October 19th, 1976
Hollow Creek, Pennsylvania
7:08 A.M.
.
.
.
.
.
The mornings gray and heavy fog still lay upon the surface, the sun struggling to penetrate the fog that clung on to Hallow Creek Road. The town was beginning to stir—distant thunder of engines being revved up, the crunch of gravel beneath tires, the muted clank of a screen door somewhere down the street.
Outside by the road, a small farmhouse stirred. A porch light came on for an instant, then extinguished.
Inside Evelyn Brooks, age sixty-two, stood at her kitchen sink rinsing out a cranked coffee cup. She gazed out the window, eyes squinting across the field. The fog obscured the visibility, but something—a shape, maybe— arrested her attention along the line of trees.
She said nothing to her husband when he came into the kitchen. No need to. Probably a deer. Or her imagination.
But she did not turn off the porch light again, either.
—
A little farther up the road, Thomas Bell struggled along the gravel verge with his head bent, patrol cap lowered, and his coat pulled buttoned up to him. His boots, scuffed and heavy, moved resolutely but in no defined direction. He walked because only walking was what he did.
He viewed the world through a fog—inside and outside his head. The mist rendered everything dreamlike, as if he never actually left the hospital. Like— if this was just another hallucination.
"...Quiet town..."
.
.
"...eyes on you..."
.
.
"...wrong... don't belong..."
The voices were mute now, like static on the radio. Not yelling, not commanding. Just. Telling him things he did not want to hear.
He passed a wooden sign saying, "Hollow Creek— Pop. 1,038." The numbers were meaningless to him. He couldn't remember when he had ever lived anywhere that had a number by it.
In his pocket, he continued to carry the shard of the mirror. Covered now in a piece of cloth, but still pointed. Still handy. He hadn't gazed at it since before dawn. He didn't want to catch sight of his face in the daylight.
Down the road, a deserted gas station sat still alongside the highway. The lights were dark. The handles of the pumps squeaked faintly in the wind. Outside the side door, a young man— mid twenties, messy brown curls—was stacking crates. He looked up when he spotted bell.
Thomas continued his way.
The man looked at him. A little too long.
Not becuase he recognized him. No.
Because the man looked. Odd.
His clothes were military, but not quite correct. His stride was rigid, metered. And his face was impassive under a thin veneer of dry mud.
"Hey," the young man shouted out, uncertain. "You okay, pal?"
Thomas, did not respond. He simply continued walking, head bent, past the station and into the fog. In a matter of seconds, he had vanished behind the bend in the road.
The young man was still for a long time. A chill crawled up his back—he didn't understand why. Something in that quiet confrontation, in the way the man moved, had unsettled him.
Later, he went to stacking crates.
But he locked the side door behind him.
Thomas saw a shallow grove of trees on the oppisite side of the curve and crept into them quietly. From there he knelt, between the trees, his gaze on the road. His ears.
The voices were quiet now.
But his mind wasn't.
Something inside of him moved—slow and still like a rusty engine. The mask of normalcy was starting to break down. The jacket was rough. The mud dried and cracked. But the cap stayed on.
The uniform wasn't about pride. It was about erasure. About hiding the last remnant of what he used to be.
He pressed the piece of mirror against his palm, not to hard to slice. Hard enough to remember it was there.
Hard enough to remember he was still there.
But only for a while.
Not in this shape.
The sun was rising over the clouds now.
And someone soon—was going to look too closely.
That's when it would begin.