Chapter 17
Cold rain lashes down in relentless sheets, turning the ground beneath our feet into sucking, ankle-deep mud.
I lead the way, or at least pretend to, but my body still aches from the plastic wrap, the stitches, and the phantom pain that flares with every step I take.
Behind me and Mattie, the others trail close. A trembling brunette with a split lip and swollen, bruised eye who hasn’t spoken since we washed ashore, and two bald women clutching each other’s hands like they’ll vanish if they let go.
The woodland swallows us, twisted trees looming overhead, their branches clawing at the black-and-blue sky like skeletal fingers.
“We shouldn’t be here,” one of the girls whispers behind me, frail voice barely noticable over the drumming rain. “This place… it doesn’t feel right.”
Suddenly, I spot a narrow track that cuts through the trees—a tram track.
“We should follow it,” Mattie says, her voice gruff, eyes locked on where I was looking. “It might lead to shelter. Or a village. Or… something to get off this island.”
The brunette suddenly laughs bitterly and empty.
“Or it leads to whatever made that woman kill herself.”
But what choice do we have? The rain is getting colder, and the sky isn’t getting any lighter, like the nighttime is here to stay forever.
We continue deeper along the tram track until the grass thins and dies, giving way to cracked, weeded pavement.
The thick trees pull back around us, and when I come to an abrupt stop, everyone else halts with me.
My wide eyes drift upward, neck craning as cold rain patters across my face. The crumbling buildings rise ahead—tall and ruined pillars of absolute black against the sickly grey sky.
They don’t just stand, they fucking loom.
Hundreds of empty windows stare down like gouged sockets, dead and waiting. Weeds and vines choke every surface, and between the towers stretch thick, glistening webs that sway in the wind, as if something inside them is still alive.
“What… the fuck,” Mattie whispers beside me, her voice already fraying.
My gaze keeps sweeping across the forgotten land, but it doesn’t just feel abandoned. It feels evacuated in a panic, like whatever catastrophe happened here was so terrible that even the ones responsible ran before they could finish witnessing what they’d unleashed.
Overturned bikes sink into the earth, scattered belongings lie exactly where they were dropped, slowly being eaten by the weeds.
A low pressure builds behind my eyes, a familiar static of dissociation flickering at the edges of my vision as the buildings seem to lean in, just slightly.
“What the hell is this place?” Another murmurs from behind.
Suddenly, a low creaking drags my attention to the left, and my head turns, almost against my will, as if the sound has hooked behind my eyes and is pulling.
They land on a playground and an immediate wave of anxiety hits me.
There’s a rusted slide that curls, a see-saw tilting gently up and down in slow rhythm. Two swings drift back and forth, chains groaning softly, moving exactly like small bodies are still sitting on them.
Although the rain is still falling, the wind has calmed down here, but the swings keep going. And I can’t tell if it’s just the breeze… or if something is still playing there.
My stomach folds in on itself, old memories clawing up from the darkness of my own childhood, and for a moment the entire scene blurs.
Mattie’s shaky hand brushes my arm.
“We should keep moving,” she whispers, but her voice sounds far away, like she’s already halfway gone.
I nod without looking at her, and my legs move before my mind agrees, carrying me forward along the cracked pavement, deeper into the dead town.
We weave between the towering buildings, my pulse hammering in my ears.
Then I see it, far ahead.
A huge shadow morphing over one side of the black monoliths ahead, taller than any man, slipping between buildings like liquid night pouring through cracks.
My breath halts in my throat, head exploding into blinding white noise.
Old terror surges up through me, the kind that taught me long ago that some things cannot be outrun.
“Run,” someone hisses.
We dart left anyway, feet pounding over broken concrete and tangled weeds, straight toward the nearest building, the door shattered like a gaping mouth.
Spilling inside, the air suddenly feels thicker in here, dense with rot and damp.
I press my back against a wall just inside the entrance, trying to make myself small, and the others crowd in beside me.
The building groans softly around us, as if settling in to keep us.
“We need to go higher,” someone whispers beside me, their voice thin, already half-eaten by the dark.
My gaze tears away from the doorway, and I turn my head to look up.
The winding staircase beside us disappears into absolute nothingness. No light reaches those steps, and the blackness there feels almost oily, like it’s waiting to pour down and devour us.
Mattie steps forward first, her cold fingers sliding into mine, gripping too tight, the way children do when they’re small and scared.
She tugs me after her as we ascend slowly, every creak of the wood exploding through the silence like gunshots.
The stairs feel rotten to the core, soft in places, as if they might collapse and swallow us into the guts of the building.
The higher we climb, the shallower my breath becomes, because I can’t see the others anymore. I can only feel their presence as terrifying shapes press too close.
We only reach what must be the fifth floor when the sound suddenly hits us—a distorted ice cream truck melody drifting up from the streets below.
Twisted notes flow like a child’s voice played backward through fucked speakers. The sound is corrupted, the fake cheer smeared into something menacing.
We halt on the landing, Mattie’s hand squeezing mine hard enough to bruise. As we both edge toward a broken window, debris crunches under our feet, and we peer around it with one eye.
Down in the abandoned streets on the far left, sickly coloured lights sweep lazily through the rain—pink, yellow, and faded blue cutting weak paths through the gloom.
The ice cream truck crawls slowly between townhouses, its engine growling, as if clogged with something bad.
It feels like it’s searching the same way the shadow had searched.
It fucking knows we’re here already.
One of the bald girls, I think I heard her friend call her Lena, suddenly jerks behind me. Her hands fly to her skull, fingers digging into her temples like she’s trying to claw something out.
“That noise,” she whispers, follow by a broken whimper. “Not that fucking noise. Please not that fucking noise.”
Her whole body starts shaking, knees buckling as she slides down the wall.
Lena’s pupils blown with pure panic, wide and unfocused. She rocks slightly, nails scraping against her scalp hard enough to draw blood.
“It’s okay, Lena,” her friend murmurs quietly as she kneels beside her. “It’s not real. None of this is real.”
“Yeah,” Mattie says, trying to sound steady. “We’ve all just had a really rough night. We need to keep moving and find somewhere to sleep.”
My eyes flash to Mattie's, my brows knitting hard, cause that sound is very fucking real.
The warped music is still swarming through the walls, faint but persistent, like sticky fingers pressing into my ears.
If it wasn’t real, how the hell did we all hear it? Why is Lena still tearing at her own skull, drawing bloody lines down her temples?
Lena’s breathing saws through the dark, and when her friend tries to pull her hands away from her face, Lena jerks like she’s been burned.
The ice cream truck’s tune seems to grow more distant, and I swallow the scream wanting to build in my throat.
We’re not safe here, we’ve never been safe.
“Whatever it was, it’s going,” the brunette whispers, “this is the best chance we’ll get to find somewhere for the night.”
Lena’s friend pulls her up as she weeps, wrapping an arm around her back as we decide to go up a few more levels.
◆◆◆
When we find an empty room further down the hall, we bundle inside, quietly pulling the door almost shut, just ajar, so a faint ribbon of dim light can still bleed through, the windows boarded up.
It seems like a filthy bedroom, and thick dust coats everything, making every inhale sharp in my lungs.
Debris litters the floor, papers, broken glass, and things that might once have been toys or bones.
We sink down against the far wall, huddling together for warmth that never quite reaches the cold inside us. Our shoulders press tight, Mattie sitting beside me, and I rest my head on her shoulder.
Sarah, the brunette, curls against my other side, her head heavy on mine as she slips quickly into uneasy sleep.
“That truck,” Lena whispers to her friend Lotty, voice shaking in the dark. “That’s how I was taken when I was five. That’s how I was groomed. The music… the lights… it always started like that.”
My eyes stare unblinking into the thick blackness across the room as I listen carefully, every word sinking into me like hooks.
“What if that woman on the beach was right?” Lena continues, barely audible. “What if this place shows our deepest fears? What if they’re ghosts of our pasts, come back to finish what they started?”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Lena,” Lotty tries to reassure her, but her voice wavers. “Maybe there’s something in the air here that’s making us hallucinate. Maybe that’s why it’s a dead town and everyone left.”
I blink slowly, the fear in my head ringing louder as I mull their words over and over.
I press closer to Mattie, but the warmth doesn’t chase away the anxiety I feel.
Sleep feels impossible now, because if Ninth Isle really does show us our deepest, darkest fears…
…then the worst is still coming for each of us.