Bramble Hollow was the kind of town where leaves never stopped falling and no one ever questioned why.
Eleven-year-old Jamie Weaver sat on the rusted swing at the edge of Pine Grove Park, the air so still it felt like time had stopped. Rust-colored leaves twisted in spirals across the grass, never making a sound when they landed. It had been seventeen days since Sadie disappeared. Seventeen days since the last scream no one else had heard.
Jamie clutched a fraying backpack to his chest, one strap nearly torn off from when Mr. Doyle, the school counselor, had yanked it away to check for "drugs" after Jamie's latest outburst. He still remembered the hollow look in Doyle's eyes—like something behind them had already given up.
No one believed him. Not his teachers. Not the sheriff. Not even his parents.
"Sadie's just your imagination, sweetie," his mom had whispered while folding his laundry, eyes blank, mouth trembling."You've always been a lonely kid," said his father, not even looking up from his newspaper. "Probably made her up to cope."
But Jamie remembered Sadie. Her laugh. Her chipped tooth. The way she used to draw dead birds and hang the sketches around her room like trophies. He remembered the scream—sharp and shrill, ripping through the night like it had claws. He'd heard it echo through the woods just before she vanished.
No one else heard it.
No one else remembered her at all.
Not even her bedroom existed anymore. Where her posters and sketchbooks had been, there was now an office—his father's new work-from-home setup. Sterile. Smelling of paper and plastic. No trace she'd ever lived there.
Jamie had started leaving sticky notes around the house. One on the fridge: "Sadie likes cherry soda."One on the bathroom mirror: "Don't forget her face."One inside his backpack: "She was real."
Now, he sat in the park, eyeing the rusted chain-link fence that bordered the overgrown woods. Something had changed. A new hole had opened in the bramble—just wide enough for a boy to slip through. It hadn't been there yesterday.
The voice had started whispering the night before. Thin and scratchy, like a dead radio signal.
"She's below."
Jamie hadn't slept.
The hole in the fence pulsed with a kind of wrongness. A gentle, humming nausea that made his teeth ache. He slipped off the swing and moved toward it, his backpack thumping softly against his spine. He didn't question why he was doing this. Somewhere deep inside, a truth had rooted like mold:
No one was going to save Sadie.So he had to.
The forest swallowed him whole.
The path beyond the fence was crooked, overgrown, but worn—as if others had come through before. Branches clawed at his arms, and shadows moved in ways they shouldn't. Shapes flickered in the periphery: hunched, twitching things with wet breath and too-long limbs. He walked faster.
Then he found it: an old drainage tunnel beneath the hill, its mouth wide and yawning like the throat of something vast and dead. Vines curled around it like veins. The concrete was damp and slick with slime, scrawled with symbols that pulsed faintly red when he got too close.
"Come in," the voice hissed.
He ducked inside.
Instant blackness swallowed him. His flashlight flickered to life, casting a narrow cone that barely pushed back the dark. The air stank of mold, rotting leaves—and something else. Coppery. Like blood.
The tunnel went on forever. As he moved, the walls began to shimmer, as if coated in oil. Graffiti twisted and morphed under his light: faces screaming, eyes melting, children hanging upside-down like meat in a butcher's window. Their mouths were sewn shut.
He heard sobbing—small, fragile, echoing from behind the walls. Then silence.
And then—crunch.
He froze. Shined his light behind him. Nothing.
He turned forward—and screamed.
A figure stood at the end of the tunnel.
It was Sadie.Or something wearing her shape.
Her face was pale and cracked, like porcelain left in the sun. Her eyes had no pupils, just black wells that swallowed the light. Her mouth was open, but the scream was silent, like the sound had been stolen from her lungs. Strings of red light looped around her wrists and ankles, tightening with every twitch. Her head jerked violently to one side, bones popping audibly.
And then, without moving its legs, the thing glided toward him.
Jamie turned and ran, his backpack bouncing, heart crashing against his ribs. Behind him, the tunnel warped—walls closing, ceiling shrinking. The flashlight flickered, then died.
He tripped, fell hard, hit his head—
Darkness.
When he opened his eyes, the tunnel was gone.
He lay in a narrow street under a red sky, the buildings around him twisted and sagging like they were melting. Bramble Hollow—but not. Every window was shattered. Street lamps drooped like wilted flowers. Shadows slithered beneath the sidewalks. A child's tricycle spun slowly in the gutter, though there was no wind.
A clock tower loomed ahead—its hands moving backward, ticking louder than thunder.
He sat up.
Etched into the pavement beside him were the words:
SHE'S WAITING BELOW.