WHERE GARETT WENT
Let's find out what happened to Garett—the first to help Mira, the one who knew how to make the walls go quiet. Let's open the place where he vanished, the silence he left behind.
This is not a rescue.
This is a revelation.......
He wasn't supposed to disappear like that.
Mira woke in the corridor beneath a sagging, bone-colored ceiling, the tiles dripping like melted wax. The air hung thick around her, too dense, too still. It clung to her throat and weighed on her chest.
She was used to the sounds by then—the soft hum of the walls breathing in slow, rotten gasps; the occasional scrape of something moving just out of sight; Garett's calm voice breaking the silence, explaining things no one should have to know, things no sane mind should carry.
But this morning—this time—there was nothing.
Only absence.
His blanket lay folded in the corner, disturbingly neat.
His boots were gone.
His makeshift journal, once clutched to his chest like a lifeline even in sleep, now sat open beside the cold ashes of last night's fire. The smoke stains on the walls seemed to lean toward it, as if reading over its shoulder.
Mira's stomach tightened.
She picked up the journal with trembling fingers, flipping through it.
The pages had changed.
Before, it was just notes. Maps. Names scratched into margins. Sketches of rooms they dared not enter.
Now—
Lines of looping, fevered script she didn't recognize, the ink thick and wet-looking, smeared like it had bled from something still alive. Every page ended the same way, no matter how frantic the text became:
One word.
Written over and over again.
Inside.
She whispered it aloud.
The hallway answered.
A deep, guttural moan rolled through the walls, vibrating the floor beneath her feet. It wasn't pain. It wasn't warning.
It was approval.
The journal trembled in her hands. She dropped it.
For a long time, Mira didn't move.
Then she did the only thing she could.
She followed.
It took her hours to find the trail—small, almost imperceptible clues he hadn't meant to leave. A torn strip of his jacket snagged on a sharp corner of wall. A faint heel-print smeared across a patch of mossy, breathing tile. A breath-mark on a pane of dusty glass where no breath should be.
And something deeper.
A sense. A tugging, almost like gravity.
The hallway itself knew.
It wanted her to follow.
It guided her down passageways that hadn't existed before—twisting stairwells that spiraled into impossibility, doors that led to copies of doors that led to copies of themselves.
At one point, she crossed a vast, empty atrium where the ceiling dripped wires like veins. In the center stood a mirror, cracked straight down the middle.
It showed Garett's face.
Wild-eyed. Gaunt. Whispering frantically to someone unseen.
Mira pressed her hand to the glass.
It was warm. It breathed against her palm.
She moved on.
Every step felt heavier. Every breath tasted more of rust.
Finally, after what could have been hours or days—or longer—she found it.
The room.
It didn't have a door.
It had teeth.
The entrance gaped like a wounded mouth, lined with jagged stone, the edges slick with something too dark to be blood. It felt wrong even to look at it, as if the world inside was pressing to get out, hungry and clever.
The darkness inside pulsed.
Not black.
Red.
A sickly, living heartbeat that echoed in Mira's bones.
For a moment, she hesitated.
But only for a moment.
She stepped through.
And the world changed.
The room beyond wasn't a room at all—it was between places. A limbo stitched together from everything the hallway had devoured: fragments of staircases that ended in nothing, hospital beds suspended in midair, shattered windows showing skies that churned with unfamiliar stars.
Mannequins lay on the beds.
Not still.
Not quite mannequins.
They blinked.
And in the center of it all—
Garett.
Floating three inches above the floor, limp, arms outstretched, eyes open but seeing nothing.
Whispers bled from him, leaking from his skin like mist. They coiled in the air—fragments of a hundred lives, babbling through grief, terror, regret.
Mira's heart broke.
She called his name.
No response.
She stepped closer, boots sinking into the floor with a wet squelch.
Not tile.
Not stone.
Flesh.
The ground pulsed beneath her.
Garett's eyes twitched.
"Mira?" he rasped, voice cracked and broken.
Relief and horror battled inside her. She ran toward him.
Something yanked her back.
A hand—grey, thin, sharp as bone—burst from the living floor and latched onto her ankle, skeletal fingers digging deep. Mira gasped, stumbling. She kicked, boot connecting with brittle wrist, feeling the snap through her toes.
She lunged forward, grabbing Garett's shoulder.
His skin was ice cold. His head lolled toward her.
Their eyes met.
"You shouldn't be here," he whispered.
"I had to know," she said, tightening her grip.
"No," Garett said. His mouth twisted into a sad smile. "You had to forget."
The room convulsed.
The red light flared brighter, bathing everything in a sickly, feverish glow.
Shapes moved within the walls—eyes, mouths, scraps of memories. They pressed against the thin membrane of the world like desperate, starving things.
Garett's body convulsed.
Ink seeped from his veins, darkening his skin. Words crawled across him like tattoos written in real-time.
"I saw it," he gasped. "Went too far. Found the core. The center. It's not a heart, Mira."
"What is it?" she asked, voice almost drowned out by the growing roar of the room.
He shuddered.
Blood poured from his nose.
"It's a rewrite machine," he said. "It doesn't feed on fear. It feeds on narrative. On story. It breaks you down until there's nothing left but the ending it wants."
Mira's eyes burned.
"No," she said fiercely. "You can come back. I'll get you out."
Garett just smiled.
"Too late."
The floor beneath him split open like a rotting wound.
Without a scream, without even a sound, Garett was pulled downward—sucked into the living stone like a stone sinking into deep water.
Only his journal remained.
It lay at Mira's feet, breathing faintly.
Shaking, she picked it up.
New words had burned themselves into the leather cover, still smoking:
CHOOSE WHAT TO REMEMBER.
The walls of the in-between place began to close.
Slow at first, then faster.
A squeezing, desperate inhalation of the room itself, trying to swallow her too.
Mira ran.
Back through the gaping maw of the entrance, heart hammering.
As she stumbled through, the teeth of the doorway snapped shut behind her—not with a slam, but with a soft, wet whisper.
The silence was worse than any scream.
She leaned against the opposite wall, panting, trying not to sob.
The journal pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat.
She stood there for a long time.
Minutes.
Maybe longer.
Staring at the blank wall where the entrance had been.
Knowing Garett was part of it now.
Not lost.
Not dead.
Integrated.
The hallway had learned through him.
Which meant it was smarter now.
More dangerous.
More personal.
And still—Mira turned away.
Because that's what survivors do.
They move, even when the ground beneath them feels wrong. Even when something soft and wet pulses beneath the soles of their boots.
Even when the journal tucked under their arm begins to tremble, pages fluttering open on their own.
Words scrawled themselves on the first blank page as she watched, paralyzed:
"You're not really here anymore, Mira.
But we are."
The lights ahead flickered.
Something shifted in the dark.
And from the hallway behind her came a voice, not Garett's:
"Mira... come back..."
She didn't turn.
She couldn't.
Because part of her already knew—
If she looked back, she wouldn't see the hallway anymore.
She would see where she truly was.
And it was already smiling.
Was it Gareth? Mira later turned?