The Face in the Shadows
And I knew him.
The instant my mind caught up with my eyes, the air left my lungs. My brother’s face had been there—in the fold of the shadows, in that impossible bend of darkness. Just a glimpse, just long enough to carve itself into me.
Daniel Ellison.
Vanished when he was seventeen. Official reports said runaway. My family never bought it, but the city buried the case beneath a hundred others. That was twenty years ago.
And tonight, I saw him again.
Alive.
My hands shook as I pressed them against the counter, grounding myself. “Daniel,” I whispered, the sound small in the empty kitchen.
No answer. No hum. No shift of shadow. Just silence pressing in like an iron lung.
I fumbled for my phone, but what would I even do? Report that I’d seen a ghost? Call Doyle and tell him the missing weren’t missing at all—they were trapped in some nightmare hour?
He’d suspend me. Maybe worse.
I steadied my breath and opened my notebook instead. My handwriting came jagged, uneven:
12:07. Shadows bent. Leah Winters appeared—alive. Daniel Ellison visible. Not hallucination. Too real. Too deliberate.
The pen dug so hard into the paper it nearly tore through.
---
Back at my apartment, sleep was a joke. I sat at my desk with the evidence bag, the watch still ticking its nervous stutter. I wanted to smash it open, to see what made it beat like a heart. But some instinct told me it wasn’t a mechanism I’d find inside.
At 3 a.m., I poured a drink I didn’t need and stared out my window at Gravenloch’s skyline. Rusted steel and concrete, rain-slick streets reflecting the jaundiced glow of neon. The city slept, but not peacefully. It never did.
Daniel’s face kept replaying in my mind. He hadn’t aged. Not a day older than when I lost him.
What the hell had I really seen?
---
By morning, the city dragged me back into its grind. Doyle called me into his office before I’d even had coffee.
“You look like hell,” he muttered.
“Good morning to you too.”
He shoved a file across the desk. “Second disappearance. Same time. Different location.”
My throat tightened. “Another one?”
“College kid. West End. Vanished from his dorm room at exactly 12:07 a.m. His roommate swears he saw him flicker like bad reception before he disappeared.” Doyle pinched the bridge of his nose. “And guess what was left behind.”
I didn’t need to guess. I knew.
“Another watch,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “How’d you know?”
I leaned forward. “Because Leah Winters’ case isn’t isolated. And if we don’t move fast, this is going to spread.”
He studied me like he wanted to say a dozen things and none of them would make sense out loud. Finally, he sighed. “Talk to Shaw.”
The name hit me cold. “Adrian Shaw?”
Doyle nodded. “Ex-physicist. Used to work with a black-site lab out near the water treatment plant. Project Nocturne, I think they called it. He went off the grid a few years back. Rumor is, he knows things about these… anomalies.”
Anomalies. That was one way of putting it.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Somewhere between drunk and homeless. Crashes in an old observatory on the north ridge. Go see if he’s still coherent.”
---
The observatory was a rotting dome of iron and glass, half-swallowed by ivy and time. I climbed the cracked steps, rain soaking my coat, and knocked.
No answer.
I pushed the door open. The smell hit me first—whiskey, dust, and rust. Then the stacks of papers, scattered across tables, scrawled with equations and diagrams that looked like blueprints for a machine that shouldn’t exist.
And slumped in a chair beneath the shattered telescope was Dr. Adrian Shaw. Beard grown wild, bottle in hand, eyes bloodshot but sharp as knives when they flicked up to me.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he rasped.
“Detective Mara Ellison,” I said, flashing my badge. “I’m here about the disappearances.”
He laughed, a dry, broken sound. “Disappearances. That’s what they’re calling it? Cute. Makes it sound like a parlor trick.”
I stepped closer. “I saw one happen.”
That silenced him. His bottle clinked softly against the table. “When?”
“Last night. 12:07. Shadows bent. A girl named Leah Winters was pulled into… something. But I also saw someone else.” My voice faltered. “My brother. He vanished twenty years ago. He looked exactly the same.”
Shaw leaned forward, eyes gleaming with fevered intensity. “Then it’s true. The tether isn’t bound by time.”
“The tether?”
He gestured to the scattered papers. “Project Nocturne. They thought they were mapping neural frequencies. Testing how the brain perceives time. But what they really did was tear a hole in it. An hour carved out, devouring anyone who slips inside.”
My stomach twisted. “You’re saying these vanishings are experiments?”
“Not experiments,” Shaw whispered. “Echoes. The experiments ended years ago. But the hour—they made it real. And once something exists, it doesn’t just stop. It hungers.”
The word clung to me like smoke. Hungers.
I forced myself to stay grounded. “Why watches? Both victims left one behind.”
“They’re anchors,” Shaw said. “Failed tethers. Each one tied to the subject, meant to keep them rooted. But the connection is unstable. The device stays. The person doesn’t.”
“And Daniel?” My voice cracked on his name. “If he’s in there—can I get him back?”
Shaw’s face darkened. “If he’s survived this long, he’s not the brother you remember.”
---
I left the observatory shaken, my head pounding with impossible words. The hour. Tethers. Hungers.
But there was one more thread I couldn’t ignore.
Don’t trust the priest.
St. Jude’s Shelter sat near the waterfront, its brick walls dark with years of grime. Inside, Father Elias Marlowe greeted me with kind eyes and a worn smile.
“Detective Ellison. What brings you here?”
I studied him carefully. A gentle man, graying at the temples, hands calloused from work. He didn’t look like someone to fear. But the voice on the phone had been insistent.
“I’m investigating the disappearances,” I said. “You run a shelter. You must hear stories.”
He nodded slowly. “They come in whispers. The vanished ones, the shadows at midnight. Some say it’s punishment. Others call it deliverance. Perhaps both are true.”
His words made my skin crawl.
“Have you seen it happen?” I pressed.
His gaze held mine. “Yes.”
The air seemed to drain out of the room.
“One of my flock,” he continued. “She vanished during evening prayers. Right before my eyes. No sound, no struggle. Just gone.”
“Did she come back?”
He looked past me, as though into something I couldn’t see. “Not whole.”
The way he said it froze me.
Before I could ask more, a voice shouted from outside. Urgent. Panicked.
I ran to the door. A young man was in the street, pointing at the sky. “It’s happening again!”
I followed his finger.
The world tilted.
Above Gravenloch, the night tore open. A wound of shadow split the clouds, pulsing with unnatural light.
12:07.
And from the rift, I saw her.
Leah Winters. Hovering above the street, her body jerking like a marionette, mouth open in a soundless scream.
The people below screamed anyway.
And then she fell.
Right in front of me.