Heya. I've been thinking about whether to call in about this for a while now. This happened when I was eleven, back in 1996. We were living outside of Bellingham, Washington, in this old house that backed right up to the woods. Dense forest, the kind where you can walk for hours and not see another person. This was early March, still cold, patches of snow on the ground in the shaded areas. My friend Sarah had moved away the month before, so it was just me exploring by myself that day. My mom told me to stay close to the house, but I was bored, you know? I wanted to see how far back the woods went. I remember I was wearing my purple jacket. The one with the hood that was too big for me. I'd packed some crackers in my pocket, like I was going on some big expedition. Just wandering around, looking at things the way kids do.
I'd been walking maybe twenty minutes when I found this clearing. Not big, maybe fifteen feet across, but it was different from the rest of the woods. Quieter somehow. The trees around it were all these massive old growth firs, and in the middle there was this cluster of fallen logs. Rotting, covered in moss, that dark green moss that grows thick in the Pacific Northwest. And mushrooms. Everywhere. Growing out of the logs, pushing up through the moss, clustered around the bases of the trees. I'd seen mushrooms in the woods before, but never this many. Never this dense. It was like the whole clearing was one big mushroom colony. I walked closer, crouched down to get a better look. That's when I noticed the movement.
At first I thought it was insects. Little flickers of motion among the mushroom caps. But then I saw one clearly. Just for a second, before it ducked back under a shelf of fungus. It was a person. A tiny person, maybe three inches tall. But wrong. All wrong. Its body was twisted, bent at angles that didn't make sense. Arms too long, legs crooked. And its face. I'll never forget that face. It had the structure of a fly's head. Bulbous, covered in what looked like dozens of tiny black eyes. Too many eyes. They caught the light, all those little reflections staring at me. The mouth was wrong too, this clicking, twitching thing that moved constantly. I froze. Didn't move, didn't breathe. Just watched.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]