Where The Mind Breaks

Chapter 3: The Lie We Told

The Everfell Inn smelled of mothballs and regret. The room was a perfect echo of the town itself...damp, faded, and holding onto a past that was better off forgotten. Nel dropped his duffel bag on the floral-print quilt and went straight to the small, rattling window, peering through the grime-streaked glass. From here, he had a sliver of a view of the lake, a sheet of bruised steel under the weeping sky.

Jason isn't your friend.

Golda’s words were on a loop in his head, underscored by the Sheriff’s polite, unblinking eyes. A wellness check. He’d called Golda’s murder a wellness check.

Nel’s fingers trembled as he pulled the lockbox from his bag. He laid its contents on the quilt, the old key, the childhood photograph, and Golda’s final, frantic note. I hid it where he'd never look. With the dead.

The cemetery. It had to be. But where? There were hundreds of dead in Everfell. The key was old, heavy, tarnished brass. It didn't look like it fit a modern door. A crypt? A chest?

His eyes fell on the photograph. Him, Vivi, Jason. Grinning on the pier. A memory, sharp as a shard of glass, pierced through the fog of years.

It was a week after the photo was taken. They were down by the lake, the three of them, skipping stones. Jason had found a dead crow, its neck broken.

“My dad says it’s bad luck to touch a dead thing,” Nel had said, his skin crawling.

Jason, twelve years old and already wearing a mask of cool authority, had scoffed. “That’s a story they tell kids. A lie.” He poked the crow with a stick. “The real truth is, dead things can’t talk. That’s why they’re safe. They keep all the secrets.”

With the dead.

A different memory surfaced, colder, darker. A story. Not one the adults told, but one the older kids whispered to terrify the younger ones. A story about the Weeping.

They said the five who vanished hadn't just disappeared. They said one of them, Elias, a quiet man who’d worked for Hedge Demmys, had been buried with a secret. They said his family, ashamed, had locked his things away in his coffin. That the real story of what happened to him was buried six feet under.

It was a grotesque campfire tale, a lie they told the children to make the Weeping seem even more monstrous.

But what if it wasn’t a lie? What if Golda, knowing the town’s superstitions and its dark stories, had used one? She’d hidden the ledger not just in the cemetery, but with a specific dead man. With Elias.

The idea was so ghoulish, so perfectly insane, that it felt true. It was the kind of move Golda would make...a journalist using the town’s own folklore as her hiding place.

He had to get into that cemetery. And he had to do it tonight, before the funeral, before Jason could have someone watching him every second.

The hours dragged, each one a lifetime. He lay on the bed as dusk bled into a moonless, starless night. The rain provided a cover of sound, a constant, hissing static. When the old clock in the inn’s lobby chimed two, he moved.

He pulled on a dark jacket and shoved the heavy key into his pocket. The weight of his father’s revolver in the duffel bag was a silent temptation. He left it. This was a job for ghosts, not gunfighters.

The walk to the cemetery was a journey through a nightmare he knew by heart. Every dripping tree, every puddle-reflected streetlamp was a landmark from his past. The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, but the low stone wall was an easy climb. He dropped onto the soft, wet grass on the other side.

The air was thick with the smell of wet earth, decay, and rain-soaked flowers. Headstones stood like crooked teeth in the dark. He used the small flashlight on his keychain, its beam a frail, darting eye in the overwhelming blackness.

He found the Elias family plot near the back, close to the woods. The trees here seemed to lean in, their branches clutching at the sky. Elias's headstone was simple, weathered by thirty years of Everfell harsh seasons.

There was no crypt. No grand mausoleum. Just the flat, cold earth.

His hope curdled into despair. He’d been wrong. It was just a childhood story. Golda had been delirious, and he was a fool chasing a ghost.

He swept the beam of his light over the headstone again, and then down to its base. There, almost completely swallowed by the grass and moss, was a small, rusted metal door, no bigger than a paperback book. It was set flat into the ground, a utility access for the grave liner, or something else forgotten by time.

In its center was a keyhole.

Nel’s breath caught. He dropped to his knees, the cold wetness seeping through his jeans instantly. His numb fingers fumbled the key from his pocket. It slid in with a gritty, metallic scrape.

He turned it.

The lock resisted for a heart-stopping second, then gave way with a groan that sounded too loud in the silent cemetery. He pulled the small door open. It wasn’t a space for utilities. It was a niche, a hollow space dug into the earth beside the coffin itself.

And inside, wrapped in thick, mildewed plastic, was a book.

His hands shook as he pulled it out. It was a large, heavy ledger, its black cover stained and blistered with dampness. The "ink of the drowned." He shoved it inside his jacket, the cold, hard rectangle pressing against his ribs. He relocked the tiny door, the click of the lock sounding like a final verdict.

He stood up, his legs weak. He had it. The truth was in his hands.

A twig snapped in the woods.

The sound was as sharp as a gunshot.

Nel froze, his blood turning to ice. He clicked off his flashlight, plunging himself into utter blackness. He held his breath, listening.

Nothing. Just the rain.

Then, a soft, shuffling footstep. Another. Something was moving in the trees, just beyond the stone wall. Something slow, and deliberate.

It was coming towards him.

He couldn’t run for the gate. He’d be seen. His only way was deeper into the cemetery, towards the older, more crowded section with its larger monuments. He started moving, crouched low, his heart hammering against the stolen ledger.

He ducked behind a large, angel-topped tombstone, pressing his back against the cold, wet marble. He peered around the edge.

A figure emerged from the tree line. It was tall, shrouded in a dark, hooded raincoat, its face invisible in the gloom. It stopped right where he had been kneeling at Elias's grave. It stood there, perfectly still, staring down at the small, now-relocked metal door.

It knew.

The figure’s head slowly turned, scanning the darkness, and for a terrifying second, Nel was certain its hidden gaze was locked directly on him.

He was trapped. The ledger, a block of damning evidence, was pressed against his chest. And the person who had killed for it was now standing twenty yards away, between him and the only way out.