The town's unease grew heavier with each passing hour. The bell had stopped ringing after its seventh toll, but its echo clung to Briarwall like smoke. Doors slammed earlier than usual, shutters latched tight, and the cobbled streets emptied before dusk as though an unspoken curfew had fallen.
Elise couldn't shake the sheriff's words: This is not like before. She needed to know what before meant.
Her search led her to the town's archive—a small, crumbling annex behind the church, seldom visited except by the vicar and those with a taste for dust and ink. She found it locked, but Reverend Crowthorne was easily persuaded by her insistence that history had answers the living were too frightened to utter.
Inside, the room smelled of mildew and lamp oil. Shelves sagged under the weight of ledgers, journals, and maps. Elise lit a lantern and began pulling volumes at random, her fingers tracing the faded names of long-dead record keepers.
It was in a leather-bound ledger dated 1872 that she found what she hadn't known she was seeking: a list of names, neatly entered in ink, each followed by a date and the word "Vanished."
Her breath hitched as she scanned the page. Seven names. Seven years apart.
1872 – Margaret Lyle – Vanished
1879 – Peter Cray – Vanished
1886 – Eliza Morton – Vanished
1893 – Jonah Pell – Vanished
1900 – Grace Fenn – Vanished
1907 – Samuel Dyer – Vanished
1914 – Thomas Marrow – Vanished
The pattern struck her like a blow. Every seven years, someone was taken. And by the current count, Briarwall was due.
Her lantern flickered as if stirred by an unseen breath. Elise turned, half expecting to find someone behind her. But the archive was empty save for the dust and the quiet creak of settling timber.
She pressed further into the ledger. At the bottom of the final page, written in a different hand—scrawled, almost clawed into the parchment—were the words: When the bell tolls, the sea remembers.
Her fingers trembled as she closed the book.
Back outside, the fog had thickened again, swallowing the churchyard in its pallid maw. Reverend Crowthorne, waiting with a nervous stoop, asked, "Did you find what you were looking for?"
Elise met his gaze. "I found enough."
But her mind whispered the truth she dared not speak aloud: Jonas Pierce's disappearance was no accident—it was the cycle beginning anew.
And if the seven-year pattern held true, there would be six more vanishings before the fog lifted.