Chapter 3: A Memory of Loss

Chapter 3: A Memory of Loss

Two weeks.

Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours.

That’s how long Alex had been living in the quiet, creeping horror that had ambushed him on a rainy afternoon. Time had splintered into two distinct streams. In one, the world continued its charade of normalcy. The news reported on politics and sports, his parents went to work, and the official story was that two college students, Max and Chloe, had vanished without a trace. Missing persons posters, bearing their smiling, familiar faces, were stapled to telephone poles—a public testament to a private nightmare.

In Alex’s stream, the truth was infinitely more monstrous. He saw the world through a cracked lens, a world populated by the Un-people. He’d learned to survive by never making eye contact. He’d walk through campus or the grocery store with his gaze fixed on the ground, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. The memory of the bus, of those heads turning in chilling synchronicity, was a constant threat. He lived with the perpetual, skin-crawling certainty that if he looked up at the wrong moment, he would see them again, their black eyes staring, recognizing him as the glitch in their pristine, hollow reality.

He hadn't slept for more than an hour at a time. Every time he closed his eyes, he was back in the bronze elevator, watching the soulless reflections of his friends. Sleep offered no escape, only a replay of the trauma.

His only sanctuary, his only anchor in the swirling madness, was his grandfather’s house.

Arthur Thorne was a seventy-year-old bastion of reality. He was solid. He smelled of pipe tobacco, old books, and sawdust from his workshop. His eyes were a pale, clear blue, crinkled at the corners from a lifetime of smiling. They were the most beautifully, blessedly normal eyes in the world. When Alex was with him, the gnawing paranoia receded to a manageable hum. Here, in this house filled with decades of memories, the world felt stable. The floorboards didn't threaten to dissolve, and the man sitting across from him was undeniably real.

“You’re wound tighter than a two-dollar watch, kiddo,” Arthur said, his voice a gravelly rumble. He was sitting in his favorite worn leather armchair, packing tobacco into his pipe with practiced, steady fingers. “Still no word on your friends?”

Alex just shook his head, hunched over on the sofa. He couldn’t bring himself to speak about it. How could he explain that they weren’t just missing? That they had been… overwritten?

“It’ll be alright,” Arthur said, though his tone lacked conviction. He struck a match, the sulfurous flare momentarily chasing the shadows from the room. “These things… they have a way of working out.”

Alex wanted to believe him more than anything. He wanted to soak in the comforting fiction that this was a normal tragedy, a solvable mystery. For a few hours, sitting in the warm, quiet living room, he almost could.

“I’m heading out to the garage to finish sanding that bookshelf,” Arthur announced, pushing himself up from the chair with a slight groan. “Should be done by dinner. Your grandmother would’ve loved it.”

He paused at the doorway, turning back to Alex. “Stay for dinner. Your mother’s making that pot roast you like. It’ll do you good to be around family.”

“Yeah, okay,” Alex mumbled, a small, genuine smile finally touching his lips. The thought of a normal family dinner felt like a lifeline.

“Good lad.” Arthur grinned, then glanced down at his own feet. “Ah, drat.” His shoelace had come undone. He bent over, resting one hand on the doorframe for balance, and began to deftly retie the worn leather lace. It was a simple, mundane act. A moment of pure, unadulterated reality.

“See you in a sec, kiddo,” Arthur grunted, his head still bowed.

Alex nodded, looking down at his own sneakers, his own laces perfectly tied. He blinked, a slow, tired blink, the kind that came after days of sleep deprivation. It couldn't have lasted more than a second.

When he looked up, the doorway was empty.

The silence that flooded the room was instantaneous and absolute. It wasn't the quiet of an empty house; it was the same dead, sound-swallowing stillness from the wrong building’s lobby.

“Grandpa?” Alex called out, his voice thin and reedy.

No answer.

He scrambled off the sofa, his heart instantly vaulting into a gallop. “Grandpa, you in the garage?”

He ran to the back door, flinging it open. The garage was just across a small, tidy patch of lawn. The door was ajar. Alex sprinted across the damp grass, his sneakers slapping against the concrete as he burst inside.

The half-sanded bookshelf sat on the workbench, a sheet of sandpaper lying beside it. A mug of coffee, still faintly steaming, sat on the corner. The air smelled of sawdust and Arthur’s familiar pipe tobacco. But the room was empty.

“Grandpa!” he screamed, his voice cracking with sheer panic. He checked the small tool shed. He circled the entire house, his breath coming in ragged, desperate sobs. He looked in every room, under beds, in closets, his rational mind warring with the rising tide of impossible dread.

He was gone. In the space of a blink, in the time it took to tie a shoelace, his grandfather had vanished from existence.

With trembling fingers, he dialed 911. The conversation was a blur of frantic explanations and calming, professional questions from the dispatcher. Within twenty minutes, a police car was parked in the driveway. A tired-looking officer with a thick mustache and a weary face listened patiently as Alex recounted the story—the sanitized version.

“He was right there,” Alex repeated, his hands shaking so badly he had to shove them in his pockets. “He was tying his shoe, and then… he was gone. I checked everywhere.”

The officer sighed, clicking his pen. “Mr. Thorne, your grandfather is seventy years old, you said? Any history of dementia? Alzheimer’s?”

“No! Nothing like that. He’s sharp. He’s… he was fine.”

“It’s not uncommon for folks his age to get disoriented. He probably just decided to go for a walk and forgot to mention it,” the officer said, his tone placating. Patronizing. “We’ll put out a BOLO, check the local hospitals, the bus station. More than likely, he’ll turn up by morning, wondering what all the fuss is about.”

Alex wanted to scream. He wanted to grab the officer by his uniform and shake him. You don’t understand! He didn’t wander off! He was erased! But the words were insane. He was insane. Saying them out loud would only get him a psychiatric hold, not a search party.

The real nightmare began when his parents arrived. His mother’s face crumpled the moment she saw the police car. His father’s jaw was set in a hard, tight line, a mask of forced control. They listened as Alex numbly repeated the lie. He was going to the garage. I looked away for a minute, and when I looked back, he was gone.

He had to watch the raw, unfiltered grief bloom on their faces. He had to witness his mother’s weeping, his father’s stoic, silent devastation. It was a new and exquisitely cruel form of torture. Their sorrow was real, aimed at a man who, for them, had simply wandered away. But Alex’s grief was for something else entirely. He was mourning the man, yes, but he was also mourning the loss of his last anchor to a reality that no longer existed.

He was forced to stand there, comforting his mother, while knowing the horrifying truth. Her father hadn't been stolen by age or illness. He had been stolen by a glitch in the universe.

That night, surrounded by his grieving family in his grandfather's silent, empty house, Alex finally understood. He hadn’t been having nightmares for the past two weeks. The elevator, the bus, the black-eyed people—they weren't hallucinations or bad dreams.

This was reality now. And a nightmare, by definition, is something you eventually wake up from.