OakFieldAlienz444
Senior Member
Lawrence had lived in the Caerlin Estate for three years when the silence came.
He wasn’t royalty. Wasn’t rich. Just a cook. A knife-hand in the cavernous belly of that enormous old house, nested far out in a nowhere pocket of rural land—somewhere past the grain silos, beyond the black rivers and forgotten turnoffs. The kind of place maps only remembered out of guilt.
He didn’t remember how he got the job. No one had really interviewed him. One day he was there, being handed a white apron and told not to speak to the family unless spoken to. After a while, that was fine with him. He preferred the company of the kitchen’s ancient stoves and the little ghosts in the pantry that made things go missing.
The house itself felt older than its stone. It shifted at night, let out long groans like an old beast with memories it couldn’t quite exorcise. It was always dim, always smelled faintly of damp paper and roasted meat. Rain hit the windows in arrhythmic patterns. The ceiling dripped sometimes, but no one could find the source.
On the morning everything ended, Lawrence woke to silence.
A thick silence. Heavy. Like it had mass.
No clatter from the scullery. No faint tinkle of cutlery being polished. No clicks from the grandfather clocks.
Just that infernal hum from the Aga oven, whispering like something breathing just below the skin of the walls.
He rose from his cot, rubbing his eyes, feeling the cold of the stone floor press up into his feet. The kitchen smelled like rosemary still. It always did. But it was sharper now, sour around the edges. Wrong.
He crept into the hallway. He heard a faint recording of "Oh my Darling oh my darliiing Clementine" for a brief moment then it faded away.
Every room he passed was the same. Dim. Still.
The first body he found was Elka, the housemaid. She was sitting on the velvet couch in the green parlor, head tilted back, mouth open in a silent gasp, her tea cup shattered on the carpet beside her. Her lips had turned black.
Then the butler, sprawled across the stairwell like a broken marionette.
The footman. The gardener. The children. The family.
All gone.
No signs of violence. No struggle. Just expressions frozen mid-thought, as though death had whispered a joke into their ears before snatching them.
Lawrence screamed. Called out. Sobbed. Nothing answered—not even an echo.
Eventually, dry-heaved and hollow, he stumbled upstairs to the Lord’s private study. He broke into the hidden safe behind the oil portrait. Inside was a brooch. Gold. Sapphire-eyed. Delicate. Worth more than all his years of wages.
His hands trembled as he reached for it, already imagining a new life—somewhere sunlit, maybe coastal, where he’d never smell death and lard again.
The brooch disintegrated in his palm.
Gone. Dust. Vanished.
He turned, slow and sick, and looked through the window.
The mansion—his world—was gone. Reduced to cinders and smoke. As though it had been burned centuries ago and he was only just seeing it now.
Lawrence walked away at dusk.
By the time he reached the long gravel road beyond the estate's twisted black iron gates, the sky was a brutal sheet of ink. Not a star. Not a moon. Just black upon black, swallowing the tree line and reaching down to gnaw at the earth.
He walked.
Crunch. Crunch. Gravel underfoot, the only sound.
Then—whines.
Like coyotes. But not quite.
They started soft. Then drew closer, longer. Moaning, hungry yowls that warped halfway through like they’d forgotten how to be animal. High-pitched keens, dissonant and wet. Sometimes just a single call, drawn out over a full minute, like something ancient being dragged across the cold.
He never saw the source.
But he never stopped moving.
The first gas station appeared like a mirage. Fluorescent lights blinking above a lonely island of cracked asphalt and an open sign that should’ve been off.
He walked inside, the bell above the door chiming like a scream underwater.
“Evenin’,” said the clerk without looking up. A pale young man with too-long arms and a neck that tilted too far when he moved.
Lawrence placed a bag of chips and a bottled coffee on the counter. Swiped his card.
Declined.
Again.
Declined.
Again.
"Transaction approved."
He didn’t question it. He just took his items and moved to sit outside, watching the dark press itself up against the glass.
The clerk watched him through the window, still smiling, still unmoving.
At the second station, thirty miles later, the clerk was older. Woman, hair like steel wool, voice like split wood.
“You come from the Caerlin place?” she asked, not looking up.
“I—did,” Lawrence said.
She rang him up slowly. His hand trembled as he swiped the card. It went through on the fifth try.
“You keep walkin’. Don’t look back, no matter what you hear,” she said, handing him a steaming cup of black coffee. “Road takes payment in more than cash.”
He nodded.
Didn’t drink the coffee.
It steamed too long.
He journaled as he walked, in a pocket pad he’d taken from the estate library. His entries became more erratic with each day:
Day 6: Heard children laughing in the cornfield. There are no children. There is no cornfield.
Day 9: My reflection won’t move when I do anymore. Only when I blink.
Day 11: A gas station played music backwards. The clerk sang along without opening his mouth.
He began to forget why he was walking. Just that it was away from something vast and final.
Then came the college.
Red brick towers. Ivy-choked walls. A wrought-iron gate creaking open to welcome him. The sign read: Whistler University, but the letters shimmered, and sometimes read something else. Something that hurt to look at directly.
The sky turned to slate. Clouds churned like ink in water. Static filled his ears.
He was late.
For what?
He didn’t know. But his feet knew. He ran. Past the statue of the blindfolded professor. Through hallways that echoed not with footsteps, but whispers in voices he remembered from childhood. A locker opened by itself and vomited out scrolls written in blood. He didn’t stop.
The cafeteria door opened before he touched it.
Inside—warmth.
People. Old friends. Past co-workers. Familiar faces. Laughing. Eating.
He sat with them.
Talked. Or tried to. Their words came out like backwards whispers and he could understand every word.
But when he looked at the far wall—
The painting.
It was not a painting. It moved. A long table. Skulls with eyes still blinking. A feast of human limbs and something that glistened like wet velvet. At the center: himself. Lawrence. A fork in one hand, the other dipped in sauce. Smiling.
The canvas bled.
The others clapped.
He felt his heart pounding. He was sure he was about to die.
But then......
He woke with a scream in his throat and dirt in his mouth.
Or had he died?
The field.
Where the mansion once stood.
Gone.
All of it gone.
Even the smell.
He lay there for a long while, letting the wind blow across his skin like cold breath.
In his pocket—the journalpad.
The last page:
You’re almost done walking. Just a few more miles. Don’t stop now. Don’t turn around.
Lawrence sat up.
Somewhere far off in the treeline, a strange coyote began to howl.
He stood.
He walked.
To be continued.
Lawrence woke to the sound of birds.
Actual birds.
Not the distant, metallic screeching things that had impersonated birds for weeks. Not the low, bone-rattling groans of invisible predators in the sky. These were good old-fashioned chirps, coming from very real-feeling feathered creatures in a very real-feeling tree.
He was lying in the yard.
The yard.
Where the Caerlin Mansion had once stood, with its grand, grotesque turrets and eternally echoing hallways. It was gone, of course. Still gone. But the grass had grown back. The sky was bright. Cheerful, even. A few lazy clouds wandered across the blue, probably having existential crises about being clouds.
He sat up.
He was still in yesterday's clothes, which smelled like sadness and mild existential dread. He brushed off a beetle that was attempting to colonize his left knee, squinted at the sun, and sighed.
"Well," he muttered to nobody. "Guess I'll go find coffee and a reason to exist."
He stood, stretched, and wandered across the gravel road that had become his reluctant pilgrimage path. But he didn't get far before he stopped short.
There, maybe twenty feet ahead of him, was a woman.
She had hair the color of a just-baked cherry pie and the kind of greenish blue eyes you only see in movies, cool drinks of water, sweet surprises or hallucinations. She wore jeans that had more personality than most people and a silver bomber jacket with a little embroidered UFO on the shoulder.
She was crouched on the edge of the road, poking at something with a stick.
Lawrence, socially awkward and deeply suspicious of beautiful women in places where beautiful women were absolutely not supposed to be, cleared his throat.
"Uh. Hi."
She looked up. Smiled.
"Oh! Howdy fuzzle widget. You're real."
"I… think so?"
"That's real good partner, good like a silk worm's birthday cake. Sometimes I run into projections and then we both scream and vanish in opposite directions, and that's just embarrassing."
Lawrence blinked. "Right. Of course."
She stood and dusted off her hands. "I'm Clementine."
"…Like the fruit?"
"Like the space anomaly that ate most of Nebraska in 1998, but yes, also the fruit. You're Lawrence, right?"
"…Yes?"
"Cool, cool. Knew it. Follow me, I'm dying for a gas station soda."
As they walked to the gas station, the song "End of the Line" by the Traveling Wilburry's would have played if this were a scene in a movie.
It played in their minds as Clementine surprisingly reached for Lawrence's hand, holding it all the way. She was just as lonely as he was perhaps?
The "Traveler's Express" gas station sat just a half-mile down the road, looking like a 1990s postcard that had been run through a dream blender. It had plastic tables and chairs out front, a menu board that advertised "Interstellar Nachos" (with the interstellar part poorly painted over), and a giant inflatable duck on the roof wearing a cowboy hat.
Clementine ordered a cream soda and a suspiciously orange sandwich. Lawrence, still not sure if this was a date or a setup, got a bag of pretzels and an iced coffee that tasted like despair and caramel.
They sat at a wobbly green plastic table in the sun.
"So," he said, "you just… hang out around exploded mansions?"
Clementine sipped her soda. "Nah, I was abducted by aliens as a kid. I just came back to this time stream recently."
"Oh. Okay. Coolcoolcool. And the aliens were, uh…"
"Nice! Super friendly. Great dental plans. One of them is a little handsy, but that's just Greg. He's got twelve arms, poor guy gets confused."
Lawrence took a long sip of coffee. "Uh-huh. So you've… just been off-planet for a while?"
"Yup. Got taken when I was five. Next thing I remember I'm working on a plasma coil reconfiguration job and paying off alien college loans."
"But you said you're twenty-five?"
She nodded, casually munching on the sandwich. "Yup."
"So… you remember being five… but also going to college and having jobs…?"
"Exactly."
"But—how?"
She blinked. "Time warp, duh."
Lawrence set his cup down slowly. "I'm gonna need you to rewind a bit."
"Oh my god. Okay." She sat up straighter. "So, the aliens who took me—The Friendly Consortium of Zarnackian Mutual Progress—they accidentally shifted me into a looped time corridor during transport. That split my consciousness and slingshotted part of my timeline into a full career path while another part got stored in cryo. Then when I 'woke up,' they had to upload my childhood memories onto a learning screen so I could get up to speed on, y'know, me."
"…Uh huh."
"I watched all ten years of my early life like a Hulu series. Had a laugh, cried at episode four. My hamster dies. It's rough."
"That's… a lot."
"Totally. You cried at the same episode, by the way."
"…Excuse me?"
"Oh, right," she said, biting into her sandwich. "You're stuck in a time warp too."
Lawrence dropped his pretzel.
"I'm sorry, what?"
Clementine gestured vaguely toward the sky. "You ever notice how everything's been weird and sad and vaguely haunted and also vaguely hilarious?"
"...That's just my life."
"Exactly," she said, pointing a fry at him. "That's how you know."
Lawrence leaned back in his chair. "So what, I've been looping through trauma for cosmic amusement?"
"Oh, no no no," she laughed. "It's just a trial period."
"For what?"
"To see if you're worthy of joining the space fleet."
"…I don't even own a toothbrush."
"Minor detail. Look, you've passed. The weird mansion, the spooky noises, the haunted gas stations—you survived all that without completely unraveling. Mostly."
Lawrence looked around. "So what now? I just… accept this and go with you?"
Clementine gave him a small, sly smile.
"You marry me. We live on the ship. Build spaceships. Raise intergalactic worms. Get paid in solar credits. And yes, I am a fantastic cook."
Lawrence opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Do I get a uniform?"
"Oh yeah. Silvery. Glows a little. Comes with a jetpack."
"…Will I still be able to get coffee?"
"Alien coffee. Makes you taste colors. You'll love it."
He stared at her. She raised one eyebrow and sipped her soda with unsettling elegance.
"…Alright," he said. "I'm in."
She beamed.
"Sweet! We'll have the wedding on Deck 7. Greg can officiate."
Two hours later, a ship the size of a modest farmhouse appeared silently above the Traveler's Express.
No one inside seemed to notice. The clerk was still rearranging beef jerky.
Lawrence and Clementine held hands as the tractor beam pulled them up into the glow.
A new life. A new weirdness. But maybe this time, a little less haunted.
And a lot more interstellar nachos.
The End
He wasn’t royalty. Wasn’t rich. Just a cook. A knife-hand in the cavernous belly of that enormous old house, nested far out in a nowhere pocket of rural land—somewhere past the grain silos, beyond the black rivers and forgotten turnoffs. The kind of place maps only remembered out of guilt.
He didn’t remember how he got the job. No one had really interviewed him. One day he was there, being handed a white apron and told not to speak to the family unless spoken to. After a while, that was fine with him. He preferred the company of the kitchen’s ancient stoves and the little ghosts in the pantry that made things go missing.
The house itself felt older than its stone. It shifted at night, let out long groans like an old beast with memories it couldn’t quite exorcise. It was always dim, always smelled faintly of damp paper and roasted meat. Rain hit the windows in arrhythmic patterns. The ceiling dripped sometimes, but no one could find the source.
On the morning everything ended, Lawrence woke to silence.
A thick silence. Heavy. Like it had mass.
No clatter from the scullery. No faint tinkle of cutlery being polished. No clicks from the grandfather clocks.
Just that infernal hum from the Aga oven, whispering like something breathing just below the skin of the walls.
He rose from his cot, rubbing his eyes, feeling the cold of the stone floor press up into his feet. The kitchen smelled like rosemary still. It always did. But it was sharper now, sour around the edges. Wrong.
He crept into the hallway. He heard a faint recording of "Oh my Darling oh my darliiing Clementine" for a brief moment then it faded away.
Every room he passed was the same. Dim. Still.
The first body he found was Elka, the housemaid. She was sitting on the velvet couch in the green parlor, head tilted back, mouth open in a silent gasp, her tea cup shattered on the carpet beside her. Her lips had turned black.
Then the butler, sprawled across the stairwell like a broken marionette.
The footman. The gardener. The children. The family.
All gone.
No signs of violence. No struggle. Just expressions frozen mid-thought, as though death had whispered a joke into their ears before snatching them.
Lawrence screamed. Called out. Sobbed. Nothing answered—not even an echo.
Eventually, dry-heaved and hollow, he stumbled upstairs to the Lord’s private study. He broke into the hidden safe behind the oil portrait. Inside was a brooch. Gold. Sapphire-eyed. Delicate. Worth more than all his years of wages.
His hands trembled as he reached for it, already imagining a new life—somewhere sunlit, maybe coastal, where he’d never smell death and lard again.
The brooch disintegrated in his palm.
Gone. Dust. Vanished.
He turned, slow and sick, and looked through the window.
The mansion—his world—was gone. Reduced to cinders and smoke. As though it had been burned centuries ago and he was only just seeing it now.
Lawrence walked away at dusk.
By the time he reached the long gravel road beyond the estate's twisted black iron gates, the sky was a brutal sheet of ink. Not a star. Not a moon. Just black upon black, swallowing the tree line and reaching down to gnaw at the earth.
He walked.
Crunch. Crunch. Gravel underfoot, the only sound.
Then—whines.
Like coyotes. But not quite.
They started soft. Then drew closer, longer. Moaning, hungry yowls that warped halfway through like they’d forgotten how to be animal. High-pitched keens, dissonant and wet. Sometimes just a single call, drawn out over a full minute, like something ancient being dragged across the cold.
He never saw the source.
But he never stopped moving.
The first gas station appeared like a mirage. Fluorescent lights blinking above a lonely island of cracked asphalt and an open sign that should’ve been off.
He walked inside, the bell above the door chiming like a scream underwater.
“Evenin’,” said the clerk without looking up. A pale young man with too-long arms and a neck that tilted too far when he moved.
Lawrence placed a bag of chips and a bottled coffee on the counter. Swiped his card.
Declined.
Again.
Declined.
Again.
"Transaction approved."
He didn’t question it. He just took his items and moved to sit outside, watching the dark press itself up against the glass.
The clerk watched him through the window, still smiling, still unmoving.
At the second station, thirty miles later, the clerk was older. Woman, hair like steel wool, voice like split wood.
“You come from the Caerlin place?” she asked, not looking up.
“I—did,” Lawrence said.
She rang him up slowly. His hand trembled as he swiped the card. It went through on the fifth try.
“You keep walkin’. Don’t look back, no matter what you hear,” she said, handing him a steaming cup of black coffee. “Road takes payment in more than cash.”
He nodded.
Didn’t drink the coffee.
It steamed too long.
He journaled as he walked, in a pocket pad he’d taken from the estate library. His entries became more erratic with each day:
Day 6: Heard children laughing in the cornfield. There are no children. There is no cornfield.
Day 9: My reflection won’t move when I do anymore. Only when I blink.
Day 11: A gas station played music backwards. The clerk sang along without opening his mouth.
He began to forget why he was walking. Just that it was away from something vast and final.
Then came the college.
Red brick towers. Ivy-choked walls. A wrought-iron gate creaking open to welcome him. The sign read: Whistler University, but the letters shimmered, and sometimes read something else. Something that hurt to look at directly.
The sky turned to slate. Clouds churned like ink in water. Static filled his ears.
He was late.
For what?
He didn’t know. But his feet knew. He ran. Past the statue of the blindfolded professor. Through hallways that echoed not with footsteps, but whispers in voices he remembered from childhood. A locker opened by itself and vomited out scrolls written in blood. He didn’t stop.
The cafeteria door opened before he touched it.
Inside—warmth.
People. Old friends. Past co-workers. Familiar faces. Laughing. Eating.
He sat with them.
Talked. Or tried to. Their words came out like backwards whispers and he could understand every word.
But when he looked at the far wall—
The painting.
It was not a painting. It moved. A long table. Skulls with eyes still blinking. A feast of human limbs and something that glistened like wet velvet. At the center: himself. Lawrence. A fork in one hand, the other dipped in sauce. Smiling.
The canvas bled.
The others clapped.
He felt his heart pounding. He was sure he was about to die.
But then......
He woke with a scream in his throat and dirt in his mouth.
Or had he died?
The field.
Where the mansion once stood.
Gone.
All of it gone.
Even the smell.
He lay there for a long while, letting the wind blow across his skin like cold breath.
In his pocket—the journalpad.
The last page:
You’re almost done walking. Just a few more miles. Don’t stop now. Don’t turn around.
Lawrence sat up.
Somewhere far off in the treeline, a strange coyote began to howl.
He stood.
He walked.
To be continued.
Lawrence woke to the sound of birds.
Actual birds.
Not the distant, metallic screeching things that had impersonated birds for weeks. Not the low, bone-rattling groans of invisible predators in the sky. These were good old-fashioned chirps, coming from very real-feeling feathered creatures in a very real-feeling tree.
He was lying in the yard.
The yard.
Where the Caerlin Mansion had once stood, with its grand, grotesque turrets and eternally echoing hallways. It was gone, of course. Still gone. But the grass had grown back. The sky was bright. Cheerful, even. A few lazy clouds wandered across the blue, probably having existential crises about being clouds.
He sat up.
He was still in yesterday's clothes, which smelled like sadness and mild existential dread. He brushed off a beetle that was attempting to colonize his left knee, squinted at the sun, and sighed.
"Well," he muttered to nobody. "Guess I'll go find coffee and a reason to exist."
He stood, stretched, and wandered across the gravel road that had become his reluctant pilgrimage path. But he didn't get far before he stopped short.
There, maybe twenty feet ahead of him, was a woman.
She had hair the color of a just-baked cherry pie and the kind of greenish blue eyes you only see in movies, cool drinks of water, sweet surprises or hallucinations. She wore jeans that had more personality than most people and a silver bomber jacket with a little embroidered UFO on the shoulder.
She was crouched on the edge of the road, poking at something with a stick.
Lawrence, socially awkward and deeply suspicious of beautiful women in places where beautiful women were absolutely not supposed to be, cleared his throat.
"Uh. Hi."
She looked up. Smiled.
"Oh! Howdy fuzzle widget. You're real."
"I… think so?"
"That's real good partner, good like a silk worm's birthday cake. Sometimes I run into projections and then we both scream and vanish in opposite directions, and that's just embarrassing."
Lawrence blinked. "Right. Of course."
She stood and dusted off her hands. "I'm Clementine."
"…Like the fruit?"
"Like the space anomaly that ate most of Nebraska in 1998, but yes, also the fruit. You're Lawrence, right?"
"…Yes?"
"Cool, cool. Knew it. Follow me, I'm dying for a gas station soda."
As they walked to the gas station, the song "End of the Line" by the Traveling Wilburry's would have played if this were a scene in a movie.
It played in their minds as Clementine surprisingly reached for Lawrence's hand, holding it all the way. She was just as lonely as he was perhaps?
The "Traveler's Express" gas station sat just a half-mile down the road, looking like a 1990s postcard that had been run through a dream blender. It had plastic tables and chairs out front, a menu board that advertised "Interstellar Nachos" (with the interstellar part poorly painted over), and a giant inflatable duck on the roof wearing a cowboy hat.
Clementine ordered a cream soda and a suspiciously orange sandwich. Lawrence, still not sure if this was a date or a setup, got a bag of pretzels and an iced coffee that tasted like despair and caramel.
They sat at a wobbly green plastic table in the sun.
"So," he said, "you just… hang out around exploded mansions?"
Clementine sipped her soda. "Nah, I was abducted by aliens as a kid. I just came back to this time stream recently."
"Oh. Okay. Coolcoolcool. And the aliens were, uh…"
"Nice! Super friendly. Great dental plans. One of them is a little handsy, but that's just Greg. He's got twelve arms, poor guy gets confused."
Lawrence took a long sip of coffee. "Uh-huh. So you've… just been off-planet for a while?"
"Yup. Got taken when I was five. Next thing I remember I'm working on a plasma coil reconfiguration job and paying off alien college loans."
"But you said you're twenty-five?"
She nodded, casually munching on the sandwich. "Yup."
"So… you remember being five… but also going to college and having jobs…?"
"Exactly."
"But—how?"
She blinked. "Time warp, duh."
Lawrence set his cup down slowly. "I'm gonna need you to rewind a bit."
"Oh my god. Okay." She sat up straighter. "So, the aliens who took me—The Friendly Consortium of Zarnackian Mutual Progress—they accidentally shifted me into a looped time corridor during transport. That split my consciousness and slingshotted part of my timeline into a full career path while another part got stored in cryo. Then when I 'woke up,' they had to upload my childhood memories onto a learning screen so I could get up to speed on, y'know, me."
"…Uh huh."
"I watched all ten years of my early life like a Hulu series. Had a laugh, cried at episode four. My hamster dies. It's rough."
"That's… a lot."
"Totally. You cried at the same episode, by the way."
"…Excuse me?"
"Oh, right," she said, biting into her sandwich. "You're stuck in a time warp too."
Lawrence dropped his pretzel.
"I'm sorry, what?"
Clementine gestured vaguely toward the sky. "You ever notice how everything's been weird and sad and vaguely haunted and also vaguely hilarious?"
"...That's just my life."
"Exactly," she said, pointing a fry at him. "That's how you know."
Lawrence leaned back in his chair. "So what, I've been looping through trauma for cosmic amusement?"
"Oh, no no no," she laughed. "It's just a trial period."
"For what?"
"To see if you're worthy of joining the space fleet."
"…I don't even own a toothbrush."
"Minor detail. Look, you've passed. The weird mansion, the spooky noises, the haunted gas stations—you survived all that without completely unraveling. Mostly."
Lawrence looked around. "So what now? I just… accept this and go with you?"
Clementine gave him a small, sly smile.
"You marry me. We live on the ship. Build spaceships. Raise intergalactic worms. Get paid in solar credits. And yes, I am a fantastic cook."
Lawrence opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"Do I get a uniform?"
"Oh yeah. Silvery. Glows a little. Comes with a jetpack."
"…Will I still be able to get coffee?"
"Alien coffee. Makes you taste colors. You'll love it."
He stared at her. She raised one eyebrow and sipped her soda with unsettling elegance.
"…Alright," he said. "I'm in."
She beamed.
"Sweet! We'll have the wedding on Deck 7. Greg can officiate."
Two hours later, a ship the size of a modest farmhouse appeared silently above the Traveler's Express.
No one inside seemed to notice. The clerk was still rearranging beef jerky.
Lawrence and Clementine held hands as the tractor beam pulled them up into the glow.
A new life. A new weirdness. But maybe this time, a little less haunted.
And a lot more interstellar nachos.
The End
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