Sunday, October 30, 2011

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.

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