The wind in Hallowreed carried a strange weight that afternoon—a hush laced with something too careful, too still. Evelyn followed the feeling as if tethered by it. She knew this pull well by now; it always led to a name, and names were never meaningless.
At the edge of a forgotten park, beside a crumbling bench eaten by rot and moss, she saw the name: Maribel. Etched faintly into the wood, the letters were almost gone, but something in her soul recognized it. Not as a memory—nothing so linear—but as a wound she hadn't realized was still bleeding.
Evelyn crouched down. Her fingers brushed the worn groove of each letter.
"Maribel," she whispered.
And the world changed.
It wasn't thunder or fire this time. It was quieter—like a lock turning. A veil lifting.
Images surged behind her eyes: A girl with black eyes, lips sewn shut by a ribbon. A windowless room. A song hummed without melody.
They made me forget who I was. So I became something else.
The voice didn't belong to Lenore. It came from deeper within. Evelyn fell back, the breath leaving her lungs in a hiss.
Lenore's presence trembled. "This is older than me," she said.
Evelyn pressed a hand to her heart. The pressure inside her wasn't grief. It was something more ancient—like her soul had recognized its architect.
Maribel wasn't just a ghost. She was a beginning.
Evelyn stumbled back to her motel. She locked the door behind her and faced the mirror. For a long time, she hadn't dared look too closely. Mirrors showed more than reflections now.
This time, her reflection blinked first.
A girl stared back. Younger. Pale. With a red ribbon tied tight around her throat.
Not Lenore.
Maribel.
It wasn't possession. It was something worse—recognition.
Evelyn wasn't haunted. She was constructed. Versions of herself layered through time. Built, erased, rebuilt.
She gripped the sink. "Who did this?"
The lights flickered.
A whisper. Just one:
The Ones Who Forget.
The memory struck her like lightning.
Not a face.
A force.
In the house in Hallowreed, she'd met it. The thing that wore her voice, her lover's voice, her grief. That thing wasn't a ghost. It was a function—created to strip identity and rewrite it in silence.
Evelyn opened the drawer and scribbled onto motel stationary—names, visions, scraps of memory. Her hand shook.
Halfway through a sentence, she froze.
She couldn't remember her mother's name.
Not Lenore's. Hers.
A cold horror bloomed in her chest.
She dropped the pen and stared at the mirror again.
Her reflection blurred, then sharpened into something not quite her.
You loved someone once.
You don't anymore.
We made sure of that.
Evelyn's throat closed.
You whispered his name every night in your sleep. Even after we took the rest.
She clutched her head. "Who was he?"
The one who made you soft. The one who made you dangerous. So we buried him in your bones.
A vision broke through.
She stood in a garden. A man knelt before her, laughing, brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. His mouth moved, but the sound was gone. The memory had no voice.
Only the ache remained.
Her scream shattered the mirror. She fell to her knees, glass cutting her palm. But pain made things clearer.
They hadn't just erased memories.
They had engineered her heartbreak.
Evelyn wrapped the glass shard in cloth and placed it in her bag.
Not for protection.
For vengeance.
She stepped out into the night and returned to the park.
She whispered again:
"Maribel. I remember you. I remember us."
The wind shifted. For a heartbeat, she saw them—shadows with faces like hers. Broken girls, remade and discarded. They nodded.
Then vanished.
Evelyn turned toward the road.
Back to Gravemarsh.
Not to bury anything.
But to dig it up.
She wasn't just a carrier of grief.
She was becoming the weapon it forged.
End of Chapter 23.