The fall wasn’t long, but it felt endless. The hands didn’t drag me so much as guide me downward, lowering me into the dark like I was being offered to something.When I hit the bottom, I expected stone or dirt. Instead, the ground pulsed beneath me, warm and slick, like the inside of a living thing. The air was wet, thick with the coppery tang of blood. The humming above was muffled here, but it never stopped. It vibrated through the walls, through my bones.
I staggered forward, my hand brushing the surface beside me. It twitched beneath my touch, recoiling as though I had startled it. The passage stretched on, a tunnel carved not by tools but by growth. The walls throbbed faintly, veins coursing with faintly glowing liquid, illuminating my way.
And then I heard them.
Children’s laughter.
It echoed faintly through the tunnel, high-pitched and playful, completely wrong for this place. My chest tightened as I followed the sound. At the end of the passage, I came into a chamber that opened wide, like the belly of some colossal beast.
They were there.
Dozens of children. Some I knew from my childhood. Some far too young to have ever lived in Ashbrook when I left. They stood in neat rows, their eyes white and glowing, their faces slack with vacant smiles. Their voices blended together in a singsong chant that scraped at my sanity:
“Ashbrook. Ashbrook. Ashbrook.”
One of them stepped forward—a boy I recognised instantly. Matthew Conroy. He’d gone missing the summer before my family fled. Posters had hung on every storefront, search parties combed the woods for weeks. His parents never found him.
He looked at me now with that same hollow gaze. His lips curled into a smile that split too wide, tearing the corners of his mouth.
“You came back,” he said in a child’s voice that was layered with something deeper, older. “You heard the call.”
The others joined him, their voices rising in a chorus. “The town remembers. The town keeps what belongs.”
My throat was dry, but I forced the words out. “What… what is Ashbrook?”
For the first time, the chanting stopped.
Matthew tilted his head, and all the children moved with him, their necks cracking in the same grotesque angle.
“It’s home.”
And then the walls shuddered, pulsing with new life, and something enormous stirred in the dark beyond the chamber.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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