Chapter 1: The Seventeenth Minute

Chapter 1: The Seventeenth Minute

The digital clock on Eli Vance’s nightstand read 3:16 AM. Its red numerals were a small, angry beacon in the otherwise complete darkness of his room. Outside, Hollow's End slept the deep, dreamless sleep of a town that prided itself on its predictability. A town of perfectly manicured lawns, a single traffic light that blinked yellow after ten, and a population that felt permanently shrink-wrapped in the 1980s. Eli hated it. He and Danny had a pact: one more year, then they were gone. No looking back.

A low hum from his computer’s sleep mode was the only sound, a familiar lullaby in the crushing silence. He’d fallen asleep waiting for Danny to come online for a final round of Wasteland Raiders. Danny had probably bailed to finish his history paper. Typical.

Eli rolled over, pulling the thin blanket over his shoulder. He just needed to get back to sleep. Just a few more hours until the sun rose on another identical day in this identical town.

Then, the clock flickered to 3:17 AM.

And the world went silent.

It wasn't just quiet. It was an absolute, sound-devouring vacuum. The hum of his computer died. The faint buzz from the streetlamp outside his window vanished. Even the gentle creak of the old house settling was gone. The air grew heavy and cold, pressing in on him.

Eli’s eyes snapped open. A power outage, he thought, his heart starting to thump a nervous rhythm against his ribs. That had to be it. He reached for his phone on the nightstand, his fingers fumbling in the oppressive dark. He swiped the screen to life.

No signal. No Wi-Fi. The time was frozen at 3:17 AM.

A knot of pure, undiluted anxiety tightened in his gut. This was wrong. This felt fundamentally wrong. He swung his legs out of bed, the floorboards cold beneath his bare feet, and crept to the window. He parted the curtains, his breath fogging the cool glass.

And he stared into nothing.

The streetlamp wasn't just off; it was gone. The familiar, comforting glow from the Millers' porch across the street? Vanished. Further down, where Danny’s two-story house should have been, with its perpetually peeling blue paint and the basketball hoop over the garage, there was only an impenetrable, inky blackness. It wasn't just dark. It was an absence. A hole punched in the fabric of his world.

“No,” Eli whispered, the sound swallowed by the dead air. “No, no, no.”

He scrambled for his hoodie, pulling it on over his t-shirt. His hands shook as he fumbled with his worn sneakers. This was a dream. A nightmare. One of those hyper-realistic ones that left you sweating and disoriented. He would run outside, feel the shock of the cold air, and then wake up in his bed, the clock reading 3:20 AM.

He yanked his front door open and stumbled onto the porch. The cold was real. It bit at his exposed skin, sharp and real. But the world wasn't.

Half of his street had been erased.

His house and the two next to it stood on a precipice, a bizarre shoreline bordering an ocean of darkness. Where the rest of Oakhaven Drive should have been, there was now a dense, unnatural wall of black pine trees, their needles so thick they seemed to drink the starlight. The road just… stopped. It ended in a clean, sharp line of asphalt that met a bed of dark, damp soil and tangled roots, as if the forest had been there for a thousand years.

Danny’s house was gone. The Millers' house was gone. The entire cul-de-sac at the end of the block was gone.

“Danny!” Eli screamed, his voice thin and reedy in the vacuum. There was no echo. The sound traveled a few feet and simply died, absorbed by the oppressive silence and the looming trees. “Mr. Miller! Anyone!”

Panic, cold and sharp, seized him. He sprinted off his porch, his sneakers sinking into the soft, wet earth where the road should have been. The ground was cold and smelled of deep, freshly turned soil and decay. He ran to the impossible edge of the forest, his hands outstretched as if he could push the illusion away. His fingers met the rough, sticky bark of a pine tree. It was real. Solid.

This couldn't be happening. He was losing his mind. He backed away, stumbling over a root, his eyes wide with terror as he scanned the horrifyingly truncated street. This was his home. He knew every crack in the sidewalk, every oil stain on the asphalt. And now, half of it was gone, replaced by a primeval forest that had no right to be there.

He stayed there for what felt like an eternity, shivering in the cold, caught between the familiar reality of his own front porch and the impossible nightmare that had consumed the other half of his world. His mind raced, trying to find a logical foothold, a rational explanation. A sinkhole? A bizarre, localized earthquake? A hallucination brought on by bad pizza?

Nothing fit. Nothing made sense.

Then, a flicker of light. High above, the first hint of dawn was beginning to bleed over the horizon, a faint line of bruised purple and pale grey. A strange sensation filled the air, a low-frequency hum that vibrated deep in his bones. The world seemed to shimmer, like a heat haze rising from summer asphalt. Eli squeezed his eyes shut, a wave of vertigo washing over him. The smell of damp earth was suddenly replaced by the familiar scent of cut grass and car exhaust. The sound of a distant train whistle cut through the silence.

When he opened his eyes, the sun was rising.

And the street was back.

The forest was gone. The Millers’ house stood exactly where it should, their porch light casting a warm, inviting glow. Further down, Danny’s house was there, the basketball hoop a familiar silhouette against the brightening sky. The streetlamp at the corner flickered on, then off, as its sensor registered the daylight.

Everything was normal. Everything was perfect.

Eli stood frozen, his chest heaving. It had been a dream. A vivid, terrifyingly detailed dream. He laughed, a short, hysterical bark of a sound. A waking nightmare. That was all.

He turned, his legs feeling weak and unsteady, and walked back toward his own front door. He felt like an idiot, standing in the middle of the street in his pajamas as the town began to stir. He could already hear the first car of an early commuter starting up a few blocks away.

His hand was on the doorknob when he saw it.

There, on the clean, dry wood of his porch, was a single, perfect footprint. It was his, the distinct tread of his worn-out sneakers. And it was caked in rich, dark, wet mud. The kind of mud you’d find deep in a forest that had no business being there.

The nightmare was real. And he had brought a piece of it back with him.