15 Apr The Crossing Place

Part I

The candles flickered against the early evening air, their small flames dancing like fireflies battered by wind. One by one, they dimmed, their light extinguished as a restless breeze stirred the space between the trees. Heather stood among the clusters of townspeople, her vigil candle still unlit in her gloved hands. She hadn’t brought a lighter, nor had she asked for one. Perhaps, on some level, she hadn’t believed she would come at all.

A girl’s voice interrupted the quiet—too soft to place and swallowed quickly by the rustle of jackets and the shifting gravel beneath dozens of feet. People around her spoke in low tones or not at all. The wind passed between them without seeming to touch their bodies, yet it disturbed everything else. It lifted jacket hoods, rattled the paper flyers tacked to a utility post, and tugged gently at the edge of a hand-painted sign that read Come Home, Maya, the purple letters bordered by glued-on plastic butterflies.

Heather’s gaze lingered on the sign as it bowed and straightened with the rhythm of the wind. It moved as if something unseen passed just behind it.

Maya Ellis had been missing for five days. She was last seen walking home from the school bus, just before sunset, near the footpath behind Calvary Pines. The woods in that area were not deep, but they stretched awkwardly between two neighborhoods and were choked with underbrush and rotting logs. It was the kind of place children liked to treat as forbidden, because it looked like it should be.

Heather remembered cautioning Maya once—not seriously, but with a teacher’s habitual concern—telling her not to wander into the trees alone. It had been during indoor recess, during a game of Connect Four. Maya had given her that quiet, sideways smile she always used and said she liked the trees better when no one else was around. Heather had meant to follow up. To say something about safety or boundaries. But the recess bell had rung, other children had needed her attention, and Maya had slipped away before dismissal, as she often did.

Now Maya was a face on a flyer. The photo—grainy, printed with low-resolution ink—stared out from gas station windows and grocery store bulletin boards like a memory already starting to erode.

Heather stepped away from the vigil and tucked her candle into the inner pocket of her coat. It bent slightly at the base, but she didn’t adjust it. Her fingers were stiff from the cold, and they smelled faintly of cheap wax.

When she returned to her car, the first thing she noticed was the notebook. It lay open on the passenger seat, half-hidden beneath a library tote and a balled-up tissue. She hadn’t realized it was still in her possession.

The notebook had belonged to Maya. She’d left it behind at the back of the classroom three days before her disappearance. Though it had no name on the cover, Heather had recognized the drawings immediately—trees with heavy, drooping branches, ferns shaped like spirals, and black stones arranged in curious geometric rings. The sketches were rough in execution but disturbingly precise in intent. Maya hadn’t been drawing for fun; there was a focus to her work, an exactness that made Heather uneasy. It felt as though the girl had seen these things with greater clarity than she could describe.

Heather thumbed through the pages slowly, brushing along the margins with her glove. Toward the end, many of the drawings repeated the same elements: a clearing encircled by tree trunks leaning inward, as if bowed in reverence, and always, at the center, a ring of dark stones. Sometimes the stones were shaded, other times left as blank outlines, but they were always there.

She closed the notebook gently and set it on the dashboard, unsure whether she was trying to comfort herself or offering the object to something watching from outside her field of view.

* * * * * *

The following morning, the search party gathered near the ranger station at Hollen Creek. A cold front had passed through overnight, and the ground alternated between muddy and frozen. Volunteers in mismatched layers of outdoor gear milled about, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups and checking radios or tightening bootlaces.

Heather arrived just before dawn and parked at the edge of the lot. She lingered inside the car longer than intended, watching the sky lighten behind the treetops. The way the clouds held still overhead reminded her of static frozen on a screen, a moment paused in tension.

She finally stepped out, pulling her coat tighter and fastening the straps on her boots. When she approached the map board, she recognized a few parents from the school, though none of them met her gaze. No one said much, and if they were praying, they did so silently.

The man coordinating the teams stood near the ranger truck, speaking with one of the officers. He wore a state-issued parka with a faded insignia on the shoulder. His close-cropped hair and weathered features suggested someone who had spent years squinting at distant horizons. Heather recognized him vaguely. His name was Mason—she remembered now that he’d spoken briefly at the vigil.

She waited until he finished giving instructions to another group before stepping forward.

“I want to help,” she said. Her voice surprised her in its steadiness.

Mason looked her over, assessing her gear, or lack of it. His eyes lingered on her boots and gloves, and then returned to her face.

“You a family member?”

“No,” she said. “I’m… I was her teacher.”

He nodded once and jotted something on a clipboard. “South trail. Group Four. We’re focusing on water access points first. Do you have a radio?”

She shook her head.

He reached into a bin, pulled one out, and checked the battery before handing it to her. “Keep this on you. If you see anything—anything at all—don’t touch it. Don’t move it. Call it in immediately.”

Heather nodded. Mason was already turning away to speak with the next volunteer.

* * * * * *

That night, the wind moved across her roof in irregular bursts, whistling through the eaves. Heather lay curled on the couch beneath an old quilt she’d meant to donate months ago. The television was on, but she wasn’t watching. Her gaze rested on the ceiling, where shifting shadows from the streetlamp played in and out of clarity.

She didn’t remember falling asleep.

In the dream, she stood at the edge of a clearing she did not recognize. The surrounding trees were tall and pale, stripped of bark, but none of them appeared dead. Their trunks bent gently inward, arching without touching. The ground beneath her was dry, covered in brittle grass that crumbled into ash beneath her fingers. There was no wind, no birdsong, and no insects. Only the distant laughter of children—dozens of voices—drifting through the air from somewhere beyond the circle of trees.

The laughter did not echo. It repeated, identical with each cycle, like a recording set to loop. Heather turned, searching for the source, but each step sank her deeper into the earth, as if the ground beneath her were cooling tar. The sky above shifted unpredictably—orange to gray, gray to violet—with each blink of her eyes.

She opened her mouth to call out for Maya, but her voice felt separated from her body, as though sound traveled several seconds behind her thoughts.

One of the trees leaned slightly in her direction, its movement too slow to notice all at once.

Then the clearing collapsed—not fading or blurring, but folding inward like paper curling into flame.

She woke tangled in the quilt, the television screen glowing blue in a dark room. The microwave clock read 3:11 AM.

Outside, something stirred. She thought—briefly—that she saw a tall, slender figure standing motionless near the edge of the yard, just behind a pine tree.

But when she turned on the porch light, there was nothing there.

Part II

Morning arrived sluggish and colorless, low clouds sagging against the treetops. Heather tightened her scarf and fell in step behind the rest of Group Four. Frost crackled underfoot as they made their way along the south trail. She had barely slept, and what little rest she managed had left her with a sense of residual unease that clung to her skin.

Mason led from the front, moving with quiet authority. He gestured now and then to familiar landmarks or patches already searched by the rangers. The group moved in a wide formation, methodical in their approach, scanning the ground for any signs of disturbance—broken branches, scraps of fabric, anything that might mark a path through the woods.

More than two hours passed without report. Heather picked her way along the uneven terrain, her eyes focused on the roots that curled up from the earth like grasping fingers. At one point, something caught her attention in the brush—a flicker of color, a brief motion—but when she stopped and looked more closely, she found only pine needles rustling in the breeze and the distant calls of another team echoing across the ridgeline.

The trail sloped downward as they headed southeast, angling toward a shallow ravine where the creek curved west. The ground grew softer, the undergrowth more tangled. Mason raised a hand for a break and stepped off the path to light a cigarette. The others leaned against rocks or trees, grateful for the pause. Heather removed one glove to check her watch. It read 8:12, but the light around them suggested something closer to midday. She looked upward and saw only a ceiling of overcast, featureless gray.

It was then she noticed the boy.

He stood just beyond the treeline, no more than twenty feet away, half-concealed behind a crooked birch. He couldn’t have been older than nine or ten, bundled in a red coat that hung awkwardly from his frame. He wasn’t moving, only staring in their direction with a quiet, unreadable expression. His hands clutched something round and metallic, and his lips moved soundlessly, as if repeating words he had already said many times.

Heather took a cautious step forward, unsure whether to call out or let her presence speak for itself. As she approached, the boy shifted his gaze toward her. His fingers tightened around the object he held. It looked like a compass, but crudely made. A jar lid housed a rusted needle suspended in cloudy water, the point drifting lazily from side to side as it bumped against the glass.

“You’re Benji, aren’t you?” she asked. “From school?”

He didn’t nod, but recognition flickered across his face.

“Benji Kral,” she continued, inching closer. “You were in Maya’s class.”

“It’s almost light,” he said softly. His voice was high and quiet, but it carried. It had the flat, rehearsed cadence of someone repeating a lesson rather than offering new information. “That’s when they peel through.”

Heather crouched beside him, trying to meet his eyes. “Who does?”

He glanced over her shoulder, toward the others still resting on the path. “The ones that whisper before you remember hearing them.”

The hair on her arms stood on end.

Behind her, Mason’s voice cut through the stillness. “Heather? You good?”

She turned her head and called back, “I found a kid.”

Mason pushed through the brush toward her, his expression prepared for frustration. But when he saw Benji, he stopped short.

“What the hell is he doing out here?”

Heather shook her head. “I don’t know. But he’s not lost. He’s been talking about them.”

“I’ll take him back to the ranger station,” Mason said. “You stay with the group.”

Before Heather could reply, Benji’s voice interrupted again.

“No,” he said firmly, almost gently. “You’ll get lost. You’ll think you didn’t move, but everything around you will change. I can find the edge. You need me.”

Mason raised an eyebrow. “He’s just a kid.”

“He was close to Maya,” Heather said. “They sat next to each other almost every day. If anyone knows where she might have gone…”

Benji turned and walked away from them—not toward the trail or the ranger station, but deeper into the forest, threading his way through the thickets without hesitation.

Heather hesitated. “If we let him out of our sight, we won’t find him again.”

Mason blew air through his teeth. “This is a goddamn circus.”

But he followed anyway.

* * * * * *

Benji led them off-trail into a narrow valley where pine needles blanketed the ground in a dense, sound-dampening layer. The forest here felt different. The further they walked, the quieter it became. Birds, usually active by this hour, had fallen silent. Even the wind seemed muted. The silence pressed in from all sides—not just the absence of sound, but a kind of auditory void, like walking into a room designed to swallow noise. Heather became aware of how little her footsteps registered and how distant her breathing felt.

They were no longer walking through a familiar landscape. The trees hadn’t changed, but the space between them had.

After about fifteen minutes of walking and climbing through tangled growth, Benji stopped in a clearing no larger than a living room. The ground was damp and littered with flattened leaves. Without a word, he knelt and used a stick to etch a pattern into the soil. Heather stepped closer and saw that he was drawing concentric, interlocking circles, connected by straight lines like the spokes of a wheel.

The image unsettled her.

It didn’t resemble a child’s idle doodling. The pattern had structure. It had symmetry. There was intention behind every mark.

Mason crouched to examine it. “What is this supposed to be?”

Benji pointed to the center of the design. “This is where the skin is thinnest,” he said. “You can hear through it, if you don’t blink too long.”

Heather’s mouth went dry. “What are we supposed to hear?”

Benji looked up at her with a distant, almost dreamlike clarity. “You’ll see the same tree twice.”

Then he stood, turned, and walked northwest, toward a narrow break in the trees where a granite outcropping jutted from the hillside.

Heather noticed something odd as she followed. Her watch had begun to tick inconsistently—its second hand moving smoothly at times, then hesitating, then surging forward in brief jumps. She reached for it instinctively, then looked toward Mason, who had stopped and tapped his own device.

“Mine’s off too,” he said. “It gained eight minutes since we left the trail.”

Heather scanned their surroundings. The light filtering through the canopy had lost any clear origin. There was no sense of top or bottom. It didn’t fall from above but seemed to hang in suspension, illuminating everything and nothing at once.

Benji’s voice drifted back to them, half-whispered and strangely disconnected.

“The wind bends backward here… only when it’s not looking…”

“…the stones are older than the woods…”

“…don’t listen when they ask your name…”

Heather glanced at Mason. Neither of them spoke, but the meaning was clear in their expressions.

Whatever this was, they weren’t turning back.

Part III

The fog arrived gradually, moving with a measured crawl through the undergrowth. It coiled around tree trunks and crept along the roots as though drawn from some unseen source deep beneath the soil. Heather wiped her glasses again, though each attempt to clear them made little difference. The world beyond her lenses had taken on a smeared, watercolor quality, where every tree bled into the next in pale grays and muted greens.

Benji remained a few paces ahead, one hand extended before him like a divining rod, while the other cradled his makeshift compass. The cloudy liquid inside sloshed with each step, and the crooked needle floated lazily, turning in uneven circles. The temperature had dropped again. Though her coat was zipped to the neck and her gloves secure, the chill had settled beneath the fabric, working its way into her chest.

Behind her, Mason kept pace but said little. He glanced often toward the treeline and the ridgeline above, as though searching for a landmark that had been there moments earlier. Everything now looked subtly altered. Trees they had passed only minutes ago were gone, or else stood at new angles. Rocks appeared overturned. Moss spread in unnatural patterns, curling into spiral forms that reversed themselves the longer she looked at them.

“Kid’s leading us in circles,” Mason muttered, though the statement lacked conviction. He sounded fatigued.

Benji turned without prompting. “We’re close.”

Mason narrowed his eyes. “Close to what?”

Benji tilted his head, eyes unfocused, voice softer now. “The place between.”

Heather glanced upward, just in time to see the trees begin to change.

Ahead of them, the trunks curved inward, all leaning toward a common center, as though bent by a force acting from deep within the forest. Their bark had been stripped clean, revealing surfaces that glistened faintly, as if polished. A few of them moved—swaying in slow, rhythmic sways. The sight stirred something visceral in Heather, a queasy recognition that reminded her of standing on shifting ground during a tremor.

Benji stopped at the top of a rise. Below them lay a clearing, perfectly circular, not marked on any map or remembered from any direction they had previously traveled. The fog retreated just enough to make the shape visible—a shallow basin ringed by the leaning trees. At its center sat a low ring of black stones arranged in flawless symmetry. The soil around them had been bleached nearly white, as if whatever resided there had drained the color from the earth itself.

Heather’s balance faltered as she stared at the stones. Their arrangement was too exact to have occurred naturally.

Benji moved forward without hesitation, stepping into the basin with the ease of someone returning to a familiar place.

Heather followed, each step heavier than the last. She couldn’t name what pulled her forward—curiosity, perhaps, or something more ancient and instinctive—but she felt it plainly, a quiet pressure urging her onward. The clearing was nearly silent. There was no breeze, no animal calls, no sound of twigs breaking beneath her feet.

Mason paused at the edge. “We shouldn’t be here.”

Heather glanced back at him. “We already are.”

As she spoke, the sensation intensified—like a compass reorienting without her consent. Her gaze returned to the circle of stones. Each one appeared unremarkable in isolation, but together they formed a geometry too precise to ignore. Their arrangement rejected randomness.

A ripple passed across the clearing. It wasn’t wind or light, but something else—an atmospheric distortion that traveled low to the ground, like heat rising off asphalt, but slower and broader. Benji froze mid-step. His voice echoed faintly before he spoke, as though a delayed copy of his words had arrived a second too early.

“This is the thinnest part,” he said, after his own voice had already passed through the air.

Mason reached instinctively for his GPS. He stared at the screen, tapped it once, and then shook it. “Coordinates are bouncing,” he muttered. “It thinks we’re thirty feet to the east, then snaps back. Now it’s blank.”

Heather didn’t respond. Her focus had shifted to the treeline, where something moved just beyond the ring of leaning trunks. At first, she thought it was the fog thickening, but then another shape emerged—tall, narrow, and almost translucent, like wet parchment held to the light. A second followed, and then a third.

They stood without sound, flickering at the edge of visibility. Their forms resembled people, but only in outline—too tall, with limbs that thinned into unnatural proportions. They lacked eyes, mouths, or any facial structure. Still, they watched.

One of them raised a hand. It didn’t beckon. It didn’t threaten. The gesture was neither a greeting nor a command. It simply reached, as though acknowledging something that had already been decided.

The air shifted again, and Heather felt a whisper, blooming directly in her mind with absolute clarity.

“You will break your leg next Tuesday. You won’t tell anyone.”

She staggered back. The message had bypassed her senses entirely. It hadn’t traveled through air. It had arrived, complete and irrefutable, as if etched into her memory before she heard it.

Benji dropped to his knees and trembled violently, his head jerking from side to side. His mouth moved rapidly, forming words too soft to hear. Then, suddenly, they came in broken whispers.

“No!” he said. “That’s not mine. I won’t go. I won’t go!”

The nearest figure didn’t move closer, but its shape pulsed rhythmically, as if it were attuned to Benji’s voice. Its glow fluttered in time with his resistance.

Mason stood several yards away, motionless, eyes locked on something Heather couldn’t see. His arms hung loosely at his sides, and his mouth had fallen open.

She rushed toward him, gripped his sleeve, and shook him once.

His expression shifted. Tears welled in his eyes, though his voice remained low and controlled.

“I saw her,” he whispered.

Heather blinked. “Who?”

“My daughter—Alyssa. Not how I remember her. She was older. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. But her eyes… something was wrong.”

A wind surged through the clearing as though a switch had been flipped. Fog spiraled inward. The figures at the treeline flickered rapidly, once, twice—and then vanished.

Benji collapsed completely, palms pressing into the dirt as he gasped for breath.

Mason looked down at his GPS. The screen had gone dark.

Heather stood still at the center of the clearing, her gaze fixed on the stone circle.

The stones had not moved, yet everything else around them had.

Part IV

Heather moved as though submerged, each step met with a mounting resistance. Even the ground beneath her boots felt distant, no longer registering pressure as it should. The world had become muted, every sound suspended in a stillness so complete it bordered on artificial.

Behind her, Mason remained frozen, his posture stiff, his gaze unfocused. He stood as though ensnared in a moment stretched too thin to break. Benji was nearby, curled on his side atop the pale soil, his body shivering beneath the too-large coat. Whatever he had witnessed had hollowed something out of him.

Then a voice spoke—a child’s, high and clear, impossibly familiar.

“We don’t age here.”

Heather turned toward the sound, and nearly stumbled. A girl stood at the edge of the clearing, only a few feet away, her posture rigid, her eyes locked on Heather without blinking. The child was unmistakable.

“Maya?” Heather whispered.

The name landed strangely in her ears, distorted by the air between them.

Maya said nothing. She neither moved nor acknowledged the name, and yet, Heather was certain it was her. Her hair lay flat and still, her clothes unwrinkled. The girl hadn’t aged, hadn’t changed a bit.

From the shadows at the edge of the clearing, others began to appear.

Children emerged in ones and twos from between the leaning trees, their forms wavering in and out of clarity. Heather recognized them from flyers and candlelight vigils. Each face had once been part of the town’s collective grief, now returned in strange, half-formed echoes. The children did not behave naturally. Some walked backward, retracing steps through invisible routines. Others stood completely still, their eyes unfocused. A few flickered, looping the same gesture or expression again and again.

The forest had ceased to resemble any place Heather had ever known. It had become a kind of liminal chamber, where moments layered upon themselves and time folded inward without warning.

Then came the voices. They arrived as a chorus, dozens of children speaking in soft, unified tones, each word indistinct on its own but perfectly synchronized in rhythm.

“We crossed when no one saw us. Now we watch the doors.”

Heather turned toward Mason. He remained frozen, lips slightly parted, eyes dimmed with the glaze of internal visions.

Benji stirred. Heather moved toward him instinctively, reaching down to place a hand on his shoulder. His coat felt unnaturally cold, the chill beneath the fabric deeper than mere exposure. At her touch, he flinched. His head turned sharply toward the center of the circle.

Without warning, he rose.

Benji stepped forward in a single, fluid motion, his limbs no longer trembling. He moved with quiet certainty, slipping free of Heather’s grasp and crossing the soil toward the ring of black stones. The figures returned. Their translucent forms shimmered into visibility as he entered the circle, surrounding him but never making contact. They hovered nearby, swaying slightly, their bodies pulsing faintly in response to his movements.

Heather fought against the drag of the air as she tried to reach him. Each step grew more labored than the last.

Benji’s voice broke the stillness. “That branch snaps at 6:04,” he said aloud, his tone flat but distinct. “The sun won’t rise next week. Don’t bring the red thread.”

“Benji!” Heather cried out. Her voice emerged fractured, its volume absorbed by the air around her. “Please—don’t do this!”

He turned to her. Despite the fear in his posture earlier, his face now held a quiet resolve, as if something long awaited had arrived, and he had accepted its terms.

“If I go now,” he said, “I can take her place.”

Heather’s throat constricted. The meaning hit her all at once, a flood of understanding she couldn’t refuse. There were no rules she could break to stop him. No arguments she could make that would shift the balance. This was a decision not born of panic but of purpose.

She reached toward him, her hand trembling, but the air between them had grown impassable. Her body refused to move forward. Whatever boundary surrounded the circle now pressed back against her with equal force, holding her at the threshold like a wall of glass.

Then the rupture came.

Without sound, without warning, the clearing bent inward. It folded—the space it occupied violently, invisibly reordered. The ground rippled beneath her feet, and the trees stretched and warped as though the sky had tilted. Colors fractured and split, tearing sideways in waves of bleeding light. The beings vanished, their forms dispersed into smears of radiance and shadow.

Benji stood at the center, eyes closed, arms at his sides.

The light swelled around him.

Heather screamed as she watched Benji’s body begin to unravel. His outline fractured into slivers of flickering light, his figure shredded into cascading ribbons that spun upward and dissolved.

Then it was over, the pressure released all at once. Heather collapsed backward into Mason, who had finally moved, his hands gripping her arms, dragging her clear of the circle. They both landed hard on the earth just beyond the boundary. The air rushed back around them, sharp and clean and cold. Heather gasped, her lungs stinging as they refilled.

The world had begun to mend itself. Trees that had leaned now stood upright. The fog thinned and retreated, and the sky settled into an even gray. The circle of black stones remained, but nothing stirred within it. They lay in silence, side by side, surrounded by a forest that looked familiar again but felt irrevocably altered. The violence of what had passed left no scorch or ruins, only a void.

Heather stared at the place where Benji had stood, her chest aching with grief sharpened by helplessness.

“Benji,” she whispered, the word nearly lost in the air. “I’m so sorry.”

Mason said nothing. He sat beside her, shoulders hunched, eyes trained on the ground, and sighed.

Part V

Heather remained still for several minutes, lying with her hands pressed to the ground as though waiting for the world to shift again. Gradually, sensation returned to her limbs, radiating outward from her fingertips and anchoring her to the earth. Her thoughts felt slow but steady, organizing themselves in hesitant sequence as reality began, piece by piece, to reassert itself.

She lifted her head cautiously, half-afraid that the clearing would fracture again—that space might warp or that light might split into colorless shards, but nothing changed. The wind had quieted. The shimmer that had stolen Benji was gone.

Beside her, Mason stared at his wristwatch, squinting as if it might tell him something he didn’t want to know. He shook his head slowly, confusion written plainly across his face.

“My watch is wrong,” he said, his voice edged with disbelief. “It’s six days ahead.”

Heather didn’t answer. Instead, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her phone. Pressing the power button did nothing. The screen remained black, lifeless. She tried again, then lowered it in her lap, the cold plastic inert in her hands. Some part of her had already known it wouldn’t respond. Whatever had passed between them and the forest had rendered ordinary tools meaningless.

Mason exhaled and scanned the clearing.

The scene before them had changed in subtle but undeniable ways. The ring of trees no longer leaned in symmetrical convergence but stood at uneven intervals, their arrangement now random. Their strange polish had dulled, and their bark had begun to show signs of wear again. The light had normalized as well—soft gray through the clouds, directionless but familiar. The extraordinary had retreated.

Heather turned slowly in place, searching for the stone circle. It was gone. There was no sign of the black stones that had stood at the center of everything. No bleached soil, no scar where the earth had warped. The ground looked undisturbed. Yet she was certain of where they had been. She could still feel the outline of the space within her body.

Then she saw it. A single flat stone remained, half-submerged in the dirt where Benji had stood. Its surface bore a spiral etched deep into the rock—one that curled inward toward a point too fine to see. She crouched beside it, brushing away the loose earth, and stared without speaking. Mason joined her but said nothing. Neither of them reached for it.

As the sky brightened with the approach of midday, the clearing continued to shift. Trees lost their distinctive spacing. The ground grew more familiar, even mundane. It was as though the forest had reclaimed what had happened, folding it beneath layers of foliage and time. The longer they stood there, the harder it became to remember the precise location of where they had been. By the time they turned back toward the trail, the path behind them had erased its own markers.

They didn’t speak during the walk back.

Days passed, and authorities expanded the search grid, combing through acres of underbrush and mapping out new radii, but nothing surfaced—no tracks, no clothing, no sign of Benji Kral. The boy who had appeared in the woods and walked toward the center of the world had vanished, leaving no trace behind.

Heather drifted through those days in a fog of restrained grief. Neighbors offered condolences in low voices, their concern tinged with confusion. Parents from the school offered her casseroles, or books on healing. She accepted these gestures with quiet nods, knowing nothing could speak to the shape of her loss.

Mason became even more withdrawn. He said little, avoided eye contact, and refused to speculate. Whatever resolve had defined his earlier demeanor had been stripped away.

Eventually, Benji was declared missing, and his face joined the others on the town bulletin boards—another small square of color pinned among the dozens that had come before. Heather returned to her classroom. She taught by habit. Her presence remained, but her attention wandered. The children’s voices, once distinct and chaotic, became background noise.

The emptiness inside her was not born of fear, but of knowing too much.

* * * * * *

Three days after Benji’s disappearance, Heather opened her mailbox and found a small parcel resting inside. The door hung slightly ajar, though she didn’t remember leaving it that way. The package was wrapped in brown paper, with no postage, writing, or return address.

She carried it inside with care and placed it on the kitchen table. When she peeled away the wrapping, she gasped. Inside was Maya’s notebook—the one she had last seen on her car seat, the one she had left behind. The pages were curled now, dog-eared and worn, but the contents had changed.

Heather flipped through the drawings. Each page had been filled. The crude sketches were gone, replaced by intricate pencil renderings far beyond what a child should have been capable of producing. The scenes were unmistakable—stone circles, leaning trees, fog-blanketed valleys, children standing still in impossible poses. Each image had been drawn from a precise vantage point. They weren’t imagined. They had been witnessed.

Then she reached the final drawing—and froze. It depicted her standing at the center of the stone circle, arms outstretched, reaching toward a boy with dark hair and a red coat. Benji stood at the center, his back turned to her, his hands open at his sides. The scene had been rendered in perfect detail.

She closed the notebook with trembling hands and pushed it away.

Sleep became elusive. Nights stretched into gray hours of half-awareness. She wandered her house without reason, lost in memories that no longer aligned with what the world would acknowledge.

Several mornings later, she awoke before dawn, roused from bed by restlessness. She dressed without urgency, wrapped herself against the cold, and stepped outside. Fog clung low to the street, curling at her ankles and swallowing the shape of the sidewalk ahead.

She walked with no destination, her boots echoing softly against the pavement. The neighborhood receded behind her, replaced by trees and damp earth. When she reached the trailhead, the sun had not yet risen, but the sky had begun to pale, and the fog had thickened, swallowing branches and burying familiar landmarks.

Heather stopped at the mouth of the trail, listening. Somewhere within the fog, a voice stirred. At first, it was only a whisper, indistinct and delicate, but then it resolved. Benji’s voice, unmistakable and close, emerged from the mist.

“Don’t wait for the wrong morning,” it said.

Heather stood motionless, the words rooting her to the spot.

Then, slowly, she stepped forward into the fog, knowing she would find nothing tangible. No body. No circle. No answers she could offer anyone who might ask. And yet, she moved forward all the same. She walked not to escape, but to remember—to feel again what she had nearly forgotten.

The path ahead held only silence, but she hoped, deep in the part of herself untouched by reason, that something might still be listening.