Blackridge — Where the Missing Are Never Missed

0:00President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Paid for by Virginians for fair elections. Warning, the following Zippercruder radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words. When you're hiring, we at Zippercruder know you can feel frustrated. For Lauren even, like your efforts are futile and you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, Zippercruder figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try Zippercruder for free at zippercruder.com slash zip. With Zippercruder, you can forget your frustrations because

1:00we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite effort. In fact, four out of five employers who post on Zippercruder get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire four, 40 or 400 people, get ready to meet first street talent. Just go to zippercruder.com slash zip to try Zippercruder for free. Don't forget that zippercruder.com slash zip. Finally, that zippercruder.com slash zip. Hello, I'm Wilkins. Stories all the time. Glad you are here. Let's get into it. I first noticed it when Emma Hall didn't show up for school. It was a Tuesday morning. Cray, windless, the sky brews purple with a promise of rain. Emma sat two rows in front of me in chemistry. Not that we were closer anything. She was one of those quite kids, the type who always did her homework on time and never spoke unless called on. But that day, her seat was empty. Mr. Kerr didn't say anything. He just kept scribbling equations on the whiteboard, oblivious or uninterested.

2:05Nobody asked. Not Lucy, who Emma partnered with on-labs. Not Jake, who used to borrow her calculator. Not even Mr. Kerr, who marked her present without looking up. That was the first time I really noticed it. By Thursday, two more kids were gone. Benji lawler and software crews. Just gone. I checked their usual spots in the cafeteria. I scored their suttles. Nothing. No updates. No goodbye, post. Not even a dramatic cry for help. It was like they never existed. But when I asked Marcus about Benji, he looked confused. Who's Benji? He asked me bite of a soga French fry. You know, I said Benji lawler. We all did that group project in history together. You and me and Benji in Sofia? He blinked at me. I seriously have no idea what you were talking about, man. He wasn't joking. There wasn't a hint of sarcasm. No smart on his face. It was like the names they said had slipped past him like smoke. I let it go for the moment. That night, I dug through my yearbook, page after page, every face accounted for except the ones that weren't. Emma's picture

3:09had been replaced by a blurry shot of an empty gas room. Benji and Sofia weren't there at all. Their names weren't even listed alphabetically. It wasn't just the school. I started checking more places. Street corners, old photos, class rosters. They were being erased. Not just taken, but deleted. And no one cared. Not my teachers. Not my friends. Not my mom, who used to wave at Emma when she dropped me off at school. I wrote their names down on a scrap of notebook paper, just to make sure I wasn't going crazy. I kept it folded in my back pocket like a totem, like proof that they'd been real. By the end of the week, I had nine names, and the list kept growing. The weirdest part? I felt it too. A tug at the edge of my memory, like something trying to pull the names from my head smudge their faces into haze. Sometimes I'd look at the list to not remember who one of them was. Not clearly. They laughed the way they walked, the sound of their voice. It all blurred like watercolors bleeding in the rain. But I knew they mattered. I knew they were real. So I started documenting everything. Names, descriptions, flasse, known whereabouts.

4:14I filled a whole spiral notebook page after page. I stayed up late every night, writing before the memories could fade. I was terrified that if I didn't, I'd forget them too. It wasn't just students anymore. Mr. Greeley, the librarian in. Done. Mrs. Hammond, who ran the bakery on maple. Done. Two cops, a nurse, an entire family on Aldo Street. Hun, the rest of the town knew like nothing had happened. The bakery was closed. Esmes S. Hammond retired. The cops transferred out of town. The empty houses. For floaters. No one remembered the people who lived there, not even their neighbors. One day, I biked on Aldo Street and saw a real tanilling up a frisale sign on the mountains in the lawn. You looking to buy? He asked. No, I said stirring at the house. What happened to the family that lived here? He squinted. Family? Yet two kids. Mr. Martinsons worked at the post office. The realtor's brav furrowed. There's no Martinsons listed here. This place has been empty for years.

5:17That night, I couldn't remember what the Martinsons looked like. I only remembered that I should remember. I know I was sure how much longer that would last. So I made a decision. I was going to figure out what was happening. Who or what was making people disappear? Why no one cared? Why only I could remember? I know I wasn't going to stop until I had answers. Even if I was next. I started with the old library. Not the new annex with the fluorescent lights and self-checkout kiosks. The real library, the one tucked behind town hall, wrapped in ivy and time. It hadn't been opened to the public for years, not since the city budget cuts pushed everything digital. But the building was still there, squat and stubborn, like it was waiting for someone to remember it matter. I picked the lock with a bobby pinnets stall and from my sister's bathroom. It took longer than I expected, twenty minutes of cursing and scrape knuckles. But eventually the tumble was clicked, and the heavy wooden door creaked open. Thus greeted me first, the constale, curling in the moonlight like ghost breath. The air smelled of forgotten paper and meldue. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, the click of the latch echoing too loudly. The shelf stood like

6:21sentinels in the dark. I moved through them slowly, sweeping my flashlight across faded spines and warpwood. I didn't know what I was looking for exactly. Records, maybe. Proof. Something untouched by whatever was happening out there. I found the archives room in the back. It was locked too, but the door was old and the frame brittle. One hard cake and it gave with a groan. Inside, filing cabinets floor to ceiling. Rows of town records, photos, blueprints, yellowed newspaper stacked in bins. I dug through them like a man drowning, looking for a rope. The further back I went, the strange of things got. The chronicles I'll have stopped updating names about six months ago. Obituries vanished. School on a rolls thinned. Church bulletins listed fewer and fewer congregants. I even found a school yearbook from last year. And just like the current one, entire pages were altered. Some students missing, others rearranged as of to hide the gaps. It was like someone or something was editing the town in real time. And then I found it. An unlabeled manila fold a tuck behind a stack of zoning maps. Inside were a series of black and

7:25white photos. Aerial shots of the town. Old, maybe 1960s or 70s. But each one had a date scribbled in red ink and circled on every photo was a blot. Sometimes a building, sometimes a street, crossed out with a shaky ex in the corner of the last photo. Someone had scored a single word breach. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it wasn't good. Then I heard it a soft creek like a footstep on old floorboards. I killed my flashlight, held my breath, and Ella Creek. Closer. I wasn't alone. I pressed back against the file cabinet heart racing trying not to breathe too loud. The darkness in the room thickened. I couldn't hear breathing, couldn't see movement, but I felt something. Like the air itself had teeth. There was a whisperer, not in English. Not even in sound, really. Just pressure. Thought not my own brushing against my skull like I's water. You shouldn't be here. And then, just like Dad, it was gone. The air eased. The silence settled. I flipped my light back on. No one was there. But when I looked down, the folder

8:28was gone from my hands. Something had taken it, and it remembered me. I stumbled out of the library into the cold night air, hot thudding like a wardrobe in my chest. The wind had picked up, slapping leaves against the sidewalk, carrying with it the distant hum of something I couldn't name, like static or a memoriam rambling in real time. I backed home like the devil was behind me. At every stop sign, I looked over my shoulder. At every intersection, I half expected to see a shadow stepping just beyond the edge of the street dump. But there was nothing. Just empty sidewalks, quiet houses, the kind of normal that felt too normal. When I got home, the kitchen light was still on. Mom was at the table, sipping Cammality and reading the same mystery novel she'd been rereading for weeks. You're out late, she said without looking up. I was studying, I lied. Dude, she turned to page. Keep it up. Don't end up like that boy who. She stopped mid-sentence. Her breath furrowed as glazed for a second. Like who? I asked. Her lips moved, searching for a name. I don't know, she murmured. It's on the tip of my tongue. I nodded to a dry, yet mine too.

9:34I went straight to my room and locked the door, pulled the curtain shut, opened my notebook. Two more names had gone faint, like the pencil had faded or the paper itself was forgetting them. I tried writing the letters, pressing hard, but the names resisted. Every stroke felt wrong, like I was trying to forge something I had never really known. But I had known them. I remembered Sophie's laugh, the chip-pink nail polish on her thumbs, the way Benji always wore the smash socks. Didn't I? President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide, not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure,

10:35you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So, while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free. That's right. Free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. That zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter.com slash zip. The phone buzzed a no number. I answered at first nothing. Then breeding. Cello. Slow. Then a voice. Raspi like it had been scraped across glass. Stop digging.

11:43I froze. Who is this? You see them because you remember. The voice quivered. But the more you look, the more it sees you. I stood up. My hand trembled. What's it? Static hiss through the line. Then you don't find a breach. It finds you. Click. Silence. I stared at the phone. My reflection looked back at me in a buck's green, except the room behind me was empty. But the reflection showed someone standing in the corner. A spun around. No one was there. Just the cold press of something unseen killing around the edge of my thoughts. The next morning, I woke with a pounding headache and a noose lead. My sheets were smeared with rust-frared stains and the corners of my notebook. My precious only proof were called and damp, like it had been left outside in a storm. I didn't remember falling asleep. I barely remembered making it to dead. But I did remember the voice in the phone and the figure in the mirror and the word etched in red and across the photograph. Breach. Skull felt like a dream on pause. The hallways required are the initiative bin, not silent, but off. Conversations that didn't

12:46quite make sense. Laughter that started too late. Teachers' calling role without realizing they were skipping names. I passed the trophy case and caught my own reflection again. Except this time, the reflection didn't match. I was standing still. It was still walking. I blinked. It blinked a moment later. I backed away. Hey, you okay? Someone asked behind me. It was Marcie Chen. She ran track. Smot. Kind. We went close. But I remembered when she broke her wrist in Jim Lossemester. I'd watched her to the nurse's office. She'd left the whole way, even through the pain. You look like you've seen a ghost, she said. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the word stuck. Have you noticed anything weird lately? I finally asked. Like people going missing. Her smile faltered. She glanced around, leaned in. Yes, that single word hit like lightning. You remember someone? I asked Desperate. She nodded slowly. It girl, Briel Deeks. She used to sit behind me in

13:49English. Always wore these big headphones and drew in the margins of her notebook. But one day she was just gone and no one said anything. Not even Mrs. Holtz. I even asked about her. Holtz looked at me like I was drunk. I stared at her. You wrote her name down? I tried Marcie set, but I can't find the notebook anymore. I think it disappeared with her. Hope sparked like a match in my chest. Come with me. We need to compare notes. She hissed at eyes starting to the hallway behind me. Are you sure? Because since I started remembering Briel, I feel like something's watching me. He got a call too? Number worse. She pulled up her sleeve. There were bruises on her forearm, faint, finger-shaped. They showed up after I had a dream, she said. I was in my backyard except the stars were wrong. There were no constellations, just a back hole where the sky should be and something was reaching through it. I didn't breathe for a full ten seconds. Marcie, I was spurt. I think this town is being edited, like someone is cutting pieces out of reality. And if we don't figure out why

14:53we're going to be next. She looked me dead in the eyes. Then we better move fast. We ditched after a fourth period, slipped us through the side exit by the auto shop, the one where the security camera had been broken since sophomore year. No one stopped us. No one even seemed to notice. I glanced back once at the door swan shut behind us, and it struck me how quiet it was, like the whole building was being muffled under a thick blanket of fog. We rode our bikes to my house. Marcie had a duffel bag with her, filled with notes, old sketchbooks, and a Polaroid camera. Why the camera, I asked. She zipped it open and pulled it out like it was a weapon. Digitals too easy to change, she said. Film stays real for now. My mom was torn. I wasn't surprised. Lately, her shifts at the clinic had been erratic. Late time itself had started unraveling her schedule. Sometimes I wondered if she'd come home at all. We spread everything out on my bedroom floor, my notebook, her sketches, loose papers with circled names and half faded memories. One name showed up in both our notes, Brioidiques. Marcie had drawn her once, months ago, just a quick sketch she did during lunch.

15:57The image was rough, mostly aligned in shadows, but there was something about it that hit me in the gut, like seeing a ghost smile. She was real. Marcie said, I know she was. I nodded. That's two people who remember her. That's something. Then I noticed it at the edge of the drawing, almost hidden in the corner of the page. A symbol, a tiny triangle pointing downward with a circle in the middle. Did you draw this? I asked. She's printed number I didn't even notice that before I traced it with my finger, it gave me a headache just looking at it like it wasn't meant to be seen by visions. One for second, the room tilted at your camera. I was asked and fine I lied that night after Marcie went home. I scanned the symbol on my nothing came up, not in any language, not in a cult form, not even in a weirdest conspiracy site I could find. But just before I give up a message popped up on my screen. Not a nad, not a pop-up. Just a single sentence typed in ball-read across my Google window. You're looking in the wrong direction. I stared at it, and then the screen went black. All of it. Lights off. Fans dead. Roaders silent. The power was gone, and I was

17:00no longer alone in the room. The temperature dropped like a stone. My breath fogged in the sudden cold, my skin prickling with goosebumps. I couldn't see anything, just a void where my room had been swallowed by a natural darkness. Not the kind that comes when the lights go out, but a thicker kind like the dark itself was watching. I didn't move, didn't breathe. Something was there. I could feel it behind me, wait this but massive, like a thunderhead crawling just above the ground, around this pressing into the world around it. My ears were iron. My limbs wouldn't respond. Then it spoke. Not a lot never allowed, but inside me. The words came like a migraine. Truck pulsing, invasive. You cannot unsee. I turned slowly against every instinct in my body. There was a shape in the corner of the room. Not a person. Not quite. It stood two still. Too long. Like it had joints in the wrong places. It skinshamed like oil on water, shifting through colours that didn't have names. No face. Just that same triangle symbol.

18:00Pulsing red. Branded into the centre of its head like a third eye. I tried to speak. My jaw locked. My tongue wouldn't obey. You cannot warn them. It raised a hand. Three long fingers extended. This shimmed and bent the air-like heat on pavement. The triangle on its face began to rotate slowly, like a camera lens adjusting. I felt something tugging my chest like it was reaching into me, searching. Then the door burst open. A blinding flash. The his of burning film. Mossy stood there with the polaroid in both hands. Fingers still in the trigger. The creature recoiled. Its body twisting and on itself like a film real burning midspin. The triangle fled red once then blinked out and it was gone. The light snapped by calm. My laptop screen rebooted. My room was whole again, but the air still tasted like static canashes. Marcy was breathing hard her chest heaving. I saw the lights die from the street. Something told me to run. She held up the photo freshly printed from the polaroid. In it barely visible, already starting

19:01to fade was the outline of the creature warped melting around the edges, but real proof. Okay, I said my voice shaking. Now I know we're in deep. She looked at me. We need to find a breach before it finds anyone else. I nodded still staring at the photo and whispered. I think it already has. We didn't sleep that night. We sat in my room, cross-legged in the floor, a curtains for untighten every light on. The photo sat between us like a loaded gun, crooked, curling at the edges. The image already warping under some unseen pressure. Even as we watched a triangle in the creature's face began to smudge, the blacking bleeding out with like a wound. It's erasing itself, Marcy said. No, I said it's being a race just like everyone else. She didn't answer. She just stared at the polaroid, her eyes glassy, and why. I flipped back through her sketchbook, searching every corner for that triangle. It showed up in places we hadn't noticed before. Hidden in the background of school hallways, drawn into the shadow under a stairwell. Even inside the eye of a cat doodle she'd forgotten she'd drum. Whatever it was,

20:03it had been leaking through for longer than we'd realized. Marcy pointed at one of the pages. Look at the date. I checked the coroner, April 3rd. That's when I first remember Beel she said quietly. It started then. I flipped to my notebook. Same date. April 3rd was when I noticed Emma was gone. The start of all of it. A coincidence. Now I'm not anymore. Something happened that day, I whispered. Something tore the fabric. Marcy leaned in. The breach. I nodded. My thoughts were racing. We had to go deeper. Back further, find out what happened on April 3rd that could have triggered a hole in reality. So we made a plan. We'd start with the surveillance system at school. Mr. Rex, the janitor, had access to the camera backups. If anyone could get us into the old security room in the admin wing to be him. He also hadn't shown up to work since those day. We checked his house the next morning. The door was a draw. No car in the driveway. Light off.

21:03Mail piling up in the box like snowdrifts. We stepped inside slowly. The air was stale, heavy with the smell of mildew and something coppery underneath. The living room was trash, drawers pulled out, cushions torn open, but not in a robbery kind of way. It looked search, desperate, like someone had been trying to find something before it vanished. On the wall, written in black marker across the wallpaper, with three words, it's not time. In the hallway, Marcy found a trap door leading to the basement. We opened it. A draft of frigid air rose from below, carrying the scent of wet earth. We looked at each other, then climbed down. The stairs grew and under our weight as we descended, each steps swallowed by the darkens below. Marcy's flashlight cut through the gloom and shaky arcs, illuminating and finished concrete, exposed pipes, and the tangle veins of old electrical wiring. The smell down there was strong the mold, wrought, and something accurate, metallic like blood that had been left out too long, the basement was colder than it had any right to be. It wasn't large, just a square space with a low ceiling and a workbench shoved up against the far wall shelves lined with paint cans and broken tools, but there in the middle of the floor was a folding table and on it, a map of the town I stepped closer. The map

22:07was hand drawn, sketched in thick black ink. Streets and intersectioned, landmarks, schools, even the woods that boarded the west end of town. But overlaying it all was something else, a web of symbols and lines connecting locations with strange geometry. Points were circled. Others were crossed out. Marcy pointed to one in the center, marked with a red triangle. April 3rd, she said. That's where it started. I traced the point. Is that right at the intersection of hollow creek road and sicklemoline? I know this place, I'm murmured. It's that empty field, the one with the weird fence no one remembers putting up. Marcy's voice was tight. That fence was always there. Tilt to the edge of the table was a sticky note of coordinates called in red pen. The side it, a polar rod, faded almost to white. We picked it up gently. It was of the field, taken at dusk. But in the background, half hidden batteries, there was something. A shimmer in the air. Like a heat mirage, but vertical. Almost door shaped. If you stay too long, the image felt like it twisted your stomach into knots. Marcy swallowed.

23:11That's the breach. Beneath the table were crates of notes. More notebooks, folders, drawings, and a small cassette recorder. We grabbed everything we could carry, stuffing it into our backdacks. Whatever Mr. Ricks had been doing down here, he'd known something. Maybe too much. Then Marcy froze. Do you hear that? I held my breath. At first, nothing. Then a faint scraping sun from above. A slow, rhythmic drag like Claus' Crosswood. Then footsteps. Heavy. Slow. A human. Something had entered the house. We killed the lights and waited in the dock, listening to it move. One step at a time toward the open basement door. The first step creaked directly above our heads. Then another. Marcy gripped my wrist so tightly I felt her nails they came to my skin, but I didn't flinch. We crouched behind the crates under the table, barely breathing. The flashlight was off. My phone was dark. The only light came from the narrow sliver of the basement door, casting a pale beam down the stairs. The thing paused at the top. It didn't speak. It didn't grill. It simply waited.

24:16And I got the sickening sense and knew we were there. That it could smell us, filled the heat of our bodies, maybe even hear the blood hammering in our veins. Then it began to descend slowly, deliberately. Each step groaned under a weight that seemed too heavy for this world. The air thickened with every motion, cold pressing against us like rising water. Marcy's breath trembled. I leaned closer to her ear and whisper, on to read, we run. She nodded, barely perceptible. One, the footsteps reached the midpoint of the stairs. A shadow stretched long across the concrete floor. Told twitching raw. Two, the sound of breathing, wet and low, almost amused. Three, we exploded from cover. I shoved the crates over as a distraction, sending a crash of metal and wood scattering across the basement. The thing shrieked and awful mechanical screeched the clawed at my brain like nails on bone. We darted to the far wall toward the narrow-egress window just beneath the ceiling. I scrambled up first, kicking the latch until it popped. Then I pushed it open and clawed through the dirt, shoving myself into the cold outside air. Marcy followed just as a hand

25:18slammed onto her ankle. She screamed. I reached down and grabbed her wrists, yanking with everything I had. The things gripped tightened, long, sinew fingers wrapped in something like skin, but not. It's heavero's interview. There was no face, just a triangle spinning in place, glowing red hot like a branding iron. Beneath it, a suggestion of stitches in its neck. Let her go, I screamed, and it did. Not because of me, but because the sunrise hit it. The first ray of light launched through the trees and touched its shoulder and the thing held, recalling like it had been set on fire. Smokest from its skin as it retreated back down the stairs, dragging a piece of darkness with it like a cloak. We collapsed on the grass panning, shaking, I stinging from tears and dirt and fear. Light hurt it, Marcy gasped. Then we need to move during the day, I said, hard pounding, and we need to get to that field. She nodded, wiping blood from her scraped cheek. Behind us, the basement door slammed shut. We didn't look back. We made it back to my place just after eight. The sun was high enough to feel safe, though we kept glancing over our shoulders, half expecting the thing to crawl out from under

26:20the sidewalk, wearing someone's skin. The air was warm, the kind of perfect summer morning that used to make me feel like everything was still possible. Now it just felt like camouflage. My neighborhood was quiet, too quiet, not in the peaceful way, but the hollow kind. No kids on bikes, no sprinklers, no barking dogs. I didn't see a single car pass while we rode, just empty driveways and trim hitches trying to look normal, trying too hard. We went inside and locked every door in window. I pulled the blinds. Marcy spread out the materials we'd stolen from Mr. Rick's basement across the floor. Folders, maps, scribbled pages that looked half mad, but were too specific to ignore. We listened to the cassette first. There was no label, just a piece of masking tape with a pull-thread scrolled in red. Mr. Rick's voice crackled through the static, older than I remembered. Tired. Fred. It's not random. None of this is. It started at Hollow Creek. That's the first breach. But it wasn't natural. Something opened it. Someone. Marcy looked at me, why died. I tried to warn them. I tried to tell the council, but it's like the

27:25towns under a spell. They don't remember. The names disappear from their mouths like static on a radio. I can't even say half the missing people out loud anymore without bleeding from the nose. There was a pause, a sound like a chair creaking. It feeds on forgetting. That's how it grows. That's why the records vanish. Why the photo is fade. Memory is its enemy. That's why it watches the ones who remember. That's why it watched me. The tape ended with a long hisastatic. No goodbye. No final screen. Just a slow decay of silence, swallowing a manhole. We sat there for a long time not speaking. Finally, Marcy pointed to them up. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide not politicians. Vote yes by April 21st.

28:35Great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire, and right now you can try Zippercrooter for free. That's right. Free at zippercrooter.com slash zip. That zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip. Then that's our next step. The coordinates led directly to hollow creek field.

29:37I've passed it a hundred times and never thought twice. Just a patch of land, fenced off with Wester chain link and a one gate sill with thick padlocks. It had always felt wrong, but now I understood why. It was abandoned. It was quarantined. We packed everything. Flashlights broke. My dad's off-cobra. Massey carried the Polaroid camera like it was a loaded pistol. We rode out again. No helmets, no forms, no backup. If this was the source of it all, the wound in the skin of reality. Then it was time to look straight into it. The field looked different now. Maybe it was always like this and I just never seen it. Really seen it. But standing there at the edge of the rusted fence when brushing through waste high grass, I felt it in my bones. A stillness that didn't belong. Like the world here had pause waiting for someone to notice. The gate was chained with two padlocks, both old and clotted with rust. We stood there in silence for a few seconds, just watching a grass shift. Nothing moved beyond the fence. No birds, no bugs, no sound. I took the crowbar from my back

30:38cock, jammed it between the chain links and twisted. The metal shriek but didn't give. Massey stepped up beside me and zipping her duffel and pulling out a pair of bull cutters. Where'd you get those? I asked. She didn't answer. Just set her jaw or might to work. The chainsnapped with the loud clink, the sound cutting through the quiet like a gunshot. The gate swung inward slowly, creaking like it hadn't moved in years. We stepped through. The temperature dropped the second off he touched the grass. Not by much, just a few degrees, but enough to notice. Enough to make your skin crawl. The field was bigger than it looked from the outside. She's roomed the edges like centre is tall and still. In the centre, maybe 50 yards in, stood a ring of standing stones. I stopped cold. Those weren't there before, I said. Marcy swallowed. They were always there. People just forgot. We moved cautiously. The air had the same shimmer I'd seen in the polar road from Mr. Ricks' basement. Like the atmosphere itself was warping, bending slightly around the stones. The triangle's symbol was carved into each one, deep in jacket. And in the middle of

31:43the rain, the breach. It looked like a vertical tear in the air. Not glowing. Not pulsing. Just open. Like someone had unzipped the sky. Through it, I could see nothing. Not badness. Not light. Just absence. The longer I stared, the more I felt like it was staring back. Marcy raised the Polaroid camera and took a photo. The flash popped and in that instant, the grass flattened out wood from the breach. Wushed as if something inside had exhaled. Hello, vibrating hum rippled out, and I swear for a split second, I heard voices. Dozens of them. Screaming was purring, overlapping. Names. Anna. Thenji. Thoffe. Burrell. Mr. Ricks. Names we remembered. Names the world didn't. They were calling to us. Holy shit, I breathed. They're in there. Marcy lowered the camera slowly, her fist pale. We have to go in. I stared at her stunned. What? Marcy didn't look away from the breach. Her

32:45voice was steady, but her hands trembled. If they're trapped inside, if their voices can still reach us, then maybe they're not completely gone. Or maybe that's what it wants us to think. She turned to me, eyes wide and dark with fear. But something else too. It was all. You heard them, she said. You heard their names. You know they're still real. This whole thing, they're racing, they're forgetting. It's not the end. It's a process. I shook my head. And if we go in and don't come back, Marcy's jaw clenched. Then at least we'll know. I looked at the tear and reality, this impossible slit in the air, like the world had been cut with a blade no one should own. It didn't shimmer anymore. It just was still, waiting. That's Ankarae ourselves, I said. We tied rope around our waist and looped it around one of the stone pillars. I scrolled our names the date, and the phrase we went in on a page in my notebook and nailed it to the pillow with a pocket knife. Then we stood at the edge. I could feel it. Something pulling at my skin, like gravity twisted sideways. The breach wasn't just space.

33:48It was memory. Time. Identity. It wanted us. It wanted everything. Marcy looked at me. On three, I nodded. One, the air buzzed with invisible electricity. Two, the rope creaked under tension. Three, we stepped through. It was like falling but not down. Inward, like being pulled into your own mind, only it wasn't yours anymore. My vision smeared into colors I didn't recognize. Shaped with too many sides floated past. I heard voices again, but they were inside my thoughts, speaking languages I didn't know, but somehow understood. Then suddenly, solid ground. We were standing in a version of the field, but it wasn't the same. The sky was flat, it's whirling grey. The trees were shadows of trees. The stones around us were still there, but their carvings riot and paused, shifting like they were alive. The rope we tied, gone, like it never existed. I turned to Marcy and we both looked up. In the distance, towering against the not sky, it was a shape tall as a building, thin as smoke, a silhouette with a spinning triangle, where its head should be. The thin.

34:51It's arse and it began to move. It didn't lock. It glided. No footsteps. No sound. Just the impossible shifting of its lawn, skeletal form weaving through the ash-gray trees like mists. Every time it passed through a shadow, it left behind a trail of flickering, geometric shapes that twisted in on themselves before vanishing. Marcy grabbed my hand. Her skin was eyes. Run, I said. We turned and bolted, feet pounding across brittle dead grass. Behind us, the thing gave no chase, but we could feel it gaining, feel it and spilling the space between us, folding it like paper. This place, this inside place, it didn't follow rules. We run through a warped version of our town. The buildings were wrong, two tall, two wide, two hollow. The windows blink like eyes. Street signs twisted into gibberish. The skull stood crooked in the horizon, black finds growing from its walls like veins. Everything looked familiar, but corrupted, like a memory infected by rock. We ducked into what looked like the library, his whole version, pre-renovation. But the shelves were skeletal, filled with blank books that

35:53screamed when we opened them. No exit in sight. No people. No time. And then a whisper, not a thought this time. A voice. Marcy. She stopped dead in her tracks. That was Brielle. I pulled her arm. We need to keep moving. No. She broke away, calling out. Brielle, where are you? Shadow shifted. The forward beneath this crack like egg shells. The error pulled as something stepped forward. A girl thin pale, wearing a hoodie three sizes too big. It was her. I recognize her from Marcy's sketch. Brielle deeks, but her eyes were wrong. Empty, not blank, just drained, like someone had scooped out her memories and left a shell behind. Marcy ran to her, grabbed her shoulders. It's me. Marcy. You remember me right? Brielle blinks slowly. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. Then her hands saw up, pointing behind me. A turn just as the thing appeared, crawling down from the ceiling like a spider, limbs too long,

36:55joints bending backward. The triangle on its face spun faster and faster. Its edge is glowing. It didn't come from me. It lunged from Marcy. I tackled her out of the way just in time. The flow cracked again, deeper this time, and reality split. We fell. Through layers of forgotten memories. Faces a half remembered. Streets that used to exist. Laughter that once meant something. All of it blared, rushing past like a river of broken time. And then impact. We landed in darkness. Alone. Marcy was gone. I couldn't breathe. There was thick, damp, like being buried beneath wet soil. Every time I tried to move, my limbs pushed through something that wasn't quite solid. It clung to me, slowed me down. Not liquid, not there. Memory. I was submerged in a sea of fading memories. They drifted around me like ghosts. Moments caught in suspension. A child laughing as he flew a paper kite. A woman lighting candles in a window. A man hammering off a sail sign into a lawn that no longer existed. Each image hovered for a moment, vivid and sharp, before flickering

38:00into dust. I swam up or pushed through the heavy, syrupy dark heart hammering. Summer above me, I felt Marcy. Then light. I broke through, fell onto something cold and solid, a tile floor. The air here was then electric, buzzing with a sharp wine of failing for recent lights. I was inside the school, but not my school. This version was warped. President Barack Obama. Virginia, we are counting on you. Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to raid the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years. But you can stop them. By voting yes, by April 21st. Help put our elections back on a level playing field and let voters decide, not politicians. Vote yes, by April 21st. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes

39:02along, which is why you should try Zip Recruiter for free. At ziprecruiter.com slash zip. Zip Recruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So, while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zip Recruiter, find you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zip Recruiter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zip Recruiter for free. That's right. Free at ziprecruiter.com slash zip. That ziprecruiter.com slash zip, ziprecruiter.com slash zip. The holes were longer. The lockers taller, pulsing slightly like lungs. The walls furred with a slow rimic vibration that sounded too much like a hot beat. At the far end of the corridor, someone stood in silhouette. I approached cautiously, while she was squeaked in the tile at going louder than

40:05they should have. Maussey, I whispered. The figure turned. It wasn't her. It was me. Were some version of me. Older, maybe, or hollowed out. The face was blank. The eyes too deep black foids. It smiled. You were always meant to stay. I backed away. What are you? What you become when you forget? It stepped forward. With each fruitful, the hallway behind a crumbled into dust. Lockers turned to ash. The floor broke into cracks of white nothingness. The world unraveled. Then a voice called out sharp, urgent. Here, over here. Maussey. I turned and ran toward the sound, the well peeling away behind me. I burst through a double door and slammed it shut. Inside was a small room, some kind of maintenance closet. Walls lined with empty shells and corroded pipes. Maussey stood in the corner, gripping a piece of paper in her hands. Her face was streaked with tears, but her eyes burned with purpose. I found a way out, she said breathlessly. It's not stable, but it's real. She held out the paper. On it, a hand drawn circle, wrapped in

41:09ruins that shifted when I tried to focus on them. In the centre, a triangle pointing up this time, instead of down. The reverse of the mark, she said. It's like a back door, a memory strong enough to anchor us. We just have to give it something the breech can to race. I stared at her and I knew what she meant. We have to remember. She nodded. Everything. Everyone. Us. Because that was the only thing the breech couldn't devire. What we refused to forget. We sat on the cold tile floor, backed back, clutching the paper between us like it was a lifeline. The circle Maussey had drawn flickered faintly in the dark, glowing with an inner pulse that didn't belong to Encore Light. I didn't ask how she found it. I didn't need to. I felt it. The edges of something ancient, deeper than language, etched in the bones of the world. Or maybe in the bones of memory itself. We have to focus, she whispered. We give it our strongest memory. Something real. Something true. My thought to realed. So many memories were blurred now, stripped away like layers of paint.

42:11But beneath it, under all the forgetting, there were still pieces that had faded. The way my mom used to hum whilst her in coffee in the morning. The smell of old books in the back of the library before they closed it. Maussey's laugh in seventh grade when she fell into the river on a field trip and tried to play it cool. That, I gripped her hand and closed my eyes. I remembered. I remembered the first time I saw her. Middle school. Drama Club. She wore a hoodie with freight sleeves and rolled her eyes at everything. She wasn't like the others. She noticed things. Me, I remembered the fire drill where we ended up standing next to each other on the blacktop. She asked what book I was reading. I told her I didn't read much, even though I was clutching a copy of Dune in my back back. She smirked and sat, liar. I remembered sitting next to her on the bus in sophomore year, sharing earbuds, listening to a song neither of us neither lyrics to, just watching the town slide by. Those weren't just memories. They were ire's. The circle flared with light. It lit up the room, burning with a steady brilliant light. Not cold, not sterile, but warm. Real. The pipes around

43:16has grown. The walls cracked. The floor beneath us began to shimmer like water. Keep going, Maussey shouted over the rising noise. She was crying now. So was I. I remembered Benji's sock collection. Softy as weird elab session, Emma's perfect silent joodles in the margins of every worksheet. Reol's hand stained with charcoal, brushing her out of her eyes, every knee-mide written in my notebook, every person I had refused to let vanish. The breach had fed on forgetting. We were starving it. The ground split open beneath the circle, not into darkness, but into light. Linding fierce infinite. A roar filled the space, a lot of a monster, but a resistance of remembrance. Now, Maussey shouted. We held the memory like a weapon, corrected our teeth, and jumped. The moment we jumped everything tore apart. Not just the world, we expected that, but something deeper, more personal. The breach fought back. As we fell into the light, it caught at us, hurling pieces of itself and desperation. Phantoms made from fracture time, false memories stitched together like broken dolls. I saw my own mother turning to ash at the breakfast table.

44:19Maussey screaming my name from inside a burning car that never existed. My house overgrown with finds that whispered in tongues. All of it lies. All of it meant to make us doubt. I held tighter to Maussey's hand. She screamed through clenched teeth. Don't let go. The light pulls brighter. The false memories began to dissolve. The breach couldn't hold us anymore. It was unraveling. It's thread snapped by the force of what we'd chosen to keep. And then, in back point, not hard, not like hitting ground. More like arriving. I opened my eyes. We were in the field. The real one. No shimmer in the air. No triangle in the sky. The stones were there, yes, but inert now, weathered in crackle-like old grey stones. The sun was rising. Birds tripped. Maussey was beside me, breathing hard, shaking but alive. She looked at me and broke into a choked laugh. We made it. I looked around. Everything felt real solid. The grass, the sky, the cool morning air. And then I saw something else.

45:21In the distance near the edge of the field. They gazed. People. Dissons of them stepping out from the tree line, linking against the morning light, like they'd been asleep for years. Some stumbled. Others did tall, days but whole. Then she saw Friard Emma, Mr. Ricks, Briel, eyes wide, stepping forward with hesitant wonder. They remembered. They were remembered. I nearly collapsed. Cheers burned down my face. Maussey stared in disbelief. It worked. Not everyone had returned. Some we would never know. Maybe they were too far gone. Maybe they'd become part of the breach itself. But so many had come back. And as they gathered in the field, finding each other, embracing, crying, laughing, real, I realized something. The world hadn't stopped forgetting. It never would. But as long as even one person remembered, as long as someone held on, refused to let go, fought from memory, then the breach could never win completely. I turned to Maussey. We write it all down, I said. She nodded. Every name, every story, we make them real again.

46:24And so we did. We filled notebook after notebook. At first it was names, then faces, stories, where people had been, who they were before the breach took them. We sat with them, irs at a time, listening, recording everything they could remember. Because they wanted to remember now. They needed it like food, like oxygen. And for the first time in what felt like forever, the town felt alive. Not bustling, not loud, but present. Neighbors stopped pretending they didn't notice things. People walked a little slow, looked each other in eyes. The old community board, long abandoned, became a makeshift memory wall. Anyone could post names, sketches, photographs, even scraps of writing about the ones who hadn't come back. We didn't talk about the breach publicly, not yet. There was no headline to explain it, no clear villain to blame, and maybe no one else would believe it unless they'd felt it the way we had. But in a quiet way, the shrews spread. A local artist began painting murals of the return of teacher re-opened the library and set up a memory archive, a notebooks front and center. Someone rebuilt the stone circle at the field's edge, not as a monument, but as a warning. And every few nights, Maussey,

47:28and I went back there just to sit to remember. One night, as we watched Fireflies dance through the tall grass she asks, do you think it's really over? I didn't answer right away. The stars above us felt vast, too vast. I remembered what the breach had felt like. The hunger, that colder Asia that didn't just take people, but ended them, unwrote them. No, I said quietly, but I think it's dormant. She nodded slowly, waiting. But next time, I added, it won't catch us off guard, because we knew now that forgetting wasn't passive. It wasn't harmless. It was a force and remembering, truly choosing to remember, was an act of rebellion. Maussey smiled. Then we keep rebelling. And so we did. We became the town's quiet archivists, its memory keepers, not heroes, just two stubborn people who refused to forget. And in that choice, in that defiance, we kept the breach up, because monsters feed on what we let slip away. And we weren't letting anything go again. And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.

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