Chapter 9: The Bed in the Woods

Chapter 9: The Bed in the Woods

The woods closed in behind Alex, swallowing the faint grey light of dawn and plunging him into a realm of deep, oppressive shadow. The gaunt woman had moved with the impossible speed of a startled deer, but she had left a trail. Not of footprints, but of wrongness. A path of bent twigs that snapped back into place too slowly, a corridor of unnatural silence where the insect hum of the pond faded completely, a lingering cold that clung to the air in her wake.

He followed, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. Every scrape of a branch against his hoodie sounded like a claw. Every patch of shifting shadow looked like her, waiting for him to draw level. He was no longer in the familiar woods behind his elementary school; he was in her territory, a place governed by a hostile and alien intelligence. The trees grew too close together, their branches weaving into a thorny canopy that felt like the inside of a ribcage. The ground was a treacherous carpet of slick, black mulch and grasping roots that seemed to intentionally trip him.

He pushed onward, fueled by a desperate, self-destructive need for answers. The image of the frogspawn, a grotesque parody of life spilling from her mouth, was burned into his mind. It was a symbol of this entity’s power: unnatural creation, a corruption of the very laws of biology. What, then, had it done to his sister? What had it done to Chris?

He stumbled through a final, thick wall of thorns that tore at his clothes and skin, and fell into a clearing.

Alex scrambled to his feet, brushing leaves and dirt from his jeans, and then he froze. The air in the clearing was dead still. The light that filtered through the canopy was a sickly, jaundiced yellow. And in the absolute center of the clearing, where a mossy boulder or a cluster of ferns should have been, sat an object so impossible, so cosmically out of place, that his mind simply refused to process it for a full ten seconds.

It was a bed.

A child’s bed, shaped like a bright red racecar.

It was a cheap, molded plastic monstrosity from the late nineties, the kind of bed every young boy dreamed of. The kind of bed Chris had. But this one was a wreck. The once-vibrant red was faded to a dull, sun-bleached pink, cracked and peeling like a terrible sunburn. A thick layer of green moss and pale fungi grew in the crevices of the plastic chassis and over the smiling cartoon face on the hood. The mattress was a ruin of stained, yellowed foam, ripped open and spilling its guts onto a bed of rotting leaves. It was an icon of suburban childhood, violently uprooted and left to decay in the heart of these malevolent woods.

Alex stared, his mouth hanging open, a low, keening sound of disbelief escaping his throat. It couldn’t be. This was a dream. A hallucination brought on by exhaustion and terror. But the smell of it was real—the musty scent of damp mattress foam, the faint, chemical odor of decaying plastic.

His feet moved before his brain gave them permission, carrying him closer. He circled the impossible artifact, his logical mind desperately trying to conjure an explanation. Maybe it was a prank. Maybe some kids had dragged it out here years ago as part of a clubhouse. But the bed wasn't just old; it felt ancient, as if it had been here for decades, slowly being digested by the forest.

And then his phone buzzed in his pocket. He flinched, the sudden vibration a violent intrusion into the dead silence of the clearing. He pulled it out. A text from a number he didn’t recognize. It contained only two words.

Touch it.

The blood drained from his face. It was an instruction. A command from the entity, delivered through the same sterile, technological medium it had used from the beginning. He looked from the phone in his hand to the rotting plastic wreck before him. This was a test. A trap. A deliberate, staged piece of psychological theater designed just for him.

He knew he shouldn't. He knew that touching it was surrendering to its game, playing by its rules. But the text message that had been haunting him for the past twelve hours echoed in his mind, Chris's last words, now imbued with a terrifying new context.

The bed wasn't mine.

He had to know.

His hand, trembling and slick with sweat, reached out. He hesitated for a moment, his fingers hovering over the cracked, mossy plastic of the car’s fender. Then, he pressed his palm against it.

The world dissolved.

It wasn’t a memory; it was a total sensory immersion, an instantaneous transportation. One moment he was a 21-year-old man standing in a dying forest; the next, he was eight years old, lying on his back in a sleeping bag, staring up at a constellation of plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to a popcorn ceiling. The air smelled of pizza and cheap soda. He could feel the lumpy texture of the sleeping bag against his cheek and the cool draft coming from a window that was cracked open just a bit too far.

He turned his head. Lying next to him in the racecar bed, a goofy grin on his face, was a young Chris, his hair a messy mop, a comic book resting on his chest.

“Told you it was the coolest bed ever,” Chris whispered, his voice full of childish pride.

“It’s pretty cool,” Alex heard himself whisper back. The words felt real, his own voice, his own thoughts. The memory was flawless, seamless, complete with the weight of shared history and the easy comfort of lifelong friendship.

They lay there in the comfortable silence of a childhood sleepover, the only light coming from the green-glowing stars and the sliver of moonlight through the window.

Then they heard the noise from outside.

It started as a low murmur, the sound of arguing voices from the woods behind Chris’s house. Then, one of the voices rose in a sharp, terrified cry that was abruptly cut off. A wet, percussive thump followed. And another. And another. It was a heavy, sickening sound, like a baseball bat hitting a side of beef.

Young Alex and young Chris froze, their eyes wide in the dim light. They looked at each other, the same unspoken terror passing between them. The thudding stopped, replaced by a low, dragging sound, like a heavy sack being pulled across gravel and leaves. A man started to plead, his voice high and thin with pain.

“Please… no… please, I don’t…”

The pleading was cut short by a choked gurgle and a final, wet crunch.

Then, silence. A profound, absolute silence that was a thousand times more terrifying than the noise it replaced. Alex felt a phantom memory of tears stinging his eyes, of Chris pulling the covers of the racecar bed over his head, of both of them lying there, paralyzed with fear, until the sun finally came up.

The memory shattered.

Alex was back in the clearing, his hand still pressed against the cold, damp plastic of the bed. He snatched it back as if he’d been burned, stumbling away, his breath coming in ragged, panicked sobs. The fabricated memory was already fading, its emotional residue clinging to him like a foul stench, but the details remained sharp and clear. The glow-in-the-dark stars. The smell of pizza. The sound of a man being beaten to death just outside the window.

He looked at the rotting bed, and the final, horrifying piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

Chris’s text message. They're making me remember. The bed wasn't mine.

The entity wasn't just planting false memories in his head. That was a simple, elegant explanation, and it was wrong. It was so much worse. It was actively, physically rewriting the past. It had created this sleepover, this shared trauma, and it had brought this bed here, this physical proof of a lie, to anchor the new reality. It was consuming their lives, not just their futures, but their histories, devouring their authentic memories and replacing them with a tapestry of its own horrific design.

He and Chris weren't friends from college. In this new, twisted reality, they had been friends since childhood. Lifelong friends, bonded by a dark, shared secret. A secret they had just been forced to remember.

He was no longer just being haunted. His entire life story, the very foundation of his identity, was being systematically erased and replaced. The entity wasn't a ghost in the machine. It was a cancer on reality itself. And Alex was its primary host.