The road back from Mike's parents' house was quiet, the kind of silence that didn't soothe but pressed inward, heavy with unspoken thoughts. Nora kept replaying the image of the thing rising from the lake, the way it had moved toward her with intention, the way it had vanished the instant Allan's hand touched hers.
She didn't realize she'd gone still until Allan glanced sideways and noticed she'd stopped walking altogether. He studied her for a moment, then said gently that there was something he needed to tell her, something he hadn't mentioned earlier because the timing had never felt right. His tone carried that careful steadiness he used when what he was about to say wasn't small.
Four weeks ago, he explained, three college students had gone missing.
Their last confirmed location had been an abandoned house east of town, a structure sitting near the edge of a forest where the land dipped into a shallow hollow. It was isolated enough that most locals avoided it, and over time it had become one of those places people spoke about only in lowered voices.
Search teams had combed the area repeatedly, police had checked every trail and path, and volunteers had spread out for miles, but no trace of the students had been found.
What made it stranger was the evidence that had turned up. Investigators had discovered a water bottle belonging to one of them near the tree line and a cigarette pack belonging to another a short distance away, yet there were no footprints leading into the house, no sign of forced entry, no disturbance in the dust inside.
The building looked as though no one had stepped through its doorway in years. It was as if the three had reached the clearing… and then simply stopped existing.
Nora listened without interrupting, her unease sharpening with each detail.
Allan told her the case had already become his priority long before tonight. He had spoken to the missing girl's parents personally and shown them something he'd received two months earlier—a letter.
They had confirmed the handwriting was their daughter's, confirmed she had written it shortly before she disappeared, and after reading it they had agreed to let Allan investigate alongside the authorities. They hadn't said it outright, but the desperation in their eyes had made it clear they were willing to accept help from anyone who might find answers.
He reached into his jacket and unfolded a creased sheet of paper he'd been carrying with him.
"This is what she sent," he said quietly.
The letter had been written in uneven lines, the words pressed hard into the page as if the writer's hand hadn't been steady. She began by apologizing for contacting him out of nowhere and explained that she had tracked him down through a podcast where he had once discussed unexplained cases.
She admitted it probably sounded crazy but said she didn't know who else to turn to. Two years earlier, when she had still been in high school, she and two friends had sneaked away from a school camp late at night and wandered into the woods looking for something exciting to do. They had found an abandoned house and, half joking and half thrilled, decided to explore it on the spot.
It had been a moonless night, the sky black, their only light coming from the narrow beams of their flashlights. She wrote that the moment they stepped inside, everything went dark. Not the house—their minds. She said she didn't remember falling or feeling dizzy or anything at all. One second they were crossing the threshold, and the next she was waking up outside in daylight with the sun already high and her friends nearby.
According to the letter, all three of them had felt strange afterward, as if something had been taken from their memories. None of them could recall what had happened inside the house or how they had ended up outside again. At the time they had brushed it off, laughing it away as nerves or imagination, and eventually they graduated, went their separate ways, and started attending different universities. Life moved on. Or at least it seemed to.
She wrote that the dreams had started months later.
She kept seeing the house again while she slept, the same doorway, the same darkness inside, the same sensation of stepping across the threshold. But in the dreams there was always something wrong. She was certain there had been four people with them that night, not three. She could feel the presence of someone else walking beside them, someone important, someone she should have recognized, yet she could never remember who it was.
Every time she tried to focus on the fourth figure in the dream, her mind would blur and she would wake suddenly in the middle of the night with her heart racing. The memory never stayed long enough for her to grasp it. She always knew she had seen something terrifying, but the details vanished before she could hold onto them.
She wrote that she eventually started therapy because the dreams wouldn't stop. During one appointment, by coincidence, she ran into one of the friends who had been there that night. They talked, caught up, laughed about old school memories, and then somehow the conversation drifted back to the house.
When she hesitantly mentioned the recurring nightmare, her friend's expression had changed. Quietly, almost reluctantly, her friend admitted she had been having the same dream too. The same house. The same missing memory. The same certainty that someone else had been there with them.
By the end of that conversation, she wrote, neither of them had felt like laughing anymore.
The last part of the letter was short and written more hastily than the rest. She said she didn't know what they had forgotten or why it felt like something was trying to keep it hidden, but she was certain it mattered. She asked Allan directly if he would look into the house and what had happened that night. She apologized again for bothering him and said she hoped she wasn't wasting his time. The final line read that she just wanted to sleep without dreaming about it anymore.
Allan lowered the page slowly after Nora finished reading.
"That letter," he said, "was sent two months ago."
Nora's throat felt tight. "And four weeks ago she disappeared."
He nodded once.
The night air seemed colder now, the memory of the lake still lingering at the edge of Nora's thoughts. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once and fell silent again. She looked down at the paper, at the deep grooves where the pen had pressed too hard, and felt a creeping certainty settle in her chest.
Whoever—or whatever—had been inside that abandoned house two years ago…
hadn't forgotten them either.