Are You Alive?
By Maayan - bronze member
Submitted on September 03, 2026
The old House of Mooncove
Chapter 1
"Are you alive?" I asked into the morning darkness, not expecting a response, and just as I thought, and just as it is every day, nothing, not one bit. My mother tells me every night that my father is out there somewhere, wanting to come home, but she has been telling me that tale since I was 6. I am 15 now, so sometimes I find it hard to believe. According to my mom, my father left to keep me safe. He left because he could not stay, but I know his name. I looked his name up on the old, broken computers in my school when I really should be studying for math, and all I ever find is a cold case from when I was 6: that a man went missing, and they found his truck flipped under the old red bridge in the woods that lead to the next town over.
My name is Silver. I am 15. My sixteenth birthday is in 3 weeks, and it also happens to be the night of the biggest red moon in the past 300 years (pretty cool, right?). Right now, my mom is out of town. She went 3 towns over to do some bank stuff, or wherever adults go to put their money in a place where the bandits won't get it (yes, bandits still existed, and no, they are not the ones stealing your left sock; those are gremlins)(yes the gremlins break into your dryers and steal your socks). So I have been home alone for the past 4 days, and it's been pretty chill. I went to school, ate some pizza, and played with some fire, and had to go on an hour-long manhunt for my favorite purple sock (I think a gremlin took it). It's been a chill past 4 days, with nothing much going on.
My thinking has been rudely interrupted with a bang at the door from God knows who.
"COMING!" I yell, knowing they can't hear me.
I roll off the bed and wander downstairs to the front door.
"Who is it?" I ask, knowing exactly who it is.
The voice on the other side of the door responds, "It's the mailman, Silver. Open up, I need you to sign the package for your mom."
One of many things I forgot to mention is my mom has a bit of a problem. She buys way the hell too many house plants: roses, tulips, fly traps, and so, so, so many vines. But whatever, I can't do much about it.
I unlock the door, then pull the massive thing open.
"Finally, took you long enough to open that."
"Hey, I was mentally taking notes about where to put all these plants. It's not my fault she buys so many plants."
I sign for the package and then found out my mom bought palm trees (why palm trees? We are nowhere near a beach. We live in Mooncove, like 500 miles from a beach).
Ok, so I am not completely in tune with all the strange things my mom does. I mean, don't get me wrong, some of the bullies at school think she is a witch (and every time they say that, I threaten to curse them). As much I dislike my mom’s strange obsession with house plants I love her so much she raised me all by herself since I was only 6 years old.
I can never repay her for that.
Well, I could probably start by watering her plants more often.
The problem is that my mom owns so many plants that if I miss one day of watering them, they start looking at me like I personally offended them.
Seriously.
I swear one of the vines in the kitchen moved when I walked by it yesterday.
Then again, weird stuff isn't exactly unusual in Mooncove.
Mooncove is the kind of town where nobody locks their doors but everyone carries a flashlight after sunset. The kind of town where your teacher might cancel class because a troll decided to take a nap in the middle of the road. The kind of town where people complain about bandits the same way people complain about bad weather.
Most towns have problems like taxes or traffic.
We have problems like "something keeps stealing chickens" and "please stop feeding the forest spirits."
I have lived here my whole life, so none of that seems strange to me.
Well... most of it doesn't.
The town sit on the edge of a giant stretch of forest called the Blackwood.
The Blackwood goes on for miles.
Nobody knows exactly how far.
Every few years some idiot decides they're going to map the whole thing.
A few weeks later they usually come back tired, confused, and missing at least one shoe.
One guy came back with an extra shoe.
Nobody ever figured out how that happened.
As for me, I try not to spend too much time in the woods.
Not because I'm scared.
Because I'm smart.
There's a difference.
Besides, school already takes up enough of my time.
Mooncove Academy isn't exactly exciting its just a old red building that was built god knows when with a set of stairs that could kill you if you offended them.
Most days consist of math, history, lunch, trying not to fail math, and then more math.
The only thing keeping me sane is my friends.
Well.
Friend.
Technically.
Her name is Arianna, and he has somehow managed to get banned from touching three separate science projects despite never actually being in the science club. To this day, nobody knows how. Honestly, neither does she. Sometimes I think Arianna survives entirely through luck and poor decision-making. Actually, that's most teenagers in Mooncove. Including me.
Arianna was also 15 and had two younger brother who she often had to watch while her parents were at work or out of town. She was most likely at home right now with her brothers trying to make sure they did not burn half of Mooncove to the ground (not like that would ever happen) and also making sure that her 2 massive dogs did not shove the fence over again (she might as well be raising wolves).
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A cake that survived a disaster
Chapter 2
Being home alone sounds a lot cooler than it actually is.
For the first few hours, it's great. Nobody tells you to clean your room. Nobody asks if you've finished your homework. Nobody reminds you that eating cake counts as dessert and not breakfast.
You can leave dishes in the sink for an extra hour. You can stay up way too late watching terrible movies. You can walk around the house talking to yourself and nobody looks at you like you've completely lost it.
For a while, it feels like freedom.
After four days, though, things start getting a little boring.
By day four, I'd run out of movies worth watching, finished the book I'd been reading, and reorganized my desk twice for absolutely no reason. The silence that had seemed peaceful at first was starting to feel a little too quiet.
I was currently sitting cross-legged on the living room floor trying to teach one of my mom's plants to play cards.
It wasn't going well.
The plant had yet to make a single move.
I stared at the hand of cards balanced against its pot.
"Your poker face is impossible to read," I told it.
The plant remained silent.
Typical.
I waited a few more seconds anyway, just in case it was thinking through its strategy. It wasn't.
With a sigh, I gathered up the cards and glanced toward the front window.
Outside, the afternoon sun hung high above Mooncove, bathing the streets in warm golden light. Through the glass, I could see people moving between shops, carrying bags and chatting as they walked. A shopkeeper across the street was setting up a sign on the sidewalk, and farther down the road a group of kids raced toward the town pond, laughing loudly enough that I could hear them from inside.
The same pond where, ten years ago, Arianna and I had accidentally started a duck uprising.
The ducks won.
To this day, neither of us liked talking about it.
I leaned back against the couch and let my gaze wander around the room.
Plants. More plants. Even more plants.
At this point, I was pretty sure our house contained more plants than furniture.
There were plants on shelves, plants hanging from the ceiling, plants sitting on tables, and plants occupying windowsills that probably hadn't seen their original purpose in years. Some were small and harmless-looking. Others seemed large enough to qualify as roommates.
Mom had promised she wasn't bringing home any more while she was out of town.
I didn't believe her.
The woman had once come home with three rose bushes, a cactus, and something that might have been a tree but was honestly too large to identify. It had taken up half the kitchen for a week before she found somewhere to put it.
A week later, another mysterious plant had appeared. She claimed she'd had it the whole time. Nobody believed that either. I was still eyeing a suspiciously large fern in the corner of the room when a loud knock rattled the front door.
I groaned.
"Please don't be more plants."
Another knock.
Louder this time.
I climbed to my feet and headed toward the door.
"IF YOU BROUGHT MORE PALM TREES, I AM MOVING OUT!" I yell.
"Good thing I didn't bring any."
I know that voice.
I throw the door open and find Arianna standing there with a backpack slung over one shoulder and a grin that usually means one of two things: she either has snacks or has done something incredibly stupid.
"Please tell me you brought snacks."
"I brought cake mix."
"Close enough."
Arianna is my best friend. We have known each other since we were 5 years old and got banned from feeding ducks at the town pond after we accidentally convinced them to follow us all the way to the marketplace. In our defense, we did not know the duck would assume we still had bread after we showed them we did not have any left.
"Your mom still gone?" she asks as she walks inside.
"Yep."
"Cool."
"Why is that cool?"
"Because that means we can make a giant cake without adult supervision."
I stare at her.
"Arianna, we are the exact reason adults supervise things."
Twenty minutes later we are making a giant cake without adult supervision.
The first problem is that neither of us can find the measuring cups.
The second problem is that Arianna decides measuring is more of a suggestion anyway.
The third problem is that I accidentally drop an entire egg on the floor.
Arianna points at it.
"You gonna clean that up?"
"No."
"Why?"
"I think the gremlins deserve a snack."
By some miracle, the cake actually turns out edible.
While it cools, we threw ourselves onto the couch and put on one of those old adventure movies where a hero spends two hours looking for a magical sword and somehow never needs to use the bathroom.
Halfway through the movie, Arianna nudges me.
"You excited for your birthday?"
"A little."
"A little?"
"It's just a birthday."
"It's your sixteenth birthday."
"And?"
"And the giant red moon thing."
I shrug.
"Yeah, that's pretty cool."
"The coolest thing to happen in this town in like three hundred years."
"I still think the duck incident was cooler."
Arianna threw a pillow at my head.
“I am serious the duck incident was amazing."
“Yeah sure sure”
So yes the whole town is freaking out about this moon thing even though I do not think its that crazy. I mean yeah sure its the most interesting thing that has happened in the boring old town for the past few decades but I still do not thing people should be freaking out about.
The rest of the afternoon passes like how it normally would when two people who are best friends are left alone: bad jokes, way too much cake, and arguing about whether gremlins would pay taxes if someone made them. Honestly, it was one of the better days I had in a while.
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We find something we shouldn't have
Chapter 3
After Arianna left, the house felt weirdly quiet.
Not creepy quiet. Not like some weird gremlin would jump out of the walls and eat my socks again. Just the kind of quiet that happens after someone spends four hours making terrible jokes in your living room and somehow making them worse every time they repeated them.
I stood in the kitchen staring at the remains of our giant cake.
Half of it was gone. The other half looked like it had survived a natural disaster. The frosting leaned sideways in places, one corner had completely collapsed, and there were sprinkles all over the counter because apparently neither of us understood the concept of aiming.
I stared at it for a moment.
The cake stared back.
"Good enough," I said to no one.
Honestly, if it lasted another twenty-four hours without falling apart, I'd consider it a success.
I grabbed another slice and headed toward the living room. The house creaked around me as I walked. It always did that when nobody else was around. Old houses liked making noises. They spent years pretending everything was normal and then suddenly made a sound that convinced you a murderer was living in the attic.
Not that I had an attic.
At least I didn't think I had an attic.
I stopped walking.
Actually, I wasn't completely sure. Mom bought enough weird stuff that she could probably hide an entire extra floor somewhere and forget to mention it.
By the time I reached the mudroom, I'd somehow convinced myself there was a secret ballroom hidden inside the walls.
There wasn't.
Instead, there were palm trees.
Three giant palm trees.
The same giant palm trees the mailman had left right on the wooden planks in our mudroom where we stored boots when it snowed.
Seriously.
Why palm trees?
We lived nowhere near a tropical island.
My mom bought enough plants to start a jungle, but these things were ridiculous. The leaves stretched in every direction like they were trying to escape. One of them was practically touching the ceiling.
I sighed and shoved my hands into my pockets.
"Guess I should move these before Mom gets home."
I immediately remembered my mom wouldn't be home for days.
Still.
Future me would probably appreciate it.
The first tree wasn't too bad. The second nearly crushed my foot. The third refused to cooperate because apparently plants enjoy causing emotional damage.
I grabbed the edge of the pot and pushed.
Nothing.
I pushed harder.
Still nothing.
The tree remained exactly where it was.
"Move."
Nothing.
"Move or I turn you into firewood."
The tree remained unconcerned.
I sometimes think there are spirits living inside trees and they can hear me. They just think I'm bluffing.
I am not bluffing.
I would absolutely turn them into firewood.
With one final shove, I threw my entire weight against the pot.
The giant container scraped across the floorboards with a horrible grinding noise. I stumbled forward as the pot moved several inches.
And revealed a metal ring buried beneath it.
I froze.
"...Huh."
For a second I just stared.
The ring stared back.
Well.
That wasn't concerning at all.
The ring was attached to a square wooden hatch hidden under years of dirt and dead grass.
I stared at it.
The hatch stared back.
Well.
That wasn't concerning at all.
For a second I considered pretending I never saw it.
That seemed like a smart idea.
Unfortunately, I am not known for making smart decisions.
I immediately did what every intelligent person would do.
I called Arianna.
She answered after two rings.
"Did you burn down your house?"
"No."
(Why does she always think I burn the house down? She is literally the only one who has actually burned down part of a house.)
"Oh. Then what's wrong?"
"I found a secret hatch."
There was a pause.
A long pause.
Then:
"I'll be there in five minutes."
She hung up.
I looked down at the hatch.
"Apparently we're doing this."
The hatch did not respond.
Which was probably for the best.
Twenty minutes later she arrived carrying a flashlight, a backpack, and enough snacks to survive an apocalypse.
"Why did it take twenty minutes?"
"I had to prepare."
"For what?"
"For the possibility of ghosts."
I pointed at the backpack.
"What part of that is ghost hunting equipment?"
"The snacks."
"Of course."
"Ghost investigations take energy."
"Ghosts don't exist."
(They do technically. I just choose not to believe that.)
"That's exactly what a ghost would say."
"I'm not arguing with you."
"You never win when you do."
Unfortunately she was right.
We spent the next few minutes clearing dirt off the hatch. The more dirt we removed, the older it looked.
Really old.
The wood was dark and weathered. The metal ring was covered in rust. Tiny roots had grown around the edges, like the ground itself had been trying to keep people away from it.
Which honestly felt like a warning.
I grabbed the handle.
"You ready?" she asked quickly.
"No."
I swallowed.
"Cool."
She grabbed the ring before I could stop her.
The hatch groaned loudly before swinging open. The sound echoed through the mudroom as a blast of cold air rushed out.
The kind of air that had been trapped somewhere for a very long time.
I immediately took a step back.
"Nope."
"Yep."
"Nope."
"Too late."
A narrow staircase disappeared into darkness.
Arianna shined her flashlight downward. The beam vanished into the shadows.
"I hate it."
"We haven't even gone down yet."
"Exactly."
We looked at each other.
Then immediately started going down.
Because apparently neither of us has survival instincts.
The stairs creaked beneath our feet as we descended. Dust floated through the flashlight beam. The deeper we went, the colder it got.
Which I definitely did not like.
At the bottom sat a small underground room.
Shelves lined the walls. Old boxes were stacked everywhere. Maps hung from rusty nails. And in the far corner sat a wooden desk.
For a moment neither of us spoke.
"Silver."
"Yeah?"
"I don't think your mom knows about this."
I looked around.
"No kidding, Sherlock."
We started searching.
Most of the boxes contained boring things. Tools. Rope. Camping supplies.
A collection of spoons for some reason.
A lot of spoons.
Like an unreasonable amount of spoons.
"Why are there so many spoons?"
Arianna opened another box.
"I don't know."
"Do you think someone was preparing for a spoon emergency?"
"What would a spoon emergency even be?"
"I don't know, but they were clearly ready for it."
She shook her head.
"You're weird."
"Says the person who packed four bags of chips to investigate a hole in the ground."
"That's called planning."
I opened another box.
More camping supplies.
Exciting.
For a moment I wondered if this was all the room was.
A weird underground storage closet full of random junk and spoons.
Then Arianna stopped moving.
"Uh..."
I looked up.
"What?"
"You're gonna want to see this."
That sentence has never once been followed by anything good.
I walked over anyway.
A wooden chest sat shoved beneath one of the shelves.
It was smaller than I expected.
Old too.
Really old.
Dust covered the lid. The corners were scratched. The lock looked like it hadn't been touched in years.
Arianna pointed at it.
"See?"
"I am looking at it."
"Look harder."
"It's a chest."
"A mysterious chest."
"That's still a chest."
She looked disappointed by my lack of excitement.
Personally, I thought finding a secret underground room was already enough adventure for one day.
The chest disagreed.
I crouched beside it.
The lock was rusted almost completely through.
I touched it.
The metal immediately snapped apart.
Both of us jumped.
"Okay."
"Okay."
Neither of us moved for a second.
Then I slowly lifted the lid.
Dust puffed into the air.
Inside were dozens of envelopes.
I blinked.
Then blinked again.
Letters. Just letters. A lot of letters, neatly stacked on top of one another. Every single envelope had handwriting on the front.
The exact same handwriting.
My stomach twisted.
No. No way.
I knew that handwriting. I hadn't seen it in years, but I knew it. Some things you don't forget, no matter how hard you try.
Arianna leaned in over my shoulder.
"You know whose writing that is?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My brain had stopped somewhere between opening the chest and seeing the envelopes.
My hand reached toward the top letter, moving slowly, like if I went too fast it would disappear.
The handwriting matched the signature from the newspaper article.
The article everyone always talked about. The one about my missing father. The one that told everyone he was dead. The one that made me believe for years that he was never coming back.
The room suddenly felt smaller, like the walls had shifted closer without anyone noticing.
"Silver..."
Arianna's voice sounded far away.
I picked up the top envelope. My hands were shaking, and I wasn't sure if she noticed. I hoped she didn't.
Then I saw the date.
And my heart stopped.
I stared at it, then looked again, then a third time, like the numbers might change if I just looked hard enough.
They didn't.
Three months after my father supposedly disappeared.
That wasn't possible.
It couldn't be.
For a moment I tried to explain it away—maybe I was reading it wrong, maybe the ink had faded, maybe my brain was filling in something that wasn't there.
But the date stayed exactly the same.
Clear.
Painfully clear.
My chest tightened.
There was no way my father could have written this.
And yet everything about it screamed that he had.
The same curve in the J. The same little star at the end of his signature. The same handwriting I remembered from birthday cards and notes stuck to the fridge.
I swallowed hard.
Arianna didn't say anything.
Which honestly scared me more than if she had.
Usually she always had something to say. A joke. A comment. A ghost theory. Anything.
But now she was silent.
My hands shook as I opened the envelope. The paper crackled softly, yellowed and slightly wrinkled from years of sitting untouched.
The room went completely quiet.
No creaking. No voices. Nothing.
I could hear my own heartbeat, which felt like it was doing a terrible job at staying calm.
Carefully, I unfolded the paper.
Every movement felt louder than it should have.
The page felt heavier than it had any right to be.
I looked down.
The first line read:
"If you are reading this, Silver, then something has gone very wrong."
I froze.
The words blurred for a second. I blinked and read them again.
They didn't change.
The room felt colder all of a sudden.
The shadows outside the flashlight beam looked deeper, like something might be standing just beyond them, waiting. (I really hoped it wasn't after my socks.) and for the first time in years, I wondered if my father might not be dead after all.
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Letters from long ago
Chapter 4
I dropped the note and stumbled back. There was no way my father wrote that. He was dead. Everyone said he was dead. Everyone told me to move on and stop thinking I would ever have a dad. How could this note have his handwriting? This note was dated three months after he supposedly died. I looked at Arianna, who was standing beside a box overflowing with moldy newspapers from who the hell knows when. (I would have fully believed anyone who told me a T-Rex had read them.) At the exact same moment, we both came to the same conclusion: we needed to get back upstairs immediately. I shoved the note back into the box, and we bolted for the stairs, tripping over our own feet as we ran before slamming the trapdoor shut behind us.
We sat there for a while, neither of us moving, both of us staring at the trapdoor like it might explain itself if we looked long enough.
The room felt smaller than it had before. The air seemed heavier somehow, as if opening that hidden space had let something loose into the house. Dust floated lazily through the sunlight coming from the nearby window, and every tiny sound suddenly seemed louder. The ticking of the kitchen clock. The hum of the refrigerator downstairs. The creak of the old house settling around us.
None of it felt normal anymore. I couldn't stop thinking about the note. The handwriting. The date. The signature. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw it again. My father's name written at the bottom of the page. Not printed. Not forged. Written. The same way he had signed birthday cards and old school forms. The same way I remembered from the few things Mom had kept in a box at the back of her closet. Everyone said he was dead. Everyone.
Teachers, neighbors, relatives, even my mom. Nobody ever questioned it. Nobody ever acted like there was any mystery left to solve. My father had disappeared years ago, and eventually people stopped talking about him altogether. But if he was dead, then how could that note exist?
Arianna finally let out a slow breath.
"Okay..." she said. "So let's think about this logically."
"Yeah," I replied, even though nothing about this felt logical.
My voice sounded weak. Distant. Like it belonged to somebody else.
"Either someone faked the note," she continued, "or... your dad didn't die when everyone said he did."
The words hung in the air between us.
"Or," she added quickly, "we're missing something obvious."
"Like what?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "That's the problem."
I leaned back against the wall and rubbed my face with both hands.
Nothing made sense.
The note looked old. The room looked untouched. The dust down there had been thick enough to leave footprints. It wasn't like somebody had snuck in recently and planted it as some kind of joke. And even if they had, why? Why go through all that trouble? Why hide it under my house? Why use my father's handwriting?
"I know his handwriting," I said quietly. "That wasn't fake."
The words left my mouth before I could stop them. Arianna didn't argue this time. That was worse. Normally she would've laughed and told me I was being dramatic. She would've come up with some ridiculous explanation involving pranksters, criminals, or aliens. Instead, she just sat there. Thinking. Worried. For the first time since I'd met her, Arianna looked genuinely unsure of herself.
"So what are you saying?" she asked carefully.
I stared at the floorboards. A crack ran through one of them near the trapdoor. I found myself tracing it with my eyes, avoiding hers.
"I'm saying..." I hesitated. "What if everyone's wrong?"
The moment I said it out loud, it sounded impossible. But it also sounded possible. More possible than it should have. Arianna looked at me for a long second, searching my face like she was trying to figure out whether I actually believed what I was saying.
"That's a big 'what if,'" she said finally.
"Yeah."
My stomach twisted. Because I did believe it. At least part of me did. A small part I'd spent years trying to ignore. The part that never completely accepted the story everyone told me. The part that still looked for him in crowded places. The part that sometimes imagined hearing his voice when I was younger. The part that secretly hoped he might walk through the front door one day and explain everything. The silence returned. Outside, a car drove past the house. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked. Life was continuing like normal while mine felt like it had just been flipped upside down.
Arianna stood up first, brushing dust off her jeans.
"I think..." she began. "We should tell someone."
"My mom?" I asked.
"Yeah. Or the cops. Someone who actually knows what to do with this."
I nodded. It made sense. It was the responsible thing to do. But for some reason, I didn't move. Part of me wasn't ready to hand the mystery over to somebody else yet. The note felt important. Personal. Like it had been left specifically for me. Arianna glanced at the trapdoor again before looking back at me.
"We're not going back down there right now."
It wasn't a question. I followed her gaze. The wooden door looked completely ordinary. Just a square piece of wood in the floor. Nothing special. Nothing scary. And yet I couldn't shake the memory of standing in that hidden room with the note in my hands. I let out a shaky breath.
"Yeah. Okay."
Another pause settled over us. Longer this time. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next.
"I'm gonna head home," she said eventually, slinging her bag over her shoulder.
I looked up.
"Already?"
"Yeah."
She gave a small shrug, but it didn't quite hide the uneasiness in her face.
"This is... a lot. And it's your family, you know? You should probably talk to your mom first."
"Right."
Arianna lingered near the doorway for a moment. It looked like she wanted to say something else. Maybe she was trying to come up with some reassuring joke. Maybe she wanted to tell me everything would be okay. Instead, she just shook her head.
"Text me, okay?" she said. "As soon as you figure anything out."
"I will."
She started toward the door, then stopped and looked back at me.
"And seriously," she added, her voice softer now, "don't go back down there alone."
I forced a small smile.
"I won't."
She didn't look convinced. Honestly, I wasn't convinced either, but she nodded anyway and walked out. A few seconds later, I heard the front door close, the sound echoing through the house before everything fell silent.
The house felt different without Arianna there. Quieter. Bigger. Emptier.
I sat there for a minute, listening to the silence and trying to make sense of everything that had happened. Every little noise seemed louder now—the faint creak of the floorboards, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the old house settling around me.
Eventually, my eyes drifted back to the trapdoor.
It sat there completely still, as if nothing had happened. As if there wasn't a hidden room beneath it. As if there wasn't a note down there signed by a man who was supposed to be dead.
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was waiting.
Waiting for me to come back.
Waiting for me to find something I had missed.
And somehow, deep down, I knew this wasn't over.
Not even close.
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I really really hate my dad
Chapter 5
Hours passed, and nothing happened. No one came for me, no gremlins tried to steal my socks, and nothing came jumping out of the trapdoor. Everything was fine, and the house was once again silent. I felt safe and sound, and like no one could get me. I decided that the best course of action was to ignore what Arianna said and head back down into the basement. That is 100% the best idea I've had while my mother was gone. Not the fact that baking a giant cake was a good idea, but this? This is a really bad idea.
So I pulled the heavy wooden trapdoor open and flicked on my flashlight, immediately starting to cough violently because apparently the basement had been storing dust for the apocalypse. Once I could breathe again, I started down the stairs into the dark basement that was full of letters telling me that maybe my whole life was a lie and that my dad was alive and out there somewhere. You know, normal basement stuff. I flicked on the light at the bottom of the stairs, and the basement lit up through the dusty air. Turning off my flashlight, I started rummaging through the boxes and shelves.
Most of the boxes crumbled into dust and sludge from years of water damage and being left alone to rot. I pulled a particularly large box off a shelf and lifted the lid. A smell like rotten eggs hit me immediately. Inside were old newspapers from when I was six. The headlines were exactly what I expected: "Young Man Goes Missing After Truck Flips Off Old Red Bridge in Mooncove." Every single paper had some version of that headline plastered across the front page like it was the only thing that had happened all year. One of the newspapers had a strange article about the crash. According to the report, there had been no body at the scene, no blood, and no evidence that anyone had even been inside the truck when it went over the bridge. I flipped through more papers, mostly finding the same stories about my father and his disappearance. Nothing really stood out as useful until I found one article buried near the bottom of the box. It explained how the police had searched for four months before officially declaring my father's case cold and giving up the search.
I set the article down slowly, like it might bite me if I moved too fast. Four months. That was it. Four months before everyone decided my dad didn’t exist anymore. But that still didn’t explain the letters. I turned back to the shelves, this time scanning more carefully instead of just rummaging. Behind a box of rotting newspapers, I noticed something odd, a loose plank in the wall. It didn’t match the rest of the wood. It was newer. Too new. I pressed it lightly. It clicked. Of course it clicked.
The plank swung inward just enough to reveal a narrow gap behind the wall. I shined my flashlight into it, expecting spiders, mold, or maybe an extremely territorial raccoon with unresolved issues. Instead, my stomach once again tried to shoot the cake up. Envelopes. Dozens of them. Neatly stacked inside a hidden compartment, like someone had been coming back again and again just to leave them there. The top one had my name on it. Not my full name, just my first name. Written in handwriting I didn’t recognize, but for some reason felt like I should have. I hesitated for exactly one second before opening it. Inside was a single sheet of paper.
If you’re reading this, then you went into the basement. So I guess you didn’t listen to her. That’s… about what I expected.
My hands started to shake, though I told myself it was just the cold. I kept reading.
Don’t trust the newspapers. They only tell you what they were allowed to see. Your father didn’t die in the crash. He left. And if you’ve found this, it means they’re already looking again.
I stopped reading. The word they didn't need an explanation. It never did in stories like this. It just sat there on the page like a tomato in a strawberry field, completely out of place and somehow making everything around it worse. My eyes stayed fixed on the letter for a moment longer before a sound from upstairs made my stomach drop. It wasn't loud. Just a single creak from somewhere above me.
I looked up toward the ceiling and listened. My house was old. Old houses creaked all the time. The floorboards shifted. The pipes knocked around whenever they felt like it. Sometimes the wind hit the walls just right and made the whole place sound like it was haunted. I told myself it was one of those things and forced my attention back to the letter. Then another creak echoed through the basement. This one sounded different. It sounded deliberate. Like someone had stepped onto the floor above me and then stopped moving.
I slowly lowered the letter and stared toward the staircase. The basement suddenly felt colder than it had a few seconds ago. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my ears. I tried to tell myself I was being paranoid, but then a terrible thought hit me. I couldn't remember locking the trapdoor.
I remembered opening it. I remembered coming downstairs. I remembered finding the newspapers and the hidden compartment. But for the life of me, I couldn't remember locking it afterward.
"Oh, you absolute idiot," I whispered.
For several seconds nothing happened. The silence stretched on so long that I almost convinced myself I had imagined everything. Then I heard it. A slow scraping sound. Wood rubbing against wood. The trapdoor. Someone was opening the trapdoor.
Every muscle in my body locked up. I stared at the stairs while my brain desperately tried to come up with a plan. Unfortunately, my brain chose that exact moment to stop being useful. The best idea it offered was climbing into one of the boxes and pretending to be old newspapers. Since that was a terrible plan, I settled for shoving the letters back into the compartment as quickly as I could. The panel clicked shut just as a shadow appeared at the top of the stairs. I nearly screamed.
The figure stood completely still for a moment, outlined by the dim light from upstairs. I couldn't make out any details, only the shape of someone standing there and looking down into the basement. Looking for me. Then the figure took a step forward. The stairs creaked beneath their weight. Another step. And another. Slowly, deliberately, they began making their way down into the basement.
My brain immediately switched into full panic mode. There was no way I was fighting whoever was coming down those stairs. I looked around the basement for somewhere to hide and quickly realized that most of my options were terrible. The shelves were too open, the boxes were falling apart, and I was pretty sure hiding under a desk only worked in movies. My eyes landed on the old broom closet in the back corner of the room. It wasn't a great hiding spot, but it was the only one I had. I ran for it, nearly tripping over a box in the process, and squeezed myself behind the door just as footsteps started creaking down the stairs.
They came down slow and careful, taking each step like it was trapped, knowing damn well that I was not smart enough to make sure my stairs were trapped. From what I could see, the person was wearing a long black cloak. (It's like ninety degrees outside, what the hell?) He walked into the middle of the room and looked around, then stared at the old plank that I had just been rummaging through.
"I know you are there. I know you can hear me," the man said with a voice that made me start shaking.
"You were never meant to find those. You were never meant to find out. But now that I know you know about your dad, and yes, he is alive, and he is searching for you. He needs you to see what he has been doing all these years."
I could make out that the man was almost six feet tall and had short black hair.
"Your father has been working on something for you, something that you will find amazing."
The man started ranting about the great things and wonders that my father had been doing all these years, but it did not make sense. Why would he leave me and my mom? The man dropped a letter on the floor and vanished into thick black smoke that filled the air, making me gag. After about three minutes, I came out from behind the door and grabbed the note off the floor. I tore it open, and it read in the same handwriting I remembered from the news:
Dear Silver, September 24th
I know you may think I abandoned you. I know you may even hate me for it. You and your mother have probably spent years wondering where I went and why I never came back. The truth is, I left because I needed time. I needed time to understand things, and time to work on something important. Things weren't working between your mother and me, and I believed that leaving was the best thing I could do for both of you, even if you never understand why.
For the past ten years, I have been working on a project unlike anything you've ever seen. I spent those years learning, building, and figuring things out. Now it's finally ready. I think you'll find it amazing. I'd love to see you again. More than that, I'd like you to come live with me and help me with this project. I need someone I can trust, and there is no one I would rather have by my side than you.
I hope you'll give me a chance.
Love,
Dad ♥
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A heart of glass? Love? Luck?
Chapter 6
I finished reading the note and just stood there, frozen. My dad is alive. He left us. He left me and my mom, and I spent ten years thinking he was dead. I spent every night staring out into the darkness, wondering and wishing that maybe, just maybe, my dad was okay. And he was. He is alive and well, and he left on purpose.
For years I imagined all the reasons he might not have come home. Maybe he got lost somewhere. Maybe he was hurt. Maybe he was trapped somewhere and trying to find his way back. Every time I thought about him, I always imagined that if he could come home, he would. I never once imagined that he simply chose not to.
I know my mom used to cry herself to sleep because I could hear her every night when I was seven. Some nights I would sit outside her bedroom door and just listen. I never knew what to do. I was too young to fix anything, too young to understand why she was hurting so much. All I knew was that she missed him. She spent years telling me he was out there somewhere and that one day he might come back. Even after everyone else had given up, she never completely stopped believing.
I was so mad. There was NO WAY that my father could have a good reason for being gone my whole childhood and never calling or sending letters. Ten years. Ten whole years. Not a single birthday card. Not a single phone call. Nothing. I wanted to scream and shout and break a window into a million pieces.
I hated him. He had NO RIGHT to just leave us behind and not tell us anything. What kind of person does that? What kind of father does that? And then after ten years he sends me a letter talking about some project like that somehow explains everything? Like I'm supposed to forget all those years and just come live with him because he finally decided he was ready?
And I don't know what I'm going to do since my mom is out of town and isn't going to be back for days. Not to mention that her husband IS ALIVE AND HE JUST LEFT FOR NO REASON. There was no way I was keeping this to myself, but there was also no way I was telling her over the phone. Not something like this.
I shoved the letter into my pocket and marched upstairs. I slammed the trapdoor shut behind me and pushed a heavy flower pot on top of it, just in case anyone, or anything, decided to come up and tell me that another one of my relatives I thought was dead was actually totally fine, and that one day they had just decided to disappear without telling anyone.
Then, just to be safe, I dragged another flower pot over too. You can never be too careful when mysterious basement strangers start delivering family updates.
I ran up to my room, threw open the door, and flipped open the loose panel in the back of my dresser. My hands shook as I pulled out the hidden drawer, the one place I REALLY, REALLY hoped nobody had searched.
Inside was the only thing I had left from the crash site: an old pocket watch.
I stared at it, running my fingers over the smooth glass.
WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE?
Why would my father leave?
WHY WOULD HE LEAVE LIKE THAT?
The watch felt heavy in my hands as memories flooded back. I remembered the day the police came to our house. I remembered the look on my mother's face when they told us he was gone, that there was nothing left of him except this watch, recovered from the wreckage.
I remembered the first night he didn't come to tuck me in. The first morning there were no waffles waiting at seven o'clock. The first time I let myself believe he wasn't coming back.
That he was really gone.
And now, after all these years, someone was telling me that my dad was actually alive? That he'd stayed away for my own good?
LIKE WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?
I gripped the watch so hard my knuckles turned white. For a second, I wanted to throw it across the room. I wanted to smash it against the wall and watch the glass shatter into a thousand pieces. But I couldn't. This stupid watch was all I had left of him. Or at least, all I thought I had left. My thumb brushed over the tiny scratch running across the metal casing. I knew every mark on it, every dent, every little imperfection.
When I was six, Dad used to let me hold it while he made breakfast. Every single time, he'd point at it and say, "Careful. That's older than both of us put together." Then I'd ask how old it really was, and every single time he'd give me a different answer. Two hundred years. A thousand years. Older than dinosaurs. Older than the moon. I'd laugh, and he'd pretend he was completely serious.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Those memories hurt now. They weren't memories of some distant stranger I barely knew. They were memories of my father. A man who was apparently alive. A man who apparently knew where I was. A man who apparently could have come home whenever he wanted.
The letter sat folded in my pocket, practically burning through the fabric. I pulled it out and read the last few lines again.
For your own good.
I hated those words.
Adults always said things were "for your own good" whenever they didn't want to explain themselves. Eat your vegetables. Go to bed. You can't stay up late. You can't know the truth. For your own good. But what truth? What could possibly justify disappearing for ten years? What kind of danger required abandoning your family? And if it really was that dangerous, why contact me now?
The question hit me so suddenly that I sat upright.
Why now?
If he'd stayed away all this time to protect us, then why send the letter? Why reveal himself at all after ten years of silence?
Unless something had changed.
Unless something had happened.
A cold feeling settled in my stomach. The stranger in the basement. The hidden room. The letter. None of it felt random anymore.
I looked toward my bedroom door. The house was silent. Too silent.
My eyes drifted toward the floor, toward the basement beneath me, toward the trapdoor I'd buried under flower pots.
A few hours ago, I would have sworn there was nothing under my house except dirt and old pipes. Nothing but old pipes and maybe a few gremlins, but now you could tell me there was a dragon sleeping with her babies in a crypt under my house and I would believe it.
I stared at the watch one last time before snapping it shut. Angry or not, confused or not, one thing was obvious. Somebody knew the truth.
And the answers weren't sitting up here in my bedroom.
They were downstairs.
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My mom knew? My mom KNEW?
Chapter 7
Here is the thing about bad decisions.
They always start with a plan.
Nobody wakes up and says "today I will do something stupid." What actually happens is you sit on your bedroom floor with a pocket watch in your hand and you think, I should be smart about this, and then you make a list, and the list makes you feel organized, and feeling organized makes you feel brave, and feeling brave is how people end up in basements.
So I made a list.
I found a pen and the back of an old math worksheet (a worksheet I had definitely not finished, which felt like the least of my problems now) and I wrote:
THINGS TO DO
1. Search the house
2. Find out what Mom knows
3. Do NOT go in the basement
4. Snacks
I looked at the list.
I crossed out number three.
Then I wrote it again, underlined it twice, and crossed it out a second time, because apparently I like arguing with myself in writing.
Then I added number five: Text Arianna so somebody knows where the body is.
I sat back and read the whole thing over.
Honestly? Solid list. Very professional. Arianna would have added something like "bring a weapon" or "check for cursed mirrors," but Arianna wasn't here, which was on purpose, which brings me to number five.
I pulled out my phone.
me: hey
me: hypothetically
me: if a person went back into the basement
me: would that be bad
The reply came back in four seconds. Four. She types faster than anyone should be legally allowed to.
arianna: SILVER
arianna: ABSOLUTELY NOT
arianna: i will walk over there and sit on you
me: hypothetically though
arianna: hypothetically i will hypothetically sit on you
I stared at the screen.
me: ok fine. im searching the house first. upstairs. lots of light. very safe
arianna: thats the most suspicious sentence you have ever sent me
arianna: and you've sent me a lot of suspicious sentences
arianna: remember the sock manhunt texts
me: that was a legitimate emergency
arianna: you sent me 41 messages
me: IT WAS THE PURPLE ONE
She sent back a picture of her dog looking disappointed in me.
Fair.
I put the phone in my pocket, grabbed the pocket watch, and stood up.
Technically I had not lied. I was searching the house first.
I just wasn't planning on stopping there.
* * *
The upstairs hallway of our house is about eleven feet long and contains four doors, one crooked picture frame, and a suspicious number of plants for a hallway.
I started with the linen closet, because I am nothing if not thorough.
Towels. Sheets. A heating pad. A box of Christmas lights that we have never once successfully untangled. Half a bag of birdseed, which raised questions I did not have time for.
No secret compartments. No hidden envelopes. No mysterious cloaked men.
I moved on.
The bathroom took ninety seconds and produced nothing except the discovery that we own four different kinds of shampoo and I have never used any of them on purpose.
My own room I skipped, because I have lived in it for fifteen years and I am pretty sure I would have noticed a trapdoor by now. Although at this point I was not confident about anything. If someone had told me my mattress opened up into a staircase I would have said "yeah, that tracks."
Which left my mom's room.
I stood outside her door for a second.
There is an unwritten rule in my house that you knock before going into my mom's room, even when she isn't home, which is a weird rule but she is a weird person and I love her, so.
I knocked.
"Sorry," I said to the empty room.
Then I went in.
* * *
Her room smelled like her. That was the first thing, and it hit harder than I expected. Dirt and lavender and the lotion she keeps on the windowsill. It smelled like being seven and having a fever and someone putting a cold cloth on your head.
I stood there for a second and felt like the worst person alive.
Then I opened her closet, because being the worst person alive was apparently on my list too, just not in writing.
The closet was the same as always. Coats crammed together. A shoebox of receipts. Two garden hats, which is one more garden hat than any human being needs.
And at the back, on the floor, half hidden under a folded blanket, the box.
I knew about the box.
Every kid knows about the box. There is always one. The one nobody talks about and nobody throws away and nobody opens in front of you. My mom kept it at the back of her closet and I had seen her carry it out exactly twice in ten years, both times on nights when she thought I was asleep, and both times I had lain in bed with my eyes open, listening to her not cry very quietly.
I pulled it out and sat down on the floor with it in my lap.
The cardboard was soft at the corners from being handled.
I opened it.
Photos, mostly. Loose, not in an album, the way photos end up when somebody keeps meaning to organize them and never does. My mom, younger, with shorter hair and a sunburn. A truck I recognized from newspaper front pages. A birthday cake with a badly piped 4 on it.
And him.
My dad, holding a baby who was extremely bald and extremely angry, which the back of the photo confirmed was me. My dad in a coat, in the snow, laughing at something outside the frame. My dad asleep in a chair with a book on his chest, taken by someone who thought that was funny enough to use up film on.
I sat there and looked at his face for a long time.
I had forgotten what he looked like from the side. That's a stupid thing to forget about a person, but I had.
I kept going through the pile, faster now, because if I slowed down I was going to start feeling things and I had a schedule.
And then I found the one that stopped me.
It was a picture of two men standing in front of the old red bridge.
One of them was my dad.
The other one was tall. Almost six feet. Short black hair.
I did not breathe for a second.
He looked younger in the photo, obviously, ten years younger, no cloak, just a jacket and a face and an expression I could not read at all. He had one hand on my dad's shoulder. They were both smiling, but only one of them looked like he meant it.
I flipped the photo over.
On the back, in my mother's handwriting, one word.
DON'T.
Not a name. Not a date. Just that.
"Cool," I said out loud, to nobody. "Cool cool cool. Very normal. Great photo."
My voice sounded thin in the empty room.
I put the picture down. Then I picked it back up and shoved it in my pocket, because leaving it there felt like letting it get away.
That was when I noticed the envelopes.
They were at the bottom of the box, underneath everything, held together with a rubber band that had gone hard and cracked with age.
Six of them. Addressed to my mother.
All in the same handwriting as the letters in the basement.
All opened.
Not torn open, either. Opened carefully, along the top edge, with something sharp. And then folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had gone soft and furry, the way paper gets when a person reads it more than a person should.
My hands went cold.
She knew.
She knew.
Ten years of "he's out there somewhere, sweetheart" and "he wanted to come home" and sitting on the edge of my bed telling me a story I stopped believing when I was eleven, and the whole time there were six envelopes in a box in her closet that she had read until the paper went soft.
I did not open them.
I want that on the record, because I am not sure I could explain why even now. My hands were on the rubber band and I was fully ready to, and then I thought about her face, and about how she reads them alone at two in the morning when she thinks nobody can hear her, and I put the rubber band back.
Some doors you get to choose to knock on.
"You could have told me," I said to the closet.
The closet, in keeping with the theme of my entire day, did not respond.
I put the box back exactly where it had been. I even folded the blanket over it the same crooked way. Then I closed the closet door, and stood up, and walked out of her room, and shut that door too.
Then I went downstairs.
* * *
Here is where things stopped being funny, and I want to say up front that I noticed. I noticed the exact moment.
It was the plants.
I came down the stairs and turned into the living room and stopped, because something was wrong with the room and it took me a full ten seconds to work out what.
The vines were pointing.
Not growing. Pointing. Every hanging vine in that room, and there are a lot of them, my mother owns approximately one vine per available inch of ceiling, all of them leaning the same direction. Toward the hallway. Toward the mudroom.
Like a room full of people all turning to look at the same door.
"No," I said.
I walked over to the big one by the window, the one that has been trying to reach the TV for two years, and I picked up a handful of it and moved it back to where it belonged.
It stayed for about four seconds.
Then it slid, slowly, out of my hand, and pointed again.
I put it down very carefully, the way you put down something that might be an animal.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Plants do that. Plants grow toward stuff. It's a science thing. Light. Whatever."
There was no light in that direction. The mudroom is the darkest room in the house and it was evening and I knew that, and I said the light thing anyway, out loud, in an empty house, to a vine.
My mother's plants have always been weird. That is an established fact of my life. They look at me when I forget to water them. They lean when I walk past. Arianna once said the fern in the corner "had opinions" and we laughed about it for a week.
We were not laughing now. Well. I wasn't. Arianna was probably fine.
I went into the kitchen and got a glass of water I didn't want, so my hands would have something to do, and I looked at the cake on the counter.
Half a cake. Sunken on one corner. Sprinkles everywhere, because neither of us understands the concept of aiming.
Nine hours ago I was arguing with my best friend about whether gremlins pay taxes.
I ate a bite of it standing up, straight off the plate with my fingers, and it was still good, and somehow that was the thing that almost made me cry.
"Get it together, Silver," I said.
Then I went to the mudroom.
* * *
The flower pots were where I left them, stacked on top of the trapdoor like a very stupid lock.
Two of them. Big ones. I remembered dragging them over because I did not want anything coming up.
I stood over them and did the math on that, and the math was not great, because a pot on top of a door works exactly as well going one direction as the other, and the direction I was about to go was down.
"Future me is going to be so mad at present me," I said.
Present me shoved the first pot aside anyway.
The palm trees were still in the corner, all three of them, leaves stretched out in every direction like they were trying to escape.
Except they weren't stretched in every direction anymore.
They were leaning too.
Down. All three of them, bowed toward the floor, toward the hatch, close enough that the lowest leaves were resting on the wood.
I looked at them for a long moment.
"Are you guys doing that on purpose?"
Nothing.
"Because if you are, I need you to know that I have absolutely turned trees into firewood before."
That was a lie. I have never turned a tree into anything. But it felt important to maintain the bluff.
The palm trees did not appear concerned.
I moved the second pot, grabbed the ring, and pulled.
The hatch groaned open, and the cold came up out of it like something exhaling.
That's the part I can't explain right. It wasn't cold air. Cold air comes out of a fridge. This came out slow and heavy and it moved around my ankles, and the hair on my arms stood up all at once, and every single thing in my body said no.
I looked down the stairs into the dark.
"I'm coming back up in ten minutes," I told the house.
Then I turned on my flashlight and went down.
* * *
The basement looked exactly how I left it. Shelves. Rotting boxes. Maps on rusty nails. The desk in the corner. The spoons, which I still had no explanation for and was starting to take personally.
The plank in the wall was shut. I had shoved it closed when the man came down the stairs, and it had clicked, and it was still clicked.
Good.
I pressed it.
Not good, obviously. That's the whole problem with me.
It swung inward and the flashlight found the envelopes right where they had been, dozens of them, stacked neat as bricks.
I sat down on the floor, cross-legged, in the dust, like I was about to teach a plant to play cards.
Then I started reading dates.
Not the letters. Just the dates on the fronts, because I wanted a timeline, because a timeline is a thing you can hold onto and I badly wanted something to hold onto.
The bottom envelope. The oldest, the one under everything else.
September 24th.
The next one up.
September 24th.
I frowned and pulled three more out of the middle of the stack.
September 24th. September 24th. September 24th.
My mouth went dry.
I went through them faster then, all of them, my hands moving quicker than my brain, envelope after envelope after envelope, ten years of them, and every single one said the same thing.
Every letter my father ever wrote was dated September 24th.
Which is my birthday.
I sat there in the dark on the floor of a room under my house and did the only piece of math I have ever done correctly on the first try.
Three weeks.
My sixteenth birthday is in three weeks. September 24th is in three weeks. September 24th is the night of the biggest red moon in three hundred years and it has not happened yet.
The letter in my pocket was dated a day that hasn't happened.
Every letter in that wall was dated a day that hasn't happened.
"That's not," I said, and stopped, because I did not have an end for that sentence.
The pocket watch was in my other pocket. My dad's watch. The one they pulled out of the wreck. The one that has not moved in ten years, that I have wound and shaken and dropped and taken apart and put back together wrong, the one that has sat at 6:41 for my entire remembered life.
It felt heavy like someone just put a weight in it.
And then, from somewhere behind the wall — behind the compartment, behind the envelopes, from the black gap where the cold air came from and where a wall has absolutely no business having a behind — something knocked back.
Twice.
Politely.
Like it had been waiting a very long time for someone to be home.
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Fire? Magic? Murder?
Chapter 8
The sound that came out of me was not a scream.
I have thought about it a lot since and I still do not have a word for it. It was not brave and it was not clever and it did not sound like a person. It came up out of somewhere under my ribs, tore its way out, and kept going after I wanted it to stop.
I heard it hit the basement walls and come back at me from three directions.
Then I ran.
I went up those stairs on both hands and one knee. The flashlight went out of my hand somewhere behind me and rolled and hit something and kept shining in a direction I did not want to know about.
Behind me the plank came off the wall.
Not swung open. Off. Wood cracked and hit the concrete.
And then footsteps.
Not dragging. Not scraping. Not any of the sounds I had spent the whole evening being afraid of.
Footsteps. Boots on concrete. Somebody walking.
Which was worse.
* * *
I got to the top and threw myself into the mudroom and grabbed the hatch and looked down, which was a mistake, and I knew it was a mistake while I was doing it.
He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me.
Long black cloak. Short black hair. Almost six feet. Hands empty at his sides.
Him. The same one. The one who had stood in the middle of that room and told me my father was alive and then turned into smoke and left me on the floor behind a broom closet door.
"Silver," he said.
He said it like we knew each other.
I slammed the hatch. I dragged the first flower pot on top of it, then the second, then a third that I do not remember picking up and could not have lifted on any other night of my life.
From under the floor, muffled, patient:
"We do not have time for this."
"Then leave."
The hatch came open.
Not blasted. Not broken. It came open the way a door opens when the person on the other side is simply stronger than what you put on it, and the pots went over, and dirt sprayed across the boards, and I was already running.
* * *
He never ran.
That is the part I keep coming back to at four in the morning. He walked the whole way. Through the mudroom, into the hall, past the palm trees, at the pace of a man who is late for something and has decided not to make it worse.
At the time it was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.
Now I am not sure it was not just a man trying very hard not to frighten a fifteen-year-old.
I ran for the front door and got my hand on the knob and something moved across it.
Vines. Three of them, thick as my wrist, across the door in an X, and the hanging plant that had been trying to reach the television for two years was down off its hook and lying across the floor between me and the way out.
I pulled at one. It did not move.
I did not have time to be afraid of that. I have been afraid of it since. Right then it was just one more thing in a house that had stopped being mine.
Behind me, in the hall, boots.
So I went to the kitchen.
* * *
Our kitchen is small. A counter along one wall, a window over the sink, the fridge, and an island in the middle that my mom built herself out of an old door and four legs.
On the island there was half a cake.
I put the island between me and the doorway and stood with my back against the sink and waited, and my hands were shaking so hard I could hear my own bracelet against the counter.
He stopped in the doorway.
He did not come in. He stood there with the dark hall behind him, and in the light I could see him properly for the first time, and he looked like nothing. He looked like a man. Forty, maybe. Tired around the eyes. Basement dust on his shoulders, a thin scar through one eyebrow, one hand flat against the doorframe like he needed it there.
"Silver," he said. "Listen to me."
"Get out of my house."
"I will. Tonight. With you."
"Get out of my house."
"September twenty-fourth." His voice went rough on the date. "Three weeks. They know it too. They have always known it. And they will be here a long time before your mother is."
"Who is they."
"That is not the question that keeps you alive tonight."
He took one step into the kitchen.
And the heat started.
* * *
It started in my hands.
Not warmth. Not a tingle. It went from nothing to too much in about a second and a half, like grabbing a pan handle you were sure was cold, except there was no pan and no handle and it was coming from inside my palms.
I looked down.
The skin was going red. There was light under it — actual light, moving, orange and low like something burning behind a curtain — and the air over my hands had started to bend the way air does above a road in August.
The counter under my left hand turned black.
I heard it happen. A short dry crack, and a line of scorch spread out from under my fingers across the countertop, and the dish towel hanging beside the sink went up all at once with a sound like a breath being taken.
"Silver." His voice changed completely. Every bit of the calm went out of it. "Silver. Look at me. You have to hold it."
I could not hold anything. That is not how it felt. It did not feel like a thing I had. It felt like a thing that had me, that had been in there my whole life, folded up small and quiet in my chest, and had just now been given permission by something and was standing all the way up.
"I don't know how—"
"Breathe. Breathe. You are going to bring this house down on both of—"
It came out of me.
The window did not break. It left. The whole thing, glass and frame and part of the wall under it, went out into the yard, and the noise arrived a full second after the light did.
The cabinet doors above the stove folded outward like paper.
Fire came up the wall behind the fridge in one motion, floor to ceiling, and stayed.
The island cracked down the middle and half of it slid to the floor and the cake went with it.
And it took me with it too. That is the part nobody tells you. I went back into the sink hard enough to knock the wind out of me and my hands were screaming and when I could look at them again the palms were blistered from the base of my thumbs to my wrists, both of them, my own hands, burned by something that came out of my own body.
I made a sound. Not a scream that time. Something smaller and worse.
The kitchen was burning. My kitchen, my house, my mother's house, on fire in five places at once with the ceiling starting to go brown, and I was on the floor in a pile of broken door and cake with my hands ruined, and the pressure was building again.
I could feel it coming back.
And he was still there.
He had been thrown into the doorframe and he was up on one knee and he was coming toward me, fast now, not calm anymore, one arm up against the heat, and he was shouting something over the sound of the fire.
I think it was my name.
I have decided it was my name.
* * *
The knife was on the floor beside me.
The big one. The stupid big one my mom uses for exactly nothing, the one Arianna had used nine hours ago to cut a giant cake into slices the size of bricks while I told her she was doing it wrong.
There was still frosting on the handle.
I picked it up with a hand that could barely close, and the second surge came up out of my chest with nowhere to go, and it went into the blade instead of into the room.
The steel went white.
I threw it.
I have never thrown anything accurately in my life. This went exactly where the thing inside me sent it, trailing fire the whole way across my kitchen, and it went into the middle of his chest and out through the back of the cloak and buried itself in the wall behind him.
He stopped.
He looked down at it.
Then he looked up at me, and he was not angry. That is the thing I would give anything not to have seen. He looked like a man who had just understood he was not going to get to finish a sentence.
"—the letters are mine," he said. "Not his. Silver. Read them ag—"
And he burst.
Not fire. Not blood. Dust. A grey wall of it, dry and thick, filling the whole room in a second — far more of it than could have come out of a body that size. It went up my nose and down my throat and I went over onto my hands and knees coughing so hard I saw white.
And it put the fire out.
All of it. Every flame in that kitchen, smothered at once, like something enormous had closed a hand over the room.
Then it settled.
And it was quiet.
* * *
The refrigerator was still running. That was the first thing I heard. Somewhere outside a dog was barking, because that is what the world does, it keeps going, it does not check with you first.
I sat on the floor of my burned kitchen in two inches of grey dust and breathed.
There was no body. No bones. No cloak. Just the knife in the wall with frosting still on the handle, and a clean patch on the floorboards, shaped like a man.
People do not do that.
I said it out loud. I said it maybe six times. It is a very good argument and I have been making it to myself for two days and it has not helped once, because here is the problem with it.
I do not know what he was.
I am never going to know what he was. That was a thing you could find out, once, and I put it in a wall.
He never touched me. I have gone over it nine hundred times and I cannot find the part where he touched me. He walked. He talked. He said my name like he had said it out loud before, a lot, for years, to somebody. When my hands lit up he did not run and he was not surprised. He told me to breathe.
He said the letters were his.
The letters in the wall. Ten years of envelopes, every one dated September twenty-fourth, in handwriting I did not recognize but felt like I should have.
Not my father's.
His.
Somebody wrote to me on my birthday every year for ten years and hid it under my house where I would find it, and tonight he finally came to explain, and I burned my kitchen down and put a knife through him before he got to the end of the sentence.
I took the photograph out of my pocket. It was bent at one corner and there was ash on it now.
My dad in front of the old red bridge. Beside him, a tall man with short black hair and a hand on his shoulder. Both of them smiling. Only one of them meaning it.
I turned it over.
DON'T.
My mother's handwriting. One word, no explanation, and two ways to read it.
Don't trust him.
Or don't hurt him.
* * *
I did not text Arianna.
I picked up my phone four times. I typed are you awake and deleted it. I typed something happened and deleted it. I typed i think i did something really bad, and I looked at it on the screen for a full minute, and I deleted that too.
There is no version of that message that does not end with my best friend walking into this kitchen.
I wrapped my hands in a wet dish towel because I could not think of anything else to do with them, and I sat in the dust with my back against the cabinet that was not there anymore, and after a while I looked up.
Every plant in that house had turned to face me.
Not the mudroom. Not the door. Me. The vines, the fern, the roses, the fly traps, the three palm trees lying on their sides in the hall. Every ridiculous plant my mother had ever dragged home and refused to explain, all of them pointed at me in a burned dark house, waiting for something.
I do not know what that is yet.
I am not sure I want to.
I looked at the clean patch on the floor, the one shaped like a man who had been standing there a few minutes ago, and I asked it the question I have asked into the dark every morning since I was six years old.
"Are you alive?"
Nothing answered.
Nothing was ever going to answer, because I had made sure of it.
And then, in my pocket, my father's watch — the watch that came out of the wreck, the watch that has sat at 6:41 for ten years, the watch I have kept and poked at and taken apart and put back together wrong — started ticking.
Steady. Even. Loud in a house with no other sound in it.
It was not telling the time.
It was counting.
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Hi, I am Lyra. I had a thought you could actually do a lot more with your story than just keep it as written content. A comic, webtoon, manga-style adaptation, character art or even illustrated scenes could give it a whole different audience and another way to monetize it. I simply help authors turn their ideas into artwork they can use to promote their work. I’m a commission based artist and have been working in this field for around 3 years. If you’ve ever thought about taking your story in that direction, I’d genuinely love to show you my portfolio. mail: contact.lilaclines@gmail.com inst: _lilac_lines_
Comment by lyraxo on September 12, 2026Liked by 0
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