Chapter 2: Echoes in the Emptiness

Chapter 2: Echoes in the Emptiness

The walk to the police station was a fever dream. Liam’s feet pounded the pavement, each step an impact that jarred him to the teeth. The city, once a familiar grid of opportunities and routines, now felt alien and predatory. The cheerful glow of storefronts seemed to mock him, the laughter from a passing car sounded like a judgment. He was a ghost moving through a world that was no longer his, clutching a secret too monstrous to hold.

He burst through the doors of the 24-hour precinct, bringing a gust of cold, night air into the sterile, fluorescent-lit waiting area. A beefy, balding officer sat behind a thick pane of plexiglass, looking profoundly bored as he typed with two fingers on a keyboard. He didn't look up.

"I need to report something," Liam said, his voice ragged. He was acutely aware of his appearance—the unwashed clothes, the matted hair, the wild, haunted look in his eyes. He tried to straighten his shoulders, to summon the ghost of the project manager who could command a room. "A… a mass disappearance."

The officer’s typing paused. He looked up, his gaze sweeping over Liam in a slow, dismissive appraisal that stripped away any lingering shred of dignity. "A 'mass disappearance,'" he repeated, his tone flat and utterly devoid of curiosity. "Okay. Names?"

"Sal. Martha. I don't know their last names. There were others, maybe five or six of them. Under the Oakhaven Bridge."

The officer let out a short, humorless puff of air. "The bridge." He leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking in protest. "Right. And what happened to Sal and Martha and the others?"

"He took them," Liam insisted, leaning forward against the counter. "A man. He was… strange. Dressed in a suit, half new, half old. He gave them tickets, they gave him their things, and then they just… dissolved. They vanished."

The officer stared at him for a long moment, his expression shifting from boredom to a kind of weary pity. "Son," he said, his voice softening into the condescending tone one uses for a child or a lunatic. "It's a cold night. Why don't you head over to the St. Jude's shelter on Elm? They'll have a warm bed for you."

"You're not listening to me!" Liam’s voice rose, cracking with desperation. "People are gone! Erased! The man who did it—"

"—Was probably a pink elephant in a tutu, right?" The officer’s patience snapped. He pointed a thick finger at Liam. "Look, I don't have time for this. We've got real problems. You can either walk out of here and go get some sleep, or I can call dispatch and have you taken for a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation. Your choice."

The threat hung in the sterile air, cold and absolute. The system Liam had once trusted, the safety net of society, had not just failed him; it had turned on him. He was no longer a citizen reporting a crime; he was a problem to be managed. Defeated, he sagged against the counter. The Collector’s words echoed in his head, laced with a new and terrible meaning. You aren't ready yet. He wasn't even ready to be believed.

He stumbled back out into the night, the officer’s dismissal ringing in his ears. There was only one place to go. If the world wouldn't believe him, he needed proof. He needed evidence that would force them to see.

The return to the bridge was different. The manic energy had bled out of him, replaced by a cold, gnawing dread. When he arrived, the space beneath the concrete behemoth was just as he’d left it: empty and silent save for the thunder of traffic. But as his eyes adjusted, a profound wrongness settled in his gut.

It wasn't just empty. It was clean.

He walked to the spot where Sal’s bedroll had been for months, a grimy fixture against the pylon. There was nothing. Not just the bedroll, but the patch of darkened, greasy concrete where it had lain was gone, the stone as pristine as the day it was poured. He lurched over to Martha’s corner. The little spray-painted flower she’d once added in a moment of whimsy, a splash of faded pink on the grey wall, was gone. The entire wall was a uniform, sterile grey.

Frantically, Liam searched the entire area. The scorch marks from their small, illicit fires. The empty cans and wrappers tucked into crevices. The decades of accumulated grime and graffiti that had marked this place as a shelter for the forgotten. All of it had been wiped away. Erased as completely as the people themselves. It was as if the last five years of history under this bridge had been professionally sandblasted from existence.

Even the little pile of traded possessions was gone. The Collector hadn't just taken the souls; he had scrubbed the scene, leaving behind a sterile void that denied their very existence.

"No," Liam whispered, his breath fogging in the cold. He sank to his knees, his hands running over the smooth, clean concrete. "No, no, no…"

Was the officer right? Was he insane? Had the cold and hunger finally broken his mind? Had he hallucinated Sal and Martha and all the others? Was he truly, utterly alone? The thought was a chasm opening beneath him, a despair so absolute it was suffocating.

And then he saw it.

At first, it was just a flicker in his peripheral vision, near the pylon where Martha always sat. A slight shimmer in the air, like the heat haze rising from a hot road. He blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light, a symptom of exhaustion. But it didn't disappear. It coalesced, wavering but persistent, into a vague, human-shaped outline.

Liam stared, his heart hammering against his ribs. He slowly turned his head. There was another one where Sal had been. And another, where the young woman with the hollow eyes had stood. They were faint, translucent, like psychic stains left on the fabric of reality.

He was not insane. It was real. This was the proof.

He crawled closer to the shimmering outline that had been Martha, his hand outstretched. As he neared, the heat-haze form began to contort. The vague shape of a head twisted, the air within it seeming to thin and stretch. The shimmering coalesced, sharpening for one horrifying, gut-wrenching second.

It was her face. Not the placid, peaceful face that had accepted the ticket, but a mask of silent, unending agony. Her mouth was stretched wide in a scream that had no sound, her eyes were black pits of terror. It was the raw, undiluted horror of a soul being torn from its moorings.

Liam scrambled backward, a cry catching in his throat. He looked at the other shimmering shapes. They too were contorting, resolving for a single, terrifying moment into the screaming visages of their former selves. Sal, the young woman, the bearded man—all of them trapped in a silent, echoing moment of their final, terrible passage.

Then, as quickly as they had appeared, the faces dissolved, and the shimmering outlines faded back into the cold, empty air.

Liam was left alone on his knees, gasping in the unnaturally clean space under the bridge. He was no longer just a witness. He was the sole archivist of a silent massacre. The Collector hadn't just taken them; he had left behind echoes of their agony, echoes that only Liam, the one who wasn't 'ready,' could see. The question was no longer just what had happened. It was why. And why had he been spared to see the screaming ghosts they left behind?