Chapter 1 

The House's Forest: Finding the Way Out

The forest. The forest was one of those places which had no solid reason to exist. It was like a creaking shack created by nature to serve as a reminder that things could always be terrifying, worse and are not meant to be disturbed. The unnatural, choking mist that swirled and sprawled on the forest floor was the first thing that spoke of a strange sort of wrongness.

Here, deep in the forest, a brown-haired boy was lying on the ground. The boy woke up without a warning, eyes flung open so vast that each iris made a perfect orb of rusty chocolate. After a second or two, his head turned like some doll, mouth slackened, “Where am I?”

The first thing the boy was aware of was the coolness of the air and its loamy fragrance. He half wondered if he was still dreaming as he sat up to take in the shafts of light that burst through the gaps in the canopy above. There were no paths around him and no sign of another person.

As far as the boy could tell he was alone with the birds who sang their carefree song around him. The sweet melody made him feel lonelier. Like a nightmare, it was worse though than it first appeared, usually at this point after waking up he'd know who he was. But now, he didn't.

He couldn’t think of a name that belonged to him or anyone he ever knew. Any face which his subconscious mind offered had as much resonance as of a total stranger. He wouldn't know his parents if they walked right in front of him right now, if he had one, that is.

The only clue the boy had lay in his right hand. He looked at his hand which held something that seemed so essential to him. Slowly, he opened his hand, and there was a scrap paper. It had been ripped in half. The half part was on the boy’s side, while another half was nowhere to be found. The letter was from the boy’s father, and the contents worried him.

‘…mind if you go to his house, but stay away from the forest. Hope to see you at home soon.

-Dad’

“Dad. . .” the boy mouthed. He had no idea what his dad looked like or what his name was. What he knew now is he must go home to where his dad is waiting for him.

The boy quickly got up and looked around him, looking for a sign to know where he was or where he came from. The tall trees surrounded him. There was a wooden sign of direction nearby. He walked up to it with haste, hoping to get some clue to where he should go now.

There were two posts made out of beaten up wooden planks that were roughly carved into arrows. The one pointing upward read ‘XYZ's House’. The other had read ‘Out of the Forest’. ‘What does XYZ’s house mean?’ wondered the boy.

Curious, the boy decided to go to the house’s direction. Maybe there are friendly people there who could show him the way out or perhaps accompany him. The boy nodded to himself and moved towards where the sign pointed upward.

Before the boy could dash out to the house’s direction, his neck began to stiffen and tense, and a tingling sensation begins to spread across his body. He couldn’t explain how he knew, but he just knew that it was because of someone else’s gaze. He paused, looked around and sure enough, something was looking right at him — a black cat.

A black cat was sitting on a rotten tree stump nearby. The cat’s long black tail swung back and forth. The boy’s eyes meet briefly with the cat’s eyes, and then the boy looked away, slightly spooked. He felt too uncomfortable to check again to see if the cat was staring, but his body told him that the cat was. His neck continued to tingle as if the cat’s eyes were brushing it up and down. Yes, indeed, the cat’s eyes were fixed on the boy and it looked like it was calculating every move the boy made.



‘Where did the cat come from?’ thought the boy. He hadn’t noticed the cat when he woke up earlier. He decided to ignore the cat and walked to the house. He took a glance at the black cat as he walked faster to the house’s direction. ‘Did the cat smirk?’

After walking a little further, the boy realised that there was a large rose bush with extremely sharp thorns, blocking the path. “Great!” the boy commented. There’s no way he could go through the bush without bleeding to death. There’s no space in between for him to crawl through and he didn’t have any weapon or sharp thing to cut down the bush.

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