Chapter 3: The Liar's Warning

The morning after witnessing Mr. Hudson's impossible disappearance, Alex woke to find Tobi already dressed and pacing their bedroom like a caged animal.

"We have to talk to them," Tobi said without preamble. "The Hudsons. We need to know what happened yesterday."

Alex sat up, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Tobi, we agreed—"

"That was before we watched a man flicker out of existence." Tobi's voice carried the manic energy that always preceded his biggest investigative breakthroughs. "This isn't just neighborhood weirdness anymore, Alex. This is something real, something dangerous, and we're living right in the middle of it."

Through their bedroom window, Alex could see the Hudson house looking perfectly normal in the morning sunlight. Mr. Hudson was visible through his kitchen window, apparently making breakfast. If he remembered being erased from reality yesterday, he showed no signs of it.

"What if talking about it makes things worse?" Alex asked, echoing Tobi's own words from the day before.

"What if not talking about it gets us killed?"

The bluntness of the statement hit Alex like a physical blow. They'd been dancing around the implications since finding the calendar, but Tobi had just voiced their deepest fear. Whatever was happening in this neighborhood, it was claiming people. The rapid turnover of residents in their house suddenly made terrible sense.

"Okay," Alex said, surprising himself. "But we do this carefully. No cameras, no recording devices. Just a conversation between neighbors."

An hour later, they stood on the Hudson's front porch. Alex's finger hovered over the doorbell, trembling slightly. Everything about this felt wrong—the too-bright morning sun, the cheerful sound of birds singing, the normalcy that surrounded them like a lie.

The door opened before he could press the button.

Mrs. Hudson stood in the doorway, and Alex's first thought was that she looked exactly like a grandmother from a Norman Rockwell painting. Silver hair in a neat bun, flour-dusted apron over a floral dress, and a smile warm enough to melt butter.

"Oh my!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands together. "You must be our new neighbors! I'm Martha Hudson, and that's my Jim in the kitchen. We've been meaning to come over with a welcome casserole."

Her voice was honey-sweet, her eyes twinkling with genuine warmth. There was nothing in her demeanor to suggest that anything unusual had happened to her husband less than twenty-four hours ago.

"I'm Alex, and this is Tobi," Alex managed. "We just wanted to introduce ourselves and see how you're both doing."

"How thoughtful! Please, come in, come in. Jim will want to meet you properly."

The inside of the Hudson house was a time capsule from the 1970s—avocado green appliances, wood paneling, and family photos covering every available surface. The smell of fresh coffee and bacon filled the air, creating an atmosphere so aggressively normal that Alex felt his skin crawl.

Mr. Hudson appeared from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "Well, hello there! I was just telling Martha we should make you boys a proper welcome meal."

Alex stared at the old man's face, searching for any sign of recognition, any hint that he remembered their conversation about the calendar. There was nothing. Mr. Hudson's expression was open and friendly, with no trace of the fear that had sent him hurrying into his house just days ago.

"That's very kind," Tobi said, his journalist instincts clearly struggling with the surreal normalcy of the situation. "We were actually wondering if you could tell us about yesterday. We were watching from our window around noon and thought we saw—"

"Yesterday?" Mrs. Hudson's smile never wavered, but something flickered behind her eyes. "What about yesterday, dear?"

"We saw Mr. Hudson outside, and then..." Tobi glanced at Alex, clearly unsure how to proceed. "Well, it looked like something unusual happened."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Mr. Hudson's friendly expression didn't change, but his wife's smile stretched wider, becoming something that belonged in a horror movie rather than a suburban kitchen.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," Mrs. Hudson said, her voice maintaining its saccharine sweetness. "Jim was inside all day yesterday. Weren't you, dear?"

"That's right," Mr. Hudson agreed readily. "Spent the whole day working on my model trains in the basement. Martha can vouch for me."

Alex felt reality tilting around him. They had watched Mr. Hudson disappear. They had video evidence, even if it didn't show what they'd seen. But faced with the man's cheerful certainty and his wife's unwavering smile, Alex found himself questioning his own memories.

"Perhaps you saw someone else," Mrs. Hudson suggested. "Mr. Patterson from down the street, maybe? He's always puttering around his yard."

"No," Tobi said firmly. "It was definitely Mr. Hudson. We watched him get his mail, light a cigarette, and then—"

"I don't smoke," Mr. Hudson interrupted, his voice carrying a note of confusion that seemed genuine. "Haven't touched tobacco in thirty years. Doctor's orders."

The lie was so brazen, so complete, that Alex felt his knees go weak. They were standing in a room with two people who were calmly, pleasantly denying reality itself. Mrs. Hudson's smile had become a rictus, stretching her face into something inhuman, while her husband nodded along as if discussing the weather.

"Well," Alex said, his voice cracking slightly, "we should probably get going. Thank you for your time."

"Of course! Don't be strangers now," Mrs. Hudson chirped, following them to the door. "And remember—this is such a quiet neighborhood. Nothing unusual ever happens here. Nothing at all."

As they reached the front porch, Mrs. Hudson caught Alex's arm. Her grip was surprisingly strong, her fingers digging into his flesh through his jacket.

"Jim, go check on that casserole," she said without turning around.

"But Martha, we weren't—"

"Go." The word came out as a hiss.

Mr. Hudson's footsteps retreated into the house. The moment they were alone, Mrs. Hudson's mask slipped completely. Her grandmother's smile collapsed into an expression of raw terror, and when she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.

"The whispers'll get you," she said, her eyes darting frantically between Alex and Tobi. "Just like they got the others. Leave before they do. Please, for the love of God, just leave."

"What whispers?" Tobi leaned forward urgently. "Mrs. Hudson, what's happening here?"

But the mask was already sliding back into place. Mrs. Hudson's smile returned, bright and artificial as plastic flowers.

"Have a wonderful day, boys!" she called out in her cheerful voice. "Welcome to the neighborhood!"

The door slammed shut with finality.

Alex and Tobi walked back to their house in stunned silence. It wasn't until they were safely inside with the door locked behind them that either of them spoke.

"She knows," Alex said. "She knows exactly what's happening, but she can't talk about it."

"Or won't," Tobi corrected. "Did you see how quickly she shut down when her husband was listening? It's like they're performing for someone."

"The whispers she mentioned—"

"Could be metaphorical. Could be literal. With everything we've seen, I'm not ruling anything out."

They spent the rest of the day trying to return to some semblance of normalcy, but the encounter with the Hudsons had shaken them both. Alex found himself checking the windows obsessively, while Tobi retreated to his investigation wall, adding new notes and connections with increasingly frantic energy.

That evening, as they sat down to dinner, the lights in the Hudson house began to flicker.

It started as a barely perceptible dimming, the kind of thing that might indicate electrical problems. But as they watched from their kitchen window, the flickering became more pronounced, more violent. The entire house strobed like a broken neon sign, windows flashing between brilliant white and complete darkness.

"Should we call someone?" Alex asked. "The fire department? The power company?"

But even as he spoke, he knew this wasn't a normal electrical problem. The other houses on the street remained unaffected, their lights steady and normal. Only the Hudson house was caught in its spasmodic light show.

The flickering continued for exactly six minutes—the same amount of time Mr. Hudson had been erased from existence. Then, abruptly, the house went dark. Not the gradual dimming of a power outage, but the complete, instantaneous darkness of lights being switched off all at once.

They waited, watching, but the Hudson house remained dark. No lights came back on. No movement was visible in the windows. The house sat in perfect darkness as if it had been abandoned for years.

"We should check on them," Alex said, but he made no move toward the door.

"No," Tobi replied. "Whatever just happened, I don't think we want to get involved."

They were right to stay away. The next morning, Alex woke to the sound of voices in the street. Looking out their bedroom window, he saw two police officers standing in front of the Hudson house, writing in notepads and looking confused.

By the time Alex and Tobi had dressed and made it outside, a small crowd of neighbors had gathered. Mrs. Patterson was there, along with several other residents they'd met during their brief canvassing.

"What's happening?" Alex asked Mrs. Patterson.

"Oh, it's the strangest thing," she replied, her painted smile firmly in place. "The police are asking about the Hudson house, but there's never been anyone named Hudson living there. The house has been empty for months."

Alex felt the world tilt around him. "But we talked to them yesterday—"

"I'm sorry, dear, but you must be confused. That house has been vacant since the Kowalskis moved out last spring."

The police officer closest to them looked up from his notepad. "Excuse me, are you folks the new residents?" When they nodded, he continued, "We received a noise complaint about this address last night, but our records show the property as unoccupied. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"

"We saw some lights flickering," Tobi said carefully. "Thought it might be an electrical problem."

"Lights?" The officer frowned. "The power's been shut off to this address for six months. No way there could have been lights."

Alex stared at the Hudson house. In the bright morning sunlight, it looked different. The windows that had seemed so warm and welcoming now appeared dark and empty. The yard, which had been meticulously maintained, showed signs of neglect—overgrown grass, untrimmed hedges, newspapers yellowing on the front porch.

How had they missed it before?

"Must have been a reflection," Mrs. Patterson suggested helpfully. "Light from the street lamps, maybe, or car headlights."

The police officers seemed satisfied with this explanation. They finished their notes, warned the neighbors to call if they saw any signs of trespassing, and drove away. The crowd began to disperse, everyone returning to their normal morning routines as if nothing unusual had happened.

Alex and Tobi stood alone in front of the empty Hudson house, trying to reconcile what they'd experienced with the reality everyone else seemed to accept.

"They were real," Alex said finally. "We talked to them. Mrs. Hudson warned us about the whispers."

"I know." Tobi's voice was hollow. "But according to everyone else, including official records, they never existed."

As they turned to go back inside, Alex caught a glimpse of something on the ground near the Hudson's front walk. A small pile of ash, gray against the concrete—exactly where Mr. Hudson's impossible cigarette had burned to nothing.

The evidence was disappearing, one piece at a time. But the warning Mrs. Hudson had whispered remained: The whispers'll get you. Leave before they do.

Alex looked up at their house, at the office window where the calendar waited with its blood-red circles. June 19th was still months away, but suddenly it felt much closer.

The neighborhood's secret was becoming clear: this wasn't just about strange occurrences or unexplained phenomena. People weren't just moving away—they were being erased, removed from existence so completely that even the memory of them could be wiped clean.

And Alex and Tobi were next on the list.