Annabelle Addams's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Annabelle Addams had knocked on every door in Ditchwater, and not one person remembered letting her in. She carried a clipboard thick with completed census forms, each signed in a hand she did not recognize. The forms said she had finished her work. The town said she had never arrived. She wanted only one thing now: to leave, and to burn down the first house that tried to stop her. The fog came up from the marsh and swallowed the path behind her. She turned to retrace her steps and found only grey. No road. No fence. No lamp. She faced forward and saw a porch she did not remember reaching. Water ran off the sagging roof. A cracked sign hung above the door: CENSUS OFFICE. The windows showed stacks of ruined paper and chairs sunk in standing water. Annabelle stopped. She had worked for this office. She had never seen the building. She pressed her palm to the door, and it swung inward on its own. Inside, the floor was a shallow pond. Her boots sank to the ankle. Rows of filing cabinets leaned in the brown water. Papers floated like dead leaves. She lifted one. It was a census form. Her name filled the top line. Under OCCUPANTS, someone had written her name again, forty times. Something moved in the water at the back of the room. It crawled toward her on four long limbs. Its face was smooth and blank, a skin with no eyes and no mouth. Mud and black water dripped from its ribs with every step. It did not hurry. It did not need to. Annabelle backed toward the door. Her heel struck the threshold. Behind her, the fog had thickened into a wall, and in it she saw a thin shape uncoil — a drifting thing with trailing limbs and one pale yellow eye. It blocked the way out. The crawling thing blocked the way in. She understood then. This office was the first house. It had let her finish her work, and now it would not let her leave. A lantern hung on a nail by the door, its glass dry above the flood. Annabelle took it down. She twisted off the cap and poured the oil across the stacked forms, across her own name written forty times. The blank-faced thing reached for her ankle. She struck a match and dropped it. The oil caught. Flame ran up the sagging paper and climbed the wall. The crawling thing recoiled from the heat, and the drifting shape in the doorway tore apart as the fire pushed into the fog. Annabelle stepped through the gap it left. She stood in the mud and watched the office burn. The water inside hissed and steamed. For the first time, the fog pulled back from her, opening a path she could walk. But the forms were gone now. And without them, no one in Ditchwater would ever prove she had been there at all.