Scene 60: Aftermath
The town of Briar Glen didn't burn.
It should have.
After the fire in the shaft, after the collapse, after the tremor that shook the nearby hills... there was nothing. No plume of smoke. No heat signature. No sirens.
Just silence.
Reaves woke beneath the ruins of the vent shaft, bruised but alive. Around her, the earth was blackened-not scorched, not charred-hollowed. Like sound had been mined out of the ground itself.
She tried to speak. Just a name. Carter's name.
Nothing came out.
And far beneath her, the ground exhaled once.
---
Scene 61: Missing
Two days later, federal agents arrived.
Reaves sat in the back of an unmarked van, blanket wrapped tight, eyes locked on the hills.
"I want to speak to someone in charge," she rasped. Her voice had returned-barely-but it scraped like sandpaper.
The agent, a pale man in a wrinkled black suit, looked at her over his clipboard. "No records of you being there, Ms. Reaves."
She blinked. "I have footage."
"You had footage."
He held up her melted phone. Her bag was empty. Her ID gone. Her recorder-a twisted plastic smear.
"There's no mine on any geological chart. Never has been."
"Then what the hell did I crawl out of?"
He didn't answer.
He just pressed STOP on the recorder and leaned in.
"We suggest you forget this."
She stared back, deadpan. "You ever hear a place breathe?"
His fingers twitched once.
Then he stood and walked away.
---
Scene 62: Ash Mouth
Back in the city, Reaves tried to rebuild.
She took a job as a night archivist at the state library-quiet work, safe. Familiar.
But sometimes, deep in the stacks, the silence thickened again.
One night, while cataloging a box of anonymous field tapes, she played a reel-to-reel marked simply:
> "ELI-1979"
It crackled.
Then:
> "-not sure if this will reach anyone. They told us to seal it. To seal the shaft. But it's not the only one. There are others. All over. Connected."
The speaker coughed. Wet. Strangled.
> "It doesn't want to kill us. It wants to echo."
> "It wants the world to repeat it."
Click.
The tape ended.
When she looked down, black ash dusted the table.
And the inside of her mouth tasted like soot.
---
Scene 63: Carter in the Walls
The psychiatric ward where Carter vanished was closed after the fire. Officially, a wiring failure caused the evacuation.
Unofficially, none of the night nurses will talk about what happened.
But the walls remember.
Maintenance crews reported hearing sobbing through vents. Whispers that knew their names. A voice, barely audible through the static of an unplugged radio:
> "Help. Me."
In Room 17B, where Carter once scrawled messages into the drywall, more words have appeared. Fresh.
Scratched from the inside.
A phrase on repeat:
> "Let me out."
---
Scene 64: The Breathing Hills
Back in Briar Glen, something stirs.
The town is still empty. The birds still gone.
But hikers near the ridge trail have reported strange noises: not animal, not wind. Just... speaking.
Not in English. Not in any language.
The sound is more like remembering aloud.
At night, hikers say the hills hum.
And sometimes, you can hear something calling out from under the stone.
A voice you once knew. Calling you by name.
One man never came back.
His tent was still there. His recorder still running.
On it, a single voice whispered one phrase over and over:
> "We are echoes now."
---
Scene 65: The Map
Reaves began to draw.
At first, it was dreams-lines, circles, notations she didn't understand. But eventually she realized it was a map. A web.
Each line led to another place. Another point of silence.
Old mines. Deep caves. Abandoned sonar labs. Places without echo.
She cross-referenced the notes Carter left behind.
Each site correlated with missing persons. Sudden shifts in wildlife. Auditory hallucinations.
In her apartment, tacked to the wall, the map looked like a nervous system.
At the center:
Briar Glen.
But the threads were spreading.
Multiplying.
Branching out like veins.
She circled the nearest point.
A closed-down subway station, sealed since 1981 after "electrical failures."
She packed her bag.
This time, she brought more than a flare gun.
---
Scene 66: What Listens
In the dark place beneath the station, she found it.
Not the mouth.
But a whisper of one.
The shape was forming. Barely visible-a circle of black stone where sound went to die. She stood at its edge, feeling her heartbeat vanish into it.
A voice spoke from inside the ring.
Not loud.
Not fast.
Just... certain.
> "You've heard us now."
She didn't reply.
But something inside her shifted.
Like an ear opening.
Like an echo preparing to repeat itself.
She turned on her recorder.
And pressed record.