“The Forgetting Field”

Stephen Hampton didn’t expect to find himself back in uniform, even part-time, but his phone began vibrating on the kitchen counter just after six in the morning. He recognized the number—Patricia Simmons rarely called him outside of holidays or bad news—and answered before the second ring completed.

Her voice carried an edge he hadn’t heard from her in years.
“Stephen, we’ve had another one. You better come in.”

She didn’t explain further. She didn’t have to. Incidents along the county line had been piling up since midsummer, and each report read stranger than the last. Stephen finished buttoning the shirt he’d tossed on, grabbed his keys, and stepped out into the cold morning. The old Ford struggled twice before turning over, coughing like it resented being awakened.

The sheriff’s office sat at the edge of town, a squat brick building that hadn’t been renovated since before Stephen took the badge. Patricia waited on the steps, arms folded against the cold, a small spiral notebook pressed against her ribs. She softened slightly when she saw him approach.

“Morning, Sheriff,” she said, out of habit more than respect for the title. “I know this isn’t your job anymore, but—”

“I wasn’t doing anything important.” He gave her a small nod. “What happened?”

She opened the door and motioned him inside.

The newest victim sat slumped in the lone holding room. A young man in a flannel jacket, mud up to his shins, palms scraped as though he’d crawled more than walked. His eyes followed the movement of invisible shapes in the corner of the ceiling. Whenever one of them drifted too close, he blinked, startled, as if remembering something vital just out of reach.

Patricia spoke in a low voice. “Found him wandering near the county line. Same spot as the last three. He kept walking in circles. Said he couldn’t figure out how he’d ‘crossed over.’ Whatever that means.”

Stephen stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. When he crouched in front of the boy, the kid flinched but didn’t back away.

“What’s your name?” Stephen asked.

The young man’s lips trembled. “Tyler, I think. I… I’m pretty sure.”

“How long were you out there?”

“I don’t know.” The kid shook his head, baffled. “I remember leaving my buddy’s house around sunset. Took the back roads. Next thing I knew, I was in that field.” His voice dropped. “It was glowing.”

Stephen exchanged a look with Patricia through the window. She wrote something down.

“Tell me about the glow,” Stephen said gently.

Tyler swallowed hard. “The grass. It… it lit up. Like fireflies stuck to the blades. And there was humming. I thought maybe a generator out there, or a bug zapper, or somethin’. But it wasn’t electrical. It felt more like…” He struggled for a word he didn’t quite have. “…like it was inside my head.”

Stephen let him take his time. The boy rubbed his eyes, then looked directly at him for the first time.

“There was someone out there with me,” Tyler whispered. “A woman. She had a lantern. She kept walking ahead of me. Every time I tried to catch up, she moved further off. But she was looking for someone. I could tell.”

When he finished, he slumped again, exhausted by the effort. Stephen stood and stepped back into the hallway.

Patricia closed the notebook. “That’s the fourth person in a month who’s mentioned a lantern.”

“And the same stretch of border,” Stephen said. “You canvassed the area?”

“Last night. Nothing out there except some old fencing, scrap metal, and a windbreak. Grass was waist-high but nothing glowing.”

Stephen rubbed the bridge of his nose. His memory felt sluggish today—fogged in places it hadn’t been before. On the drive in, he’d forgotten the name of the road he’d taken a thousand times before. It came back to him eventually, but not quickly enough for comfort.

Patricia noticed. She had always been sharper than she let on.
“You alright?” she asked quietly.

“I’m fine,” he answered, though even he could hear the strain hiding behind the words. “Let’s look over the previous case notes.”

They settled into the shared office, the smell of old paper and stale coffee filling the air. Patricia laid out the files in order. Stephen scanned the handwritten statements from earlier victims.

All mentioned light.
All mentioned humming.
All mentioned losing track of time.
And three mentioned the woman with the lantern.

Stephen flipped through his archived notes—yellowed pages from decades ago, entries written in his own steadier handwriting. Several cases from the late eighties jumped out. A hunter found disoriented near the same fence line. A woman who walked into the sheriff’s office convinced she’d been missing for days, despite disappearing for only two hours. Neither case led anywhere.

One line in his old handwriting gave him pause:
“Victim describes glimmering grass and asks if we found the woman with the lantern.”

He didn’t remember writing it.

Stephen closed the folder gently. “Patricia, something’s been going on out there longer than we realized.”

“You think it’s connected to the old folklore? That ‘County Line Witch’ story?”

“Folklore usually comes from somewhere.”

Outside, late afternoon shadows stretched along the street. Stephen felt a tug in his chest—an unease he hadn’t felt since his early years as sheriff, when he’d investigated a disappearance that kept him awake for months.

He stood, slipped into his coat, and adjusted his hat.
“I’m heading out to the county line.”

Patricia stiffened. “Alone?”

“I need to see the place myself. It’s been too long since I walked that stretch. If something’s happening out there, I want to catch it before the sun goes down.”

She hesitated but didn’t argue. “Call me the moment you see anything.”

Stephen stepped outside, the cold air cutting across his face. The sky deepened into an early dusk, the edges of the horizon tinged with violet.

He drove toward the county line, the road familiar in shape but strangely distant in memory. When he parked beside the rusted fence and stepped toward the tall grass, he paused only once.

Behind him, the wind carried the faintest tremor of a sound—almost like humming.

Then he moved forward.

Part II

The fence at the county line ran in a wavering line across the landscape, posts leaning at odd angles like tired men. Stephen rested his hand on one of them and felt the rough, splintered wood press into his palm. Beyond it, the field lay quiet and unremarkable at first glance—just a stretch of grass broken by a few scrub trees and a dip in the terrain where spring meltwater collected.

The sun had nearly gone. The remaining light was soft and uncertain, slipping away minute by minute.

He swung his legs over the fence, boots sinking into the damp earth on the far side. The grass brushed his shins, cold and wet. He adjusted his footing, getting a sense of the ground, then took his first deliberate step into the open field.

Nothing happened.

Birds muttered to each other in the trees behind him. A truck passed on the distant highway, its engine a flat distant roar. Stephen drew in a slow breath and moved forward, counting each step.

One. Two. Three.

By twenty, he noticed the insects had gone quiet.

He stopped and listened. No crickets. No flies. Even the faint rustle of small creatures in the brush seemed to have receded, as though they’d agreed on some unwritten boundary and refused to cross it.

“Alright,” he muttered under his breath. “Show me what these kids have been talking about.”

He walked deeper into the field.

After a while—he wasn’t sure how long—Stephen looked down and realized he could see his boots more clearly than he should have in that light. At first he thought his eyes were adjusting, but the source was more specific than that.

The grass glowed.

It started as a faint suggestion beneath the surface, like veins of color running through each blade. A pale green tint, almost phosphorescent, traced the length of the grass, brighter near the ground and fading toward the tips. As he moved, the glow shifted, as though responding to his presence.

He crouched and pinched a blade between his fingers. It felt normal. Damp. Cool. The light wasn’t hot, and it didn’t pulse like a mechanical thing.

When he let go, the blade leaned back into place among its neighbors, that faint luminescence settling into a pattern that didn’t quite match the wind.

He straightened slowly. The horizon looked farther away than it had from the fence. The truck sounds from the road had dissolved into an indistinct murmur, as if filtered through layers of distance.

“Tyler said humming,” he reminded himself quietly.

At first he didn’t hear it. Then he realized it wasn’t in his ears exactly. It sat somewhere just behind them, nested in the base of his skull. A low, constant tone, not unlike what he’d heard when standing close to high-tension lines, but this felt less mechanical, a shade more organic and irregular. It rose and fell on a pattern that his mind attempted to follow but never fully caught.

He checked his watch.

The second hand clicked forward once. Then again. Then it seemed to hitch, then travel further in a single motion, skipping several marks before settling. He tapped the glass lightly. The hand drifted forward at a normal pace again, behaving as though nothing had happened.

Stephen took another step.

And then another.

He blinked.

When his eyes opened, he was standing much farther into the field. The fence was now a dim suggestion behind him, nearly swallowed by the dusk. He couldn’t remember walking that distance—no awareness of each footfall, no recollection of the subtle changes in the terrain.

It felt like a page had been torn out of a book he’d been reading.

He turned slowly, trying to reorient himself. The sky overhead had slipped further toward night. Stars gathered in the east, sharp and numerous. He tried to recall how long he’d been out here. His best guess dissolved as soon as he reached for it, like wet paper coming apart in his hands.

“Alright, that’s enough,” Stephen said quietly, mostly to hear his own voice.

He pivoted toward the fence and froze.

There was a light deeper in the meadow. Not star-light. Not the diffuse gleam of the grass. This was focused, a distinct source. It bobbed gently at about chest height, orange-white and steady.

A lantern.

He hadn’t seen it a moment ago. Or he thought he hadn’t. Doubt slid in before he could stop it. Maybe it had been there the whole time and he’d simply missed it. Maybe he’d glimpsed it and forgotten, the way he’d misplaced a road name earlier in the day.

The light drifted to the right, slow and unhurried, as if carried by someone walking at a steady pace.

Stephen narrowed his eyes. There was a shape behind it now—a figure, defined mostly by the absence of light where its body blocked the dim sky. A long dress or coat, hair gathered or hanging; the details shifted when he tried to pin them down.

“Ma’am?” he called.

The lantern paused. The humming rose slightly in pitch, then settled back.

“Ma’am, this is Sheriff’s Department property now. I need you to stop where you are.”

The light remained fixed, hovering over the invisible curve of the land. No response.

He took several careful steps forward, keeping his gaze locked on the lantern. As he approached, the glow from the grass brightened in a subtle gradient, as if acknowledging each footfall, an unspoken welcome or warning he couldn’t categorize.

“Ma’am,” he called again, louder. “Are you hurt? Do you need help?”

The lantern tilted a few degrees, like a person cocking their head.

He could almost see her face now, or thought he could: pale skin touched by the orange reflection of the flame. Eyes that caught the light in a way he’d seen on animals by the roadside at night. The expression behind them hovered between pleading and accusation, a tension he recognized from too many domestic disputes and accident scenes.

“Who are you looking for?” Stephen asked. The question slipped out before he could think better of it.

The humming in his skull lurched.

The figure straightened, shoulders drawing back. The lantern lifted higher, as though answering some inner command. The grass between them brightened, making a narrow corridor of illumination across the meadow.

Stephen took one more step.

He looked down at his boots. When he raised his head again, he was suddenly closer, uncomfortably so. The fence behind him no longer existed as a visible point of reference. The lantern woman stood less than ten yards away.

He had no memory of bridging the gap.

His breath shortened, not from exertion but from the uncanny absence of continuity. The field no longer felt like simple open space. It felt misaligned, pieces of distance rearranged while his back was turned.

The woman’s face was clearer now. She appeared middle-aged and ageless at once, features smoothed by some persistent exposure. Her hair hung in clumps that might once have been curls. The lantern’s flame did not waver in the breeze; in fact, he realized there was no breeze anymore.

Her lips moved.

Stephen strained to hear, but no sound carried. She repeated the motion. He took another small step forward, cupping his hand around his ear without meaning to.

“What did you say?” he asked.

The humming surged, filling his head with a pressure that wasn’t quite pain. His own name slipped from his grasp for an instant. He knew who he was, of course he knew, but the label that fit him, the two words people had used for decades, flickered.

“…Stephen Hampton,” he whispered to anchor himself.

The woman’s eyes brightened. She took one step toward him.

Cold touched his forehead, like fingers made of groundwater. For a heartbeat, he wasn’t standing in the meadow anymore. He was waist-deep in floodwater, night all around, rain stabbing the surface. Someone was screaming a name over and over, a name he nearly caught before it snapped away.

His boots sank into mud again. The water vanished. The field returned.

The woman stood where she had been, but something in her posture had changed. More intent now. More aware.

Stephen stumbled back, heart laboring against his ribs. He needed to retreat, to get out of this place long enough to think. To write down what he’d seen before it slipped through his fingers.

“I’ll come back,” he said, though he didn’t mean to promise that. “I’ll… I’ll come back with help.”

The lantern dipped. Whether in agreement or refusal, he couldn’t tell.

He turned away and began pushing toward where he believed the fence lay. The glow underfoot dimmed with every step. The humming receded but never fully left, a faint line of sound that trailed him like an afterthought.

When he finally saw the silhouette of the fence posts against the darkening sky, relief loosened something in his shoulders. He climbed over, boots scraping the wood, and dropped back onto the county road side.

Car headlights swept past him a minute later. He realized he didn’t remember climbing the last few yards to the fence, nor the exact moment when the humming had vanished.

He reached for his phone with hands that trembled slightly and hit Patricia’s number.

She picked up on the first ring. “Stephen? You alright?”

“I saw her,” he said. “The woman with the lantern. And the grass… it’s not just kids exaggerating. Something’s off in there. Time. Distance. Maybe more than that.”

There was a short pause. “Did you feel any different? Anything missing?”

He opened his mouth to answer and stopped.

He could picture his late wife’s face. He could recall the town’s layout, this road, her voice on the day he retired. But there was a small, specific space in his mind where something else ought to be, like an empty frame on a wall.

“I don’t know yet,” he said at last. “But I think it took a piece of something. And I think it knows me now.”

The line stayed quiet for a few seconds.

“Come back to the station,” Patricia said. “We’ll write everything down while it’s fresh.”

Stephen looked back over the fence. The field sat in shadow now, unremarkable in the fading light.

Still, he felt watched.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled away, trying not to dwell on the firm, cold impression of fingers that had never quite been there, resting briefly against his brow.

Part III

Stephen didn’t sleep well. He’d gone home after giving Patricia a full report—every detail he could scrape together before the experience thinned and lost its edges—but even then, he felt pieces drifting away while he spoke, as if the act of remembering stirred something hungry in the dark recesses of his mind.

At home, he sat in his recliner until the room cooled. The television murmured to itself in the corner, forgotten. He tried to review the night in his head, forming clear mental anchors he could check against in the morning: the shape of the lantern, the strange hum, the sense of distance coming apart under his feet. But as soon as he settled on an image or a sensation, another thought rose beneath it, soft and directionless, and dragged it down.

By dawn he’d slept no more than a handful of restless minutes.

Patricia called just after seven.
“I want to talk to a few locals before the weekend crowd gets moving,” she said. “You up for company?”

“I’m up,” Stephen said, though he felt drained. “I’ll meet you at Miller’s Diner.”

The diner sat on the south side of town, the kind of place that had survived on the strength of its coffee and the stubbornness of the morning regulars. The bell over the door jingled as he entered. A half-dozen retirees sat scattered across the room, newspapers spread out, coffee mugs steaming.

Patricia waved him over to a corner booth, where an older woman sat already—white hair coiled at the nape of her neck, hands wrapped around a mug in a way that suggested she rarely let go of it.

“This is Evelyn Norquist,” Patricia said. “She says her grandmother used to talk about that field.”

Evelyn looked at him with the directness of someone who had outlived the polite hedging of conversation. “You walked in there last night.”

Stephen didn’t bother to deny it. “What do you know about the place?”

She took a slow sip of coffee before answering. “My grandmother used to warn us not to cross the county line after dusk. Said something lived out there. Something that didn’t remember itself anymore.”

Patricia leaned forward. “Did she say what it wanted?”

“A name.” Evelyn set her mug down carefully. “Or so she thought. My grandmother told stories—mostly flood tales. Back before the ground was leveled out with drainage ditches and culverts, that dip in the land used to flood every spring. Lost a few cows every year. Once, they lost a woman.”

Stephen felt the hair along his arms lift.

“Was she a farmer?” he asked.

“No,” Evelyn said. “She was a young mother. Or a wife. Nobody agreed on the details, and by the time I came along the story had grown strange. They said she was walking the floodplain with a lantern, searching for someone who had gone missing in the water. Some nights people saw her out there long after the storm had passed.”

Patricia frowned. “You mean a ghost story.”

“That’s what they called it.” Evelyn’s voice softened. “But my grandmother never told it like a campfire tale. She sounded scared every time she mentioned that lantern. Said the woman looked for something she could no longer remember.”

Stephen felt an echo of the night before. The pale face. The silent whisper of her moving lips.

“Did your grandmother ever say what her name was?” Stephen asked.

“No one knew.” Evelyn reached for her mug again, and her hand trembled. “That’s the part that always bothered her. A woman dies in a flood and no one remembers her name? How does that happen?”

Patricia wrote notes quickly. “Has anyone seen her recently? Before these new incidents?”

Evelyn shook her head. “Not that I know of. But people have been avoiding that field for generations. Every time someone gets lost out there, the old-timers mutter about the lantern woman and fall quiet.”

Stephen leaned back. Fatigue tugged at his thoughts. Something Evelyn said gnawed at him—not the story itself, but the shape of it. The outline of a memory he couldn’t fully access.

“Did anyone ever mark the place?” he asked. “Put anything in the ground? A boundary stone, maybe?”

Evelyn nodded. “There were old survey markers out there once. My grandfather pointed them out when I was a child. Said the land had been subdivided and litigated so many times that the markers were half-buried or forgotten by the time the county settled it.”

Stephen rubbed his chin. “You remember where they were?”

“Near the center of the field.” Evelyn’s expression tightened. “But you don’t want to go that far, Sheriff.”

“I’m not sheriff anymore.”

“You still carry yourself like one.” Evelyn held his gaze. “Promise you won’t go alone.”

Patricia looked at Stephen pointedly. He let the plea hang between them but didn’t answer.

* * * * * *

Later that afternoon, he and Patricia drove to the county records office. They spent an hour combing through land surveys, property disputes, and floodplain maps dating back fifty years. The field had shifted boundaries over time, as erosion and water damage warped the terrain. Several old plats referred to it as “Hampton Draw,” though Stephen had no recollection of it ever being called that.

Patricia noticed his stare lingering on the name. “Something familiar?”

“Maybe.” He closed the folder. “Maybe not.”

The truth unsettled him. He couldn’t tell whether the recognition came from his own memory or from something the field had pressed into him last night.

They returned to the sheriff’s office. Patricia went to log their findings into a digital report. Stephen moved into the break room and poured himself coffee, though he had no appetite for it. He stared into the mug, waiting for the surface to settle.

A faint ripple passed across the coffee without any disturbance. A memory slid toward him—something from years ago, another missing person along that same border. He could see the young man’s face clearly. He could recall the man’s boots, worn to the tread. But the man’s name—Stephen reached for it and found only empty space.

Patricia entered quietly. “You okay?”

“Something’s off,” he said. “It’s not just the field. I think some of this happened before, and I forgot it.”

“You have notes from decades ago,” she reminded him. “Anyone would forget details that old.”

“Not names,” he said, staring at the shifting ripple in the coffee. “I never forgot names.”

She hesitated. “Did you tell me the boy Tyler’s address last night?”

“Yes,” he said immediately.

But then, as he opened his mouth to repeat it, the numbers dissolved. He grasped at the details, but they slid away, refusing to settle into shape.

Patricia saw the confusion flicker across his face. “Stephen… what did it take from you?”

He set the coffee down carefully. He didn’t trust his hands to stay steady.

“I need to go back,” he said. “Not tonight. But soon. Whatever’s out there is waking up, and it knows I saw it.”

Patricia exhaled slowly. “If you’re going, I’m coming with you. We tie a rope, we go with lights, and we plan it. No more improvising.”

Stephen nodded. “We’ll need supplies. Flashlights. Audio recorders. And find me any mention of old boundary stones in those surveys.”

Patricia wrote a quick list.

Stephen looked toward the window, where dusk gathered early over the county line. His mind drifted again to the woman in the floodwater—an image he couldn’t confirm as memory or impression.

In the rippling reflection of the glass, he could almost see her lantern swinging.

Part IV

Patricia arrived at Stephen’s house just after sunset the next evening. She carried a canvas duffel filled with equipment—two flashlights with fresh batteries, a digital recorder, a packet of survey printouts, and sixty feet of braided rope. Stephen studied the rope for a long moment, uneasy with the implication but unable to argue against it.

“You sure you want to go through with this?” Patricia asked as they loaded the gear into her SUV.

“Last night wasn’t a hallucination,” he said. “And if that woman is tied to the field, we need to understand why people keep getting pulled in.”

She nodded once. They drove in silence toward the county line, headlights carving a narrow corridor through the growing dark.

When they reached the fence, the field stretched out in muted colors, the grass unmoving in the still air. Patricia parked well off the road. She uncoiled the rope and tied one end around Stephen’s waist, securing the knot with practiced hands.

“I’ll stay right here,” she said, strapping the other end around her torso. “If something feels wrong, you turn around and come back. Don’t wait for anything to make sense.”

Stephen tested the knot and flicked on his flashlight. Its beam cut across the grass, throwing a pale stripe over the ground. He stepped over the fence, landing on the far side with a soft thud.

He moved forward slowly. Patricia kept tension on the rope, giving him slack as needed. The grass swallowed sound just as it had before; insects fell quiet, and even the distant hum of traffic faded into a muted impression.

Ten yards in, the grass began to glow again. Pale green filaments traced themselves along the blades, brighter than the night before. Stephen paused to observe it. His flashlight beam weakened near the glow, as if the field resented competing illumination.

“Still with me?” Patricia called from behind.

“Still here,” Stephen answered. His voice felt muffled, like speaking with thick fabric over his ears.

He raised the digital recorder and pressed the button. The red light blinked.
“Hampton entering the field at approximately eight forty-three p.m. Observing anomalous luminescence in vegetation. No visible movement ahead.”

He took another step. And another.

The humming returned—not loud, but persistent, weaving through his thoughts. He tried anchoring his attention to each footfall, marking the shift of weight from heel to toe. Even so, he felt the distance warping around him again, the fence receding faster than any natural perspective allowed.

The rope jerked once, lightly.

“Still with me?” Patricia called again.

He turned to answer but hesitated. For a split second, the fence seemed impossibly far behind her—then it snapped back to its proper place, as though reality corrected itself.

“I’m here,” he said. “Proceeding.”

He continued another twenty yards. The hum dimmed. The glow sharpened. The temperature dropped by several degrees, enough for his fingers to stiffen around the flashlight.

Ahead, the field opened into a shallow hollow. In the center stood the Lantern Woman.

Tonight her lantern burned brighter, the flame steady and amber-gold, untouched by the slight movements of her arm. Stephen approached with measured caution, keeping the recorder raised.

“This is Sheriff—” He stopped. A rush of panic swept through him. His name—his own name—wouldn’t surface for a moment. The syllables slid around each other, refusing to settle. He swallowed and tried again. “This is Stephen Hampton documenting visual contact with the figure reported by previous victims.”

She lifted the lantern toward him. The beam didn’t behave like ordinary light; it washed softly over him in layers, almost as though it passed through him before returning to her hand. Her face gleamed with spectral clarity. Her eyes were not hollow or feral—they were weary, strained by years of searching.

Stephen took two more steps.
“I need to know who you are,” he said. “Can you understand me?”

Her lips moved. No audible sound emerged, but her expression tightened in a plea he recognized from countless missing-person cases.

“What are you looking for?” he asked gently. “Someone you lost?”

The lantern flickered.

The rope pulled sharply at Stephen’s waist. He stumbled backward as Patricia braced herself.
“Stephen, something’s happening to the line,” she yelled. “It’s tightening on its own.”

He steadied his footing. The rope went slack again, then snapped forward as if jerked by invisible hands. Patricia dug in her heels near the fence, fighting whatever force worked against her.

Stephen raised the recorder toward the woman, but the red light blinked erratically. The device captured distorted echoes—his voice recorded seconds before he spoke, overlapping with versions where he spoke words he hadn’t yet thought.

The Lantern Woman stepped closer. Stephen tried to retreat, but his body moved sluggishly, as if the space between them had thickened, resisting his attempt to break contact.

Her free hand lifted and hovered near his chest. He expected cold. Instead, he felt the sensation of something sifting gently through him, as though she were reaching into a collection and searching for a specific detail stored deep within.

Images fluttered through his mind. The summer he’d turned twelve. His mother’s handwriting on a birthday card. The pattern of oak leaves against morning sunlight. Each memory brightened, then dimmed, as though she were examining them one by one.

“Stop,” he said quietly. “Those aren’t yours.”

Her fingers didn’t move. Her head tilted at an angle that conveyed grief instead of malice. She pressed the lantern forward, flame leaning toward him. For a moment, the flame stretched into a thin line that touched the front of his shirt. Heat didn’t follow—only a sensation like being unmade in specific, careful increments.

Stephen’s thoughts blurred. A fishing trip from his youth slipped sideways in his head. A conversation with Patricia last winter felt distant and incomplete. He reached out instinctively, not to grab the lantern or push her away, but to steady himself against the cascading disarray of memory.

The rope jerked violently, nearly yanking him off his feet.

Patricia screamed his name, voice sharp enough to cut through the fog. The Lantern Woman drew back as though startled. The flame shrank. The humming fell apart in uneven fragments.

Stephen used the moment to stumble backward. Patricia hauled the rope, pulling him toward the fence. The ground under him seemed uncertain, folding slightly in places where there should have been solid turf, but he pressed on until the glow dimmed and the humming thinned into nothing.

He collapsed against the fence, breath trembling through his chest as Patricia tore the rope free of her harness and knelt beside him.

“Stephen, talk to me,” she said.

He blinked at her, trying to fix her features in his mind. Weary eyes. Brown hair. The faint scar across her chin from a bicycle crash she told him about years ago. He seized those details and held them tightly, afraid they’d drift away like the others.

“I saw her,” he whispered. “I think she knows who I am now. Or… she wants me to be someone I’m not.”

Patricia’s jaw tightened. “We’re done for tonight. We need to regroup.”

Stephen looked back over the fence. The field had gone dark again, as though nothing unusual had ever occurred there. But the hollow where she stood seemed deeper now, shaped by countless steps and perpetual longing.

“She’s searching for a name,” he said. “And she’s going to keep taking pieces until she finds it.”

Patricia placed a hand on his shoulder. “You don’t go back alone. Not again.”

Stephen nodded, though he wasn’t convinced he’d honor the promise.

That night, long after he returned home and turned out the lights, a faint glow appeared outside his bedroom window—brief, like a lantern shielded by a moving hand.

And then it was gone.

Part V

Stephen arrived at the county line shortly before midnight. The moon hung low and wide, its pale glow caught in thin ribbons of cloud that drifted lazily across the sky. He parked near the fence and turned off the engine, letting the night settle around him.

He hadn’t told Patricia. That felt like a betrayal, but he also knew what her presence would invite—more danger, more memory exposed, more opportunities for the field to pull her in. The Lantern Woman had focused on him. He didn’t want her attention shifting to anyone else.

He stepped out of the vehicle and moved toward the fence with a steady stride. His legs felt heavy, reluctant, as though something deep inside recognized the hazard before his mind could catch up. He paused only long enough to take a single breath, then climbed over the fence and dropped into the grass.

The field was darker tonight, but the hum began almost instantly. It wasn’t the gradual seep he’d felt during earlier visits. This time it met him at the boundary, purposeful and unwavering. The grass brightened, pale strips of light running across the blades in long horizontal strokes.

He moved forward.

The glow brightened with every step, guiding him toward the hollow where he’d seen her last. The air thickened subtly—not literally, not in the forbidden metaphorical sense, but in the way that extended silences can feel when a room is waiting for someone to speak. Each footfall felt noted, recognized.

When he reached the hollow, the Lantern Woman stood waiting.

Her lantern burned with a soft gold flame that reached upward in thin tendrils, like threads of light unspooling from the wick. The field responded to it—grass bending slightly toward her, the glow intensifying as though her presence steadied whatever force ran through this land.

Stephen stopped several paces away.

“You’ve taken something from me,” he said quietly. “I think you took it without meaning to. But I need to understand why.”

Her head inclined by a fraction, acknowledging his voice. Her free hand lifted slightly, fingers trembling with a fragile, almost human uncertainty.

“You’re searching for someone,” he continued. “You lost them. And you lost your own name with them.”

The Lantern Woman stepped closer. Her face, illuminated by the flickering light, held shape but not identity—features blurred around the edges, soft where they should be defined. She looked like an outline of a memory, not the memory itself.

She moved her lips again, soundless.

Stephen tried to read the shape of her mouth. A single syllable. Not quite formed. Not quite real.

He took another step toward her. “Tell me what you want.”

The lantern brightened, throwing long streaks of gold across the field. A wave of impressions rolled through him—flashes of floodwater roaring across the plain, the weight of soaked clothing dragging a body under, the howl of wind tearing loose branches from trees. A lantern bobbing on the surface of the water, dipping and rising, dipping and rising.

He staggered under the onslaught. These weren’t his memories, yet they pressed against him with intimate clarity.

Her hand brushed his shoulder.

A cascade of images followed: a child’s boots in mud. A man’s coat caught on a broken fencepost. A lantern swinging wildly as someone screamed a name that dissolved into static before it reached his understanding.

She needed the missing piece—her identity, the thread that tied her to the lost loved one she sought.

Stephen swallowed hard. His voice came quiet.
“You’re searching for yourself.”

Her eyes brightened. Something inside the hollow responded, a low tremor that traveled through the ground and into Stephen’s legs. For the first time, he felt the field’s need—vast, empty, and persistent.

She lifted the lantern toward him.

Stephen understood then that she wasn’t simply taking memories. She was sampling them, sifting through centuries of borrowed recollections in the hope that one of them contained the name she’d lost in the flood.

But the flood had been too thorough. Time too unforgiving.
Her identity had scattered across generations.

“You’ll never find the right memory,” Stephen said. “Not this way.”

She stepped closer.

Stephen didn’t retreat this time.

He looked at her—the silent plea in her posture, the endless searching locked behind her eyes—and felt a slow, heavy decision settling into place. The missing memory she sought couldn’t be recovered. But she could be given something else.

A name. A story. An identity to anchor her so she could stop reaching blindly into the lives of others.

He took her free hand gently and pressed it against his chest.

“If you can’t remember who you were,” he whispered, “then take something whole and let it be enough.”

The lantern flared.

Light poured into him—soft at first, then bright enough to wash out the field. Stephen felt his memories rising in a rush, not tearing away but unthreading, each one lifting from him like threads pulled from cloth. He didn’t resist. He focused only on the warmth of her fingers against his sternum and the sound of the lantern’s glow deepening with every moment.

He released everything.

The hollow filled with a low resonance. The grass shuddered gently. The lantern’s flame stretched upward, then compressed into a single point of brightness before fading back to a gentle glow.

When the light subsided, the woman stood still, watching him with an expression that had shifted subtly. Not peace. Not sorrow. Something like completion.

Stephen felt the emptiness first—vast and quiet—and then confusion. The field looked unfamiliar. The sky unfamiliar. His own hands unfamiliar.

“Who…?” he murmured, barely forming the word.

The Lantern Woman lowered the flame. The humming receded.

Then she stepped backward and dissolved slowly, her lantern the last thing to fade.

* * * * * *

Patricia found him at dawn.

She had followed the faint glow she’d seen from her window hours earlier, panic growing with each step as she crossed the fence and hurried into the meadow. She found him wandering along the county line, moving without direction, eyes fixed on nothing in particular.

“Stephen!” she called.

He paused, turning slightly toward her voice.

Recognition didn’t come.

She approached slowly. “It’s alright. You’re safe.”

He looked at her as though she were a stranger who had spoken a foreign language. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again.

“I… don’t know where I’m supposed to be,” he said softly.

Patricia steadied him with a hand on his arm.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll get you home.”

Behind them, the field lay dim and unremarkable. No glow. No hum. No sign of the Lantern Woman.

As Patricia guided Stephen toward her SUV, he glanced back once.

A faint warmth spread across his chest—so slight he couldn’t attach meaning to it.

“I think she’s finished,” he said quietly.

Patricia turned to look at him. “Who?”

He blinked. “I… don’t know.”

They left the county line behind as the sun climbed over the horizon, the field quiet and still, its long vigil ended for now.