The Vanishing
They told me you never forget your first case. That’s not true. You forget plenty of them—the robberies, the domestic calls, the drunks screaming in the alleys at three in the morning. They blur together, file numbers fading until they’re just paper stacked in drawers no one opens again.
But you never forget the first time someone simply… vanishes.
My name is Detective Mara Ellison, and Gravenloch is the kind of city that remembers everything except the truth.
It was a Tuesday when the call came in. A missing person. That was nothing new—people disappeared here all the time. Runaways, addicts, debts unpaid. But there was something in the dispatcher’s voice that made me take it personally. A kind of hesitation. Fear bleeding through the professional mask.
The girl’s name was Leah Winters. Twenty-two. Lived on the east side, in a decaying apartment block that smelled like mildew and gas leaks. I arrived just after midnight, rain dripping down the cracked stairwell as I climbed to the third floor.
Her roommate met me at the door—a pale, shaking thing in oversized pajamas. She kept glancing behind her as if the shadows were listening.
“She was here,” she told me. “We were watching TV. She got up to make tea. She never came back.”
“Never came back?” I repeated.
She nodded. Her lips trembled. “I checked the kitchen. Empty. No sound, no door. She was just… gone.”
I searched the apartment myself. Small space, one exit, no forced entry. Windows latched from the inside. No signs of struggle. No blood, no overturned furniture, nothing missing except the girl.
It should’ve been impossible.
But when I stepped into the kitchen, I saw something I couldn’t ignore. On the table, beside the chipped mug Leah had set out for tea, lay a wristwatch. The second hand ticked erratically, jerking forward and back like it couldn’t decide which moment it belonged to.
I leaned closer. The air around it felt… wrong. Thicker somehow. Heavy, like standing too close to a power line.
“Did this belong to her?” I asked.
The roommate shook her head. “I’ve never seen it before.”
I slipped on gloves and bagged the watch. Even then, I swear I felt its pulse against my palm, faint and steady, like a heartbeat.
That was the first time I realized this wasn’t just another missing person.
---
By morning, Leah’s case file was already stacked on my desk, thin and unsatisfying. I hate thin files. They feel like lies pretending to be work.
I opened my notebook and scribbled:
Leah Winters. Age 22. Disappearance: 12:07 a.m. Last seen: apartment kitchen. No exit. No struggle. Object left behind: watch (erratic movement).
The watch sat on my desk in an evidence bag. I couldn’t stop glancing at it.
“Ellison.”
I looked up. Captain Doyle loomed in my doorway, tie crooked, face carved by sleeplessness and cigarettes. “You working the Winters case?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He hesitated before stepping inside. “Be careful with this one.”
That made me pause. Doyle wasn’t the kind of man who said things like that. His warnings usually came in the form of budget memos or threats about overtime.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He rubbed his temple. “Just… don’t get too deep. Missing persons in Gravenloch have a way of staying missing.”
He left before I could press him.
---
By noon, I was walking the east side, canvassing neighbors. A woman across the hall swore she’d heard Leah humming an old lullaby through the walls—right up until the moment she disappeared. Then silence.
A janitor swore the hallway lights flickered at the exact same time, buzzing like a swarm of bees.
Another tenant, eyes glazed with lack of sleep, muttered only one phrase before shutting his door: “The hour took her.”
I wrote it down. The hour.
Gravenloch was full of whispers like that. Folklore woven into cracked pavement.
---
Back at the precinct, I pulled Leah’s file again. She had no history with drugs. No outstanding debts. A quiet life. A job at a bookstore downtown.
Normal.
Too normal.
It was while I was staring at her photo—a girl with a shy smile and sharp eyes—that my phone buzzed. An anonymous number.
I answered. “Detective Ellison.”
A man’s voice crackled through static. “You’re looking in the wrong place.”
“Who is this?”
“Leah Winters isn’t missing,” the voice said. “She’s been taken.”
My grip on the phone tightened. “Taken by who?”
The line hissed with distortion, but through it I caught fragments—“the project”… “the hour”… “don’t trust the priest.”
Then silence.
I sat frozen, the phone still pressed to my ear, heart hammering.
“Don’t trust the priest.”
I thought of Father Elias Marlowe. Everyone in Gravenloch knew him. A gentle man who ran the St. Jude Shelter, feeding the homeless, offering beds to runaways. Why would anyone warn me about him?
I didn’t know yet. But I wrote it down.
---
That night, I returned to Leah’s apartment alone. The roommate had left to stay with her parents. The place was silent, shadows stretching across peeling wallpaper.
I stood in the kitchen where Leah had last been seen. The watch ticked in my bag, though I hadn’t wound it.
12:07 a.m. That was the time Leah disappeared.
I stayed. Waiting.
The clock on the stove blinked 12:05.
12:06.
12:07.
The lights flickered.
My chest tightened. The air grew thick, vibrating with a low hum that I felt more than heard. My breath frosted in front of me.
Then, in the corner of the kitchen, the shadows moved. Not stretched, not shifted—moved.
I froze.
The darkness bent inward, like a hole opening in the air. The hum grew louder. And for a heartbeat, I saw her.
Leah Winters. Standing in the doorway. Eyes wide. Mouth open in a silent scream.
And then—gone.
The hum died. The shadows smoothed back into place.
Only the watch remained, ticking madly.
I staggered back, hand gripping the counter, my pulse racing.
Leah wasn’t missing. She wasn’t dead. She was… somewhere else.
And the worst part?
As the silence settled over me, I realized I’d seen another face in the shadows.
A man. Watching.
And I knew him.