Chapter 1: The Fifth Poem

Chapter 1: The Fifth Poem

The town of Red Horse was dying of a broken heart. It was a slow, quiet death, measured in for-sale signs that yellowed in dusty windows and the way people’s eyes slid past each other in the grocery store aisle. Five years. Five years since the sky had broken open over Pearsons Park and stolen its future.

Leo Vance felt the town’s decay in his own bones. He drove through the listless streets, his knuckles white on the steering wheel of his beat-up sedan. Every year, on this day, he made the same pilgrimage. A ritual of self-flagellation and remembrance. October 12th. The day the world had gone mad.

Pearsons Park was just as he remembered, and worse. The swingsets hung limp and rusted. The picnic tables were tattooed with graffiti. Nature was reclaiming it, but not in a beautiful way. It was a choked, resentful conquest. Only the old willow tree by the creek seemed to have thrived, its branches weeping lower than ever, a curtain of green hiding a hollow heart. Their willow tree.

Leo parked and got out, the familiar chill of the autumn air doing little to numb the cold dread that lived permanently in his gut. He clutched the worn leather notebook in his left hand, its pages filled with his own frantic scrawls and, more importantly, careful transcriptions of her four poems. The only four she’d ever given him.

He walked the path, each step an echo of a happier ghost. He could almost see her, a sunlit memory at sixteen, running ahead of him, long hair flying, turning back to laugh. Emilia Hayes. The name was a prayer and a curse on his lips.

He reached the willow. Its trunk was thick and gnarled, a testament to its age. There, just at shoulder height, were the initials they’d carved with his pocketknife that golden afternoon. L.V. + E.H. His thumb traced the rough letters, a pointless act of communion with a ghost.

This was his ritual. He would sit on the worn bench beneath the branches, open his notebook, and read her four poems aloud to the empty air. He’d read them until his voice was raw and the words blurred into meaningless sounds, a desperate incantation to turn back time.

Today, the grief felt different. Sharper. Five years was a milestone. A tombstone. The world had moved on, filed the incident under ‘unexplained phenomenon’ or ‘mass hysteria,’ and buried it. The national news had called them the ‘Red Horse Hysterics.’ Therapists had offered explanations. But Leo knew what he saw. He’d been there. He’d been holding her hand.

He sat on the bench, the damp wood seeping through his jeans. He didn’t open his notebook. Not yet. He just stared at the carving, letting the silence and the memories wash over him. He had failed her. That was the one, immutable truth that had governed his life for half a decade. He’d stood just feet away, screaming into a wall of absolute silence, and watched her disappear.

His eyes drifted from the carving, tracing the patterns in the ancient bark. And then he saw it.

Tucked into a deep crevice just below their initials was a piece of paper. It was folded into a tight, neat square. It was clean. Impossibly, pristinely white, as if it had been placed there only moments ago.

Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, painful rhythm. This was new. This was wrong. His first thought was a surge of white-hot anger. A prank. Some cruel, twisted teenager had decided to desecrate his private memorial. He reached out, his hand trembling, and plucked the paper from the bark.

He unfolded it. It was a single sheet, crisp and cool to the touch, unlike any paper he’d ever felt. And on it, in familiar, elegant script, was a poem.

His breath hitched. He knew that handwriting better than his own. The precise, delicate loops of the ‘g’s and ‘y’s. The way she drew a tiny, five-pointed star instead of a simple dot over her ‘i’s. It was Emilia’s.

It couldn’t be. A forgery. A copy of one of her old school assignments. His rational mind scrambled for an explanation, for anything to quell the impossible hope that was blooming like a poison flower in his chest. But he had memorized every word she had ever written, every stray line she’d doodled in the margins of her textbooks. This was not one of them. This was new.

He forced his blurring eyes to focus, his lips forming the words as he read them silently.

They gave me a room of silent glass, Where strange-lit suns and embers pass. The Gardener comes with jointless hands, To tend the soil of stolen lands.

I paint your face on star-dusted walls, Recall your voice when silence calls. My thoughts are threads, a silver line, Cast through the dark, to see if they shine.

A song of numbers, a map of grey, Is all I have to light the way. Find the shimmer, the ink that weeps, My love is the promise the darkness keeps.

The world tilted on its axis. The rustling leaves, the distant traffic, the chirping of a lone bird—it all faded into a roaring hum in his ears. This wasn't a poem about sunsets or first love. The words were alien, drenched in a quiet, cosmic horror. Jointless hands. Stolen lands. A room of silent glass.

It was a description. A message. A scream trapped in ink and meter.

For five years, he had been haunted by a memory. He’d built his life around an absence, a void shaped exactly like her. The world, the police, even his own parents had eventually settled on the most palatable lie: that she had run away, and he, in his trauma, had invented the rest. The silent, invisible wall. The shimmering lights. The tall, faceless thing that had taken her.

But this poem… this was proof. A ghost had reached across an impossible distance to leave him a note.

He looked around the empty park, a wild, paranoid energy coursing through him. Was someone watching? Had they left it for him? Or had it simply… appeared? He scrambled to his feet, shoving the poem into the front of his notebook, his sanctuary of her memory now host to something active, something terrifyingly alive.

She wasn’t a memory. She wasn’t a ghost.

Emilia was somewhere out there, in the dark. And she was waiting for him. The five years of grieving were over. The hunt had just begun.