Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I’d once again been exiled to some abandoned train station out in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing around. No ticket booth or passengers and speakers crackling overhead with a robotic voice announcing where I’d been stranded. Hell, there wasn’t even a lonely bench to sit on or a rusty sign with a name letting me know where I’d been tossed to.

  What was worse was that, at least the last time I’d been stranded there’d been a ghost town nearby. There was nothing around me now. Sure, Harbor Glen had been creepy as hell and was home to a bunch of nightmarish ghouls, but at least it had shelter.

  The first thing I did was decide to finally check out all the offerings I’d taken from the church. Between running through the Deadlands with Eaters chasing after me, escaping the ambush on the train, and nearly being lynched by an angry mob of passengers, I hadn’t had the chance to check out my loot.

  I dumped the burlap sack out on the ground and took stock of everything. Two cans of food I’d scavenged from an abandoned campsite. A bent spoon and a pair of mismatched forks. A blanket and a canvas tarp, also from the campsite. A dented cooking pot, some pencils, a small hand-made journal, a tiny bowl from a mortar and pestle set, a few weird parcels of dried food (jerky, maybe?) a bit of twine, some threadbare socks that looked like they’d disintegrate as soon as I put them on, and a pair of pants that were at least two sizes too small for me.

  Also among the offerings was a hand-crank flashlight that didn’t work no matter how much I tried to fix it, my bone-handled knife, and a handful of random bits and bobs that I hoped I could MacGyver into something useful.

  At the very bottom of the bag, hidden like a stowaway, was a small doll. It was around palm-sized and stuffed with something lightweight and lumpy. Its faded cloth body sagged and it was threadbare in a couple spots. One of its button eyes was barely hanging on and the other was scratched to hell. A thin black thread gave it a simple stitched mouth. It looked like the kind of doll that a kid loved once and then lost in a move. If I’m being honest, the thing was creepy as hell. But I didn’t want to just toss it aside in case it turned out to be a collectible or an antique.

  I packed everything back up in the sack and used a bit of twine to tie it shut and give myself a small handle. It was better than nothing. Then I slung the bag over my shoulder and looked around to where I’d ended up.

  There was nothing around but two endless rails that sliced through the Deadlands, vanishing off into the distance. I took a breath and tried to center myself, going through the priorities I needed: water, shelter, some sleep, definitely a show, and what I wouldn’t do for a pair of boots.

  None of that was going to drop out of the sky for me though. I needed to move and I needed to move fast. I didn’t know if the Eaters were still chasing me. They probably were. And I definitely wasn’t gonna be safe if I just stood around looking lost and forlorn.

  So I adjusted my pack and set off, walking along the tracks. I didn’t know where they led, but I was hoping that if I kept to the tracks they’d eventually lead me to somewhere with people. And hopefully those people weren’t completely insane and offering strange gifts to nightmarish creatures.

  A couple hours later and the thirst was getting to me. My lips were splitting and my throat felt like sandpaper. I hadn’t had a sip of water since the train, which felt like years ago. My eyes were glued to the horizon, hoping to spot something. Anything. A town. A water tower. A lonely sack with a rusty sink. Hell, I’d have settled for a grimy puddle as long as it was filled with something wet.

  Eventually, I did find something. It started as a flicker. A barely-there shape on the horizon. My first instinct was to just write it off as a mirage. I mean, I’ve never actually seen a mirage in my life. How many people ever have? But I’d watched enough cartoons as a kid where Bugs gets trapped out in the desert, so I knew that mirages were a thing and they could play tricks on a dehydrated mind.

  I steered myself towards the mirage and, as I got closer, the shape held. It grew. It took form. Another half an hour of walking and I was able to pick out a few details.

  It looked…I don’t know. Not really a building. At least, not a standing one. I was guessing that it was a series of ruins, or maybe a derailed train that was sticking up out of the ground. Possibly it was another train depot where I could find shelter and get picked up by a train only to be dumped a few stations down the line.

  When I finally got close enough to make out more details, I found out that the thing was tall and lopsided. It looked like it was made of part iron and part stone. I slowed slightly as I tried to figure out what it was and if it was a good idea to stumble my way towards it.

  Every book and movie and video game that I’d ever consumed warned me about the dangers of rushing into a series of ruins, especially ruins in the middle of a region called the Deadlands. I knew that it wouldn’t end well. And if I had a choice and wasn’t starving and cold and tired and thirsty, I would have turned around and headed the other way. But I was all those things. So I pushed down my fears and trepidations and forced my feet to keep taking me to the ruins.

  When the presence returned, all my fears of the ruins left me. The presence wasn’t as loud and overwhelming this time. It didn’t feel like it did back when it was chasing me through the Deadlands or attacking the train. It was quieter. Fainter. But it was still unmistakable. I could feel it in my bones, crawling up my spine, and whispering at the edges of my thoughts.

  The Eaters were back.

  I broke into a trot. The closer I got to the looming structure, the louder the presence became. Something about it had shifted. It wasn’t furious anymore. It wasn’t bloodthirsty or murderously joyous. It felt…uneasy. Cautious. I can’t really translate the feelings from it entirely accurately. I mean, it’s a weird monstrous presence that comes from eldritch-like creatures. But it felt like it didn’t want me getting closer to the structure. Like it was trying to call me away. Trying to tell me that what I was racing towards was dangerous and I should stay far away from it.

  Obviously I wasn’t going to be listening to the thing that had been hunting me. I picked up the pace and raced towards the structure. My thoughts were that anything that could force the presence into being hesitant and careful, and intimidate them into backing off, might be good for me.

  My legs pumped harder and faster, driven by the growing sense of danger that was racing towards me. I ignored the wound in my ankle as adrenaline flooded my body. I ignored the presence, ignored its whispers trying to coax me away from the building, ignored the cautiousness that was rolling off it. It wasn’t coming closer to me. It wasn’t chasing. It didn’t want to get closer to the ruins.

  And then everything went sideways.

  I was about fifty feet from the structure when the drop happened. There wasn’t any kind of warning, just a sudden plunge that sent my stomach lurching into my throat. One moment I was running and the next it felt like someone had yanked reality out from underneath me.

  My vision smeared. Everything twisted and blurred like I was looking through warped glass. The world bent in on itself. I couldn’t breathe. I was weightless and falling and floating, all at the same time.

  Then a thud. The impact pushed the air back into my lungs. My palms slapped the floor and my knees hit hard and I sucked in a sharp breath.

  I looked up and found that I wasn’t in the Deadlands anymore.

  Instead, I was kneeling on the floor of a massive entry hall in an enormous mansion. Behind me was a massive oak door, thick enough to stop a battering ram. It was the kind of door that you’d expect to find in an ancient cathedral or some kind of fairy-tale castle. Flanking the door were two towering glass windows. The one on the left showed snow falling softly outside. Big lazy flakes that blanketed a yard and covered everything in a thick white sheet.

  I blinked and came back to myself. Snow? Here? There hadn’t even been a breeze in the Deadlands. The whole place had been dry and dead and hot. I looked down at my shoes which were still caked in the dust and dirt of the Deadlands, just to check and make sure there wasn’t any snow on them.

  I turned back to the windows and noticed the one on the right was fogged up and streaked with beads of condensation. Through the drops of water I could make out a sprawling garden. Pinks and yellows and purples bloomed against the heavy rail falling on them.

  Snow outside one window. Rain and flowers outside another. Two seasons out past the same door.

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  The rest of the entrance hall was eerie and quiet. All I could hear was the groaning of old wood beneath my feet and the whisper of wind blowing from deeper inside the mansion. Four hallways branched out from the entry way, forming a wide X. Directly across from me was a grand staircase that led up to the second floor of the mansion. It was tall and elegant and covered in a thick layer of dust, but outside that it was still intact. A faded red runner was pinned to the middle of the staircase and the banisters showed some signs of slight wear and tear. All told though, everything still seemed okay. Not at all like the ruin I’d been running towards out in the Deadlands.

  I peered at the landing of the second floor and felt a blast of danger radiating from it. Something deep inside me twisted and coiled and I knew that the stairs led to a terrible fate. Don’t ask me how I knew, but something up there was dangerous and my body didn’t want to get anywhere close to it.

  The fear that the staircase instilled in me kinda reminded me of the Bronx Zoo. I went there on a class field trip once. Some of us split off from the rest of the class and headed to the big cat exhibit. I’d always been fascinated by tigers and lions and cheetahs and panthers. I remember pressing my face against the window, trying to get as close as possible to one of the big cats.

  None of them paid me any attention. They were just sunning themselves outside, completely ignoring all the gawkers and kids watching them from behind thick windows. I was the smallest morsel to those giant cats and wasn’t worth the effort it would take them to attack. But I remembered the shiver of fear that raced through my body when one of the lions turned to me and stared at me through the glass.

  It was the same type of fear that I had when I stared at the second floor. A primal part of my brain screamed at me to run away. There was no way in hell I was gonna head up those stairs.

  I’d grown something of a spine back on the train. I’d been 100% willing to start slashing with my knife if Asshole had tried tossing me outside. If it had come down to it, I would have done everything possible to kill the man. I would have lost, definitely, but I would have extracted a price.

  But there is a difference between fighting some pissed-off mercenary/adventurer who could easily bench press me but was human and susceptible to being stabbed, and waltzing up to the second floor of a mysterious mansion to greet whatever deadly creature called it home; a creature I was sure made the presence nervous.

  I turned away from the grand staircase and instead glanced around the entry way, trying to figure out what to do next. I’d been tossed into a strange house, nowhere near the Deadlands, and I was thirsty and hungry and tired. My best bet at figuring out where I was and finding a way back to the Deadlands, a train, and civilization, was to explore the mansion. I didn’t have a map or any sense of what this place was, so I did what anyone would do in my situation.

  I picked a hallway at random and hoped that I didn’t die when I went down it.

  There were four halls that split off from the entryway and each hall stretched out into shadow. All the hallways looked equally uninviting, so I simply chose one at random. I didn’t have a gut feeling or instincts or anything that led to that choice. It was just blind faith that whatever was at the end of that hallway wouldn’t be immediately fatal to me.

  The hall was…weird. It looked short. Probably only thirty feet or so. But walking the length of it took me a full five minutes. The wooden floorboards felt soft and spongy, like walking on wet cardboard, and the hall stretched as I ventured down it. Eventually, when I’d walked far enough, I was spit out into a different world.

  The air became warm and wet and heavy. It smelled like damp earth and lilacs and moss. A wave of humidity slapped me in the face and made me think I’d just entered into a greenhouse of sorts.

  Ivy blanketed the walls and slipped through cracks in the wallpaper and spilled over picture frames. The ceiling had partially collapsed in a few places, letting in shafts of sunlight. The whole place was wild and abandoned, looking like a jungle had crept in and taken over what was once a well-kept mansion.

  Water trickled down the walls in thin rivulets and pooled in warped floorboards. I crouched down and cupped my hands, trying to catch a bit of the runoff. There wasn’t much, just a shallow layer of water. It tasted stale and earthy, but I was way too thirsty to complain so I drank enough to wet my tongue and dull the dryness in my throat.

  I pushed deeper into the greenery. Room after room in this wing of the mansion had been overtaken by nature. Splintered furniture was choked to death by vines, and cabinets sagged under the weight of mildew and moss. It felt less like I was wandering through an abandoned mansion and more like I’d gotten lost in some primeval forest.

  There were signs that someone had tried fighting back against the encroachment of nature. Rusted gardening tools leaned forgotten in corners and soil bags were split open and spilled out onto the floor like old sandbags from a long forgotten war. Broken clay pots were tucked under the roots of what had once been houseplants but had turned into monstrous tangles of growth that had claimed entire rooms.

  Whatever section of the mansion this place had originally been - an indoor garden or botany wing or research space - it had long since been reclaimed by nature.

  After what felt like an hour of wandering, I finally stumbled across a small study that was tucked behind a side door. The place was a mess. Even more than what was outside. Books and journals were scattered haphazardly across the desk and floor. An entire wall of the room had collapsed in on itself and was covered in thick vines that I couldn’t see past.

  Most of the objects in the room were beyond saving. Most of the books that I picked through disintegrated in my hands into damp, pulpy flakes of paper. The few books that didn’t fall apart were way too waterlogged to read. The ink had bled into blots or faded entirely and the pages were clumped together.

  I did find one book in the study that had survived the jungle. It was wedged under a thick tangle of vines beside a collapsed bookshelf, half-buried in the mud and dirt. The cover was stained and curled in at the edges and the binding was warped and swollen from years of moisture. I brushed away most of the dirt from the leather cover and opened it. The pages were soft and water-warped and tinted yellow with age. But surprisingly, the thing was still readable. Mostly.

  The ink had faded in some places and spread into gray smudges in others, but I could still make out a few of the words. The first couple pages were written in a careful, looping hand. After reading bits of it, I felt like the thing used to be a journal.

  I saw her again today, by the old garden gate. It’s where we used to play when we were kids. She smiled at me and, for the briefest of moments, I thought…maybe.

  I used to think I’d tell her everything one day. I’d tell her how I’d picked the lilacs because they were her favorite flower, and how I faked that twisted ankle just so she’d hold my hand all the way back to the manor. I’d tell her that I knew all her favorite plants, and made sure to carefully prune the flowers outside her window so she’d wake every morning to something as beautiful as her. But I never did. And now she’s leaving. I should have told her.

  Towards the end of the book the words became more and more faded. I could barely make out the last few entries.

  Tried again today. Still nothing.

  She trusted me. I’m still trying.

  The Bloom won’t come back. I think it’s really gone.

  The journal didn’t have any clues about who’d written it. I didn’t know what “The Bloom” was or why it was so important or why it wouldn’t come back. There was nothing in it telling me what this mansion was or why it had fallen to nature or how to escape the place. The only thing that was certain in the journal was the grief in those pages.

  Every word that was written felt heavy. I could imagine the author writing in their journal and hurting, like the words had to be physically dragged out of them to be put on the page. I could see someone sitting alone in this section of the mansion, pouring out all their loss and their sadness and their grief into the journal.

  I closed the book and gently tucked it into my pack. It was doubtful that it’d be worth anything when I got back to civilization, but it felt wrong to leave it behind in the overgrown study. With nothing else of interest in the room I left and kept searching. The deeper I went into the mansion, the stranger everything became. Vines thickened along the walls and curled around door frames. The silence of the place pressed heavier against my ears and I could tell that nothing in this section of the mansion was alive except for the plants.

  Then I turned a corner and saw him.

  For a brief moment I figured that my mind had finally cracked. After everything - the soul-sucking monsters, the train ride from hell, almost being strung up by an angry mob - I figured that this was it. The tipping point. I was seeing full-on hallucinations. My brain had finally tossed up its hands in defeat. But no matter how long I stared at the hallucination in front of me, it didn’t disappear.

  It was a man, standing near a collapsed planting table. He was bent slightly, his hands moving in slow and careful movements, almost like he was tending to something that wasn’t there. Every motion from his hands was precise and practiced, but there was nothing in front of him. It was like whatever he was caring for existed in his memory and had vanished from the rest of the world.

  He was dressed in a long, weathered brown coat with sleeves that were rolled up to his elbows. His gloves were stained with dirt and he sported a wide-brimmed hat that drooped low over his face.

  Oh, and he was a goddamn ghost.

  He wasn’t glowing or anything. There wasn’t a shimmer to him. He wasn’t hovering or flickering like you’d see in Hollywood movies. But he was definitely a ghost.

  I used to roll my eyes at all those people who believed in spirits and energy and all that “we’re all just stardust and vibes” shit. Back on Earth I knew a bunch of people who swore by horoscopes and crystals and believed in ghosts and UFOs and haunted houses. I’d always waved all that stuff away as nonsense. Of course, that was before I got isekai’d into a video game world and saw creatures suck a soul out of a body. I’ve been a little more open-minded since then.

  So, sure. Maybe ghosts are real. But this guy didn’t feel like your classic horror movie ghost. He wasn’t dragging around any chains and he wasn’t moaning or translucent or floating. He was…different. It was more like he was a memory. A moment. Something or someone that refused to fade away. A loop that kept playing even after the rest of his world had moved on.

  I just read that back and realized it’s a little…iffy. I’m not really describing it well and what I’m trying to say could be difficult to understand. The best way to describe him is that he was an echo. He was someone who I knew had been real once, but was now stuck repeating an action. How I knew that he was real…that’s a good question and one that I don’t have an answer to. Maybe it was a feeling or an inkling or…maybe it’s part of the mystical that this world seems to be filled with.

  The man moved slowly, brushing away invisible soil and checking on something in front of himself that didn’t exist anymore. Everything he did looked like it was gentle and practiced and I was transfixed by the entire scene.

  There wasn’t any threat in that room. There wasn’t any weird glitchy NPCs spouting broken dialogue at me, or a looming threat that was chasing me across the Deadlands, or an Asshole trying to throw me from a moving train. The only thing there was the soft sound of running water dripping from vines and a lone gardener trapped in time.

  And the longer I watched him go through his motions, the more I felt it. Sorry. Quiet and heavy. It wasn’t the feeling of raw grief. It was more worn down and lingering than that. Regret, maybe? Longing? An ache that comes from trying to bring back something that is already long gone?

  I didn’t say anything to the echo or try to reach out to it. It felt wrong to break the silence. Speaking to him would’ve felt like I was interrupting a prayer. Instead, I simply stepped closer and brushed away some of the dirt from the planting table, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything that could tell me what he was tending.

  There was nothing there though. The only thing in front of him was an old, cracked wooden planting table with a faint circular stain, like something had once rested there for years before being taken away.

  The echo continued working, ignoring my actions as he gently brushed away soil and adjusted objects around him that no longer existed. I watched, mesmerized by the way he moved as he worked. Then, for a brief second, he turned his head.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t react. I don’t know if he ever really saw me. But something in the air shifted and I felt a flicker of awareness leak from him. Maybe some small part of him, a shiver of instinct or a small fragment of what he once had been, knew that I was there.

  Neither of us moved. We both stood, tense and quiet, surrounded by the ruins of whatever this place used to be. Then he turned back to his imaginary pot and I stepped away. I stared at him and tried to understand what had just happened. I tried to figure out who he was. I tried to learn what this place had once been and what it had lost.

  And why it all still mattered to him.