Three Years Earlier
Friday nights tasted like root beer floats.
They always had. Sweet and effervescent and full of the kind of light that only existed between the end of homework and bedtime. Gwen was thirteen years old and cross-legged on the living room carpet, the worn fibers leaving a familiar pattern on her calves. Her father, Leo, was a solid, warm presence on the couch behind her, his socked feet propped on the coffee table. They watched a man in a rubber Godzilla suit stomp through a model Tokyo, the monster's roar tinny through the old TV speakers. The glow of the screen painted the walls in flickering shades of blue and green, reflections that made the whole room feel like an aquarium of soft, domestic light.
When her father dropped his voice into a ridiculous growl, she shrieked with laughter, tipping back until her head bumped his knee.
"Dad, stop—you sound like you're gargling!"
"That's authentic Godzilla," he protested, grinning down at her. His eyes, the same shade of hazel as her own, crinkled at the corners. "I studied the ancient texts."
"You studied YouTube," she shot back, delighting in their old, comfortable argument.
"Same thing," he declared, and stood up, his joints emitting a series of soft pops. His footsteps were heavy and sure on the hardwood, a sound that meant Dad is home. She heard the freezer sigh open, the clink of the scoop against her favorite glass—the one with the cartoon frog on it. The familiar sounds of a ritual they'd performed every Friday for as long as she could remember.
The ritual had its own rhythm, one she could count on like heartbeat and tide: the hiss of the root beer, the faint crack of ice cream against the metal scoop, the sound of his humming under his breath—an aimless tune that might have been a hymn or something he'd made up on the spot. The house itself seemed to settle deeper into its foundations when he was home, the creaks and groans of the old structure sounding like contentment, as if it trusted him to hold it together.
When he came back, he handed her the tall glass—vanilla ice cream already melting into a perfect, foamy head on the root beer, just the way she liked it. He settled back onto the couch with his own, the cushions releasing a soft whump and the springs creaking under his weight in a way that meant safety and permanence and home.
"Root beer float for my girl," he said, his voice warm and solid and completely present. "Best thing ever invented."
She took a long sip through the straw. The sweetness was clean and bright, the carbonation sharp on her tongue, the ice cream smooth and cold as it went down. It tasted like exactly what it was—a Friday night with her dad, the weekend stretching ahead with nothing but time, bad monster movies, and the comfortable, unshakeable weight of knowing she was safe.
The world outside the windows was a mystery of wind and darkness, but inside, everything glowed soft and golden, the steady hum of the refrigerator a lullaby of normalcy.
"Dad?"
"Hm?" He didn't take his eyes off the screen, where Godzilla was now breathing atomic breath represented by a wobbly jet of cotton.
"Can we do this every Friday? Forever?"
He reached down and ruffled her hair, his carpenter's hand rough with calluses but infinitely gentle. A faint scent of sawdust and soap clung to his skin. "Forever's a long time, baby girl."
"I know," she said, utterly serious. "That's why I'm asking now."
He laughed—that deep, rolling rumble she could feel vibrating through the couch cushions and into her bones. "Yeah. Yeah, we can do that."
On the TV, Godzilla crushed another building while the ice cream melted into the root beer and her father hummed along with the dramatic music, gloriously off-key and perfect.
The moment tasted like happiness, just happiness. Nothing complicated or hidden underneath—just the pure, clean, unadulterated taste of being loved.
She thought she'd remember the sound of that laugh forever. She was right—but not in the way she'd hoped.
The sweetness faded long before the glass was empty.
Three years later, everything tasted like rot.
Not the poetic earth-after-rain kind, not the natural decay that fed soil and made things grow. Real rot. Visceral and nauseating, like the sour-milk stink of a forgotten lunchbox shoved in a locker for a month, or the sweet, gagging reek of roadkill baking on summer asphalt until it became something that barely resembled an animal anymore.
It coated Gwen's tongue like a film she couldn't scrape off no matter how hard she tried—thick, inescapable, made entirely of other people's misery.
She was fifteen now, pressed against the back wall of Brennan's Funeral Home as if she could phase through the cheap wood paneling. Her fingers were locked around the rough edge of a dusty plastic fern, its pot wobbling precariously on its stand—unsteady on its base, like everything else in her life.
The room was overly warm, stifling, despite the October chill outside. The air was heavy, a cloying cocktail of lilies, formaldehyde, and something underneath that smelled like death disguised as peace. The carpet under her cheap, pinching funeral shoes was industrial gray and worn thin by decades of shuffling, mourning feet.
The air buzzed faintly from the old fluorescent lights above, a persistent, maddening hum. Each flicker, each stutter in the tube, dragged her nerves tauter. Her pulse echoed in her ears, a frantic drum in perfect, cruel rhythm with the radiator's occasional hiss—a sound that jolted through her spine every time it broke the suffocating hush.
Her dress, a simple black one bought two years ago for his first oncology appointment—back when the word "treatment" still held a shimmer of hope—was now too tight across the shoulders. The synthetic fabric cut into her armpits with every shallow, insufficient breath. It was a reminder that she was still growing into a woman's body while her world disintegrated around her. The hem that had once brushed her knees now hung awkwardly mid-thigh. She looked like exactly what she was: a girl caught between childhood and whatever came after, wearing clothes that no longer fit to say goodbye to a father who'd been dying by inches for two brutal years.
The murmurs of the mourners were a swarm around her—overlapping voices, somber footsteps, the scrape of wooden chairs. Each sound reverberated in her chest, a physical pressure building until she thought her ribs might crack from the vibration of it all.
The smell intensified—roses, lilies, polished wood, antiseptic, and beneath it all, the undeniable, sweet-tang of decay. It curled at the back of her throat, a living thing, and made her stomach lurch violently.
Someone coughed. Someone else whispered her name, the sound slithering through the haze. Gwen. Poor thing. Every breath of the living felt like a violation against the profound stillness of the dead.
She focused on the fern's plastic leaves digging into her palm—a sharp, artificial anchor in a sea of noise. It didn't help much. Her head felt swollen, her chest a cage too small for the panicked bird of her heart. Her whole body trembled with something that might've been grief or panic or both, tangled together so tightly she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
She wanted to disappear, to sink through the floorboards, to run outside and keep running until her lungs burned and she could taste nothing but clean, cold air and her own sweat. But her legs were leaden. Her vision blurred at the edges, people's faces twisting into grotesque, pitying masks, their voices blending into a single oppressive drone that screamed directly into her skull.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket—once, twice. Probably her best friend Melissa. R u ok? Do u need anything? The kind of well-meaning messages that meant absolutely nothing when your father was dead and the world tasted like rot. She ignored it. Every vibration was a tiny hammer pounding against her temples.
And then, a hand landed on her shoulder.
The grip was tight enough to bruise, deliberate and grounding. Birdie's voice cut through the noise like a knife through soft butter—rough as gravel, no-nonsense in that way that somehow made everything feel slightly less unbearable.
"Gwen."
No sympathy, no soft platitudes—just blunt assessment. "You're going outside. Now."
Gwen shook her head frantically, panic clawing up her throat, sharp and metallic. "I—I can't! I need to—"
"You need to stop drowning in everyone's grief," Birdie interrupted, her fingers firm on Gwen's arm, already hauling her toward the side door with surprising strength for a woman in her seventies. "Including your own. Move."
The autumn air hit her face like a splash of cold water. Shocking. Clarifying. It was a physical shock to her system. Leaves, dry and brittle, swirled in the wind, catching in her unbrushed hair. The crisp clarity of the outside cut through the fog in her head like a blade.
She stumbled, her legs finally giving way, and Birdie caught her, guiding her down onto a weathered, cold stone bench at the edge of the parking lot. Gwen pressed her face into her knees, the rough fabric of her dress scraping her cheeks, and breathed—great, gulping, desperate breaths of cold October air that tasted like nothing except wind and freedom.
The breeze carried the clean, wet smell of damp pavement, the distant scent of woodsmoke, the faint, almost-sweetness of decaying leaves—a different kind of rot, natural, cyclical, merciful.
"Sorry for the rough handling," Birdie said, lighting a cigarette with practiced ease despite the wind. The match flared, a tiny, real star in the twilight. "But you were about two seconds from shattering in there. Sometimes gentle doesn't cut through fast enough."
She took a long drag, exhaled a plume of smoke that the wind immediately snatched and tore to nothing. "You've been different. Don't look so shocked—I'm not blind."
Gwen's head snapped up, her eyes wide and rimmed with angry red. How could Birdie know? How could anyone know what had been happening to her these past three weeks, since the silence where her father's heartbeat used to be? The way she could taste her mother's despair like burnt coffee, or Melissa's pity like overripe fruit.
"I'm fine," she whispered, the lie cracking in the middle.
"Bullshit," Birdie said, her voice dropping, gentler now. "You've been tasting more than you can handle, feeling things that would break most people twice your age. Pretending you're fine isn't helping anyone."
She hesitated—a flicker of something unreadable, something old and tired, crossing her face. "You think I don't know what that means? You think I didn't, once?"
The words didn't just sink in; they plunged, like stones in a deep, dark well, their impact resonating in the silence between them.
Gwen's protest died in her throat. Tears, hot and shameful, pricked at her eyes. She didn't know if she was relieved or furious that Birdie could see through the fragile fortress of her composure so completely.
Birdie reached out and squeezed her hand—a quick, firm, unexpectedly soft gesture. "I can't fix this for you—nobody can—but I can make sure you don't break today. Stay out here. Breathe. I'll deal with your mother before she goes into orbit. You get your head straight first."
Gwen nodded, mute. Birdie's words were a tether, pulling her back from the edge. She stayed on the bench, hands tucked under her arms for warmth, and watched as the panic slowly ebbed, its grip loosening like a tide going out.
Beyond the edge of the funeral home parking lot, the town of Hemlock Ridge spread out in a patchwork of autumn-colored streets and neat, oblivious houses. Halloween decorations hung on porches—cheerful plastic skeletons and strings of cheerful orange lights that would've seemed festive any other year. For one fleeting, painful second, she could almost taste it again: the clean, sharp sweetness of root beer, the rich creaminess of vanilla, the sound of her father's laughter. The memory was so vivid it made her chest ache with a grief so profound it felt like it might split her open.
And beneath it all, the pull. The one she'd been feeling for days, a silent, psychic scream—a compass needle in her soul pointing toward something unseen. It was still there, faint but insistent, clearer now that she was away from the crushing weight of all the human noise.
The funeral home sat at the edge of town, right where the manicured lawns gave way to the wild Pennsylvania woods. Behind the building, a narrow, forgotten trail wound into the trees—overgrown, barely maintained, likely meant for smoke breaks and desperate escapes. Fallen leaves carpeted the ground in a tapestry of red and gold and brittle brown.
Gwen stood on steadier legs. She crossed the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, her cheap shoes crunching through drifts of dry leaves, and found the trailhead with its rusted sign reading PRIVATE PROPERTY in faded, flaking letters. She ignored it. The rules of that world no longer applied to her. She stepped into the trees, and the woods swallowed her whole, leaving the suffocating grief behind.
The light died immediately, the gray October afternoon turning darker, older under the canopy. The air was cooler here, damper, and blessedly quieter. The smell was rich and organic—damp earth under a blanket of fallen leaves, the honest, straightforward stink of decomposition without the emotional poison of human death.
For the first time all day, she could draw a breath that actually reached the bottom of her lungs.
The pull grew stronger with each step, calling from deeper in the woods with an insistence she could no more ignore than her own heartbeat. It wasn't dragging her forward—it was guiding her, inevitable as gravity, like water finding its own level, following a slope only it could sense.
Branches, like skeletal fingers, snagged at her too-short dress. Thorns tore at her stockings, leaving angry red lines on her skin, but she didn't care. She needed to understand. Why had this call become a deafening roar since the moment her father's heart had stuttered and stopped?
Birdie had named it. She'd said Gwen "tasted what people felt," that she'd eventually learn to build walls, to filter the noise. But Birdie hadn't mentioned this—this cold, vast, alien awareness that felt nothing like human emotion. It tasted like static and silence and the void between stars, like something that had never been alive at all.
The trail narrowed, then gave up entirely, swallowed by thorny undergrowth. Gwen pushed through, her breath loud and ragged in the profound silence. The light was leaching from the world, the colors fading to monochrome.
She should turn back. Go to her mother. Accept the hollow hugs and listen to the well-intentioned lies about better places and peaceful rest.
But the pull was stronger than sense. It was stronger than fear.
The woods grew dense and strange. The trees here—oaks and maples she'd known her whole life—seemed to lean at wrong angles, their trunks twisted as if something had warped their very growth. The last, desperate rays of sunlight slanted through the bare branches, painting everything in shades of rust and dying gold.
Then, suddenly—the trees simply fell away.
They opened into a clearing that shouldn't have existed.
A perfect circle, twenty feet across, was carved into the forest as if something had scorched the life out of it years ago and salted the earth for good measure. The ground was bare, packed hard as concrete. Dead leaves lay in deep, crisp drifts around the edges, as if repelled by an invisible force field emanating from the center.
No grass grew here. No insects chirped. No birds sang. The trees leaned away from the emptiness, their branches reaching out as if in warning, or in fear.
And in the middle of the clearing sat a rock.
It was dark gray, roughly the size of her fist, pitted and scarred like a shard of meteorite that had traveled through cold space for eons. The moment her eyes landed on it, her mouth flooded with that alien taste she'd been catching in fragmented whispers for weeks—the one from the funeral home that hadn't belonged to any mourner. It was cold and vast as the abyssal plain at the bottom of a frozen ocean, but heavier now, so much heavier that it made her teeth ache and her jaw feel numb.
It was the flavor of a starless sky, of the space between atoms, of an absence so complete it had somehow acquired a terrible, dense weight. It pressed against her consciousness like a cold hand on a door in her mind she hadn't even known existed.
This wasn't human. It wasn't even of this earth.
She knelt in the cold dirt, her black dress pooling around her like the petals of a dark flower. Up close, the pits and scars on the rock's surface weren't random. They swirled in intricate, impossible patterns, fractals that made her eyes water and her head throb when she tried to follow their logic. The surface didn't just reflect the fading light; it shimmered with a color that wasn't quite gray or black but something hungrier, something that devoured the light.
The taste filled her mouth, thick and cloying, until she could barely breathe through it. Her hand, trembling and pale, hovered over the stone. Every instinct, every rational neuron in her brain, screamed don't.
But she'd spent two years watching her father, the strongest man she knew, be reduced to a ghost by inches. She'd survived three weeks of drowning in the salted, rotting ocean of other people's grief. She would be damned if she ran from this now, just because it scared her.
Her fingertips brushed the surface.
The cold was not temperature.
It was annihilation.
It exploded up her arm, a lightning bolt of absolute zero, into her chest where it froze her heart mid-beat, through her skull where it turned every thought to static ice. And for a fraction of a moment that stretched into a small, private forever, she was nowhere and nothing—the very concept of Gwen dissolving like a sugar cube in boiling water.
Then, the vision slammed into her, and she was—