The town looks like it forgot how to breathe.
An upside-down sedan floats in the algae-slick pool like a drowned moth under glass. The ambulance sits nearby with its hood yawning open, ribs of hoses and wires showing—long dead, long ignored. Streetlights blink with a sick yellow tremor. The siren at the firehouse is a mute throat. Trash skitters. Paint peels. Even the swings in the park creak without moving, as if something invisible just stepped off.
When the sun tilts toward the trees, an old panic stirs. Bolts slide. Boards go up. Curtains choke the last window-light. Before doors shut, hands hang a small amulet—cold metal, a ring of symbols no one can read. It knocks once against the wood, then goes still, like a promise pressed to a pulse.
Night arrives like a held breath finally let go.
They come smiling. They come knocking—politely at first, then with a patient rhythm that worms into your nerves. They stand in the yard and call you by the names you haven’t heard since the funeral, the hospital, the day you left home. They sound like your mother asking you to help with the groceries. They sound like your kid asking for a glass of water. But the smiles don’t reach their eyes, and the eyes don’t blink, and the shadows at their feet lean toward the house instead of away.
Some folks swear those things aren’t monsters at all. Then a child’s room goes quiet. Then a tiny shoe is found on the sidewalk at dawn, damp with dew and something that isn’t dew. The arguments stop.
The sheriff keeps order the only way it seems to work: with a locked jaw and the butt of his gun. Leave a window unlatched and he’ll make sure you remember the lesson tomorrow—better bruised than buried, he says. He’s not a hero. He’s a man who’s seen a door open half an inch and everything behind it go wrong.
Strangers still wander in from time to time. Families, headlights sweeping the same curve one too many times. They try the highway out, then the side road, then the dirt track, always returning under the same half-shot billboard, the same hand-painted welcome sign that doesn’t mean it. The road here eats its own tail. Your gas runs out before the hope does.
People whisper theories—chemicals in the water, a prison experiment, government spooks with clipboards—but there’s no schedule to the horror, no cameras in the trees, no men in vans. There are rules instead, etched by survival: inside by sundown; amulet on the latch; don’t answer the voice that sounds like someone you miss.
And there are the ones who walk after dark wearing borrowed faces. Their skin is right and their eyes are wrong. Their breath fogs the glass on a warm night. They ask to be invited in, almost shy about it, almost kind. When you refuse, they just keep smiling, as if patience is the sharpest knife they own.
Dawn is not relief so much as a reprieve. The amulet on the door is warm to the touch, as if something pressed its mouth to it all night long and whispered. The sheriff limps past the upside-down car. The swings still creak. Somewhere, a new family studies a road map that won’t matter.
And as the sun climbs, the town starts to breathe again—shallow, hurried, already counting the hours until it has to hold its breath once more.