Chapter 2: A Name From the Past

Chapter 2: A Name From the Past

The phantom taste was a constant, unwelcome guest. All day, as Leo clicked and typed his way through endless spreadsheets, the ghost of that rich, savory flavor lingered on his tongue. It was a sensory watermark, a stain left by a meal that, by all digital logic, had never happened. He tried to wash it away with bitter black coffee and a dry turkey sandwich for lunch, but it remained, an echo that mocked his attempts to rationalize the night before.

He kept the faded pizza box. He’d fished it out of the trash that morning and hidden it in the back of his pantry, behind a stack of canned beans. It was his only proof, a tangible link to the impossible event. Several times, he found himself pulling it out, running his fingers over the greasy, softened cardboard and staring at the cartoon chef's vacant, smiling eyes. Uncle Sal. The name echoed in the empty spaces of his mind.

By late afternoon, the obsession had become a fever. The logical part of his brain, the part that organized his life into neat, predictable columns, was losing the battle against the gnawing sense of the uncanny. The internet had yielded nothing. A search for "Uncle Sal's Pizza" in his city brought up a dozen legitimate businesses, none of which matched the faded logo or the ghost listing. He was at a dead end, trapped with a greasy box and a memory that felt stolen.

There was only one other place to look for answers, a repository of forgotten history he rarely consulted: his mother.

He hesitated, his thumb hovering over her contact photo. Calling Elena was a carefully managed affair. Their conversations followed a script: he was fine, work was fine, yes, he was eating, no, he wasn't dating anyone. He never mentioned his insomnia or the crushing loneliness that felt like a physical weight in his chest. To tell her he was investigating a ghost pizza delivery would invite a level of concern he couldn't handle. He’d have to be casual.

He pressed the call button. She picked up on the second ring, her voice a warm, familiar wave of sound.

"Leo! Honey, I was just thinking about you. How are you?"

"Hey, Mom. I'm good, just on a break from work. How are you guys?"

The first few minutes were standard procedure. He listened to a lengthy update on his father’s golf game and a detailed account of a neighbor's landscaping dispute. He made the appropriate noises of interest, his mind miles away, his tongue absently probing his teeth for any remnant of that flavor. He had to steer the conversation, to make his question sound like a random, passing thought.

"Yeah, that sounds crazy," he said, seizing a lull in the neighborhood drama. "Hey, Mom, this is super random, but speaking of old places, do you remember a pizza joint from way back? It was called... Uncle Sal's Pizza?"

Silence.

It wasn't a bad connection, not the crackle of a dropped call. It was a deep, sudden void. The cheerful momentum of their conversation slammed into a brick wall. Leo could hear the faint, humming static of the open line, the sound of his own heart beating in his ears. For a terrifying second, he thought the call had actually dropped.

"Mom?" he asked, his voice tighter than he intended.

He heard a soft, shaky intake of breath on the other end. When she finally spoke, her voice was completely different. The warmth was gone, replaced by a brittle, cautious tone he hadn't heard in years.

"Sal's? Leo, where on earth did you hear that name?"

"I don't know," he lied, the words feeling clumsy in his mouth. "I think I saw something online, maybe? A 'remember this place?' kind of post. Just rang a bell for some reason."

Another pause, longer this time. "Well," she said, her voice strained. "That was a long, long time ago. Before we moved."

"What was it like?" he pushed, trying to keep his tone light. "Was the pizza any good?"

"It was… a place," she said evasively. "A local spot. The kids liked it. It had one of those claw machines and some noisy arcade games. It was in that old strip mall off the highway, the one that's all boarded up now."

Leo’s mind flashed with a jarring, fragmented image: a glass box filled with cheap stuffed animals, a metal claw hovering uselessly above them. The image was as fleeting as the phantom taste, but it left him with a chill.

"What happened to it?" he asked, his feigned nonchalance slipping.

"It closed," she said, her tone sharp and final. "It was a tragedy, Leo. A very sad story."

"A tragedy? How?"

He heard her sigh, a sound of profound weariness, of a stone being lifted and then dropped again. "The owner… the man, Sal. He wasn't well. He put everything he had into that restaurant, it was his whole life. When the business started failing… he took it very hard. One morning, the man who delivered the bread found him. He’d… he’d hanged himself, Leo. Inside the restaurant. Right from the big ceiling fan over the tables."

The air left Leo’s lungs. The cartoon chef on the box in his pantry warped into the image of a dead man, his smile a rictus of despair. The extension cord hanging like a noose. The phrase from some long-forgotten horror movie flickered in his brain, unbidden. A cold dread, far more potent than what he’d felt last night, washed over him. The ghost listing wasn't just a glitch; it was an echo from a tomb.

"My God," he whispered. "That's horrible."

"It was," his mother affirmed, her voice low. "It shook the whole community. They boarded the place up right after. I don't think anyone ever set foot in there again." Then, her tone shifted, becoming insistent, almost pleading. "But there is no way you would remember any of that, Leo. You were just a toddler, maybe four years old, when it closed. We barely even went there. You couldn't possibly have a single memory of it."

Her denial was too forceful. It was a door slamming shut in his face. She wasn't just telling him he couldn't remember; she was instructing him not to. It was the same tone she used when he was a child and asked about things he wasn't meant to know.

But she was wrong. He did remember something. The smell, the taste—they were real. They were his. And her desperate insistence otherwise only confirmed that there was more to the story, something she was deliberately burying.

"Right," he said, his voice hollow. "Yeah, must have just been a weird post I saw. Okay, Mom, well, my break's over. I should probably get back to it."

"Leo, wait," she said, a raw edge of worry in her voice now. "Are you okay? You sound… strange."

"I'm fine, Mom. Just tired. Talk to you soon."

He ended the call before she could ask another question, tossing his phone onto the couch. He stood in the middle of his living room, the sterile gray walls seeming to close in on him.

A suicide. A ghost haunting a delivery app. A flavor he remembered but shouldn't.

His mother's words echoed in his mind. That old strip mall off the highway, the one that's all boarded up now. The information settled in his gut not as an answer, but as a destination. The vague, digital dread had coalesced into a physical location, a point on a map. A place he could go. A place he could see with his own eyes.

The story was no longer just about a bizarre meal. It was about a dead man named Sal, a restaurant that had become a crypt, and a taste from a past his own mother swore he never had.

The need to know was no longer a curiosity; it was a physical pull, an irresistible gravity. He had to see it. He had to see the place where it all ended. Grabbing his keys from the hook by the door, he walked out of his apartment, the phantom taste of old pepperoni and a forgotten tragedy burning on his tongue.