Apache question (technical)

[jaguar]

I'm playing around with Forcetype in an effort to clean up URLs, all well and good, I want it so that for example:
domain.com/type/item
gets echoed back to domain.com/index.php with the $vars type and item.

So far I've got a file called type that is a php file and is recognised as such, all well and good, all I need to do now is include index.php and we're cooking with gas.

This is where is gets odd. PHP thinks it's inside a dir called log, which of course doesn't actually exist and thus " require'index.php'; " craps out, as does " require'../index.php' ". There are plenty of tutorials out there on ForceType but none seem to deal with this issue of including files.

I've tried creating an absolute URL from $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] and adding the php but that was no good either.

Ideas?