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Dusk in this place always carried the same scent—a mix of stagnant leaves, damp earth, and inevitability. Victor had measured this town in years that had long ceased to form actual numbers. Thirty? Perhaps. Thirty years since his mother’s scream had cut short in the thicket of the woods, and little Eloise had gone to the place from which no one returns.
He had learned to be a ghost. To steer clear of those brought here by the looping road. The newcomers were always the same: too loud, too vital, reeking of gasoline and panic. Victor avoided them, hiding among the rusted car carcasses and his own drawings. But this time, they noticed him.
Two men from the "fresh batch." The kind whose anger hadn’t yet yielded to submissive terror, demanding an outlet instead. They took a dislike to this strange, silent man with a child’s gaze—a man who knew more about the town than they did, yet showed no urgency to share his secrets. They decided this "local lunatic" was simply mocking them. Or worse, stealing their supplies.
They ambushed him by the old barn just as the sun became tangled in the pine tops. It was that specific hour when shadows lengthen, serving as a reminder that time is running out; Victor needed to get back to his peach-colored truck, the only sanctuary where the nightmares couldn't reach him.
The strangers weren't looking for answers—they were looking for someone to blame for their own fear. One of them, swearing under his breath, struck Victor squarely with a heavy tire iron. The world flared into a blinding spark and instantly went dark. To ensure the "weird local" wouldn't get in their way, they dragged his limp body deep into the woods, far from the abandoned roads. And as they left, they took his most prized possessions—a battered sketchbook and the colored pencils in his lunchbox—stripping him of the only thread that held the fragments of his memory together.
When consciousness returned, silence reigned over everything. The forest seemed frozen in anticipation.
His head throbbed with an unbearable, pulsing ache, and the salty taste of coppery blood had dried on his lips. Victor opened his eyes but saw nothing except a gray, ghostly fog creeping between the tree trunks. The damp autumn air burned his lungs. Pushing himself up on trembling elbows, he glanced up at the sky through the canopy and his blood ran cold: the sun had long since set. Deep night had fallen—the hour when the living were supposed to hide underground and pray to survive just one more day.
Barely a kilometer of dense thicket separated him from the salvation of his truck. But right now, that distance felt infinite, for the forest no longer belonged to him.
Somewhere close by, just beyond the chalky veil, a soft whisper echoed. It was followed by a polite tapping of fingernails against dry bark. They knew he was here. And they were already coming for him, their faces fixed in those eternal, frozen smiles.
Victor forced himself to his feet. His knees shook and the ground rolled beneath him like the deck of a sinking ship, yet he stubbornly pressed on, step by step. Don't look around. Above all, don't look into the fog. If he didn't meet their eyes, he could pretend this forest didn't exist—that it was just another bad drawing he needed to flip past as quickly as possible.
He stumbled forward, throwing out his numb hands to grope for a path among the rough trunks and clutching branches. A step. Another step. Somewhere out there, past this darkness, his truck was waiting.
"Victor…"
The soft, insidious murmur of a woman’s voice drifted from so close behind that an icy chill washed down his spine. It held no malice, no overt threat—only a gentle, solicitous warmth that made his knees buckle.
"Victor, where are you going? Look at us."
He didn't turn around. He merely clenched his teeth harder, feeling sticky sweat crawl down his neck.
"Victor, Victor, Victor…" The voice glided soundlessly after him, keeping perfect pace. A note of feigned sorrow crept into it. "You failed to make friends with the newcomers again, didn't you? They hurt you again? Why are they always so cruel to you?"
Out of the fog to his right, the hem of a familiar dark coat flickered. He didn’t need to look to know that the woman calling his name was walking right beside him, her feet barely brushing the withered grass, her pale face fixed in a dead smile.
He knew that coat all too well. And those neat, unchanging earrings catches of dull light in the dark—relics from some distant, long-erased peaceful past.
The monsters of this town played by their own warped rules. For reasons known only to them, whenever Victor’s path crossed theirs, they never lunged at him the way they did at the others. Instead, they preferred to stalk him, to taunt him, whispering hideous, cruel things that turned his childhood fears inside out—yet they never sought to kill him outright. It was as if, to them, Victor was a piece of the town itself: an old, familiar fixture of the landscape that was far more amusing to torment than to break.
Victor pressed on, his eyes stubbornly fixed ahead. He tucked his head into his shoulders and repeated a nursery rhyme over and over in his mind, trying to drown out the insidious whispering, to ignore their very existence.
The woman behind him stopped. She let out a long, drawn-out sigh—steeped in that specific disappointment a loving mother feels for a wayward child. The sound, so agonizingly human and sincere, made Victor shudder. For a moment, the rustle of footsteps behind him ceased. They had let him go. For this night, they were leaving him in peace.
The final stretch was the hardest. His feet caught on exposed roots, but the fog finally parted, exposing the familiar, rust-eaten silhouette of the peach-colored truck.
Before taking his final step, Victor froze. Shrouded in the thick shadow of the bushes, he stared back into the nocturnal thicket until his eyes burned. Checking. Waiting. Satisfied that he wasn't being followed and that the pale shapes had vanished into the depths of the woods, he slipped silently toward the cab and vanished inside, sealing the heavy door behind him.
Sleep only came to him near dawn—fitful, light, and plagued by nightmares of falling pencils and laughing faces. When Victor opened his eyes, the sun was already high above the forest.
Yet the warmth of this sunny day brought no comfort. Every movement was met with a dull ache; the back of his split-open head throbbed, and the scrapes on his face and ribs had scabbed over, stinging with his slightest breath. Hoisting himself up with effort, Victor sat on his makeshift bed, wrapping his arms around his knees.
Inside his mind—trapped somewhere in his distant childhood—he simply couldn't fathom it: why were people so cruel? He guessed that the newcomers were driven by fear. A wild, primal terror of this place. But Victor was afraid, too. He had been afraid every single second of his long, lonely life. And yet, he had never once struck anyone, never betrayed anyone. Why did they, who were so big, strong, and loud, immediately resort to causing pain? In moments like these, Victor found himself quietly wishing, just as he had many years ago, that he didn't exist at all in this brutal, incomprehensible world.
But the day had begun, and his routine, honed to near-automation, demanded his attention. Loneliness had taught him strict discipline. It was the only way left to keep from losing his mind.
First, Victor pulled a can of preserved peaches from the hiding place beneath his seat. The absence of his treasured sketchbook had left a gaping void in his soul, and he sought to drown it out with a familiar taste. Forcing his trembling fingers to work a blunt-edged stone, he managed to pry up a slippery, cloyingly sweet slice. Peaches were his solace, his personal ritual of safety, but today even they tasted of nothing.
Having finished his meager breakfast, he set about tidying his sanctuary. Victor meticulously smoothed the old blanket, wiped the dust from the dashboard, and counted the remaining cans. Every single item in the truck had to occupy its exact, designated spot.
Once his chores inside the cab were done, Victor cautiously climbed out. The sun blinded his eyes, a lazy breeze stirred the leaves, and this stark contrast between the beautiful weather and his internal mourning felt almost offensive.
His path led him toward the edge of the forest, far away from the noisy houses of the new residents. He headed to the spot where two modest mounds, bordered by gray river stones and painted just the way they would have liked, lay hidden in the tall grass. The graves of his mother and his sister, Eloise.
Victor sank to his knees straight into the dry, prickly grass, stifling a soft groan as his reopened wounds and aching joints flared with sharp pain. With slightly trembling fingers, he began to tenderly clear the gray river boulders, brushing away the pine needles, twigs, and withered leaves that had fallen overnight.
He sat motionless for a long time, his eyes locked on the two humble mounds. "Mama... Eloise..." his lips brushed together in a ghost of a movement, breathing names that through thirty years of solitude had morphed into a silent prayer. He wanted desperately, with a bitter ache rising in his throat, to complain to them. To tell them about the cruel strangers, about his stolen sketchbook and pencils, without which the world inside his head was rapidly losing its form. He wanted to recall the woman in the coat with the dull earrings, the one who had lain in wait for him in the night fog.
Yet Victor remained silent, choosing not to trouble their peace with his adult sorrows. Instead, he gently caressed the rough, sun-warmed stone and left a tiny tin can at the foot of the mound—one in which, at dawn, he had carefully collected the pure morning dew, drop by drop.
On his way back to his sanctuary, Victor kept his usual distance, treading cautiously along the fringe of the path. But the moment he rounded a dense thicket of brush, he froze. His heart, already frayed by constant anxiety, skipped a beat, and a suffocating lump rose in his throat.
Right by the door of his truck, splayed upon the trampled earth, there they lay. His belongings.
There was the familiar lunchbox. Scattered beside it in disarray were his pencils—nubby, worn down, their paint flaking away. They had taken something else, too: the small tin box that held scraps of colored ribbons and a woven bracelet his sister had given him long ago. It all lay there, discarded as if in mockery, a careless offering from whoever held his fate on a short leash.
Victor went rigid. A mounting horror rang in his ears: had they truly been here while he was praying over the graves? Had they peered inside?
He lunged for his things, gathering them greedily into his arms. His fingers trembled as he pressed the cold metal of the tin to his chest. Casting a frantic look around, he saw no one. There was only the forest, swaying its branches with utter indifference, and the shadows that grew longer with every passing minute.
In two strides he was inside, the heavy bolt throwing shut with a sharp metallic clatter. Locking the door, Victor pressed his back against it, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He laid the sketchbook and pencils out on the table, inspecting each item with trembling hands. Nothing was missing, yet their sudden return felt far more sinister than the theft itself. Why give them back? Was it a reminder that he was entirely transparent to them? That they could slip in and out of his life at whim, tossing his treasures onto his doorstep like bones thrown to a dog?
He sat in the gloom of the cab, listening to the rising evening wind outside, as an agonizing realization throbbed against his temples: these objects were no longer his sanctuary. Now, they were a stark reminder that from this place, and from this game, he had no shelter—and he never would.
Several weeks passed. Victor continued to live his quiet, routine life, taking care not to venture from the woods more than necessary. Yet his supplies were running dangerously low, and deep down, he harbored a faint hope of coming across some newly arrived vehicle. In the glove compartments and trunks of such cars, one could occasionally unearth true treasures: fresh cans of preserves, an untouched sleeve of crackers, or, with a stroke of luck, a blank notebook. It was this sheer necessity that finally forced him to cross the threshold and head toward the settlement.
He moved with caution, weaving between the rusted chassis of old sedans, ensuring he kept his distance from the houses whence intimidating voices drifted.
But the moment he reached the fork near the main street, his feet rooted to the ground. Hanging from a tall utility pole, swaying gently from the overhead wires, were two bodies.
It was them. The very same two men who had brutally beaten him by the barn.
Victor froze, unable to tear his eyes away from the gruesome spectacle. The sun beat down mercilessly, and the corpses looked as though they had been dangling there for days. Darkened, leathery skin, the jagged rents of terrible claws, and the suffocating stench of decay that the wind carried across the clearing. The town's monsters hadn't merely killed them; they had displayed them as a horrific monument to human helplessness. It seemed that night’s "game" of returning his sketchbook had been nothing more than a prelude to the actual slaughter.
Victor averted his gaze sharply, squeezing his eyes shut as a wave of nausea rose in his throat. He felt an agonizing, visceral sickness wash over him.
For a fleeting moment, a bitter sorrow flared within his soul. He felt no triumph, no relief, no sense of vengeance. He felt genuine pity for these men, no matter how cruel they had been to him in life. For this cursed, perverted place spared no one—neither the kind nor the wicked. It ground everyone down indifferently, reducing human fears, ambitions, and malice into nothing but rot beneath a blazing sun.
Abandoning his search for supplies, Victor turned and began his slow, weary trek back to the forest.