he had entered the forest

What had happened in that forest? To this day, he didn’t know. He was being driven crazy. He was seeing things where things shouldn’t exist, shadows where there were no structures. He was being driven crazy and he didn’t know what to do.

He had entered the forest, pursued by the eyes of intelligent beings, eyes that were on the heads of dumb animals. Maybe he had already started to go crazy by that point. Maybe he was crazy before he entered the forest. And then he had entered it. He went deeper and deeper in. The smell of oak, and pine, and something fresh. And something rancid. The last, a smell waiting to happen. He had a feeling he was bringing it. He had a feeling it was a precursor to the full strength of the smell that could come. He was a little jittery. But he kept walking. Aimlessly it seemed. He had seen that tree before. No, they all looked the same. He looked up at the sky that he could barely see, it was covered by a canopy of trees, and tried to work out where the light was coming from. He made his way towards the exist and then stumbled into a clearing. Two things struck him about it. It must have been very beautiful once. It was not now. He saw a big beast feeding in a corner of the clearing. It was impossibly built, something he had never seen before. It looked ludicrous, like something that shouldn’t exist. He dredged his memories, but he couldn’t find anything for it. It stopped, ears perked, then began to turn around. He was afraid of what would happen if it could see him. He blinked. It wasn’t there anymore. He let out the breath he had been holding. What a relief. Nevertheless, the primal feeling of fear was still thumping loudly, terrified in his chest. He made his way out, blindly. What a relief when he had stepped out into the sunlight outside of the forest. The second thought he had was that it didn’t feel the same. The world was somehow darker, as if it had just missed a chance to be bright. Two of the entities that made up the sun had been so close and then separated.

And now, a few days later, he was losing his mind. He didn’t know what or where or how. He kept seeing shadows, he kept hearing shadows. Slithering about, hissing words that were incomprehensible to him, he feared that if he listened too closely, he would understand them. And then he could no longer pretend to believe everything was normal. Not that he was doing a good job of it anyways. The pretending, that is.

The detective put his head in his hands and almost sobbed. He stopped himself, closed his eyes so tight that tears formed around the corners. He did what he always did best, or had done, until recently. He began to think. Draw the beginning, the events that had unfolded since, and tried to draw a line through them to whatever ending there may be.