The hallway sagged under its own weight, walls warped with moisture and time, but it was the Ochre that made it truly wrong. Thick streaks of it clung to the ceiling beams like veins torn from a deeper anatomy, its color not quite black, not quite rust, but some choking blend of oil, blood, and soot.
It pulsed faintly, as if listening, bleeding downward in slow, deliberate rivulets that pooled across the floorboards and erased every footprint beneath it. The air was syrup-thick with a metallic sweetness, like rotting pennies in stagnant water, and the light that pierced the roof refracted strangely through the sludge, casting reflections that didn’t align with the geometry of the real world. Somewhere ahead, past the smear of a broken threshold, the Ochre rippled, as if remembering something we hadn’t done yet.
The vines of black sludge slowly oozed down the walls, permeating the entire broadcast center with the ineffable otherness of something not of this world.
“We can’t walk through that,” Kim said, looking for an alternative route.
“Maybe we don’t have to,” Katie said. “If the radio interrupts the signal, maybe we can push it through and it can regress the growth of the Ochre?”
“If that doesn’t work, we’ll lose our only weapon against the signal.” Kim said. “We can’t risk it.”
“No,” Ace said. “We can’t risk the radio. But, we do know what happens when we’re exposed to it.”
She walked forward, into the hallway, before Kim or any of us could grab her.
“Anastasia, don’t!” Kim shouted.
But it was too late. Ace stepped into the hallway and into the Ochre. I watched in horror as my friend put herself in danger for the good of the town, for us.
Elijah, on the other hand, watched for another reason.
“I remember you, Ace,” he said. “You’re a pain in the ass, reckless firebrand. You’re fierce, kinda stupid, but loyal to a fault.”
The Ochre tendrils shuddered around her. Grazing her shoulders and crawling up her boots as she walked.
“I remember when you knocked down that hornet nest and got stung a billion times to keep it off the playground at recess.
I remember you looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man afterwards, and everyone, including you, was laughing.”
I looked at Elijah and then to Ace.
“I remember you beating the brakes off that sixth grader for bullying a classmate,” I said.
As I spoke, the Ochre blinked.
The tendrils touching her recoiled as she walked, not far and not for long, but enough to reinforce Elijah’s hypothesis. Ace got to the far end of the hallway and turned around for us.
She, standing there with her hand out, reaching across a cosmos of a divide, was real. She was solid. She was the rock we would walk upon.
Katie pushed the dolly forward, keeping her eyes pinned on Ace. Elijah and I followed behind her, likewise focused on our friend. But Kim hesitated. Her rational, scientific mind couldn’t grasp what ours did. She couldn’t square the facts, it just didn’t make sense to her.
“We have to go,” Katie said softly, still looking across the divide at her helplessly lost mother. “The only way back is forward, to stop the signal.”
I was both incredibly proud of and utterly horrified with her relentless pragmatism. Looking at her, I could see the fear and uncertainty in Katie’s eyes, yet still we had to go.
She turned away and pushed the dolly forward, toward the elevator. Elijah stepped in beside her, walking alongside and helping push the dolly.
Ace took point, leading us through the black covered hallway. Each step deliberate, each movement solid.
When the hallway swallowed the entryway with its spiderwebbing of slime and vein-like appendage, we lost sight of Kim behind Its squirming mass.
The hallway opened up into the lobby.
In the center of the polished marble floor stands a detailed diorama of Eden Falls.
The town model rests atop a circular stone pedestal, enclosed by velvet ropes and brass posts. At its heart rises the W.E.D.N. tower, jagged and black like a rusted needle driven into the land. Fine wires connect it to miniature buildings around it, The Garden newspaper office, the Monolith Power Station, and the creeping edges of Wychwood Forest that seem to lean inward, hungry.
Soft light gleams off the tiny rooftops, casting eerie shadows across the Letter House, a meticulously recreated mansion with ivy crawling up its sides and mailboxes that seem almost too real. Just beyond it, a sealed grate marks the Manahoac Mine, the town’s oldest structure.
Above the diorama, the room’s mural now depicts not industrial triumph, but a shifting history: children on bikes staring up at the tower, a well overflowing with black ink, and faceless adults walking past as if blind. The text beneath the mural, once a tribute to the power of the press, now reads:
“The Garden Remembers. The Garden Forgets.”
At the edge of the room, a bust of a forgotten man stands guard, plaque faded and hard to read. Nearby, behind a glass case, a looping video flickers: static-filled clips of W.E.D.N. broadcasts and missing person reports from 1986.
The whole room felt like a time capsule sealed during the Cold War and only now reopened, part civic center, part museum, part warning.
This was not the normal lobby. Things had changed a lot, since our field trip earlier in the year. The influence of the Ochre had warped the very fabric of the building.
“You okay, Katie?” I asked, walking up to her.
She was standing a few feet from the diorama, her fingers lightly tracing the velvet rope. Her jaw was set and she was focused, but behind her eyes I could see the worry. The muted light from the model cast long, unsettling shadows across her face.
“I will be,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Once this is over. Once we get Mom back.” She looked at me then, a flicker of something unreadable in her gaze before it hardened again, focusing on the miniature W.E.D.N. tower. “We have to disable this. It’s the only way.”
Ace, who had moved ahead, was already examining the bust of the forgotten man, her fingers brushing against the faded plaque. “Anyone recognize this guy?” she called out, her voice echoing unnaturally in the quiet room. “Looks like someone famous, or infamous.”
Elijah, meanwhile, was circling the diorama, his eyes scanning the intricate details. He paused at the miniature Letter House, then moved to the sealed grate marking the Manahoac Mine, a thoughtful frown on his face.
“This whole thing,” he murmured, more to himself than us, “it’s not just a model. It’s a map. And a warning.”
“The Letter House is here, on the map?” I said. “What does that mean?”
Elijah looked across the diorama at me.
“It means we may be in liminal space,” he said. “If my guess is right, I think we’re in between right now.”
“Between what?” Ace said.
“Our earth and whatever they opened through Gateway,” Elijah said.
“That’s why mom got stuck,” Katie said softly. “Because the Ochre is so strong here, it’s a bridge between worlds.”
As if on command, the room shifted and rotated as if it were sitting on a giant lazy susan. A terrible noise that I can only describe as a wet, sloshing, grind rumbled up from beneath us. The sound was trying to be real in a space that doesnt obey physics.
I felt the same feeling that I felt when we fired Kim’s weapon. A lurchIng, sudden vertigo on multiple axies at once. Elijah held onto a rail in front of the diorama.
Where the forgotten man’s statue stood was now a bust of Kim Nguyen, wrapped in the vines and choking to death on them. It was hyper-realistic and Ace had to physically stop Katie from rushing over.
“Not real,” Ace said, holding Katie tight.
“Look,” Elijah said, still holding the rail. “It didn’t change.”
Just like Ace’s moment, Elijah held firm. Solid. He was holding onto railing that didnt need to exist in the new space, yet his own reality, his own permanence, grounded the changing world in what he knew was real.
Katie shrugged off Ace and took a deep breath.
“Okay, okay,” She said. “I got it,”
I saw her come to grips with the illusion being fake. “Believe what you know, not what you see,” she said, almost to herself.
As if to defy her solid logic, the bust of her mother made a wretching noise. All four of turned and watched in horror as the lifeless statue vomited up the choking vines, which pooled at its feet in an inky black sludge.
The statue of Kim Nguyen stood like a marionette dropped mid-performance, head cocked unnaturally, shoulders hunched, legs slightly parted as if she’d forgotten what balance was. For a moment, she didn’t move. Just breathed. Or maybe that wasn’t breath, just a wet, sucking sound from somewhere beneath the black ooze that wrapped her head likeaa second skin.
Then she twitched.
Not a step. A twitch. Her foot slid forward in a shuddering half-limp, like muscle memory short-circuiting. Her hips swung with a jarring sway, almost seductive if it weren’t so broken. Her arms dangled, but not loosely, they were held, rigid, fingers curled inwards like claws remembering the shape of something they’d once torn open.
Every few seconds she would stop, frozen mid-stride, like she’d lost the thread of reality and had to wait for it to spool back in. When she moved again, it was sharp, violent, off. The rhythm was all wrong. Not human. Not entirely. She moved like a dream trying to wear a body.
And then she turned her head, no eyes beneath the black, no face to speak of, but she looked at me.
I don’t know how, but I felt it. Like being seen by something that had no business seeing.
Katie and Ace gasped and I fell into the vacuum of the thing’s missing eyes. All I could do was stay stuck on the wrongness of it. The completely alien wrongness.
As it reached its clawed hands up toward me, it suddenly blurred and was undone in a sickening shower of black slude that left a silhouette on the wall behind it.
As it liquefied, I peeled my eyes away from the madness to see Elijah, holding Kim’s Improvised weapon in his hands and standing on solid ground.
“Elijah?” I said. “Thanks…”
“What the HELL was that?” Ace said
“It was the Hollow version of Mom,” Katie said. “It’s what the other side thinks of us.”
Katie was right. The Hollowing wasn’t just wrong, it was anti-life. As if the concept of life was a meaningless facade in an easily replicated machine. It wasn’t that it didn’t understand life, it was that we simply weren’t that important to it.
A cold, vast indifference washed over me. It was heavier than any physical fear I had. It made my own breath feel shallow, my own heartbeat a pathetic, futile thrum against the backdrop of the overwhelming emptiness of the Hollowing.
It wasn’t until Elijah spoke that I began to claw my way back from the endless void of nihilism.
“We need to get upstairs, to the tower,” he said to Ace.
Ace came up and chest bumped me.
“Snap out of it, Benjy,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’s all just nothing.”
Part of me wanted to sink into that nothingness, that void, but the physical touch of her impact sent a jolt through me that clicked my teeth together. Her words and the sudden jolt of undeniable force were a splash of cold water on my burning mind.
Katie grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the dolly. Its heaviness, its solidity, further grounded me back into the world and the mission at hand.
“Okay, I said.” “Let’s go.”
I glanced at Elijah, still holding Kim’s Improvised weapon, as he took up a position beside the dolly. In his beautiful, twisted mind, all of this somehow made sense. He could always see the strings behind the marionette of life and he knew his way back. I felt a comfort in that as we pushed the dolly toward the elevator.