Phobia of 99'
Chapter 2: The Palehaven Rot:
Winter 2002 arrived as a slow-motion collapse. The town felt brittle, a collection of grey shingles and cracked pavement held together by the collective silence of its residents. The neon optimism of 1999 had long since dissolved into a landscape of damp fog and heavy, leaden skies. Palehaven was a town in mourning for its own reality.
Cody watched the frost bloom like a fungus across his windowpane. He had grown thin, his frame hidden beneath an oversized thrift-store jacket that smelled of woodsmoke and old paper. His spiky black hair was now a jagged, unkempt shadow over eyes that had seen the architecture of a nightmare. He didn't speak. Words felt like a waste of breath in a town that was already holding its own. He spent his hours filling the margins of old textbooks with geometric shapes that shouldn't exist—lines that folded into themselves, angles that hurt to look at.
The Burial of Loriaith:
Loriaith's room smelled of stale tea and ink. She sat on her bed, her fingers tracing the worn edges of a notebook, when the temperature plummeted. Her breath hitched, blooming in the air as a white cloud. The radiator groaned, a metallic shriek that sounded like a dying animal.
The voice erupted from within her marrow. A psychic vibration rattled her teeth, bypassing her ears entirely. It was a cold, internal pressure, the kind of sound a person hears when their own bone snaps.
"Loriaith..."
It was a jagged recording of Zahar, sounding like a voice being dragged through gravel.
"Help me. The cold is inside me now. I can't feel my name anymore."
Loriaith bolted. She sprinted down the hallway, her boots thudding against the floorboards as she fled a house that suddenly felt like a ribcage closing around her. The wallpaper seemed to sweat a thick, yellow ichor.
Outside, the construction site near the old mall loomed. A yellow crane sat idle, its metal rusted and flaking like dead skin. Without warning, the engine shrieked. A plume of black smoke choked the air as the wrecking ball swung. The iron sphere carved through the atmosphere, a blind god seeking a sacrifice.
Loriaith dove into the mud. The ball pulverized a concrete pillar where her head had been a second before. Shrapnel of stone and rusted rebar peppered her back. She scrambled through the debris, the crane's arm tracking her with mechanical hunger. The earth groaned and gave way. Loriaith fell into a jagged, thirty-meter maw of wet silt and rebar, the sound of the grinding engine fading into a distant, metallic pulse above her.
The Melancholy of 2002:
The "Palehaven Melodies" music store was a tomb of wood and wire. Cody sat at an upright piano, his fingers leaden on the keys. He played Dido's Honestly OK, the hollow chords matching the grey light filtering through the storefront. The music felt like a thin veil over a screaming silence.
The bell chimed. Cassandra stepped inside, smelling of cheap coffee and the Otahoo Diner where she spent her shifts. She had moved next door to Cody months ago, a move born from a desperate need for proximity to the only other person who understood the weight of the sky. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her hands trembling as she adjusted her dark-rimmed glasses.
She leaned against the piano, her dark hair casting a shadow over her face. "I saw his mother," she whispered, her voice cracking.
"She still keeps his dinner plate out. She was polishing it. It was already clean, Cody. She just kept polishing it until her fingers bled."
The door swung open again. Morris Adam entered, carrying a guitar case like a weapon. He was a Toronto transplant, a sharp contrast to the fading locals, wearing a leather jacket that looked too heavy for his frame. He slid a hollow-body electric onto the counter.
"This is done," Morris said, his voice flat. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a leather-bound journal—Cody's private logs of the Box. "You dropped this at the school library. You should be more careful with your maps of the void. Some things shouldn't be left for the janitor to find."
He turned and left before Cody could summon a question, the bell ringing a final, sharp note.
The Transmutation:
"How did he get that?" Cassandra reached for the journal.
The piano key beneath Cody's finger began to throb. The ivory softened into the texture of a human molar. Throughout the store, the instruments began a wet, rhythmic transformation. A violin on the wall began to weep a dark, viscous fluid from its f-holes.
A cello's strings snapped and regrew as pulsating sinew. The flutes on the wall developed pink, weeping apertures that wheezed with every draft, breathing in a ragged, communal rhythm. The floorboards turned into a sea of bruised, twitching tongues that tasted the soles of their shoes.
A drum kit sprouted chitinous legs made of splintered drumsticks, scuttling toward them like a giant, rhythmic spider. The snare drum pulsed like a heart. Cody grabbed a heavy brass trumpet, swinging it with a desperate, silent fury to ward off a swarm of violin bows that lunged like vipers, their horsehair bristles sharpened into needles. The store dissolved into a cathedral of gore, the walls screaming in a chorus of familiar, dead voices.
"Close your eyes!" Cody's voice cracked the air, a raw, jagged sound. "It's the judgement! Don't let it see you!"
He focused on the smell of floor wax and the mundane cold of 2002. He forced himself to remember the exact weight of a Canadian nickel, the taste of a stale donut—anything real.
The wet tearing sound ceased.
Cody's sister stood in the doorway, her face twisted in annoyance. She was holding a stack of sheet music, looking at the two of them as if they were vandals. The store was normal. The instruments were wood. The tongues were just floorboards, scarred by years of foot traffic.
"Don't lose this one too, Cody," his sister snapped, pointing at Cassandra.
"I'm closing. Get out before I call Dad..."
The Bathing of Shawn:
At the edge of town, Shawn sat in a bathtub filled with cold, grey bubbles. The bathroom smelled of mildew and old Spice. A kitchen knife lay on the porcelain rim, its blade reflecting the flickering fluorescent light. He stared at the ceiling, his mind a static-filled void.
He looked at his right hand. A small, circular hole had appeared in the center of his palm. It didn't bleed. Then another on his wrist. They were perfect, hollow vents. He tried to scrub them away with a loofah, but the water in the tub began to thicken into a black, viscous oil that clung to his skin like tar.
Shawn tried to stand, but the tub felt miles deep. His body was becoming a honeycomb, hundreds of tiny, whistling holes opening in his flesh—on his chest, his shins, his neck. The air passing through him created a discordant, agonizing flute-song. He was a human instrument, being tuned by an invisible hand. He was sucked downward into the drain, his bones softening into wax, his muffled screams sounding like a broken woodwind instrument.
When Cody and Cassandra arrived at the house ten minutes later, the bathroom was empty. The water was gone, leaving only a ring of black soot around the porcelain. On the bathmat lay a scrap of parchment that smelled of old blood and copper.
The message was written in a hand that looked like a machine's: The harvest is never finished. Silence is just the space between notes.
Cody felt the bile rise in his throat and vomited into the sink. The vomit was black and flecked with what looked like piano keys.
The Reunion of the Damned:
They found Loriaith at her door. She was a ruin of yellow clay and dried blood, her sweater torn to shreds, her fingernails gone from clawing her way out of the pit. Her mother stood in the foyer, screaming about pranks and madness, her voice a hysterical screech.
"It's a prank! You're all doing this to torture me! You're just like those boys from the news!" her mother shrieked, shoving Loriaith out onto the porch and slamming the door so hard the glass rattled.
"Fucking rude.." said Loriaith.
The three survivors retreated to the treehouse. The wood was grey, the Korn stickers peeling and bleached. It was a skeleton of their childhood. They sat in the dark, the only light coming from a flickering Maglite that cast long, distorted shadows.
"The Listener isn't waiting," Loriaith said, her voice a fragile thread. She was shivering uncontrollably. "The town is being digested. It's using our fear as a digestive enzyme. We're already in its stomach..."
Cody looked at his snack. The apple had turned into a cluster of weeping black sores in seconds, instantly rotting. The wooden walls of the treehouse shimmered, turning into jagged, cold glass. The forest outside vanished, replaced by a horizon of red clouds and the distant, rhythmic thud of a heart the size of a building.
The hatch opened. Morris Adam climbed in, tossing a heavy, leather-bound book onto the glass floor. The book felt heavy, as if it contained more matter than its size should allow.
"You're making too much noise," Morris said. He didn't look scared, rather he looked exhausted. "The Listener likes it when you scream. It's like seasoning! If you want to find Shawn, you have to stop playing the victim."
Cody stared at the book. The title was written in a script that seemed to move when he wasn't looking, shifting between English and something ancient.
"Who are you?" Cody finally spoke, his voice sounding like dry leaves.
"Someone who's seen the Gardener in a different garden," Morris replied.
END OF CHAPTER 2