Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. I first noticed it when Ema
Hale didn't show up for Skull. It was a Tuesday morning,
gray windlass, the sky bruise purple with the promise of rain.
Emma sat two rows in front of me in chemistry,
not that we were closer anything. She was one of
those quite kids, the type who always did her homocon
time and never spoke unless cold on. But that day
her seat was empty. Mister Karro didn't say anything. He
just kept scribbling equations on the whiteboard, oblivious or uninterested.
Nobody asked, not Lucy, who Emma partnered with n Labs,
not Jake who used to borrow her calculator, not even
mister Caerro, who marked her present without looking up. That
was the first time I really noticed it. By Thursday,
two more kids were gone. Benji Lawler and soft A
Cruise just gone. I checked their usual spots in the cafeteria.
I scold their socials not then, no updates, no good
bye pos, not even a dramatic cry for help. It
was like they never existed. But when I asked Marcus
about Benji, he looked confused. Who's Benji, he asked, mid
By of Vasoka French fry. You know, I said, Benji Lawler.
We all did that group project in history together, you
and me and Benji and Sofia. He blinked at me.
I seriously have no idea what you are talking about. Man.
He wasn't joking. There wasn't a hint of sarcism, no
smirk on his face. It was like the names they
said had slipped past him like smoke. I let it
go for the moment. That night, I dug through my yearbook,
page after page, every face accounted for except the ones
that weren't. Emma's picture had been replaced by a blurry
shot of an empty glass room. Benji and Sofi weren't
there at all. Their names weren't even listed alphabetically. It
wasn't just the school. I started checking more places, street corners,
old photos, class rosters. They were being erased, not just taken,
but deleted, and no one cared. Not my teachers, not
my friends, not my mom who used to waive that
ema when she dropped me off at school. I wrote
their names down on a scrap of notebook paper, just
to make sure I wasn't going crazy. I kept it
folded in my back pocket like a totem light proved
that they'd been real. By the end of the week,
I had nine names, and the list kept growing. The
weirdest part, I felt it too. I tug at the
edge of my memory, like something trying to pull the
names from my head. Smudged their faces into haze. Sometimes
I'd look at the list and not remember who one
of them was. Not clearly they laughed, the way they walked,
the sound of their voice. It all blurred, like watercolors
bleeding in the rain. But I knew they matted. I
knew they were real. So I started documenting everything, names, descriptions,
last known whereabouts. I filled a whole spiral notebook, page
after page. I stayed up late every night, writing before
the memories could fade. I was terrified that if I didn't,
I'd forget them too. It wasn't just students any more.
Mister Greeley, the librarian inn done, Missess Hammond, who ran
the bakery on Maple done, two cops, a nurse, an
entire family on Alder Street. None. The rest of the
town moved like nothing had happened. The bakery was closed,
s Missus Hammond retired, the cops transferred out of town.
The empty houses for clothes. No one remembered the people
who lived there, not even their neighbors. One day I
biked on Oldo Street and saw a real to nailing
up a for sale sign on the Martinson's lawn. You
looking to buy, he asked, No. I sat starring at
the house. What happened to the family that lived here?
He squinted, family, yet two kids mister Martinson's worked at
the post office. The realtor's brow furrowed. There's no Martinson's
listed here. This place has been empty for years. That night,
I couldn't remember what the Martinsons looked like. I only
remembered that I should remember, and I was sure how
much longer that would last. So I made a decision.
I was going to figure out what was happening, Who
or what was making people disappear. Why no one cared,
Why only I could remember, And I wasn't going to
stop until I had answers, even if I was next.
I started with the old library, not the new annex
with the fluorescent lights in salth Check at Kiosk's the
real library the one tucked behind town Hall, wrapped in
ivy in time. It hadn't been open to the public
for years, not since the city budget cuts pushed everything digital.
But the building was still there, squath and stubborn, like
it was waiting for some one to remember it matter.
I picked the lock with a Bobby pinn hat stolen
from my sister's bathroom. It took longer than I expected,
twenty minutes of cursing and scrape knuckles, but eventually the
tumbles clicked and the heavy wooden door creaked open. Thus
greeted me first, thick and stale, curling in the moonlight
like ghost breath. There smelled a forgotten paper and mild you.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, the
click of the latch echoing too loudly. The shelves stood
like sentinels in the dark. I moved through them, slowly,
sweeping my flashlight across faded spines and warp wood. I
didn't know what I was looking for exactly, reco maybe proof,
something untouched by whatever was happening out there. I found
the archive's room in the back. It was locked, too,
but the door was old in the frame, brittle, one
hard cake, and it gave with a groan. Inside filing
cabinets floor to ceil, in rows of town records, photos, blueprints,
yellowed newspaper stacked in bins. I dug through them like
a man drowning looking for a rope. The further back
I went, the stranger things got. The chronicles Arkab stopped
updating names about six months ago. Obituaries vanished, school on
a rolls thinned, Church bulletins listed fewer and fewer congregants.
I even found a school yearbook from last year, and
just like the current one, entire pages were altered, some
students missing, others rearranged, as if to hide the gaps.
It was like someone or something was editing the town
in real time. And then I found it, an unlabeled
Manila foldo tucked behind a stack of zoning maps. Inside
were a series of black and white photos, aerial shots
of the town old maybe nineteen teen, sixties or seventies,
but each one had a date scribbled in red ink
and circled on every furto was a blot, sometimes a building,
sometimes a street, crossed out with a shaky X. In
the corridor of the last photo. Some one had called
a single word, breech. I didn't know what that meant,
but I knew it wasn't good. Then I heard it,
a soft creak, like a footstep on old floorboards. I
killed my flashlight, held my breath. A knellow creek closer.
I wasn't alone. I pressed back against the file cabinet,
heart racing, trying not to breathe too loud. The darkness
in the room thickened. I couldn't hear breathing, couldn't see movement,
but I felt something like the air itself had teeth.
There was a whispery not in English, not even in
sund really, just brusher, thought, not my own, brushing against
my skull like ice water. You shouldn't be here. And then,
just like Daddy was gone. The air east. The silence settled.
I flipped my leg back on. No one was there,
but when I looked down, the folder was gone from
my hands. Something had taken it, and it remembered me.
I stumbled out of the library into the cold night air,
hot thudding like a war drum in my chest. The
wind had picked up, slapping lease against the sidewalk, carrying
with it the distant hum of something I couldn't name,
like static or a memoryum reveling in real time. I
backed home like the devil was behind me. At every
stop sign, I looked over my shoulder at every intersection,
I half expected to see a shadow stepping just beyond
the edge of the street lamp. But there was nothing.
Just empty sidewalks, quiet houses, the kind of normal that
felt too normal. When I got home, the kitchen light
was still on. Ma'am was at the table, sipping camp
malty and reading the same mystery novel she'd been re
reading for weeks. You're out late, she said, without looking up.
I was studying, I lied, don't. She turned a page.
Keep it up. Don't end up like that boy who.
She stopped mid sentence, her brow furrowed, eyes glazed for
a second, like who. I asked. Her lips moved, searching
for a name. I I don't know. She murmured, it's
on the tip of my tongue. I nodded, throw dry
yet mine too. I went straight to my room and
locked the door, pulled the curtain shut up. In my
note book, two more names had gunnfaint, like the pencil
had faded, or the paper itself was forgetting them. I
tried rewriting the letters, pressing hard, but the names resisted.
Every stroke felt wrong, like I was trying to forge
something I had never really known, but I had known them.
I remembered Sofy's laugh, the chippink nil polish on her thumbs,
the way Benji always wore a smatch socks, didn't I.
The phone buzzed a known number. I answered, at first nothing,
then breeding cello slow, then a voice raspby, like it
had been scraped across glass. Stop digging, I froze, who
is this? You see them because you remember the voice quivered.
But the more you look, the more it sees you.
I stood up, My hand trembled, what's it? Static kissed
through the line. Then you don't find the breech, it
finds you. Click silence. I stared at the phone. My
reflection looked back at me in the black screen, except
the room behind me was empty, but the reflection showed
some one standing in the corner. I spun around. No
one was there, just the cold press of something unseen,
culling around the age of my thoughts. The next morning,
I woke with a pounding headache, and a nurse leed
My sheets were smearred with rost fratt stains, and the
corners of my note book, my precious only proof, were
curled and damp, like it had been left outside in
the storm. I didn't remember falling asleep. I barely remembered
making it to dead. But I did remember the voice
in the phone, and the figure in the mirror, and
the word ditched, and reading across the photograph breech Skull
felt like a dream on pause. The hallways were quieter
than they should have been, not silent, but off. Conversations
that didn't quite make sense. After that started too late,
teacher's calling roll without realizing they were skipping names. I
passed the trophy case and caught my own reflection again,
except this time the reflection didn't match. I was standing still,
it was still walking. I blinked, it blinked. A moment
later I backed away. Hey you okay, some one asked
behind me. It was Marcy Chen. She ran track smart kind.
We went close, but I remembered when she broke her
wrist in Jim lassomes, Sir, I'd watch her to the
nurse's office. She'd laughed the hallway, even through the pane.
You look like you've seen a ghost, she said. I
opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the words duck.
Have you noticed anything weird lately? I finally asked, like
people going missing? Her smile faltered. She glanced around, leaned in. Yes,
that single word hit like lightning. You remember some one,
I asked, desperate. She nodded slowly. A girl Brieled, as
she used to sit behind me in English, always wore
these bigcadphones and drew in the margins of her note book.
But one day she was just gone, and no one
said anything, not even misss Holt's. I even asked about her.
Holes looked at me like I was drunk. I stared
at her. You wrote her name down, I tried, Marsey said,
but I can't find the note book any more. I
think it disappeared with her. Hope sparked like a match
in my chest. Come with me, we need to compare notes,
she hastted. I was darting to the holly behind me.
Are you sure, because since I start of remembering Brielle,
I feel like something's watching me. He got a call
to number worse. She pulled up her sleeve. There were
bruises on her forearm. Faint finger shaped. They showed up
after I had a dream, she said. I was in
my back yard, except the stars were wrong. There were
no consolations, just a back hole where the sky should be,
and something was reaching through it. I didn't breathe for
a full ten seconds. Marcy, I whispered. I think this
town is being edited, like some one is cutting pieces
out of reality. And if we don't figure out why,
we're going to be next. She looked me dead in
the eyes, then we better move fast. We did after
fourth period, slipped us through the side exit by the
auto shop, the one where the security camera had been
broken since sophomore year. No one stopped us, no one
even seemed to notice. I glanced back once at the door.
Swan shot behind us, and it struck me how quiet
it was, like the whole building was being muffled under
a thick blanket of fog. We rode our backs to
my house. Marci had a duffel bag with her, filled
with notes, old sketch books, and a Polaroid camera. Why
the camera, I asked. She zipped it open and pulled
it out like it was a weapon. Digital's too easy
to change, she said. Film stays rill for now, my
mom was home. I wasn't surprised. Lately her shifts at
the clinic had been erratic, like time itself had started
raveling her schedule. Sometimes I wondered if she'd come home
at all. We spread everything up on my bedroom floor,
my notebook, her sketches, loose papers with circled names and
half faded memories. One name showed up in both our notes.
Brialdique's Marci had drawn her once months ago, just a
quick sketch she did during lunch. The image was rough,
mostly aligned shadows, but there was something about it that
hit me in the gut, like seeing a goot smile.
She was real, Marcy said, I know she was. I nodded.
That's two people who remember her. That's something. Then I
noticed it at the edge of the drawing, almost hidden
in the corner of the page, a symbol, a tiny
triangle pointing downward with a circle in the middle. Did
you draw this, I asked? She squinted number. I didn't
even know this that before I traced it with my finger.
It gave me a headache just looking at it, like
it wasn't meant to be seen. My vision swam for
a second. The room tilted at yo kemas, I asked
in fine eye light. That night, after Marcy went her
eyes scanned the symbol online. Nothing came up, not in
any language, not in the culp forms, not even in
the word ast conspiracy SATs I could find. But just
before I gave up, a message popped up on my screen.
Not an AD, not a pop up, just a single sentence,
typed in bolve red across my giggle window. You are
looking in the wrong direction. I stared at it, and
then the screen went black, all of it. Lights off,
fan's dead rode or silent. The power was gone, and
I was no longer alone in the room. The temperature
dropped like a stone. My breath fogged in the sudden cold,
my skin prickling with goose bumps. I couldn't see anything,
just to avoid where My room had been swallowed by
a natural darkness, not the kind that comes when the
lights go out, but a thicker kind, like the dark
itself was watching. I didn't move, didn't breathe. Something was there.
I could feel it behind me, weightless but massive, like
a thunderhead crawling just above the ground. A run this
pressing into the world around it. My ears RN, my
limbs wouldn't respond. Then it spuck, not loud, never allowed,
but inside me. The words came like a migraine, sharp, pulsing, invasive,
you cannot unsee. I turned slowly, against every instinct in
my body. There was a shape in the corner of
the room, not a person, not quite. It stood too still,
too long, like it had joints in the wrong places.
Its skin shimmered like oil and water, shifting through colors
that didn't have names, no face, just that's same triangle,
symbol pulsing red, branded into the center of its head,
like a third eye. I tried to speak, My joe locked,
My tongue wouldn't obey. You cannot warn them. It raised
a hand, three long fingers extended. They shimmered and bent
the air like heat on pavement. The triangle on its
face began to rotate slowly, like a camera lens adjusting.
I felt something tugging my chest, like it was reaching
into me, searching. Then the door burst open, a blinding flash,
the hiss of burning film. Massie stood there with the
polaroid in both hands, fingers still on the trigger. The
creature recoiled, its body twisting and on itself like a film,
real burning midspin. The triangle flared red once, then blinked out,
and it was gone. The light snapped back on my
laptop screen rebooted. My room was whole again, but the
still tasted like static and ashes. Marcy was breathing hard,
her chest heaving. I saw the lights die from the street.
Something told me to run. She held up a photo,
freshly printed from the polaroid. In it, barely visible, already
starting to fade, was the outline of the creature, warped,
melting around the edges, but real proof. O kay, I said,
my voice shaking. Now I know we're in deep. She
looked at me. We need to find a breach before
it finds any one else. I nodded, still staring at
the photo, and whispered, I think it already has. We
didn't sleep that night. We sat in my room, crosslegged
in the floor, the curtains for untight and every light on.
The photos sat between us like a loaded gun, crooked
curling at the edges, the image already warping under some
unseen pressure. Even as we watched, a triangle in the
creature's face began to smudge, the blacking bleeding outward like
a warned, it's erasing itself. Marcy said no, I said,
it's being a race, just like everyone else. She didn't answer,
She just stared at the polaroid, her eyes glassy and why.
I flipped back through her sketch book, searching every corner
for that triangle. It showed up in places we hadn't
noticed before, hidden in the background of schull hallways, drawn
into the shadow under a stowwell, even inside the eye
of a cat Duti she'd forgotten, she drum. Whatever it was,
it had been leaking through for longer than we'd realized.
MARSI pointed at one of the pages. Look at the date.
I checked the coroner, April third. That's when I first
remembered Beel, she said, quietly. It started. Then I flipped
to my note book, same date, April third, was when
I noticed Emma was gone. The start of all of
it a coincidence now, but not any more. Something happened
that day. I whispered something toward the fabric. Marcy leaned
in the breach. I nodded. My thoughts were racing. We
had to go deeper back, further find out what happened
on April third that could have triggered a hole in reality.
So we made a plan. We'd start with the surveillance
system at school. Mister Rex, the janitor, had access to
the camera back ups if any one could get us
into the old security room in the admin wing to
be him. He also hadn't shown up to work since Thursday.
We checked his house the next morning. The door was
a jaw, no curry in the driveway, lights off, mail
piling up in the box like snowdrifts. We stepped inside slowly.
The air was stale, heavy with the smell of mildew
and something coppery. Underneath the living room was trash drawers
pulled out, cushion's torn open, but not in a robbery
kind of way. A look searched, desperate, like some one
had been trying to find something before it vanished on
the wall. Written in black marker across the wallpaper were
three words, it's not time. In the hallway, Marcy found
a trap door leading to the basement. We opened it.
A draft of frigid air rose from below, carrying the
scent of wet earth. We looked at each other, then
climbed down the stairs groaned under our weight as we descended,
each steps swallowed by the darkness below. Marsy's flashlight cut
through the gloom and shaky arcs, illuminating and finished concrete,
exposed pipes and the tangle veins of old electrical wiring.
The smell down there was strong, the mauled, wrought, and
something acrid, metallic, like blood that had been left up
too long. The basement was colder than it had any
right to be. It wasn't large, just a square space
with a low ceiling and overork and shoved up against
the far wall, shelves lined with paint cans and broken tools.
But there in the middle of the floor was a
folding table, and on it a map of the town.
I stead closed her. The map was hand drawn, sketched
in thick BLACKink, streets and intersections, landmarks, schools, even the
woods that bordered the west end of town. But overlaying
it all with something else, a web of symbols and
lines connecting locations with strange geometry. Points were circled, others
were crossed out. Marcy pointed to one in the center,
marked with a red triangle April third. She said, that's
where it started. I traced the point, sat right at
the intersection of Hollow Creek Road and Sicamore Lane. I
know this place, I murmured. It's that empty field, the
one with the weird fence no one remembers putting up.
Marsy's voice was tight. That fence was always there. Taped
to the edge of the table was a sticky note
of Coordinate's cold and red pen. Beside it a polaroid
faded almost to why we picked it up gently. It
was of the field, taken at dusk, but in the background,
half hidden by trees. There was some thing, a shimmer
in the air, like a heap mirage, but vertical, almost
door shaped. If you stayed too long, the image felt
like a twisted your stomach into knots. Marcy swallowed. That's
the breech. Beneath the table were creates of notes, more notebooks, folders, drawings,
and a small cassette recorder. We growded everything we could carry,
stuffing it into our back axe. Whatever mister Rix had
been doing down here, he'd known something, maybe too much.
Then Marsy froze. Do you hear that? I held my
breath At first, nothing, then a faint scraping sound from above,
A slow rhythmic drag, like claws crosswood. Then footsteps, heavy, slow,
A heeman something had entered the house. We killed the
lights and waited in the dark, listening to it move
one step at a time toward the open basement door.
The first step creaked directly above our heads. Then another
Marsy gripped my wrists so tightly I felt her nails
dick into my skin, but I didn't flinch. Ruch behind
the crates under the table, barely breathing. The flasklight was off,
My phone was dark. The only light came from the
narrowest sliver of the basement door, casting a pale beam
down the stairs. The thing paused at the top. It
didn't speak, it didn't groll, It simply waited, And I
got the sickening sense and knew we were there, that
it could smell us, fill the heat of our bodies,
maybe even hear the blood hammering in our veins. Then
it began to descend, slowly, deliberately. Each step groaned under
a weight that seemed too heavy for this world. The
air thickened with every motion, coal pressing against us like
rising water. Mars's breath trembled. I leaned closer to her
ear and whispered, on tea we run. She nodded, barely perceptible.
One the footsteps reached the midpoint of the stairs. A
shadows stretched on across the concrete floor, tall, twitching brawn.
Two the sound of breathing, wet and low, almost amused.
Three we exploded from cover. I shoved the crates over
as a distraction, sending a crash of metal wood scattering
across the basement. The thing shrieked, and awful mechanicals creached
the claw at my brain, like nails on bone. We
darted to the far wall, toward the narrow egress window
just beneath the ceiling. I scrambled up, first, kicking the
latch until it popped. Then I pushed it open and
clawed through the dirt, shoving myself into the cold outside air.
Marcy followed just as a hand slammed under her ankle.
She screamed. I reached down and grabbed her wrists, yanking
with everything I had. The thing's grip tightened, long sinney
fingers wrapped in something like skin but not its head
rose into view. There was no face, just a triangle
spinning in place, glowing red hot like a branding iron.
Beneath it, suggestion of stitches in its neck. Let her go,
I screamed, and it did not because of me, but
because the sunrise hid it. The first ray of light
lanced through the trees and touched its shoulder, and the
thing howled, recoiling like it had been set on fire.
Smoke kissed from its skin as it retreated back down
the stairs, dragging a piece of darkness with it like
a cloak. We collapsed on the grass, panting, shaking, I
stinging from tears and dirt in fear. Light hurt it.
Marcy gasped. Then we need to move during the day,
I said, hart pounding, and we need to get to
that field. She nodded, wiping blood from her scrape cheek.
Behind us, the basement door slant shut. We didn't look back.
We made it back to my place just after eight.
The sun was high enough to feel safe, though we
kept glancing over our shoulders, half expecting the thing to
crawl out from under the sidewalk wearing some one's skin.
The air was warm, the kind of puffect summer morning
that used to make me feel like everything was still possible.
Now it just felt like camouflage. My neighborhood was quiet,
too quiet, not in the peaceful way, but the whole kind.
No kids on bike, snow sprinklers, no barking dogs. I
didn't see a single car pass while we rode, just
empty driveways and trim hedges, trying to look normal, trying
too hard. We went inside and locked every door and window.
I pulled the blinds. Marsy spread out the materials we'd
stolen from mister Rigg's basement across the floor, folders, maps,
scribbled pages that looked half mad but were too specific
to ignore. We listened to the cassette first. There was
no old label, just a piece of masking tape with
they pul Thouds growled and read. Mister Rik's voice crackled
through the static, older than I remembered, tired for it.
It's not random, none of this is. It started at
Hollow Creek. That's the first breach. But it wasn't natural.
Something opened it, some one. Marcy looked at me, white eyed.
I tried to warn them. I tried to tell the council.
But it's like the town's under a spell. They don't remember.
The names disappear from their mouths like static on a radio.
I can't even say half the Missing people out loud
any more without bleeding from the nose. There was a pause.
It sounded like a chair creaking. It feeds on forgetting.
That's how it grows. That's why the records vanish, why
the photo was fade. Memory is its enemy. That's why
it watches the ones who remember. That's why it watched me.
The tape ended with a long hissistatic no goodbye, no
final scream, just the slow Decay's islands, swallowing a man hole.
We sat there for a long time, not speaking. Finally
Marcy pointed to them up. Then that's our next step,
the cold and it led directly to Hollow Creek Field.
I've passed it a hundred times and never thought twice.
Just a patch of land fenced off with westered chain
link and a wooe gate silled with thick padlocks. It
had always felt wrong, but now I understood why it
was to abandon. It was quarantined. We packed everything, flashlights, rope,
my dad's old krober Massie carried the polaroid camera like
it was a loaded pistol. We rode out again, no helmets,
no forms, no back up. If this was the source
of it, all, the wound and the skin of reality,
then it was time to look straight into it. The
field looked different now. Maybe it was always like this
and I'd just never seen it, really seen it. But
standing there at the edge of the vusted fence, when
brushing through waist high grass, I felt it in my bones,
a stillness that didn't belong like the world. He had paused,
waiting for someone to notice. The gate was chained with
two padlocks, both old and clotted with rust. We stood
there in silence for a few seconds, just watching the
grass shift. Nothing moved beyond the fence. No birds, no bugs,
no sound. I took the crow before my back cock,
jammed it between the chain links and twisted the metal. Shriek,
but didn't give Massy stepped up beside me and zipping
her duffel and pulling out a pair of bowl cutters.
Where'd'ye get those? I asked? She didn't answer, just set
her jar went to work. The chain snap with a
loud clink, the sound cutting through the quiet like a gunshot.
The gate swung inwards, slowly creaking, like it hadn't moved
in years. We stepped through. The temperature dropped the second off.
He touched the grass, not by much, just a few degrees,
but enough to notice, enough to make your skin crawl.
The field was bigger than it looked from the outside.
Trees rimmed the edges like centris, tall and still in
the center, maybe fifty yards in, stood a ring of
standing stones. I stopped cold. Those weren't there before, they said,
Marcy swallowed. They were always there. People just forget. We
moved cautiously. The air had that same shimmer I had
seen in the polaroid from mister Rook's basement, like the
atmosphere itself was warping, bending slightly around the stones. The
triangle symbol was carved into each one, deep and jagged,
and in the middle of the rain the breech. It
looked like a vertical tear in the air. Not glowing,
not pulsing, just open, like someone had unzipped the sky
through it. I could see nothing, not blatness, not light,
just absence. The longer I stared, the more I felt
like it was staring back. Marcy raised the Polari camera
and took a photo. The flash popped, and in that instant,
the grass flattened outward from the breech. Whush, as if
something inside had exhaled. Hello, vibrating hum rippled out, and
I sware. For a split second, I heard voices, dozens
of them, screaming, whispering, overlapping. Names Enough Benji, Darfare, Burrell,
mister Ricks. Names were remembered, names the world didn't. They
were calling to us. Holy shit, I breed, they're in there.
Marsy lowered the camel slowly, her fist pail. We have
to go in. I stared at her, stunned what MASSI
didn't look away from the breech. Her voice was steady,
but her hands trembled. If they are trapped insie, if
their voices can still reach us, then maybe they're not
completely gone, or maybe that's what it wants us to think.
She turned to me, eyes wide and dark with fear.
But something else too, was all you heard them, she said,
You heard their names. You know they're still real. This
whole thing they are raising, the forgetting. It's not the end,
it's a process. I shook my head. And if we
go in and don't come back, Massi's jalw clenched. Then
at least we'll know. I looked at the tear in reality,
this impossible slit in the air, like the world had
been cut with a blade no one should own. It
didn't shimmer any more, it just was still waiting. Let's
anchor yourselves, I said. We tied rope around our waist
and looped it around one of the stone pillars. I
scrolled our names, the date, and the phrase. We went
in on a page in my note book and nailed
it to the pillow with a pocket knife. Then we
stood at the edge. I could feel it, something pulling
at my skin, like gravity, twisted sideways. The breach wasn't
a space, It was memory, dine, identity. It wanted us,
it wanted everything. Marcy looked at me. On three I nodded. One,
the air buzzed with invisible electricity. Two the rope creaked
under tension. Three we stepped through. It was like falling,
but not down inward, like being pulled into your own mind,
only it wasn't yours any more. My visions mirrored into colors.
I didn't recognize shapes with too many sides floated past.
I heard voices again, but they were inside my thoughts,
speaking languages I didn't know, but somehow understood. Then suddenly
solid ground. We were standing in a version of the field,
but it wasn't the same. The skuy was a flat,
swirling gray. The trees were shadows of trees. The stones
around us were still there, but their carvings rithed and pulsed,
shifting like they were alive. The rope we tied gone
like it never existed. I turned to Marsy and we
both looked up in the distance. Towering against the Nott
sky was as shape, tall as a building, thin as smoke,
a silhouette with a spinning triangle where its head should be,
the thin its ass, and it began to move. It
didn't wock, It glided, no footsteps, no sound, just the
impossible shifting of its lawns, gletal form, weaving through the
ash gray trees like mists. Every time it passed through
a shadow, it left behind a trail of flickering geometric
shapes that twisted in on themselves before vanishing. Marsie grabbed
my hand. Her skin was eyes run, I said. We
turned and bolted, feet pounding across brittle, dead grass. Behind us.
The thing gave no chase, but we could feel it,
gaining feel it and spoiling the space between us, folding
it like paper, This place, this inside place. It didn't
follow rule. We run through a warped version of our town.
The buildings were wrong, too tall, too wide, too hollow.
The windows blinked like eyes, street signs twisted into gibberish.
The skull stood crooked on the horizon, black vines growing
from its walls like veanes. Everything looked familiar, but corrupted,
like a memory infected by rot. We ducked into what
looked like the library, his whole version, pre renovation. But
the shelves were skeletal, filled with blank books that screened
when we opened them. No exit in sight, no people,
no time. And then a whisper, not a thought, this
time a voice, mossy. She stopped dead in her tracks.
That was Brielle. I pulled her arm. We need to
keep moving now. She broke away, calling out, Brielle, where
are you? Shadows shifted, the four beneath us crack like eggshells.
The aer pulled us. Something stepped forward, a girl, thin, pale,
wearing a hoody three sizes too big it was her.
I recognized her from Marsy's sketch brielled eeks, but her
eyes were wrong, empty, not blank, just drained, like some
one had scooped out her memories and left a shell behind.
Marcy ran to her, growd her shoulders. It's me, Marty,
you remember me, right? Brielle blinked slowly, our mouth opened,
nothing came out. Then her hand shot up, pointing behind
me a turn, just as the thing appeared, crawling down
from the ceiling like a spider, limbs too long, joints
bending backward. The triangle on its face spun faster and faster,
its edges glowing. It didn't come for me, It lunged
for Marcy. I tackled her out of the way, just
in time. The floor cracked again, deeper this time, and
reality split. We fell two layers of forgotten memories. Faces
are half remembered streets that used to exist well after
that once meant something. All of it blared, rushing past
like a river of broken time, and then impact. We
landed in darkness alone. Marcy was gone. I couldn't breathe.
The air was thick, damp, like being buried beneath wet soil.
Every time I tried to move my limbs pushed through
something that wasn't quite solid. It clung to me, It
slowed me down, not liquid, not there memory. I was
submerged in a sea of fading memories. They drifted around
me like ghosts. Moments caught in suspension. A child laughing
as he flew a paper kite, a woman lighting candles
in a window, a man hammering of a sale sign
into a lawn that no longer existed. Each image hovered
for a moment, vivid and sharp, before flickering into dust.
I swam upward, pushed through the heavy syrupidarc heart hammering
somewhere above me. I felt marcy, then light. I broke through,
fell onto something cold and solid, attil floor. The air
here was thin, electric, buzzing with the sharp wine of
failing for rescent lights. I was inside the school, but
not my school. This version was warped. The halls were longer,
the lockers taller, pulsing slightly like lungs. The walls frobed
with a slow, rimic vibration that sounded too much like
a heartbeat. At the far end of the corridor, someone
stood in silouet I approached cautiously, while shees squeaked in
the tile, echoing louder than they should have. Marsy I whispered.
The figure turned. It wasn't her. It was me, or
some version of me, older maybe, or hollowed out. The
face was blank, the eyes two deep black voids. It's mild.
You were always meant to stay. I backed away. What
are you? What you become when you forget? It? Stepped forward?
With each footful, the hallway behind it crumbled into dust.
Lockers turned to ash. The four broke into cracks of
white nothingness. The world unraveled. Then a voice called out, sharp, urgent, here,
over here, Marty. I turned and ran toward the sound,
the well peeling away behind me. I burst through a
double door and slammed its shut. Inside was a small room,
some kind of maintenance closet, walls lined with empty shells
and corroded pipes. Marsi stood in the corner, gribbing a
piece of paper in her hands. Her face was streaked
with tears, but her eyes burned with purpose. I found
a way out, she said, breathlessly. It's not stable, but
it's real. She held out the paper on it a
hand drawn circle wrapped in runes that shifted when I
tried to focus on them in the center, a triangle
pointing up this time instead of down, the reverse of
the mark. She said, it's like a back door, a
memory strong enough to anchor us. We just have to
give it something the breech can't race. I stared at her,
and I knew what she meant. We have to remember.
She nodded everything, every one us, because that was the
only thing the breech couldn't devire, what we refused to forget.
We sat on the cold tile floor, back to back,
clutching the paper between us like it was a life line.
The circle MASSI had drawn flickered faintly in the dark,
glowing with an impulse that didn't belong to in call light.
I didn't ask how she found it. I didn't need you.
I've felt it, the edges of something ancient, deeper than language,
etched in the bones of the world, or maybe in
the bones of memory itself. We have to focus, she whispered.
We give it our strongest memory, something real, something true.
My thoughts reeled. So many memories were blurred, now stripped
away like laves of paint. But beneath it, Under all
the forgetting, there were still pieces that had it faded.
The way my mom used to hum while stirring coffee
in the morning, the smell of old books in the
back of the library before they closed it. Massy's laughed
in seventh grade when she fell into the river on
a field trip and tried to play it call that.
I gripped her hand and closed my eyes. I remembered.
I remembered the first time I saw her middle school
drama club. She wore a hoodie with frayed sleeves and
rolled her eyes at everything. She wasn't like the others.
She noticed things me. I remembered the fire drill where
we ended up standing next to each other on the
black top. She asked what book I was reading. I
told her I didn't read much, even though I was
catching a copy of Doune in my backpack. She smirked
and sat lyre. I remembered sitting next to her on
the bus and sophomore year, sharing Neerberds, listening to I
saw neither of us near the lyrics to you, just
watching the town slide by. Those weren't just memories, they
were eres. The circle flared with light. It lit up
the room, burning with a steady, brilliant light, not cold,
not stirl, but warm, real. The pipes around us groaned,
the walls cracked, the floor beneath us began to shimmer
like water. Keep going. Mossy shouted over the rising noise.
She was crying. Now so was I. I remembered Benji
saw collection, Sophia's weird al obsession, Emma's perfect silent jodles
in the margins of every worksheet, Riol's hands stained with charcoal,
brushing hair out of her eyes, every name I'd written
in my notebook, every person I had refused to let vanish.
The breech had fed on forgetting we were starving it.
The ground split up and beneath the circle, not into darkness,
but into light, blinding, fierce, infinite. A roar filled the space,
lot of a monster, but of resistance, of remembrance. Now,
Marshy shouted. We held the memory like a web and
created our teeth and jumped the moment we jumped. Everything
tore apart, not just the world we expected that, but
something deeper, more personal. The breech fought back as we
fell into the light. It caught at us, hurling pieces
of itself in desperation, phantoms made from fractured time, false
memories stitched together like broken dolls. I saw my own
mother turning to ash at the breakfast table, mossy screaming
my name from inside a burning caw that never existed.
My house overgrown with finds that whispered in tongues. All
of it lies, all of it meant to make us stout.
I held tighter to Marcy's hand. She screamed through clenched teeth,
don't let go. The light poles brighter. The false memories
began to solve. The breach couldn't hold us any more.
It was unraveling. It spread, snapped by the force of
what we chosen to keep, And then in back point
not hard, not like hitting ground, more like arriving. I
opened my eyes. We were in the field, the real one.
No shimmer in the air, no triangle in the sky.
The stones were there, yes, but inert, now weathered and
cracked like cold greystones. The sun was rising, birds tripped.
Marcy was beside me, breathing hard, shaking but alive. She
looked at me and broke into a choked laugh. We
made it. I looked around. Everything felt re real, solid,
the grass, the sky, the cool morning air. And then
I saw something else in the distance, near the edge
of the field, thigas people, dozens of them, stepping out
from the tree line, blinking against the morning light. Light
they'd been asleep for years. Some stumbled, others stood tall,
dazed but whole. Then she saw faded Emma mister ricks Brielle,
eyes wide, stepping forward with hesitant wonder. They remembered, they
were remembered. I nearly collapsed, Cheers burned down my face.
Mossy stared in disbelief. It worked. Not everyone had returned.
Some we would never know, maybe they were too far gone,
maybe they'd become part of the each itself. But so
many had come back. And as they gathered in the field,
finding each other, embracing, crying, laughing, real I realized something.
The world hadn't stopped forgetting. It never would. But as
long as even one person remembered, as long as someone
held on, refused to let go, fought from memory, then
the breach could never win completely. I turned to Marcy.
We write it all down, I said. She nodded, Every name,
every story, We make them real again, and so we did.
We filled notebook after notebook. At first it was names,
then faces, stories, where people had been, who they were
before the breach took them. We sat with them ires
at a time, listening, recording everything they could remember because
they wanted to remember now. They needed it like food,
like oxygen. And for the first time in what felt
like forever, the town felt alive, not bustling, not loud,
but present. Neighbors stopped pretending they didn't notice things. People
walked a little slow, looked each other in eyes. The
old community, bored long abandoned, became a makeiff memory wall.
Any one could post names, sketches, photographs, even scraps of
writing about the ones who hadn't come back. We didn't
talk about the breach publicly, not yet. There was no
headline to explain it, no clear villain to blame, and
maybe no one else would believe it unless they'd felt
it the way we had. But in a quiet way,
the shrewd spread. A local artist began painting murals of
the return. A teacher reopened the library and set off
a memory archive on notek's front and center. Someone rebuilt
the stone circle at the field's edge, not as a monument,
but as a warning, And every few nights Marcy and
I went back there just to sit, to remember. One night,
as we watched fireflies dance through the tall grass, she asked,
do you think it's really over? I didn't answer right away.
The stars above us felt fast, too vast. I remembered
what the breach had felt like, the hunger, that colder asia,
that didn't just take people, but it did them and
wrote them. No, I said, quietly, but I think it's dormant.
She nodded, slowly, weeding. But next time, I added, it
won't catch us off guard, because we knew now that
forgetting wasn't passive, it wasn't harmless. It was a force,
and remembering, truly, choosing to remember, was an act of rebellion.
Mossie smiled. Then we keep rebelling, and so we did.
We became the town's quite archives memory keepers, not heroes,
just two stubborn people who refuse to forget. And in
that choice, in that defiance, we kept the breech hup
because monsters feed on what we let slip away, and
we weren't letting anything go again. And that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.