The bicycle was a mistake.
William knew it three minutes into the ride, when the wind became a physical force and the rain turned to needles against his skin. But the device was burning in his pocket, numbers still climbing—8.975 now—and every instinct screamed that time was bleeding away.
He pedaled harder, streetlights giving way to darkness as he left Ashenwick's borders. The Old Mill Bridge loomed ahead, its iron skeleton groaning against the storm. This was where they'd found the car. Where the blood trail ended. Where the world had swallowed his father whole.
Something black detached from the darkness.
William had no time to brake. The crow struck his face with a wet thud, beak raking his cheek, wings beating against his eyes. He went down hard, asphalt chewing through his raincoat, palms shredding on gravel.
For a moment, he lay still, listening to the river's roar beneath the bridge. Then pain arrived in waves—scraped knees, twisted wrist, the copper taste of blood in his mouth.
He sat up.
The bicycle's front wheel was pretzeled, tire hissing its death. Useless.
William reached for his pocket. The device was still there, still on, and when he pulled it free, the screen blazed with an impossible number:
14.924
The signal sound had changed. Instead of searching, it had found something. A steady tone, directional, pulling him toward the river. He moved towards the river, there the river was flowing so strong. He recognises something there. The police thinks that the last spot where his father might have been would be where he is standing now. The signal signal was leading toward the forest. Toward the fifty kilometers of wilderness where no one built houses and no roads dared penetrate.
William left the bicycle. He walked across the bridge, wood planks slick with moss, iron rails vibrating with the river's fury. On the far side, the Thornveil Forest waited—ancient, unmarked, forbidden.
The device pointed the way.
He followed.
Time became meaningless.
William walked until his legs shook, until the storm reduced visibility to arm's length, until the town lights vanished behind him like closing eyes. The device never stopped its tone, never stopped climbing—23.445, 31.892, 44.201—and William stopped checking the journal's warnings.
The Hollow. Temporal viscosity. Ghost particles.
The words meant nothing against the reality of mud sucking at his boots, of branches whipping his face, of wolves howling in the distance.
Wolves.
The sound cut through the storm's white noise—a chorus of predatory voices, closer than before. Behind him. Between him and home.
William ran.
He ran without direction, without thought, terror overriding exhaustion. The forest blurred into a tunnel of green and black, roots reaching for his ankles, vines snagging his coat. The device was screaming now, a continuous wail that harmonized with his own ragged breathing. He turned it off.
Then he saw it.
A banyan tree, massive as a cathedral, its aerial roots forming natural pillars. Beneath it, barely visible through the downpour: broken walls, collapsed roofing tiles, a statue's weathered head staring at the sky with empty stone eyes.
William threw himself inside the ruin, pressing against cold stone as the wolf pack's howls circled closer. Rain drummed on the broken roof, masking his scent, his breathing, his heartbeat.
Slowly, the sounds faded.
William turned on his flashlight. The beam caught ancient murals—faded pigments depicting figures in robes, hands raised toward swirling vortexes in the sky. Sanskrit or Pali or some older script crawled across the walls, describing ceremonies he couldn't comprehend. And a god's statue he couldn't recognise.
An abandoned temple. In the middle of nowhere. Not on any map.
He checked his father's coordinates. Nothing matched. This place was... unmarked.
But the device knew. It pulled him onward, deeper, until the temple ruins gave way to raw forest again. William walked until his body threatened collapse, until the flashlight beam began to dim, until he realized with cold certainty that he was lost. He was under a mountain. Water was flowing down through the mountains.
Then he saw a cave.
It opened like a wound in the earth, limestone gleaming wetly in the torchlight. William stumbled inside, grateful for the sudden silence, the absence of rain. He found a dry ledge and collapsed, gasping.
The cave breathed.
He felt it immediately—a current of air moving from depths that shouldn't exist, carrying a scent like ozone and old copper.
William opened the journal with trembling hands, flipping to the back pages. There, among the frantic equations, he found something: a sketch. Rough, hurried, but unmistakable.
A cave.
What he didn't knew is that the cave he is now standing is the same cave on his father's journal.
William felt the first true touch of fear—not of wolves or weather, but of understanding. Of recognizing that Carl Anderson hadn't disappeared by accident. That he might've been hunting something. Or being hunted by something.
A sound echoed from the cave's throat. Not water. Not wind. Something like... tearing. Like reality itself being unzipped.
William grabbed his flashlight, aimed it into the darkness, and walked toward the sound.
The passage narrowed, then opened into a cathedral chamber. Stalactites hung like dragon's teeth. The floor sloped downward, treacherous with condensation. William's beam caught something ahead—a shimmer in the air, wrong in a way his eyes couldn't process.
He slipped.
His feet went out from under him on the wet stone, body crashing down. Pain exploded in his hip, then his elbow, then—
Crack.
The sound came from his pocket. William fumbled for the device, but his wet fingers lost their grip. The yellow casing tumbled, hit a protruding rock, and bounced.
It landed facing upward. The screen blazed:
99.9999
The tone became a shriek.
William lunged for it, but the device was already doing something impossible. The air around it was... bending. Curving like heat shimmer, but cold, so cold his breath fogged. The cave walls seemed like a broken glasses, as if the geometry itself was becoming glassy
He reached out, instinct overriding sense, and touched the distortion.
The world rippled.
It was like pressing against water, but the water was solid, was air, was the fundamental fabric of space-time deciding to behave like a liquid. The ripple spread outward from his fingers, and where it passed, William saw—
Colors that didn't exist.
Angles that hurt to perceive.
And through it all, something looking back.
He tried to pull away, but his hand was stuck, submerged in the impossible medium. Panic flooded his system. He twisted, yanked, threw his weight backward—
—and the stone beneath his other foot crumbled.
William fell.
Not down. Through.
The last thing he saw was the device's screen, numbers finally stabilizing:
ERROR: THRESHOLD BREACHED
Then his head struck stone, and the Hollow swallowed him whole.
Meanwhile, in Ashenwick: Jenna Anderson woke to the sound of silence.
The rain had stopped. The house was too quiet—missing the creak of William's footsteps overhead, the rustle of a teenager who thought himself stealthy. She sat up, neck stiff from the sofa, and called his name.
"William?"
The lamp burned on, illuminating empty space.
She climbed the stairs slowly, dread building with each step. Infront of his room's door was the black square of the attic access panel open, dangling rope visible.
"William!"
She screamed it this time, tearing through the house, checking every room, every closet, every shadow. The front door was unlocked, rain puddles on the mat leading out into the night.
Jenna collapsed onto the porch, staring into the forest that had taken her husband. Now it had her son.
"Not again," she whispered to the darkness. "Please. Not again."
But the Thornveil Forest kept its secrets. And somewhere in its depths, a device counted upward toward infinity, tearing holes in the world.
To be continued...