Unseen Threads of Willowbrook - WC 1295

Memories are as fragile as life.

Unseen Threads of Willowbrook

          The train hissed to a stop at the edge of nowhere, as it always had. Willowbrook's station was a skeleton of forgotten wood, its roof sagging under the weight of uncounted winters. I stepped onto the platform, my boots sticking to the mud in the same way they had twenty years prior, when I'd last fled this place. The air smelled of damp earth and something else, something faintly metallic, like blood or rust. I told myself it was nostalgia gnawing at me.

          No one waved a greeting. No one asked why I'd returned. That was... polite, I supposed. Or cowardly. Either way, it suited me. I'd come back alone, under the pretense of drafting an article about "preserved rural communities," a lie even I found thin. But the truth, I needed to see it again, to prove it wasn't real, lodged in my throat like a stone.

          The inn was first. Mrs. Peabody's Hearth, its sign weathered but still legible in the slanting late-afternoon light. I remembered it as a squat, cheerful building with green-shuttered windows. Now, it looked... narrower. The porch steps had always been three; today, there were four. I counted again. Four. My fingers brushed the railing, its wood smoother than I'd expected.

          Inside, the smell of lavender and roasting meat wrapped around me like a quilt. A woman stood behind the counter, her silver hair pinned too neatly, her smile too wide. "Welcome back, dear," she said, and I flinched. Her name was supposed to be Peabody, pronounced Pay-body. She said it Pay-buddy.

          "Mrs. Peabody?" I asked, testing the name.

          "Call me Marianne," she replied, and her eyes were the same color as the funeral. No, the color of a different sky. "You must be the journalist. Come, let's get you settled."

          My room was on the second floor, down a hallway that had once been blue. Now it was a sickly sage green. The door number -7--had always been a chipped 8. I stared at the numeral until my pulse steadied. Stress, I thought. You're sleep-deprived. You're hallucinating.

          But the room itself was worse. The window overlooked the square, as it should have. Yet the angle felt wrong, the proportions skewed, as though the town had been reshaped in my absence. And there, on the dresser, the music box.

          It was a tarnished brass owl; its wings etched with thorny vines. I'd smashed it the day Elise died. Or so I'd believed.

          Mrs. Peabody, or whoever she was, found me staring at it. "A keepsake," she said lightly. "From a previous guest."

         I didn't tell her I'd carved that music box with Elise, our hands sticky with glue, our laughter echoing through the workshop. I didn't tell her that on the night of the fire, I'd tried to save it. The heat had been a living thing, the smoke thick enough to taste. I'd fled with nothing but the memory of Elise's singed scarf, its cherry-red threads still tangled in my fingers.

         "You look tired," she said. "Rest. Dinner is at seven."

          The square at night was unchanged, or so it seemed. The lampposts flickered the same yellow, and the bakery's awning sagged in familiar curves. But when I passed the old workshop, now a gift shop, the windows were dark. Odd, I thought. The place had been closed for decades. Yet there was a light on in the upstairs window. Elise's window.

          I told myself I was imagining things. Instead, I wandered to the cemetery, where the headstones leaned like old men. Elise's name wasn't there. Not ever had been. I'd been told she'd been buried in a private plot, but when I'd asked her parents, they'd looked at me like I'd said something vulgar. There is no plot, they'd said. There are only the river and the ash.

          But tonight, as I traced the names on the stones, I noticed something new. A fresh marker, half-buried in mud. Elise M. Carter, 1983-2003. Beloved Daughter. My hands trembled. I'd never known her birthday. I'd never known her parents' names.

         A voice behind me said, "You shouldn't be here."

          It was Mrs. Peabody. Or not. Her face was shadowed, her tone brisk, but her hand hovered near her coat pocket. I saw the glint of a key ring. A master key, perhaps. Or something else.

          "I just--" I began, but she cut me off with a look.

         "Dinner will get cold."

          The music box haunted my dreams. In them, I was nine years old again, running through smoke, the owl clutched in my hands. Elise's voice called to me, but the words were muffled, drowned out by the crackle of flames. I woke in a sweat, the box silent on the nightstand.

          At breakfast, Mrs. Peabody's "previous guest" story unraveled. "The box has been here since 1998," she said when I pressed her. "You must be confusing it with another item."

         1998? I said. "But that's--"

          "Elise died in 1999. I bit my tongue. Or did she?

          That afternoon, I went to the library. The records were sparse, as I'd expected. But when I asked about Elise Carter, the clerk blinked. "There's no one by that name in the system. At least, not in our records."

          "Could there be a misspelling?"

          The clerk shrugged. "Try the town archives. They're in the basement of City Hall."

          The archives were colder than I'd expected. The boxes smelled of mold and old ink. I rifled through them, my fingers brushing over permits, tax documents, and death certificates. And there, in a folder labeled Unresolved Incidents, 1999, a report on a fire at the workshop. The cause? Undetermined. The victim's name: Elise M. Carter. Age 16.

          I stared at the paper. The date was October 12th. My birthday. The story I'd told myself for twenty years, I'd been at a friend's house, safe, while Elise died alone, felt like a page torn from someone else's life.

          But the report had a notation in the margin: No body recovered. Case closed pending new evidence.

          That night, I returned to the inn. Mrs. Peabody was in the parlor, knitting. The music box sat on the table beside her.

          "You knew," I said, and my voice didn't shake. "You've always known."

          She looked up, her needles stilled. "Knew what?"

          "Who I am. What happened."

          She sighed and set down the needles. "You don't remember, do you? The agreement we made. The one that erased you from this place."

          "I don't--" My mind blanked. A flicker of memory: a room full of mirrors, a contract written in blood, Mrs. Peabody's voice saying, "You'll forget. It's the only way."

          But that was impossible.

          "I don't know what you're talking about," I said, but it was a lie.

          She stood, slowly, and placed a hand on my shoulder. "You took her place. You always have. That's why the town forgot her. That's why you forgot too."

          The music box whirred suddenly, its gears turning without touch. The tune it played was a lullaby Elise had hummed to me, the one I couldn't remember.

          "Elise is gone," I whispered.

          "No," Mrs. Peabody said, and her smile was tender, cruel. "She's here. And so are you. And you'll stay that way, won't you?"

          I don't remember leaving the parlor. I don't remember falling asleep. But when I woke up, the inn was gone. The town was gone. The train platform stretched into nothingness, and in my hand was a ticket stub for a train I'd never boarded.

          A voice, far away, called my name.

          I turned. A girl stood at the edge of the woods, her scarf a flicker of cherry red in the mist.

          "Elise?" I asked.

          She smiled, and the trees behind her burned.

Word Count: 1,295
Prompt: A person returns to a place they once promised never to see again. Nothing looks wrong at first. No one mentions the past. But small details don't line up--the layout of a room, the way a name is spoken, an object that shouldn't still exist.