03 Jun The Town Between

Part I

The hum of tires on pavement and the occasional rhythmic slap of seams in the asphalt filled the cabin of the car. It was just after midnight, and Graham Holt kept his eyes fixed on the empty stretch of highway ahead, illuminated by the high beams cutting through the Alabama dark. His wife, Kristen, had been asleep in the passenger seat for over an hour, her cheek pressed against the window, her breath fogging the glass.

Graham didn’t mind the solitude. He liked driving at night, especially on long trips like this. The roads thinned out, the distractions faded, and the monotony gave him time to think. He tapped a finger absentmindedly on the steering wheel in time with the music—an old rock playlist he’d built for road trips just like this one.

They were somewhere southeast of Montgomery now, cutting through one of those long rural corridors where nothing seemed to exist except road, trees, and the occasional worn billboard for fireworks or antique stores that might not even be in business anymore. He had checked the GPS not ten minutes earlier and saw nothing noteworthy for miles. The road was just a line between pinpoints, and the only light besides his headlights came from the waxing moon.

He was just beginning to zone out again when something unusual caught his attention in the distance. A faint amber glow rose above the tree line ahead. It wasn’t the stark white of headlights or the dull orange of a streetlamp. It was warmer than that—more diffuse. For a moment, he thought it might be a truck stop, maybe a diner or a 24-hour gas station.

But as the car crested a low hill and the trees thinned, he saw that it wasn’t just a single building. It was a town.

A modest main street stretched out to the right of the road, lined with tidy little businesses. Neon signs flickered in pink and blue. Windows glowed with soft yellow light. A drugstore sat on one corner, its storefront trimmed with retro tile and a well-lit soda fountain visible through the window. Across from it, a barber shop with red and white poles spun slowly in the breeze. All of it looked clean, polished, and inexplicably untouched by time.

Graham slowed the car slightly, squinting through the windshield.

There were people, too. A couple strolled along the sidewalk, their pace unhurried, the man tipping his hat to someone across the street. A group of teenagers—maybe six or seven—stood outside a movie theater, its marquee announcing a double feature of Rebel Without a Cause and House on Haunted Hill. They laughed at something Graham couldn’t hear, their voices muffled by the glass.

He reached for the volume dial on the stereo, turning it down to better take in the sight.

Beside him, Kristen stirred and sat up, rubbing her eyes. “Are we stopping?” she asked, her voice thick with sleep.

“No,” Graham said, keeping his eyes on the town. “But you’re gonna want to look at this.”

Kristen blinked and leaned forward. “What the hell…?”

“I know,” Graham said.

The car rolled past the edge of town, and Kristen twisted in her seat to keep watching. “What is this place? Did we miss a sign?”

“I didn’t see one,” he said. “And it wasn’t on the GPS. Look at the storefronts. This place looks like a movie set.”

Kristen frowned, still peering out the window. “Could be one of those planned communities. You know, like themed neighborhoods for retirees? They do that kind of retro vibe sometimes.”

“Maybe,” Graham said. “But at one in the morning?”

Kristen didn’t answer.

The road curved gently as they exited the far side of town. The lights faded behind them, swallowed again by the woods and darkness. Graham glanced in the rearview mirror, but the glow was already gone.

The GPS flickered briefly, and then corrected itself. A blue arrow continued east. No mention of a town. No street names. Just a road, as empty and featureless as it had been for hours.

They reached Florida without incident the next day.

* * * * * *

A week later, they retraced the same route on the drive home. The sun was lower in the sky this time, casting long shadows across the fields and the tree-lined highway. Kristen, wide awake and flipping through a playlist, kept an eye out for the little town, now curious to see it again in daylight.

“You sure it was around here?” she asked.

Graham nodded. “It had to be. I remember the hill and that billboard for boiled peanuts. Should be just ahead.”

They passed the hill, the trees, and the stretch of shoulder where the entrance had been, but what they saw this time was not the same town. Or rather, it was—but only in the barest sense. The buildings still lined the roadside, but the windows were broken, their glass panes missing or smeared with soot. Signs hung askew. Paint peeled in curling strips. The movie theater’s marquee had collapsed, the letters strewn across the sidewalk like fallen teeth. The barbershop pole was gone entirely, and the drugstore’s awning had caved in.

Grass and vines had overtaken the sidewalks, sprouting from cracks in the pavement. A tree had grown up through the roof of what might once have been a diner. A rusted truck, its tires flat and windshield shattered, sat abandoned in the middle of the street.

Kristen leaned forward. “No way.”

Graham slowed the car again, staring. “That’s the same town. It has to be. Same layout, same buildings. But this looks like it’s been abandoned for decades.”

Kristen shook her head. “We must’ve gotten turned around. Maybe it’s a different town that just looks similar.”

“There’s no way. I remember that gas station on the corner. It had the same paint job, that same big Coke ad painted on the side. But now look at it.”

The ad was faded to the point of illegibility, its colors leached to ghostly pastel. The gas pumps were missing.

Kristen’s face was pale. “This place can’t have decayed like that in a week.”

“No,” Graham said. “It can’t.”

He drove on, and neither of them spoke for several minutes. When the GPS offered them an alternate route further north, they took it without hesitation.

They didn’t talk about the town again until weeks later, and even then, it was brief. Kristen insisted there had to be a logical explanation. Maybe there had been two towns, or maybe they had misremembered the route. Graham never believed that. He didn’t say much about it, but the memory stuck with him, sharper than most.

He didn’t tell Kristen that sometimes, late at night, he thought about the town—not just what they’d seen, but what they hadn’t.

Something about it had felt incomplete. Like they’d only seen one side of something much larger.

He told himself it didn’t matter. It was in the past.

But he never forgot.

Part II

The sun hung high over a stretch of two-lane blacktop that wound its way through southeastern Alabama. The sky was bright and cloudless, and the day had that familiar southern heaviness that settled in the bones and refused to lift until long after sunset. Graham Holt adjusted his grip on the steering wheel and glanced at the GPS display mounted on the dashboard. The route guidance had failed ten minutes ago, freezing for several seconds before rebooting entirely.

They were supposed to be detouring around a highway closure near Evergreen, but nothing about the road they were currently on matched the alternate route directions Kristen had written down before they left.

“Anything yet?” he asked, nodding toward her phone.

Kristen frowned and shook her head, thumbing at the screen. “It keeps saying we’re off course, but the map won’t redraw. I think we’ve lost signal.”

Graham looked ahead and noticed the landscape had changed while they weren’t paying attention. The pines had grown taller and thicker, pressing in on both sides. The road had narrowed slightly, and the few scattered homes and businesses they had seen an hour ago had given way to long stretches of nothing.

Kristen shifted in her seat and opened the glove compartment, pulling out the folded road atlas they kept as a backup. “Want me to check the county roads?”

“Sure,” Graham said, though a dull ache had already begun to form in his chest.

There was something familiar about the terrain now. The way the trees leaned in, the slight curvature of the road, the infrequent, weathered telephone poles that lined the ditch.

He gripped the wheel tightly and tried to ignore the growing certainty that he had been on this road before.

Kristen traced a finger along one of the smaller highways, and then paused. “If this is County Route 93, we’re heading northeast. That’s the way we wanted to go, but we’re definitely not where we’re supposed to be. None of this matches what I mapped out.”

Graham didn’t respond immediately. His eyes were locked on the road ahead. A low hill was beginning to rise in the distance, the same kind they’d passed on that strange trip years ago. He recognized the slope, the gradual curve of it, and the broken remains of a billboard just beyond it.

“Kristen,” he said, his voice quieter now, “I think we’re close.”

She looked up from the map. “Close to what?”

He didn’t answer.

As they crested the hill, the trees parted slightly, and the town revealed itself like a memory being summoned back to life.

It appeared exactly as it had the first time—clean, bright, impossibly preserved. The storefronts were intact, the glass gleamed in the sunlight, and the same vintage signage flickered with soft neon. A bakery, a soda fountain, a clothing store with mannequins in mid-century dresses all stood as though they had been waiting for someone to return.

Kristen leaned forward. “No way.”

Graham slowed the car, his hands rigid on the wheel.

The people were there too. A man in a bowtie swept the sidewalk outside a barber shop. A pair of teenage boys tossed a baseball back and forth in front of the theater, whose marquee once again offered the same double feature.

Kristen stared. “I thought this place was—”

“Abandoned,” Graham said. “It was.”

She turned in her seat to look at him. “We must’ve gotten it wrong last time. We thought we were in the same place, but we must not have been.”

“No,” he said firmly, without looking away. “It’s the same place. Same hill. Same billboard. Same town.”

They rolled past the gas station on the corner, and Graham spotted the red-and-white Coke mural on the side of the building. It was unblemished, with no trace of fading or wear.

Kristen turned to look out the rear window. “It doesn’t make any sense. You said it looked like it had been falling apart for decades.”

“It did,” he said.

They drove another block before Graham pulled the car into a diagonal parking space outside what appeared to be a general store. The engine ticked quietly as it cooled. For a moment, neither of them moved.

“Maybe we should ask someone where we are,” Kristen said cautiously.

Graham didn’t argue. They stepped out of the car, and immediately the warmth of the sun was cut by a strange stillness in the air. The town had a lived-in look, but there was something about the atmosphere that felt staged, like a film set caught between takes.

The bell above the door jingled as they entered the gas station.

A middle-aged man stood behind the counter, wiping his hands on a rag. He looked up and smiled broadly. “Afternoon. Passing through?”

Graham nodded. “Yeah. Got a little turned around. GPS cut out, and now we’re just trying to get back on track.”

The man chuckled. “You’re not the first. Happens more often than you’d think.”

Kristen stepped forward. “What town is this, exactly?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “This here’s Hartfield.”

“Hartfield?” Graham repeated. “I don’t remember seeing that on the map.”

“We’re kind of tucked away,” the man said. “Easy to miss if you’re not lookin’.”

Graham exchanged a glance with Kristen, then turned back to the clerk. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What year is it?”

The man blinked, clearly caught off guard. “Well… it’s twenty—uh… twenty twenty… four?” He hesitated at the end, the words sounding more like a question than an answer.

Kristen’s smile faltered. “Right. Okay. Thanks.”

They left the store in silence. Back outside, Graham checked his phone. No signal. The bars were gone, and the screen displayed only a spinning icon in place of a location.

Kristen tried hers with the same result. “I don’t like this,” she said quietly.

Graham nodded and turned to look back down the street. “Let’s just get back on the road. Head the way we came in.”

They returned to the car and pulled out of the parking space. Graham followed the same road they had entered on, but within two blocks the scenery changed. Instead of the open stretch leading to the forested highway, the road curved sharply to the right and brought them past the theater again.

Kristen frowned. “That’s not right. This is where we just were.”

He kept driving, taking another right, trying to reverse direction. Again, they passed the gas station. Then the general store.

“Try left this time,” Kristen said.

He did. The road wound past a playground and a municipal building before feeding back into the main street. The theater loomed ahead once more.

“Graham…”

“I know.”

He tried again, making a series of left turns this time, attempting to find a pattern or break free of the loop. But no matter what route they followed, they always returned to the same intersection.

The same storefronts. The same people. The same fixed smiles.

He gripped the wheel harder. “We’re not getting out.”

“We’re trapped,” Kristen replied.

Graham pulled the car to the curb and shut off the engine. For several seconds, neither of them said anything.

In the distance, the faint sound of a song played from some unseen radio—something old, upbeat, and distorted, like it was being broadcast from a place that hadn’t existed in decades.

And from somewhere deeper in the town, behind brick walls and closed doors, the rhythm of footsteps echoed across the pavement like a metronome ticking down time neither of them could track.

Part III

They spent nearly twenty minutes driving in circles before accepting what had become undeniably clear. No matter which turn they took or how carefully they tried to retrace their route, the roads kept leading them back to the same few streets, the same businesses, and the same set of townspeople who continued their peculiar routines as though nothing had changed. With each pass, the gas station attendant offered the same smile, the same casual wave. The boys in front of the movie theater tossed their ball with the same lazy arc. The man sweeping outside the barber shop never moved from his square of sidewalk.

Graham stopped the car in front of a modest brick building bearing a neon sign that read Pine Rest Motel. The sign buzzed faintly in the afternoon heat, casting a red glow against the wall beside it.

“We should stay,” he said, as Kristen stared out the window beside him.

Kristen turned toward him slowly. “Stay here?”

“Just for the night. Maybe we’re exhausted. We haven’t had anything to eat in hours, and the sun’s going down soon. We’ll regroup. Try again in the morning.”

She hesitated, clearly uneasy, but after a long pause, she gave a small nod. “All right.”

They climbed the short concrete steps and pushed open the front door, which triggered a brass bell hanging just above the frame. The lobby was small but clean, with a worn checkerboard floor and a wooden reception desk framed by twin ficus plants. A woman in her forties stood behind the counter. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun, and her pale yellow uniform dress looked freshly pressed.

She smiled as they approached. “Welcome to Pine Rest,” she said pleasantly. “You’re just in time. We’ve been expecting you.”

Graham stopped short. “You’ve been expecting us?”

“Yes, of course.” The woman turned the guestbook on the counter and gestured to it. “See for yourself.”

The book was bound in brown leather with a cracked spine. Graham opened it and flipped through the pages. Near the bottom of one entry, written in neat blue ink, he saw their names—Graham and Kristen Holt—scrawled in firm handwriting.

The date beside the entry stopped him cold.

It read: August 17, 2019.

Four years ago, nearly to the day.

Kristen leaned in and stared. “This has to be a mistake,” she said, but her voice was quieter than it had been moments earlier.

“I don’t think it is,” Graham said. He looked up. “Who wrote this?”

The woman smiled with practiced ease. “Well, you did. That’s your signature, isn’t it?”

He didn’t respond.

Their room was on the second floor, near the end of the hallway. It was modest, like the lobby, with matching lamps on either side of the bed and a small dresser facing a curtained window. The bedding was clean, though patterned in a dated floral design. Everything looked recently maintained, and yet it all felt subtly out of place—as if they had stepped into a facsimile of a motel rather than the real thing.

Kristen paced the room while Graham pulled the curtains open. The street outside looked as it had an hour earlier—empty but lit with late afternoon sunlight. A man walked slowly along the far sidewalk, twirling a coin between his fingers. He did not glance in their direction.

“This place isn’t right,” Kristen said finally. “That guestbook—how would they have our names from four years ago? And why would we have signed in back then?”

“We didn’t,” Graham replied. “We never stayed here. I’d remember. But that doesn’t change the fact that our names are in that book.”

Kristen crossed her arms. “Maybe someone’s playing a trick on us. It could be a setup. A prank. Or even—”

“Even what?”

She hesitated. “Even something worse.”

As the evening deepened, Graham began moving through the room, checking the drawers, the closet, the dresser, even under the bed. It was a habit he had picked up from his father, a retired sheriff who had spent decades emphasizing the importance of evidence—of details, of signs most people missed.

In the nightstand drawer, Graham found a local newspaper titled The Hartfield Ledger. The front page featured a story about the expansion of a train depot that no longer existed in any of the maps Graham had seen of the region. The date on the paper was October 4, 1957.

Beneath it was another issue, more yellowed than the first. Its headline described a Fourth of July parade scheduled for the upcoming summer of 1974. And at the bottom of the stack, nearly brittle with age, was a single sheet with no date at all. It contained only a classified section with items for sale—milk delivery service, typewriter repair, and radio vacuum tubes.

He spread the papers across the desk and stared at them for a long time. Kristen joined him and skimmed the headlines.

“These don’t make sense,” she said. “They’re not even from the same decade.”

“No,” Graham agreed. “Some of them might not even be real.”

When night fell, Kristen double-checked that the room’s deadbolt was secured and that the curtains were tightly drawn. The street had grown unnervingly quiet. No cars passed. No voices echoed from the sidewalk.

At 11:42 p.m., Kristen sat upright in bed. Graham had just begun to drift off when her sudden movement startled him awake.

“Did you hear that?” she asked.

He rubbed his eyes. “Hear what?”

“A sound. Just outside the window.”

They both fell still.

Then it came again—a slow, steady rhythm.

Tap… tap… tap.

Graham sat up and turned toward the window, but the curtain did not stir, and the sound stopped just as abruptly as it had begun. He moved to the window and pulled the curtain aside slightly.

The sidewalk was empty. The street beyond it was still.

Kristen stood beside him. “There’s no one there.”

“No,” he said. “But someone was.”

Neither of them slept much that night.

* * * * * *

By morning, the town appeared unchanged. The people resumed their routines with eerie precision, like wind-up toys on a schedule. Graham, determined to find an answer, left the motel after breakfast and began walking the streets, watching for anything that might break the illusion. Kristen stayed behind, unsettled by the previous night’s tapping and still unconvinced they were safe outside.

The newspaper office was just down the block, nestled between the barber shop and a modest bakery. Inside, the reception area was vacant, the front desk empty. A small bell sat atop the counter, and Graham tapped it once.

A door behind the desk creaked open, and a man stepped out—a familiar figure in a brown suit, his fedora tipped at a slight angle. He was clean-shaven, neatly dressed, and looked exactly as he had on that first trip four years earlier.

The man smiled warmly. “You made it back,” he said.

Graham was speechless. The man didn’t seem surprised to see him. In fact, he behaved as though this was a long-anticipated reunion.

“I saw you once before,” Graham said cautiously. “You were standing outside the theater. Four years ago.”

The man nodded. “Yes. You noticed, even then. Not everyone does.”

“What is this place?” Graham asked. “Why are we here?”

“You tell me,” the man said, and he gestured toward the door without offering further explanation.

Graham left the building without another word.

* * * * * *

That night, the town began to change.

It started subtly. The lights along the main street dimmed earlier than they had the previous evening. The neon signs buzzed louder, some of them flickering more rapidly or shutting off entirely.

Kristen watched through the window as the bakery across the street vanished, its warm interior lights extinguished in a blink, replaced by boarded windows and crumbling stone.

“Graham,” she whispered.

He looked up and joined her at the glass.

The theater now stood in ruin, its marquee barely hanging on, just as it had appeared four years earlier on their return trip. The same pieces of fallen lettering lay strewn across the sidewalk.

And then, just as quickly, the decay reversed. The marquee reassembled itself in the blink of an eye. The signs brightened. The shop windows glowed once more.

“What the hell is going on?” Kristen murmured.

Graham didn’t answer immediately. He was watching the people—only now, they weren’t moving at all. They stood motionless in doorways, behind glass, near benches and storefronts. All of them stared toward the motel.

Toward the window.

Toward them.

“I think they know we’re not supposed to be here,” Graham said quietly.

Kristen shivered. “Or maybe… we are.”

Part IV

The next morning arrived with an unnatural silence. The birdsong Graham had heard faintly the morning before had vanished. Even the air outside the motel room felt stagnant, as if held in suspension, waiting for something to break it loose.

He stood at the edge of the parking lot with a paper cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. The street was there—identical to the day before—but the people seemed less animated, as if each of them was simply occupying a place rather than living a moment. He watched the man in front of the barber shop sweep the sidewalk with the same exact strokes, the same rhythm he had seen yesterday and the day before that. The boy in the red windbreaker outside the theater bounced the same ball off the same square of pavement.

The routine had become too perfect, too rehearsed. It no longer seemed like repetition born of habit but rather the malfunction of a system struggling to simulate life.

Kristen joined him on the motel steps, arms crossed tightly against her chest. She had slept even less than he had, and her eyes were rimmed with red.

“This place isn’t changing,” she said.

Graham shook his head. “No. But I think we are.”

She looked at him.

“Think about it,” he said. “The papers in the nightstand—different decades. The people repeating themselves. The town flipping between whole and ruined. I don’t think this place exists in just one time. I think we’re inside something fractured. Something that’s trying to hold itself together by pretending nothing’s wrong.”

Kristen turned her eyes back toward the street. “Then what does it want with us?”

Graham hesitated. “It wants to remember. And it’s using us to do it.”

The sky had darkened by late afternoon, colors themselves dimming with the passage of time. The hues of buildings, cars, and trees had all begun to mute. The whites of the window frames became gray. The yellow of the soda shop’s awning faded to beige. It was as if the entire town was being drained of its saturation.

They were walking back from the diner—one of the few buildings still operating—when Kristen slowed beside him.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Graham paused.

From somewhere in the distance, behind the theater or maybe beyond it, came the low thrum of bass, a muffled echo of live music. The tone was warm and slow, suggestive of a blues progression being played far too late at night.

Kristen’s expression shifted. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“No,” Graham said. “It doesn’t.”

They rounded the corner and passed an alleyway that had not been there earlier. At the end was a door with a frosted pane and a hanging sign above it that read ”The Side Pocket Lounge.” A faint red light glowed behind the glass. The music grew louder the closer they approached.

“I don’t remember seeing this before,” Kristen said.

Graham took a step toward the door. “I need to see.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He shook his head. “No. Just stay here. I’ll be right back.”

She hesitated, then nodded reluctantly.

He pushed the door open.

Inside, the bar was bathed in a warm amber glow. The walls were lined with old framed photographs, and dust motes floated in the still air. A stage stood at the far end of the room, lit by a series of dim spotlights, and on that stage was a four-piece band playing something slow and haunting.

The bass player wore a weathered leather jacket and tapped his heel in time. The guitarist kept his head low, fingers working the frets. The keyboardist leaned into his instrument with a far-off look in his eyes. But it was the drummer who held Graham in place.

He was looking at himself. Not a stranger who looked vaguely similar, but an exact copy—his own face, his own posture, his own nervous energy channeled into every downbeat. The man on stage didn’t look at him, but the rest of the band did. Their eyes locked onto him like they’d been waiting for him to arrive.

The song continued, but now it seemed less like a performance and more like a ritual. Something was being summoned, or remembered, or rebuilt through rhythm and motion.

Graham stepped back, nearly knocking over a barstool, turned, and hurried through the door.

Kristen was gone. The alley was empty. He shouted her name once, then again, until at last he began to panic. He ran down the alley, then back to the main road. No sign of her. No indication she had ever stood there.

The people on the sidewalk remained unchanged. They went about their silent mimicry, offering no acknowledgment of him, no indication that anything had happened at all.

Graham ran block to block, scanning windows, alleys, and open doors. He called out for her until his throat grew hoarse, but no one answered. And no one helped.

He had nearly given in to despair when, across the street, in a stretch of ruined buildings that had not existed minutes earlier, he saw movement behind a jagged window.

It was her.

Kristen stood in the dark interior of what might once have been a department store, her hands pressed against the glass. Her mouth moved, but no sound reached him. The window itself looked thick with grime, its surface buckled and fractured, and the building around it seemed to teeter on the edge of collapse.

Graham darted across the street and climbed over a pile of broken bricks to reach the front door, which hung askew on rusted hinges. The inside of the building was even worse than it had appeared. The floorboards sagged beneath his weight, and the air smelled of rot and mildew. But Kristen was still there, visible through the cracked frame of the window, her expression panicked and pleading.

He crossed the room and found the staircase half-buried under rubble. He climbed carefully, avoiding the soft spots in the boards, until he reached the upper floor. The hallway was warped and slanted, its walls peeling in sheets, but there was a door ajar at the far end, a sliver of flickering light behind it.

He pushed it open.

Kristen turned toward him from where she stood by the window.

“You found me,” she whispered, her voice faint but intact.

“I never stopped looking.”

Suddenly, the floor quaked beneath them, and a deep groan rolled through the structure. Dust rained down from the ceiling, and the walls trembled with a sudden, violent energy.

“We have to go,” Graham said.

He took her hand, and together they ran back through the hallway as the boards cracked behind them. The stairwell trembled underfoot, and outside, the world seemed to strobe violently, shifting between the pristine town and its decayed counterpart with every few steps. One second, they were running through fresh pavement and clear skies, the next through cracked streets and a sky the color of ash.

They reached the street and sprinted past storefronts that morphed as they passed them. One blink and the bakery returned. Another, and it vanished again.

Every window was now filled with faces—watching, unmoving, their eyes fixed forward, unblinking.

As they crossed the last intersection, the street fell away behind them. Buildings collapsed in bursts of noise and dust, the streetlights winked out, and the ground rippled. Then, without warning, it was gone. The next thing they knew, they were standing on the shoulder of a normal country road, a row of long weeds at their feet, and pine trees stretching ahead in either direction. No buildings. No signs. No town.

Behind them, the sun began to dip toward the horizon. The road was quiet again, and there was no trace of Hartfield, only a long stretch of highway leading away from the place they should never have found.

Part V

The drive home was uneventful. It should have been comforting, the way the familiar terrain returned—highway signs, gas stations, cell reception, and the dull glow of strip malls along the outskirts of cities. But for Graham Holt, the normalcy felt foreign.

Kristen sat quietly in the passenger seat, her head turned toward the window, though her reflection in the glass revealed that her eyes were closed. She had barely spoken since they crossed the invisible line that had freed them. He hadn’t pressed her, and she hadn’t volunteered anything.

When they arrived back in their neighborhood, everything looked the same. The hedges were trimmed. The neighbors’ porch lights clicked on with programmed precision. The air smelled of grass clippings and grill smoke. And yet, even in the light of the mundane, the memory of Hartfield clung to them.

That night, Graham lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, Kristen lying beside him, while the rhythmic hum of the ceiling fan traced lazy circles across the room.

He didn’t sleep.

* * * * * *

By morning, Kristen had returned to her routines, but something fundamental had shifted. She moved through her day with practiced normalcy—pouring coffee, checking work emails, folding laundry—but avoided any mention of the trip. When Graham asked if she remembered what had happened, she responded with clipped deflections or silence. The few times he pressed her, she shook her head, once with enough force to spill a half-full mug of tea across the kitchen counter.

“I just want to forget it,” she told him finally. “If we talk about it, it stays real.”

So Graham stopped asking.

But he didn’t forget.

He couldn’t.

Over the following weeks, he began researching everything he could about that region of Alabama. He scoured topographic maps, old highway guides, and archived versions of online directories. He looked for Hartfield in real estate listings, in census records, and in digitized obituaries. Nothing ever came up. It was as if the place had been surgically removed from public record.

He reached out to amateur historians and ghost town enthusiasts through message boards and obscure blogs. A few replied, but no one had heard of a preserved mid-century town near Route 93 that blinked in and out of existence. One person responded with a theory about “liminal settlements”—places that exist between real-world coordinates but occasionally intersect with our own. The explanation made a certain kind of poetic sense, but offered no proof. No name. No paper trail.

And Graham needed something tangible. Something provable.

He returned to his father’s house that fall. The old man had passed two years earlier, and the house had been sitting vacant ever since. It still smelled of pipe tobacco and cedar shavings, and the basement, where his father had kept all his case files and archives from his time as sheriff, remained untouched.

He went through the metal filing cabinets, expecting nothing but police reports and clippings from local papers. He nearly missed it—an unmarked folder tucked into the back of a drawer beneath a box of slide photographs. Inside were a few yellowed sheets of paper, an envelope sealed with tape, and a brittle newspaper clipping folded down the middle.

He opened the clipping first.

The headline read:
MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES ALONG HIGHWAY 93: LOCALS WARN ‘DON’T STOP FOR THE TOWN’

The article had no byline and offered no concrete information, only a brief summary of missing travelers and unverified sightings of a “place that shouldn’t be there.” Locals had refused to comment directly, but a handwritten note in the margin, likely scrawled by his father, read: Never closed the file. Too many blanks. Not enough bodies.

There was a grainy photo beneath the headline, barely legible from decades of wear and poor ink transfer. But even through the distortion, Graham recognized it instantly.

It was Hartfield.

The drugstore. The marquee. The striped barber pole. All there.

His hands trembled as he unfolded the envelope. Inside were two Polaroids dated August 17, 1981. The first showed a street corner, identical to the one he had parked beside. The second depicted a man and a woman standing in front of the motel. They were slightly blurred, caught mid-step, as if they hadn’t expected to be photographed.

The resemblance between the man in the photo and Graham was uncanny. The woman was less distinct, her face half-turned, but something in the posture looked familiar.

He checked the back of the photo. There were no names, only a faint pencil marking that read: Returned three days later. No sign of either.

* * * * * *

That night, Graham didn’t tell Kristen what he’d found.

She had already gone to bed, and he didn’t want to stir the thin thread of stability she was clinging to. But when he finally lay down beside her and closed his eyes, the room was no longer silent.

From outside, beyond the hedges and the concrete drive, came a sound so faint he nearly dismissed it as imagination.

Tap… tap… tap.

He sat up and looked through the window, but there was nothing beyond the glass except darkness and the glint of a passing car’s headlights reflected in the distance.

Still, he didn’t move, because some places, he now knew, aren’t meant to be found.