Chapter 5: The Ones Who Never Clocked Out

Chapter 5: The Ones Who Never Clocked Out

Liam’s accusation of “mass hysteria” echoed in Leo’s skull, a taunting counterpoint to the memory of the whispering static. Hysteria didn’t leave perfect, barefoot prints in the mud. Hysteria didn’t leave a child-sized handprint on a backpack. Hysteria didn’t haunt a phone’s dead air.

Leo hadn’t slept for more than a few fitful, nightmare-plagued hours since he’d heard it. The dream of the bunker, of the cold, muddy water dripping on his face, returned each time he closed his eyes. During the day, he was a ghost in his own life, his mind miles away, back in the dripping darkness of Ashworth Park. He’d stopped answering Liam’s calls. He barely registered his parents’ worried questions. His world had shrunk to a single, obsessive purpose: find an answer.

His bedroom had transformed into a frantic command center. Old town maps were spread across his floor, historical survey printouts were taped to his walls, and his laptop screen glowed with declassified documents and obscure local history forums. He was fueled by caffeine and a gnawing fear for Chloe. She’d gone quiet, answering his texts with single-word replies, the digital equivalent of a flinch. He knew the whispers were getting worse. He felt a profound, crushing guilt. This was his fault. He had led them there.

His online searches had yielded frustratingly little. The Ashworth Ordnance Depot was a ghost in the official record, its existence mentioned only in passing, its specifics shrouded in wartime secrecy. If he was going to find anything real, he had to go analog.

That’s how he found himself in the basement of the Northgate Public Library, a place that smelled of decaying paper and forgotten time. The local history archive was a cramped, dusty room overseen by a librarian with a formidable bun and an even more formidable glare. She watched him as if he were a silverfish looking for a meal.

“The Ashworth Depot files are restricted,” she’d said, her voice dry as old parchment. “National security. Even after all these years.”

“I’m not looking for schematics,” Leo pleaded, trying to sound like an earnest history student and not a terrified teenager. “I’m looking for personnel records. Newspaper articles. Anything about the people who worked there.”

She had stared at him for a long moment before sighing, a sound like dust settling. “Accidents and incidents would have been reported in the Northgate Chronicle. But they were heavily censored. Don’t expect much.”

She pointed him to a clunky, beige microfilm reader in the corner. For hours, Leo sat hunched over the machine, the world scrolling by in a flickering reel of black and white. He scanned headlines from 1943, 1944, 1945. War bond drives, rationing announcements, saccharine stories of local boys writing home from the front. The depot was mentioned, but only in glowing, vague terms: a bastion of the war effort, its workers praised as “soldiers on the home front.” There was no mention of anything ever going wrong.

His eyes burned from the strain. His hope began to fray. Liam’s voice was back in his head, mocking him. It’s a campfire story. Grow up.

He was about to give up when he found it. Not a headline, but a tiny, two-paragraph column buried deep in the classifieds section of the October 28th, 1944 edition. The headline was deliberately bland: “Minor Setback at Local Works.”

His heart hammered against his ribs. He leaned closer to the illuminated screen, cranking the focus dial.

The article was written in the clipped, sterile prose of wartime propaganda. It mentioned a “minor geological event” that had occurred during a “routine expansion” at the depot. It spoke of a collapsed access tunnel, assuring the public that production was not significantly impacted and that the site remained secure. It was a masterpiece of saying nothing at all.

But Leo had a date. He abandoned the newspapers and turned to the municipal records, his hands shaking slightly as he loaded a new reel: Public Works Reports, 1940-1950. He scrolled frantically to the correct date, searching for anything related to the depot. He found a heavily redacted report detailing a sudden, massive requisition of timber and concrete for “remedial reinforcement” in what was designated as “Tunnel 7.”

A cover-up. Not just censored news, but a full-blown, state-sanctioned cover-up. He felt a surge of validation that was quickly drowned by a wave of dread. What were they so desperate to hide?

He went back to the newspapers, this time looking at the weeks following the incident. He was searching for a different kind of clue. Obituaries. Missing persons reports. He found nothing. The town’s public face remained stoic and untroubled.

Defeated, he slumped back in his chair. He was missing something. He let the microfilm scroll idly, his eyes glazing over, when a photo caught his eye. It was from a week before the collapse, part of a "Salute to Our Workers" series. The caption read: ”Foreman Miller’s crew takes a brief respite from their vital work deep within the Ashworth Depot.”

Leo’s breath hitched. He stared at the grainy image. It was a group of about a dozen men and a few women, their faces smudged with dirt, their overalls caked in mud. They were standing in front of the raw, timber-supported entrance to a tunnel. They looked exhausted, but they were managing tired smiles for the camera.

Then his eyes fell on a follow-up article on the next page, published a month later. It was an interview with a union representative, deflecting rumors of unsafe conditions. Leo scanned the text, his pulse quickening as he read a quote from a man who wasn’t named, identified only as a “site survivor.”

The reporter asked about the workers who had been in the collapsed tunnel. The union man gave a canned response about honoring their sacrifice. But the reporter must have pressed, because the survivor’s next quote was raw, unscripted.

“Sacrifice? They weren’t soldiers. They were diggers. One minute they were there, the next… the earth just took them. The company sealed the tunnel. Said it was too unstable to risk a recovery. We all knew what that meant. They were buried alive. They’re still down there. All of them. The ones who never clocked out.”

The words hit Leo like a physical blow. The ones who never clocked out. They were never reported dead or missing because, on paper, they were still on shift. A bureaucratic loophole to hide a mass grave. This wasn't a ghost. It was an echo. The echo of a forgotten tragedy, trapped beneath the park. It was a collective of souls, their bodies never recovered, their story never told.

His blood ran cold. With trembling hands, he scrolled back to the photograph of the work crew. He looked at their faces again, no longer seeing just workers, but seeing the dead. He imagined them trapped in the crushing darkness, their final moments filled with terror and confusion.

His gaze drifted across the back row and stopped. It landed on a young man, barely older than Leo himself, standing slightly apart from the others. He wasn't smiling. While the others looked at the camera, his gaze was distant, his face a mask of profound, hollow-eyed sorrow. There was a gauntness to his features, a deep weariness that seemed to go beyond physical exhaustion. His hands, hanging at his sides, were long and slender.

Leo zoomed in, the image dissolving into a coarse collection of dots. It wasn't that he recognized the face. He recognized the feeling behind it. It was the crushing loneliness of being utterly, hopelessly trapped. A shiver, deep and violent, traced its way down his spine. The past wasn't just a story on a microfilm reel. It had a face. And Leo felt, with a terrifying certainty, that he was looking into the eyes of the thing that had followed them home.