Chapter 8: The Un-Place

Chapter 8: The Un-Place

The fluorescent lights of the sheriff's department substation hummed with an aggressive, artificial buzz that felt a thousand times louder than the profound silence of the woods. It was a sterile, unforgiving light, stripping away the shadows and revealing the three of them in all their wretchedness: smeared with dirt and woodsmoke, clothes torn by branches, eyes hollowed out by a terror that had no name in this clean, well-lit world.

Liam did the talking. He was the anchor, the one whose feet still seemed to touch the ground, even if the ground had been ripped out from under him. He leaned on the high counter, his grease-stained hands leaving faint smudges on the worn laminate, and tried to translate an experience from another reality into the mundane language of a missing person report.

“His name is Kian Thorne,” he said, his voice flat and exhausted. “Twenty-two. He had… a breakdown. He ran from our campsite.”

The deputy on duty, a man named Davis with a thick neck and eyes that had seen too many Saturday night drunks, typed slowly into his computer. “A breakdown over what?”

“We were working a job,” Liam said, choosing his words carefully. He couldn’t talk about impossible houses or doors that opened into madness. “Filming something. For a client. Kian… he got worked up. He wasn’t acting right.”

Davis stopped typing and looked up, his gaze moving from Liam’s steady, desperate face to Chloe, who was huddled in a plastic chair, wrapped in a coarse station blanket, her body shaking with silent, continuous sobs. Then his eyes fell on Elara. She sat beside Chloe, perfectly still, her dark eyes fixed on a water stain on the ceiling tile. She hadn't spoken a single word since they’d fled the cul-de-sac. She just stared, occasionally framing a shot of nothing with her ink-stained fingers.

“You kids been drinking? Doing anything else out there?” Davis asked, his tone shifting from bureaucratic boredom to weary suspicion.

“No,” Liam said, his voice sharp. “We were working.”

“What kind of work pays you twenty thousand dollars in cash to camp in the middle of nowhere?”

The question landed like a punch. The money. The absurd, life-changing sum the Patron had given them. In the context of this brightly lit, logical room, it sounded like the setup for a drug deal gone wrong, not an eccentric art commission.

“It was for a film project,” Liam insisted, knowing how thin it sounded. “The client was an eccentric art collector. She wanted… authentic reactions.”

Davis grunted, a sound of profound disbelief. “Right. An authentic reaction. And your friend just happened to have a ‘breakdown’ and run off with the cash?”

“He didn’t take the money! It’s in my truck!” Liam’s control finally cracked, his voice rising. “Look, we can’t find him. He ran into the woods at a place off the old logging trail past Miller’s Creek. It’s some weird, abandoned cul-de-sac. The place is called… Beasts O’ Field Court.”

The name sounded absurd on his tongue. It had sounded theatrical and pretentious when Kian had first read it from the Patron’s instructions. Now, it sounded like the ravings of a lunatic.

Davis just stared at him. “Son, I’ve been patrolling these woods for fifteen years. There’s no ‘Beasts O’ Field Court’ off that trail. There’s nothing but fifty miles of state forest.”

It took another hour of pleading, of Chloe’s tearful, fragmented testimony about Kian’s strange chanting, and the silent, unnerving presence of Elara, before Davis finally agreed to organize a search party at first light. It wasn’t belief that motivated him, Liam knew, but procedure and the fear of a lawsuit. They were treated not as frantic friends, but as suspects or, at best, unreliable, hysterical witnesses.

The sun rose as a pale, indifferent smear in the grey sky. Liam rode in the lead sheriff’s vehicle, guiding them back down the winding forest road. Every landmark was agonizingly familiar: the split oak tree, the sharp curve above the ravine, the place where the dirt road turned to gravel. The world looked painfully, mockingly normal in the morning light. The horrors of the night felt like a fever dream, a story he’d told himself. For a terrifying moment, he wondered if Davis was right. If they had all imagined it.

“It’s here,” he said, pointing. “There was an overgrown track. Right here.”

The sheriff’s SUV slowed to a crawl. Liam stared out the window, his heart hammering against his ribs. He was looking at a solid, unbroken wall of dense undergrowth and ancient, gnarled pine trees. There was no track. No path. No sign that a vehicle had ever passed through.

“I… I don’t understand,” he stammered, his own certainty beginning to crumble.

He burst out of the car, the two deputies following him with expressions of weary resignation. He pushed his way through the wet ferns and thorny vines, his hands searching for a sign, a landmark, anything. “It was right here! We drove through here! The clearing… the houses… they were just beyond these trees!”

He fought his way fifty feet into the woods, the deputies trailing him. The forest was thick, the canopy blocking out the weak morning light. There was no clearing. No roundabout. No peeling paint or derelict Ford Chimera. There were only trees, moss, and the damp, loamy smell of earth that had lain undisturbed for a century. The world itself was gaslighting him, calmly and completely denying the reality of his trauma.

He found the spot where their campfire had been. A circle of blackened earth and a few charred logs. To the deputies, it was proof of nothing more than a simple bonfire. To Liam, it was the only remaining gravestone for a place that had swallowed his friend whole.

“There’s nothing here, son,” Sheriff Davis said, his voice laced with a cold, final pity. “No houses. No cul-de-sac. We checked the county archives. This land has been undeveloped state property since the 1930s.”

Chloe, who had followed them, let out a heart-wrenching sob and collapsed to her knees by the dead fire pit. The official world had passed its verdict. Beasts O’ Field Court did not exist. Therefore, nothing they said had happened there could be true.

They were interviewed for hours, separately this time. The story of the Patron, her crisp envelope, the strange cards—it all sounded like a poorly constructed lie to cover up a crime. Without a body, without a crime scene, without any evidence at all, Kian Thorne was officially listed as a voluntary missing person. The prevailing theory, unspoken but hanging heavy in the air, was that he had staged the whole thing, taking the money and leaving his naive girlfriend and friends to take the fall.

That evening, they sat in the quiet of Liam’s cluttered living room, the Patron’s blood money sitting in a duffel bag on the coffee table like an unexploded bomb. The world had shrunk to the space between the three of them. The police didn't believe them. Their friends wouldn’t understand. They were utterly alone, adrift on a small island of shared memory in an ocean of rational denial.

Elara finally spoke, her voice a dry, rasping whisper. She was looking at Chloe, who was staring blankly at the wall.

“He said… ‘You are,’” she murmured, her dark eyes filled with a chilling comprehension. “The joke. He said the universe told him, ‘You are.’”

Liam looked at his sister, at her shattered friend, and at the money that had cost them everything. The official world had no room for Beasts O’ Field Court, no explanation for what had happened there. Their terror, their loss, Kian’s horrific final performance—it had all been erased, paved over by the solid, unyielding asphalt of reality.

Their secret was all they had left. It was a wound they would all share, a bond forged in impossible horror, isolating them from everyone they had ever known. They were the sole survivors of a place that never was, and the chilling truth settled upon them: the show wasn’t over. They had only just left the stage.