It happened in Ashbrook - Chapter Two: The Return of Emily

The first return should have been a moment of celebration, but it wasn’t.

Emily Carter was found at dawn, standing barefoot in the middle of Main Street, her nightgown caked with mud. Her mother, who had been making coffee when she spotted her through the kitchen window, screamed so loudly that neighbours came running. They thought at first she was unharmed—thin, yes, and pale, but alive. Emily’s eyes, however, told a different story.

They were no longer the warm hazel her parents knew. Instead, they had darkened, flecked with a strange metallic gleam that caught the light unnaturally. When her father rushed to embrace her, Emily recoiled, pressing her back against the cold asphalt as though she didn’t recognize him.

“Don’t touch me,” she whispered. “He’s still watching.”

Her words rippled through the crowd like a chill.

Sheriff Landon was called, and Emily was rushed to the clinic on Elm Street. The doctor performed every test he could think of: reflexes, blood samples, X-rays. Most results came back inconclusive. Except one.

In her chest X-ray, behind the ribs and lungs, there appeared to be something—an object the size of a coin, perfectly round, lodged near her heart.

The doctor dismissed it as an artefact of the machine, perhaps a shadow or glitch in the imaging, but Emily’s behaviour told a different story. She was restless, constantly scratching at her chest, muttering about “the cold light” inside her. When asked where she had been, she gave the same answer Caleb had: “Up.”

Her return ignited panic throughout Ashbrook. Parents demanded explanations. Some swore they saw strange lights above the cornfields that same night, streaking across the sky like silent meteors. The sheriff urged calm, but his voice betrayed uncertainty.

Emily’s mother, desperate, sat with her daughter for hours, trying to coax details out of her. Emily only spoke in fragments:

“He takes us to the white room.”

“There are needles made of glass.”

“He whispers without sound.”

“He says we’re seeds.”

The last word haunted her mother. Seeds of what?

That night, Emily woke screaming. Her voice carried all the way down the street, waking neighbours from their beds. By the time her mother reached her room, Emily was convulsing. Her veins bulged black beneath her skin, glowing faintly, as though something moved within them.

And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. Emily sat upright, gasping for breath, her eyes wide and glassy.

“He knows you’re watching,” she said in a voice that wasn’t her own. Deeper, distorted, as though two people spoke at once.

After that, Emily barely spoke again.

The town began to fracture. Some families packed their belongings overnight and fled Ashbrook. Others clung to their routines, pretending nothing was happening. A few men even talked of patrolling the cornfields with rifles, but no one had the courage to follow through.

The children, meanwhile, were no longer afraid of the dark. That was what unsettled the adults most. Instead of hiding beneath blankets, the children of Ashbrook began standing at their windows at night, staring out into the fields. They seemed drawn to something unseen, humming low tunes in unison, songs no one taught them.

One evening, a group of children was found gathered at the base of the old water tower, all barefoot, all staring up at the night sky. When questioned, each child gave the same response:

“He told us to wait here.”

The sheriff broke up the gathering and escorted them home, but the incident left the town shaken. If the Tall One could call the children to him without ever setting foot in a house, then there was no keeping them safe.

Back at the clinic, Emily drew pictures on the walls with crayons provided to her for comfort. Circles, always circles, interlocking and overlapping. At the centre of each circle was an eye—wide, lidless, unblinking.

The sheriff looked at the drawings uneasily. “She’s just processing trauma,” he muttered, but his voice was hollow.

The doctor nodded, though he had noticed something else. The object on Emily’s X-ray had shifted slightly. It was no longer resting where it had been the day before. It had moved closer to her spine.

And late that night, when Emily’s mother checked in on her, she found her daughter standing perfectly still, her back arched unnaturally. The skin along her spine writhed, bulging outward, as if something beneath the flesh was trying to push its way through.

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