There are places that are not meant to be remembered. Places that exist just on the edge of memory and forgotten dreams, hanging there like a mist you can never touch, even though it clings to you.
It’s a path, hidden in plain sight, just beyond the reach of your mind.
People who’ve walked it don’t speak about it, and the few who do, you stop listening to. They say it’s nothing—and that’s all they remember.
I remember it like this: a day too quiet, like the air was waiting for something, and the world itself held its breath. I was with her, my sister, Lila, on a walk.
We’d taken that route dozens of times before, past the same street signs, the same groaning old oak, the same narrow alley that never seemed to lead anywhere.
But this time was different. This time, the alley wasn’t empty.
We had always joked that if you looked hard enough, the alley would open up, like a door to somewhere else, and we’d laugh and turn back, dismissing it as a trick of the light or our overactive imaginations.
But today, it was different. The shadows in that alley were… wrong.
They were deeper, colder, like they didn’t belong to the trees or the buildings, like they belonged to something else. Something older. Something that had never walked this earth.
“You’re not thinking of going down there, are you?” Lila said, standing at the entrance, staring into the darkness.
“I don’t know,” I said. My heart was racing, but not because I was scared. It was more like… curiosity. An invitation, maybe, from the unseen. “It feels… like we’re supposed to.”
Lila laughed nervously, her voice cutting through the silence. “Supposed to? Who says that?”
But there was something about the alley that day. The air felt thick, like it had been waiting for years, holding its breath until it was ready to burst. Something was calling us. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it, tugging at my skin, urging me to step closer. And so, I did.
Lila followed. Her footsteps echoing in the narrow space as we ventured deeper. The walls seemed to close in. I looked back, but the entrance had vanished. Not like it had been blocked, but like it was… no longer there.
We were trapped in a place that wasn’t supposed to exist. Not in the world we knew.
“Where’s the way out?” she whispered, her voice trembling.
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t even know what was real anymore. The alley stretched on, endless and twisting. Every time we looked forward, it seemed different, like it was shifting under our feet.
The air was thick, impossibly so, and it tasted of dust and something older—like the kind of forgotten things that only live in the cracks between dreams.
Then, we saw it.
At the end of the alley, there was a door. I hadn’t noticed it before, not in all the years we’d passed by. It was small and covered in ivy, almost hidden from view.
It wasn’t the sort of door anyone would think to open—it had that feeling, you know, the one that makes your gut twist with unease. But we were drawn to it. Slowly, without speaking, we both reached for the handle.
Turn it, whispered a voice from deep within the shadows.
It was a voice we both recognized, even though we hadn’t heard it in years. It was our mother’s voice. But she had been dead for a long time, hadn’t she? No, no. She hadn’t been. Not here, not now. We both knew what we had to do, even though it didn’t make sense.
The door creaked open. Beyond it, a small, dim room awaited. The walls were covered in clocks, all ticking in perfect harmony, all showing different times, none of them matching. And in the center of the room, there was a chair.
Old, dusty, but the kind of chair you see in nightmares.
And there she was. Our mother. Sitting in that chair, her hands folded in her lap.
Her eyes were open but empty, staring at nothing, seeing everything. And she smiled at us—slowly, just a twitch of the lips. “You found it, didn’t you?” she asked.
I wanted to scream, to run, but my legs were frozen in place.
“You’ve been waiting for the path to call you,” she continued, her voice no longer comforting, but a chilling reminder of something that should have been left forgotten. “Now that you’ve walked it, you’ll never be the same.”
The clocks stopped ticking.
And then, with a jolt, the room changed. It wasn’t a room anymore. The walls were gone, replaced by an endless expanse of mist, stretching as far as the eye could see.
The ground beneath us trembled, the sky above us turning to an impossible shade of green, and the world—our world—vanished.
I reached for Lila’s hand, but she wasn’t there.
A distant, hollow laugh echoed in the emptiness.
And I understood.
The path had never led us out. It had led us somewhere else. Somewhere far worse.
And now, we would never be able to leave. Not now. Not ever.
In the end, we all find the paths we’re meant to walk—though, a warning to you… some paths are best left unseen.
