The man was as bare and stark as the undressed mattress that he sat on. His head was nodding forward, and Anna made the mistake of eagerly seizing onto his shoulder, trying to shake him. As his head lolled back, Anna dropped the man's unnaturally cold shoulder and screamed. Although he was unnaturally pale, the man looked otherwise fine, as though nothing were the matter with him, except for the fact that his eye sockets were empty, carved into grotesque, perfect squares.
An ambulance was called, and the body was taken away to have the mystery of his disappearance – and his death – to be discovered. Anna was taken out of the house and her husband was called to come and pick her up, and the senior officer was left in the bedroom, alone, with the puzzle of what the had happened to solve. After a quick search of the room, he found that a drawer in a cabinet in the room had been left opened.
Inside of the drawer was an odd journal that had been rendered completely illegible. It looked as though the thing had been soaked with some kind of a black, staining liquid. The pages rippled like ones in an old manuscript, and were difficult to manipulate. What could be seen in the pages appeared to the senior officer to be odd sketches that made no sense to him whatsoever – running the gamete from a carefully, amazingly drawn rendition of a small girl turning to look over at her shoulder to a terrible, crude drawing of what looked like a fire, with large, crazed swirls depicting smoke. What few sentences he picked out from between ruined stains did not make sense from one to the next. It was this lack of correlation between the words in the journal that rubbed him the wrong way, what worried him immensely.
As he shut the journal, grateful to be done with it, he nearly dropped the thing on the ground when he saw what had been carved into the back cover. Carved into it at a violent, sideways slant were the words,“left the forest lost - sleep tight”.
An autopsy at the police station revealed that aside from the loose eyeballs, there was no sign on his body of how he had died. It only appeared that his heart had given out.
A week later, the doctor's funeral was a packed one – people flooded the town, filling the only hotel in town and then offering money to locals to rent rooms for the day of the event – and the found notebook ended up in the hands of the youngest of the local police force, who turned the whole thing into a book that got pretty famous. Well, pretty famous for the humble town.
The notebook itself disappeared less than three days of the cop having written the rough draft of his book. This corresponded, oddly, with the disappearance of the author himself, his wife, and their three sons, who seemed to have left one Sunday, leaving whatever they were doing following their return from one of the local churches infinitely uncompleted.
The only thing left to debate about the whole thing among the locals, usually after the loosening of alcohol or sex, is whether or not the town is somehow safer following the doctor's death. The locals are worried enough to leave any large grouping of trees surrounding the town alone. Well, most of them, any way.
The only real way to determine whether or not things are better would be to take into consideration the amount of freak disappearances and mysterious deaths that take place in the county, and that itself is hard to figure. With more people leaving the lonesome places in town and in the countryside alone, or traveling through them only with company, it does seem odd and out of place that the number of disappearances and what can be deemed as “out of place” deaths seem to have stayed the same, and it seems almost impossible to not become such a number if one becomes an adventurous -and unfortunate - traveler.
Nobody brings up the “spider man” any longer, not even jokingly, and there have been rare cases of someone beginning the preparations for their own funeral, following a walk through a woods that seems to have gone awry. Coffins do seem to be the only thing that is a good business to be in lately, as people have taken to escaping town in one fashion or another.
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