Chapter Sixteen: The Divide
The frost came early that year.
Maple Hill woke one morning to find its streets wrapped in pale silver, trees crusted with delicate ice, and rooftops shining under a pale sun that felt more symbolic than warm. Winter had always been quiet here—but now, it was too quiet.
The town's silence wasn't peaceful. It was brittle. Tense.
The line between the Rememberers and the Forgetters had turned from a whisper to a fracture, and it ran through the heart of the town—through friendships, marriages, even bloodlines.
There were houses now where one sibling would scrawl dreams into a journal while the other locked themselves in the bathroom and ran the faucet to drown the voices. Some shops displayed hand-lettered signs in their windows:
> "Memory-friendly space. All are welcome."
Others had signs just as bold:
> "Private Property. No Visions. No Records. No Ellie Carter."
Ellie saw them all.
She said nothing.
She was tired of being the argument everyone had rehearsed.
---
At the town hall, Granger sat alone behind a table with stacks of reports in front of him—complaints about the "effects" of the memory flood. "People seeing dead family members." "Children drawing violent imagery." "Dreams of ancestors' pain." "Violence in sleep." "Chronic insomnia." "Waking to unknown scars." "Murmurs in the walls."
And one note scrawled in a shaky hand:
> There is something wearing my father's skin.
Granger rubbed his eyes. He hadn't shaved in days. "We can't keep up with this," he muttered.
Ellie leaned against the doorway. "No one asked us to."
He looked up. "They do. In their own way. They want answers. Explanations."
"Or scapegoats."
Granger hesitated. "Some want both."
He pulled out the newest file: a report from Darlene Mavis—yes, the same woman who remembered Mr. Harper locking her in a basement that never existed on any record. She now claimed her own reflections were beginning to behave independently of her. "Like they're waiting for me to turn away so they can step out."
Ellie's skin prickled.
"She's not the only one," Granger added quietly. "We've had six similar complaints. Mirrors. Windows. Standing water."
"Thin places," Ellie whispered. "Where memory bleeds through."
Granger tapped the desk. "This was supposed to be healing, El. But something else came through that door with the truth."
---
That night, the Forgetters held a rally.
Ellie didn't attend, but she stood in the shadows near the square and watched the gathering from a distance. Over fifty people had shown up, bundled in coats, candles clutched like talismans. The leader was a woman named Clara Desmond—mid-forties, formerly a teacher, once quiet, now terrifyingly articulate.
"We are not deniers," Clara shouted, her breath fogging in the air. "We are preservers. We believe that peace is found in the present. That the past, with all its violence and grief, has no right to steal our now!"
Applause. Cheers.
Ellie recognized many of the faces. People who'd once come to the archive. People who'd cried on her shoulder. People who had remembered.
Now they wanted to forget again.
Clara continued. "These memories are not ours! They are invasions! Possessions! Let us cut the roots before they strangle everything!"
Someone lit a match. Then another.
They burned pages torn from old journals—pages copied from the archive. The crowd cheered.
Ellie stepped away.
The next morning, her archive windows were shattered. Again.
---
Despite everything, people still came.
A boy, maybe twelve, claimed he had met his great-grandfather in a dream. "He told me where his ring was buried." They found it—beneath the baseboard of an abandoned cabin in the woods, exactly where the dream had shown.
A woman remembered the lullaby her mother had sung before vanishing in 1984. No one had heard it in decades. But the melody matched a recording found in the chapel basement—an old cassette tape labeled "for when the trees forget."
Even Clara Desmond's own niece showed up at Ellie's door late one night, shivering and tearful.
"I saw my twin," she whispered. "I didn't know I ever had one."
---
Then came the disappearances.
At first, no one said the word aloud. People "wandered." They "went quiet." They "lost track of time." But soon, it was clear: those who suppressed their memories too deeply began to vanish altogether.
Not die. Not run.
Vanish.
Sometimes in the middle of a sentence. A blink. A breath.
Gone.
The Forgetters denied it at first. Called it dramatics. But then three of their own disappeared in a single week—including Clara Desmond's husband.
She came to Ellie.
Not with apology. Not with surrender.
But with terror.
"Tell me how to remember," she begged.
---
Meanwhile, the mirror phenomenon grew worse.
Ellie herself began to catch glimpses—flashes of movement in glass that didn't mirror her actions. Her reflection sometimes tilted its head a second too late. Once, it smiled without her.
The grove shimmered constantly now. At night, voices rose from the depression. They weren't asking anymore.
They were warning.
> You opened the gate.
You must seal it before the town forgets itself completely.
Memory is life. But too much… too fast… will drown you.
Ellie returned to the chapel. The ancient book now bore a new chapter.
The Balance.
> To remember is to live.
But remembrance must be tempered with grounding.
Anchor the soul. Name the self. Or become a host to history.
She sat in silence, reading it over and over. And then she understood.
Memory was not the enemy.
But memory without self was.
People weren't being consumed by ghosts—they were becoming them. Dissolving into the torrent of other lives, other truths, until nothing of their present self remained.
Ellie looked into the chapel's cracked mirror.
Her reflection stared back.
This time, it was weeping.
---
The next town meeting was unlike any before. Tensions were high. Security was posted.
Ellie stood on the stage, gripping the podium.
"There is no cure," she said calmly. "There is no way to unsee. And no promise that all memories are true. But we have a choice."
The room was silent.
"We can deny. Resist. Be swept away. Or—we can root ourselves. Balance memory with meaning. Anchor each vision with truth. We are not what we remember—we are what we choose to become with it."
Whispers. Then a voice:
"How?"
Ellie raised a worn journal.
"Tell your stories. Share them. Anchor them in others. Don't carry them alone. Speak the name of your fear, and it will lose its teeth."
She stepped back.
And slowly—tenderly—others stepped forward.
A woman with shaking hands. A man with a letter from his dream. A child humming a song that made the entire room cry.
It was the beginning of something not yet healing—but not hopeless.
And outside, in the grove, the wind shifted.
For now, the town still stood.