As if they desired a moment to pay wordless respect to the dead, the branches above you suddenly cease their creaking entirely. An unnatural stillness grips the forest, and suddenly you find yourself taken by the kind of fear you haven't felt since childhood. All at once the darkness seems as if it could host any number of unseen menaces, the stillness of the branches invoking ideas of some invisible presence, the corpse which lays in front of you seeming as if it could rise up and claw at you with rotting hands, eager to personally drag you down into the pits of hell.
Rather than the hands of some undead menace, it is panic which begins to claw at you as you stand in the darkened forest; your hands starting to shake and a nauseous knot forming in your stomach. Without thinking, you slowly begin to step backward, eyes furtively flitting from the branches overhead to the shadows around you and then back to the ground where the deformed corpse lay. All at once, the situation becomes too much, and you spin on your heel and break into a run. Driven by an overpowering feeling of horror, you don't pay much attention to whether you are heading back the exact way you came, or much of anything else. The woods around you form a blur as you leap around trees and blindly lash out at any branches which seek to impede your flight. With your heart hammering in your chest, you run for what seems like hours, never casting your gaze back to the source of your blind panic; half out of a single-minded need to simply flee, and half from the fear that you might actually see some hideous thing ripped out of your worst nightmares shambling after you.
Eventually, shadows give way to light, and the ground you pass over begins to even out. However, your pace does not begin to diminish until you break free of the trees and you manage to spot the park gates ahead. It is then that your weary legs begin to object to your frenetic pace, and you slow down to a jog. Finally, after a glance over your shoulder to assure yourself that no ungodly menace pursued you, a burning pain in your side convinces you to rest, and you come to a stop right at the entrance to the park. Gasping for breath, the terror which had so ardently gripped you begins to subside, and you allow your body to recover a bit.
Finding coherent thought somewhat less elusive, you begin to analyze the situation, and a vague sense of shame at your mad flight through the woods settles into the back of your mind. It quickly dawns on you that the body was probably some unlucky hiker who had taken a bad fall, and the situation would need to be reported to the police. After several moments spent collecting yourself, you turn and make your way through the park gates in a marginally more composed state.
The walk home, spent mostly deep in thought, is entirely uneventful. No greater crisis arises than being hissed at by a passing cat, and you arrive at your front door as intact as someone who has scared themselves half to death could expect. Digging out your keys, you find that your hands have not entirely lost their shake, and your cheeks flush with embarrassment at being so easily spooked. Starting to rehearse how you will go about reporting a corpse to the police, you find the correct key and move to unlock the door.