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.
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