It happened in Ashbrook - Chapter Four: The Gathering

By the time autumn settled over Ashbrook, the town was no longer pretending. The missing posters, once taped with hope to telephone poles, had yellowed and curled in the damp air. Families who could leave had left, leaving behind hollow houses with curtains drawn tight. Those who stayed did so out of desperation, or denial, or a stubborn belief that nothing so monstrous could really be happening.

But the children knew.

They spoke in whispers, not to each other, but to something unseen. At school, they stared blankly at chalkboards, scribbling circles into their notebooks instead of notes. They ate less and less, yet somehow didn’t weaken. Their eyes glazed silver in certain light, and their voices carried an odd resonance, as though something else was listening through them.

Teachers reported their concerns, but soon they too fell silent, avoiding the subject. Parents who pressed their children for answers were met with blank stares—or worse, with smiles too knowing for such young faces.

It was Timothy Hale, age seven, who first gathered them.

One September night, his mother woke to find his bed empty and the back door ajar. She screamed for her husband, who sprinted outside. The neighbours joined the search, but they didn’t need to look far. Timothy was standing in the middle of Maple Street, surrounded by at least twenty other children. None of them spoke. None of them blinked.

They just stared at the sky.

Above them, a faint shimmer rippled across the stars, like heat rising off pavement. It stretched from horizon to horizon, bending constellations into shapes unrecognizable. When the sheriff arrived, flashlight trembling in his hand, he demanded the children go home. None moved.

Then Timothy turned his head slowly, his silver eyes catching the beam of the flashlight.

“He is coming,” the boy said, his voice monotone. “We must be ready.”

The sheriff cursed under his breath and ordered his deputies to break it up. But as they approached, every child in the circle began humming. Low, steady, synchronized, like a choir that had practised for years. The sound dug into the deputies’ skulls, rattling their teeth, making them stagger back with hands clamped to their ears.

The sheriff shouted, but his words were drowned out. One of the deputies fired his revolver into the air, and the hum stopped instantly. The children blinked, looked around, and screamed as though waking from a nightmare.

Parents rushed forward, dragging them home. Timothy, however, lingered.

He looked at the sheriff, lips curling into a smile too calm for his age. “You can’t stop him,” he said. “You’re already inside the circle.”

That phrase spread quickly among the townsfolk: inside the circle. No one knew what it meant, but everyone felt the weight of it.

In the following days, strange symbols appeared on barns, sidewalks, even the school walls—interlocking circles drawn in ash, soil, or something darker. No one saw who made them, yet they multiplied overnight.

The doctor, sleepless from studying Caleb’s and Emily’s abandoned files, noticed a connection. The symbols resembled cellular diagrams, mitosis captured in crude form. He brought this theory to the sheriff, who dismissed it angrily, but not before stealing one of the diagrams and staring at it for hours in his office.

Meanwhile, more children disappeared. Not taken in silence this time, but lured. Parents described their sons and daughters slipping away in broad daylight, walking calmly into the cornfields as though called by name. When chased, the children were always just out of reach, the stalks closing behind them like a living wall. None returned.

On the night of the Harvest Festival, the town gathered reluctantly in the square. The mayor insisted tradition must be upheld, though his voice shook. Pumpkins lined the streets, bonfires blazed, and yet the air was heavy, electric. The children clustered together, not laughing or running as they once had, but standing shoulder to shoulder, eyes locked on the horizon.

And then the hum returned.

This time, louder. Stronger.

The bonfires flickered blue, pumpkins split and rotted before the crowd’s eyes, and every clock in town struck midnight, though it was only 8:37 p.m. The children raised their hands in unison, palms open to the sky.

The shimmer above the stars thickened, coalescing into a shape. Not the Tall One himself, but a shadow of him, projected across the heavens.

Every child spoke in one voice, deafening in its unity:

“He is here.”

And in that moment, every adult in Ashbrook understood: the town was no longer theirs. It belonged to him.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model