried that the two senior officers would see how shocked he was, he buried his hands into his coat's pockets, not thinking for a moment that horror had already settled on his features.

They moved from the living room, glancing around for any obvious clues, shining lights around to fight through the heavy miasma of darkness and awful stench, before eagerly moving onto the adjacent hallway.

They tromped into the kitchen, where they finally got an idea of where the stench was coming from.

The kitchen itself was clean – spotless, in fact – but on the stove was a large stock pot. Grimacing, the younger of the senior officers gestured for the novice officer to look into the stock pot. Groaning loudly in dismay, the youngest man did as he was instructed, trying to stop thinking about the sketch that was still imprinted on his mind.

Looking into the pot, the man had to step away from the stove and clamp his hand over his face, over his nose and his mouth. Even then, he had to bend at his knees, nearly collapsing on the ground, from the strength of the stench so up close.

One of the other officers shook his shoulder, and answering hoarsely, he said, “There's a lotta... It looked like fuckin' stew. God -” Although he had been fighting to keep his composure, he could not stop himself from dry heaving on the ground. As he tried to straighten himself up, he strove to gain control of what he wanted to say. “... Ugh, I can't even guess about how long that had to of been here. There's a lot of it in there – are you guys sure that he lives alone, that he don't have any friends?”

The senior officer happened to glance over into the large sink next to him. “Well,” He said, gesturing towards the sink. “Based on all of those dirty bowls in there, I'd say he's been livin' off of this for a while. Must've not had much time to cook for himself.”

The three men abandoned the room, relieved that they did not have to remain in it for long. They walked back out into the hallway, where they made a quick search of the three nearly empty rooms that they came to agree that the doctor must have been using for storage.

Coming out of the hallway, they walked back through the living room and up to the stairs. Upstairs there seemed to be much more evidence of an everyday life than the first floor had. A basket overflowed with the doctor's clothes in the short hallway that lead to the two rooms on the second floor. They glanced into the bathroom and found nothing unusual about the room, save for the fact that the room looked almost obsessively clean, compared to the rest of the house that they had seen. They walked into the bedroom, and began to walk around in it, looking for any sign of the doctor, dreading that they would find who they were looking for, lying in bed with his head blown off from a shotgun.

They found nothing in the bedroom, and they left, walking down the stairs and preparing to leave the house. As they came from off of the stairs, the youngest of the officers happened to glance over at the living room. He stopped the others with a near-shout, his heart feeling as though it was bursting out of his chest.

All of the mess that had been in the living room was gone, the furniture in the room had been moved dramatically, with everything, save for the coffee table, pressed up against the walls of the living room. The overhead light in the room was on now, casting a yellowed, discomforting light on the room, and made the neat pile of papers, wrapped in string on the coffee table, only more ominous.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Three)

The writing that he had collected began to grow connectivity, and each account that Paul had decided as being true seemed to lock together into a wondrous pattern.

The pattern emerged alongside the account of an elderly woman whose friend has seen the creature and had promptly died in her house during the winter, the heat in her house shorting out one night, along well as the story of a young boy who had seen the thing and had soon after died of an awful snake bite.

The pattern was a remarkable thing in Paul's mind, as real as the skin covering his arms were. He compulsively returned to his Masterpiece, the imprint on his mind which made living in it worth while. One day, while returning to this macabre creation, Paul's heart stilled dead in his chest as he realized that the pattern that he had been weaving was no meaningless enterprise.

He knew, with all of the certainty that existed within him, where the creature lived.

Paul was ashamed of how he had not seen the obvious tying factor in all of the stories that was the large, mostly still wild forest that all of the people who had seen the thing had had their encounters with it in.

Although excited, to the degree that people asked him at work if he had met someone the night before, Paul swore that he would not act quickly to this discovery. He thought about what to do with his realization for a day before he decided to put his personal fear aside and to go into the forest.

He entered the woods through an alleyway next to his house. It was a path that lead to a small outcropping of the forest. He resolved that he would begin searching, in earnest, when he reached a far enough distance in the forest that he would not have to worry about being found by somebody.

It was an hour past the time that the doctor was supposed to show up to the clinic the next day that the people working in the clinic tried to contact Paul. It was easy to shrug off Paul's disappearance, as everyone seemed to attribute his non attendance at work to the fact that he was new to town. There also existed the possibility, to everyone, that he may have skipped town, not being able to handle his new found responsibilities.

Eventually someone from the clinic was sent to the doctor's house on behalf of the other staff members. One of the receptionists, named Anna, had a bitter loathing for the doctor, and was adamant that she was going to ransack his house until she found him or a clue about just where he had gone, leaving her and everyone else clutching at their jobs in fear. As she came up to his front door, however, she lost her earlier anger and resentment, beginning to notice the obvious signs of neglect that laid around Paul's front porch. A large collection of mail almost poured from the upright mailbox that sat next to his door and there was a multitude of newspapers that littered the front steps. She began to feel a bad chill, as though something were seriously wrong.

Feeling grateful that the only thing that she had to do there was to slip a letter imploring the doctor to come back to work under the front door, the woman did just that, and barely suppressed the urge to run as fast as she could back to her car.

The next day, when no news came about the missing doctor, the man who rented out the office that the clinic used came to visit Paul's house. He stayed on the front step of the house, knocking incessantly and yelling at the door until he stood there for a good ten minutes in uncomfortable silence. He didn't like waiting for the man who had rented his building out, but he began to feel a deep, unexplainable feeling of dread fill him then. He could not put a finger on it, but he did not like what he felt as he stood on the entrance to the house. It felt to be too still, even for an empty house.

After two more days, even the man's neighbors had become worried that something had happened to the quiet man who lived next to them for two seasons. Paul had never before failed to go to work every day that the clinic was opened, even walking the ten blocks between his home and the place in the drenching rain.

Calls were made constantly to the police, and all efforts were made to push the local police to break into the house.

The three police officers who arrived at Paul's home were surprised to find that the front door was unlocked. They were so surprised that none of them moved to open the door after discovering that it was not locked, and stood there in mutual silence. One of them eventually grew annoyed and rapped his fist, hard, against the door. After knocking failed to elicit a response, one of the other officers pushed the other one aside and opened the front door.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part Two)

It was a ratty, big thing, one that had been written halfway through before he had come to town. He had had it for when he could remember the scarce dream, here and there, in the desert of his dreamless nights. This bothered him deeply, as he could remember a time in which he was quite skillful at lucid dreaming, which once broke him from the awfulness of his dull, lifeless practice, but that had waned without warning one day, years ago. They were replaced with an outbreak of nightmares, which were, in turn, caused by anything that frightened him. Dr. Paul was brave during the day, and to some he was even harsh, but at night, he wished he knew someone romantically, so that she could wake him from the awful things.

The dream diary was more of a way to try to keep the fear away from his sleep than to memorize the happy ones, as they simply ceased to happen. If it worked to keep the fear away during the night, he did not know, and he clung to it, hopelessly, like it were his only sanctuary.

He grew to hate the drunkard that had come into his practice on his first day of work, as the human spider had caused him a lack of much sleep, even weeks after hearing about the abomination. In his dream journal there was entry after entry involving pale, scarcely clothed corpses scuttling after him as he walked home past some dark, empty graveyard, or something grabbing one of his ankles from behind him while he tried to ascend the stairs from his empty basement.

It got worse for him, much worse, when he happened to flip through some of the earliest occurrences of his nightmares that he had managed to record, back when he first received the journal. At some point he had described something comprising of a grotesque head that looked entirely broken from its neck, entirely gray skin, and was naked, save for what looked to be like far too loose men's black trousers hanging like elephant's skin from around its waist. He described how it moved, the clicking noise it made as it dashed madly about, only moving quickly when its presence was discovered, and otherwise how it slunk deplorably low to its knees, to its disfigured elbows. Its eyes were the worst, shaped weirdly, almost perfectly rectangular, as though they had been carved to perfectly match each other.

Paul locked the journal up in an unused drawer and decided to go about trying to cure his nightmares without the use of his writing.

Things only got worse – going from night terrors into the light of Paul's daily life. His manner around everyone, not only in his personal life, but also at work, deteriorated into rubbish. His growing phobia soon translated into an obsession with learning about everything dealing with the local legend. He pulled out his old dream journal, threw out all of the pages that he had written in before, and he started to keep a collection, loose only at first, of everything he heard about the human spider.

Things began to come together, to synchronize, into a coherent story that seemed to happen again and again.

One of the stories he collected went like this: A woman who lived alone at the edge of town was walking alone after she had gone fishing. She was in a good mood as she walked home, enjoying the sun and the shade from the trees' canopies, the way the leaves left pretty speckled shadows on everything in the forest path.

She heard a noise, turned around to look at where it had come from, and screamed, dropping her fishing equipment where she left it until she and her neighbor got it the next afternoon. There was nothing more that was particularly interesting about her story, save that two weeks after the incident a serious fire burnt down her home while she was held up in the grocery store. She said that she felt that if she had not had trouble in the store, and had come home those extra ten minutes early, she would have been trapped in her house.

The other interesting thing about the woman, her story, was that she was later found, unconscious, next to the same spot where she had dropped her fishing equipment. She was taken to the hospital, where she lived for a day before she died.

In Paul's estimation, nearly everyone who saw the thing was going to die, but if they didn't die the first time that their stroke of “bad luck” kicked in, then they died in a more excruciating way somewhere a little further down the line. They never lasted past a month to the day that they escaped death. Paul became more than a little afraid of going outside after hearing of the fishing woman's story, and he began to find ways to stay inside as often as he could. To him being outside was what brought the human spider to its victim.

Paul convulsively gathered more and more information, never discounting any story that he ever heard of that rang of the same elements of all of the others. He stopped taking pride in his work professionally, finding perverse pride in his mastery of the thing of his nightmares, in the cataloging of its habits, its anatomy, and its secrets.

He tried to perfect a drawing of it, the first attempt at its sketch falling apart when the number of erasing that had been done on the paper tore holes through the work. He ripped the ruined page out of the journal and continued to sketch on a fresh sheet, trying to discover the fearful perfection that made up its eyes.

Left the Forest Lost Sleep Tight (Part One)

Paul had heard about the thing on the day that he came to live in town. News of it had come to him while he was in his office. As a foot specialist, he was being kept busy on his first day at work, caused in no small part by the facts that the town had had no local podiatrist for the last ten years as well as the fact that he had begun unpacking that day as well.

The first patient of the day had been a backwoods local who had told the nurse that he had “broke his foot real bad” and who had an impromptu brace attached to the injured leg. He said he had to do it himself, because he had to drive himself to the clinic.

He was taken into the examination room huffing in pain, and in his haste to go into the room he ended up whacking the harmed leg against the door frame. Howling, he nearly crumpled to his knees in pain, and then waved Paul off of him when he came to help him up, stuttering out, “Sorry, sorry, new on this thing.”

Trouble continued from there, as the man refused Paul's help in hopping onto the examination cot, taking a full minute in doing it himself. Paul would wonder, four weeks after this meeting, if it had perhaps been the man's bull-headedness or his clumsiness that had contributed to his falling down a steep hill, resulting in him cracking his head open on those train tracks they would later find him on. After he managed to get the brace off of the man's leg, Paul was able to see the extent of damage that he had sustained.

“You hurt your ankle and shin pretty badly. How'd you manage it?”

The man was silent for a moment, looking as though he was struggling with what to tell Paul, then muttering, “I was runnin'.”

“A relay race?”

The man grimaces. “That's for high schoolers. I was runnin' from something.”

“What kind of a something?”

The man looked away before speaking in a voice frank in its fear. “Something I never seen in those woods before.”

“Why'd you run from it?”

The man turned to look at Paul then, his eyes surprising him with the amount of unbridled fear in them. “Youda run, if you saw it.”

Paul, thinking of how often the good 'ol boys in town must drink, suppressed the urge to chuckle at this assertion. “Well, what did it look like?”

Looking down at his hands, the man said, “I couldn't actually see it – I thank God almighty for that – but I know that it was a body.”

“Body? Like, what kind of a body?”

“Like a body, in a graveyard.”

Paul, unable to help himself, started to grin. “So, a zombie, then?”

The man bristled in anger, his voice tight as he spoke. “No, I wasn't that drunk... It crawled all around, like a spider, or a crab. Except it looked like a person, but... different.”

The words weighed eerily on Paul's mind, and he hurried through the rest of the initial examination before rushing the man into the x-ray room to get his foot scanned.

The words stayed with him – like a cuckoo dropping its egg into a doomed sparrow's nest. It didn't help that the daily doldrum of the town only increased its growth in his mind, and it kept crawling back to Paul.

The memory of the hick's recounting of the human spider came back into Paul's dreams, and, subsequently, into his dream journal.