The Thread In The Ground

Part One:

Scraping dirt away from sides of the hole to widen it, Claude's shovel glances off something, taut and tough, about three feet down, which in the darkness he assumes is a branch root from an aspen. A grove of the ancient trees tower around him, blocking out what little light leaks from the waning moon, so it's not until he shines his flashlight on the hole that he sees that the thread is too pale to be a root, too smooth, and glistening with something thicker than water, drooling listlessly into the soil and clay below.

Sunrise and any risk of discovery are hours away, so Claude feels comfortable temporarily halting his dig to investigate the thread more closely. The way it reacts with the flashlight beam is wrong, somehow, and reminds him of a hospital, or his Nana's nursing home... like slick, translucent flesh, like an IV line pumping gruel. Or an exposed tendon.

He wraps his dirt-covered fingers around it, and pulls. He expects resistence, but it slides easily from the surrounding soil, lubricated by whatever thick, clear liquid now drools between his fingers and around his knuckles. Now standing, holding the thread pulled up from the forest floor about four feet to each side of his fist. Claude leans down, sniffs it, and finds it odorless, but his mind is suddenly flooded with associative memories: a different night, another forest, a campfire, a tent, a hollow wind, and in the center, something black and ugly and cruel, a missing act, a violent absence.

Something's wrong. These aren't his memories. Something's wrong.

Compelled, Claude pulls more of the thread up from the earth. He knows he should finish digging the hole, that it's very important (why is it important, again? he can't remember), but the promise of the thread has taken that from him (find what's missing, find the ending), and he follows it out of the grove, towards his truck, parked a few dozen meters away.

By the time he reaches the truck, he no longer needs to pull the thread up out of the ground. It's already there, at height, drawing him forward. He assumes it's leading him to the vehicle, but it passes (impossibly, impossibly) through a fender, emerging at an angle through the driver's side door on the other side like the trajectory of a bullet bouncing off bone, and continues.

The thread leads on, into the darkness of the forest. Claude follows, losing something of himself with every step.