Chapter 3: Fourteen Years of Silence

The data entry job at Morrison & Associates was perfect for someone who wanted to disappear into the background of life. Forty hours a week of mindless typing, converting physical records into digital files, surrounded by the quiet hum of computers and the occasional rustle of paper. My coworkers knew me as the quiet guy in cubicle 7B who never joined them for drinks after work and always ate lunch alone.

What they didn't know was that every paycheck went toward funding an obsession that had consumed half my life.

I'd turned twenty-two three months ago—fourteen years since that night at the dojang—and I still woke up some mornings expecting to find Lucas sitting at the edge of my bed, grinning and ready for another adventure. The disappointment never got easier.

My apartment in Trenton reflected the reality of my priorities: bare minimum furniture, a mattress on the floor, takeout containers that I forgot to throw away. But the walls—the walls told the real story of who Azuman Tengku had become.

Maps covered every available surface, marked with red pins and connected by lengths of string like some conspiracy theorist's fever dream. Newspaper clippings dating back decades were taped in clusters, their yellowed edges curling with age. Police reports I'd obtained through FOIA requests. Missing person flyers printed from internet archives. Academic papers on folklore and urban legends. Everything centered around a single point: the address where the dojang used to be.

The building had changed hands six times since Master Kim closed the school. Dry cleaner, phone repair shop, a short-lived tattoo parlor, a check cashing place that folded within months. Currently, it housed a discount furniture store that seemed to specialize in items that looked expensive from a distance but fell apart if you actually tried to use them.

I'd driven past it hundreds of times over the years, sometimes parking across the street just to stare at the building and remember. The back alley was still there, of course, unchanged except for newer graffiti and a different dumpster. Sometimes I caught myself holding my breath when I walked past, as if the metallic scent might still be lingering after all these years.

It never was. Until tonight.

I was working late—again—when it hit me. That familiar, nauseating smell of old pennies that made my stomach clench with muscle memory. The office was empty except for the security guard making his rounds, but the scent was unmistakable, drifting through the building's ventilation system like a ghost made of copper and dread.

My hands froze over the keyboard, a half-entered address hanging incomplete on the screen. The smell was stronger than I remembered, thick enough to taste, and with it came a flood of sensory memories I'd spent years trying to suppress. The sound of Lucas pounding on that door. The wet sliding noise as something dragged him away. The terrible silence that followed.

I pushed back from my desk so fast the chair rolled into the cubicle wall behind me. The scent seemed to follow, growing stronger instead of dissipating, and for one terrifying moment I was eight years old again, watching my best friend walk toward a door that should never have been opened.

"Get it together," I whispered to myself, but my voice sounded thin and scared in the empty office.

I packed up my things with shaking hands and made it to the parking garage in record time, my footsteps echoing off concrete walls that suddenly seemed too narrow, too dark. The smell followed me all the way to my car, only fading once I'd rolled down all the windows and put five miles between myself and the office building.

Back at my apartment, I stood in front of my wall of research and tried to convince myself it had been a coincidence. Old buildings had weird smells. Maybe someone had spilled something metallic in the break room. Maybe I was finally losing what was left of my mind.

But my eyes kept drifting to a particular cluster of articles, ones I'd printed just last month after finally gaining access to the county historical society's digital archives. Missing children dating back to the 1940s, all from the same general area. All described in police reports that mentioned "unusual odors" and "witnesses reporting the scent of copper or metal."

I'd found seventeen cases over the past seventy years. Seventeen children who'd vanished without a trace, their disappearances dismissed as runaways or accidents or family abductions that could never be proven. The locations formed a rough circle on my map, with the old dojang sitting dead center like the eye of a hurricane.

My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number: Still looking for answers that don't exist?

The message made my blood freeze. Nobody knew about my investigation. I'd been careful, obsessively careful, to keep my research private. Even my therapists from years past had never gotten the full story.

Another message: Some doors should stay closed, Azuman.

I fumbled with the phone, trying to call the number back, but it went straight to a disconnected line. The contact showed only as a string of digits that didn't match any area code I recognized.

Sleep was impossible after that. I sat on my mattress with my laptop balanced on my knees, going through security footage from my office building that I definitely wasn't supposed to have access to. The data entry job came with certain perks—like learning which databases had laughably weak password protection and which security systems recorded everything but actually monitored nothing.

The footage from earlier that evening showed me working alone, typing steadily at my desk. At 9:47 PM, I suddenly stopped and looked around, my body language shifting from relaxed to alert in the span of seconds. I watched myself stand up, pack hastily, and leave like something was chasing me.

But the cameras showed nothing else. No other person in the building. No obvious source for the smell that had sent me running. Just me, apparently having a breakdown in an empty office.

I was still staring at the screen when my laptop chimed with a new email. The sender was listed as [email protected], and the subject line made my hands shake: Lucas says hello.

I didn't want to open it. Every instinct screamed at me to delete the message, to shut down the laptop, to pack a bag and drive as far from New Jersey as my savings account would allow. But fourteen years of wondering, of guilt, of questions that had never been answered, made the choice for me.

The email contained only a single line of text: He's been waiting for you to remember. They all have.

Attached was a photograph.

It was grainy, poorly lit, like something taken with an old phone camera in low light. But I could make out shapes in the darkness—a narrow space between brick walls that looked exactly like the alley behind the dojang. And there, barely visible in the shadows, were faces. Children's faces, pale and indistinct, but unmistakably human.

I stared at the screen until my eyes watered, zooming in and adjusting the contrast, trying to make out details that the darkness refused to reveal. One of the faces looked younger than the others, with features that might have belonged to an eight-year-old boy. Features that might have been familiar if I could just see them clearly enough.

The metallic smell was back, seeping through my apartment walls like it had at the office. Stronger now, almost overwhelming, carrying with it the weight of years and guilt and a truth I'd been avoiding since childhood.

Lucas hadn't run away.

He'd been taken by something that lived in the spaces between spaces, something that collected children who were foolish enough to knock on doors they shouldn't have touched. And whatever it was, it wasn't done with me yet.

I closed the laptop and walked to my wall of research, my fingers tracing the red string that connected all those missing children across all those years. Seventeen cases. Seventeen families destroyed by something that the authorities refused to acknowledge because it didn't fit their understanding of how the world worked.

But I knew better. I'd always known better.

The smell of pennies lingered in my apartment until dawn, and when I finally fell asleep on my mattress, I dreamed of doors opening in the dark and children's voices calling my name.

The investigation that had sustained me for fourteen years was about to become something else entirely. Something active. Something dangerous.

Because whatever lived behind that dumpster, whatever had taken Lucas and all those other children, it had finally decided to remind me that some games never truly end.

They just wait for the right moment to resume.