"Stillness Between Second"

 

The article was buried halfway down the third page of the newspaper, almost like it had been placed there on purpose — hidden in plain sight.

“UFO-Like Depression Found in Remote Farmland – Locals Baffled”

Zane Faulkner sipped his lukewarm tea as his eyes sharpened on the headline. “No scorch marks. No engine traces. Perfectly circular imprint in wheat fields outside Hillfield Ridge.”

He folded the paper and looked across the room at Eli, who was trying to balance an orange on his head while lying upside down on the couch.

“Put your gravity experiments on hold,” Zane said, rising. “We’re going to the countryside.”

Eli groaned. “Please tell me there’s a five-star hotel involved.”

Two Hours Later – Hillfield Ridge

Grey mountains loomed in the distance under a cold blue sky. The wind carried the faint scent of damp earth and pine. A lone crow cawed as the black sedan pulled up beside a rusted farm gate.

Zane stepped out first, long coat billowing slightly. Eli followed, instantly shivering.

“Lovely,” Eli muttered, eyeing the thick mud. “Absolutely lovely.”

They walked across the field until they reached the depression.

It was breathtaking — a perfectly round indentation, nearly forty feet across. The wheat inside had been flattened in a spiral, smooth as glass, with the center slightly deeper than the edges.

Zane crouched, running his fingers through the dirt. “No burn. No melting. Just pressure. Like something extremely heavy... but soft... pushed down without crushing.”

“Like a massive jellyfish,” Eli offered.

Zane pulled a compact magnetic scanner from his pocket. The needle twitched violently.

“Electromagnetic residue,” he said. “Localized to the center.”

“Meaning?”

Zane stood. “Meaning something landed here. But not something from here.”

Back in the car, Zane was silent, eyes scanning aerial images on his tablet.

Then his phone rang.

Private number.

He answered.

A woman’s voice trembled on the other end. “Mr. Faulkner... please... my daughter... she came back.”

Zane’s grip tightened. “Back from where?”

“She disappeared six months ago.”

Zane leaned forward. “And now?”

“She’s in her room. Wearing the same clothes. She hasn’t aged. She thinks it’s the same day.”

Zane looked up at Eli.

“Another one.”

The Kelman Residence – Edge of the City

Lyra was already there when they arrived.

“She called me,” Lyra explained. “Panicking. I recognized the symptoms.”

The girl — Emily — sat quietly on the bed, swinging her legs. Hair in two ponytails. Tiny ink stain on her sleeve. Same clothes she wore the day she vanished. Not a scratch. Not a memory.

Zane sat across from her.

“Do you remember what you were doing before you came back?” he asked gently.

Emily frowned. “I was... brushing my cat. Then I blinked. And Mum screamed.”

“Any sound? Smell? Light?”

She hesitated. “I... I remember a ticking.”

“Like a clock?”

She nodded. “But... faster.”

In the hallway, her mother sobbed softly. Lyra comforted her.

Zane stood staring at Emily’s drawing on the nightstand.

A spiral. With no center.

Back at Zane’s apartment, the corkboard was up again.

Emily’s photo joined Maya’s and Dylan’s.

Eli placed the tea on the desk and looked at the array. “Three kids. All gone for exactly six months. All came back unchanged. All think no time passed.”

Lyra added, “All showing tiny inconsistencies. Missing scars. Changed handwriting. Different dominant hand.”

Zane pointed at the spirals. “Each one drew the same shape. A loop that doesn’t close.”

“Meaning?” Eli asked.

“They weren’t returned. They were replaced. With near-perfect copies.”

Later that night, the apartment lights flickered.

Then went out.

Only the emergency light over Zane’s desk stayed on.

Then the radio crackled.

"Subject breach acknowledged. Observer tagged."

The voice wasn’t human.

Zane calmly picked up a pen and jotted the time down.

3:04 a.m.

The exact same moment Dylan had spoken Latin in his sleep.

The next morning, Zane called a meeting. Just the three of them.

“I’m missing something,” he said. “A bigger picture.”

Lyra pulled out a file. “I ran a search. Eighteen similar cases worldwide since 1950. All same age group. Same six-month absence. Same blank memory.”

She laid out the timeline.

Zane studied the pattern.

Eli looked between them. “It’s escalating, isn’t it?”

Zane nodded. “Yes. And it’s not random. It’s converging.”

“On what?”

Zane whispered, “On us.”

That evening, they received an unmarked package.

Inside — an old photo. Black and white. A rural street. Children playing.

At the center: Emily.

Same age. Same dress.

Photo dated: 1913.

Zane’s jaw clenched.

On the back, written in faded ink:

"Time is not a line. It is a door. Some children are keys."

                    ************

The living room was quiet, save for the occasional click of Zane’s pen against his teeth — a sign that something was brewing. On the corkboard in front of him, red strings stretched like veins between photographs, newspaper clippings, child sketches, and strange symbols.

Lyra sat across from him, cross-legged on the couch, flipping through a folder. Her brows were furrowed. "This symbol again," she murmured, pointing to the same spiral-with-open-center that had appeared in multiple child drawings.

"I think it’s not just a symbol," Zane replied. "It’s a map."

Eli looked up from where he was struggling to assemble a sandwich. "A map to what? Creepy preschool?”

Zane stood up, walking over to the sketch. “Imagine a spiral... but not on a flat surface. Imagine it in motion — a corridor through space that folds inward."

Lyra blinked. “Like… a tunnel?”

"More like a siphon,” Zane said. “Sucking reality from one end, spitting it into another."

Eli dropped his sandwich. “I vote we stop imagining that.”

The team headed to the next location — a child named Clara who had returned in the same manner. This time, they had a witness.

Clara’s older brother, Jamie, had seen her vanish.

“She was chasing the cat into the backyard,” Jamie said. “I saw her run past the oak tree. Then… she flickered. Like a TV glitch. And then she was gone.”

Zane’s face turned unreadable. “Did you tell anyone?”

Jamie nodded. “The police thought I made it up. Said I was in shock.”

Lyra leaned in. “And when she came back?”

Jamie swallowed. “She walked back into the kitchen like nothing happened. Same clothes. Same ketchup stain. Except… except she called our mom by her full name.”

Eli raised a brow. “That’s creepy.”

“She’d never done that before.”

Zane looked at Clara from a distance. She was playing with crayons, drawing something that looked like overlapping clock gears. Her lines were perfect — unnaturally so.

"You don’t think she’s… her anymore, do you?" Jamie asked.

Zane didn’t respond.

Back at the apartment, the tension was rising. Zane sat silently for nearly an hour, then suddenly spun around.

“Lyra, how do you feel about breaking into a government facility?”

She blinked. “Did you just ask that like it’s a dinner suggestion?”

“I need data from the Atmospheric Monitoring Station — specifically the magnetic anomalies over Hillfield Ridge. They won’t give it to us.”

Eli groaned. “Of course not. Because it's classified, illegal, and—”

“Already done,” Lyra interrupted. She held up her laptop. “Hacked it thirty minutes ago.”

Zane grinned. “Remind me to give you a raise.”

The screen filled with colorful spikes. Massive electromagnetic surges — all timed with each child’s disappearance. Each surge lasted exactly 7.9 seconds.

“Why 7.9?” Eli asked.

Zane’s tone dropped. “Because it’s the interval between conscious and unconscious perception — the moment where the brain can no longer register the passage of time. They’re using it as a doorway.”

That night, Zane couldn’t sleep. He stood by the window again, watching the skyline.

The blinking lights were back. But this time, they weren’t random.

They moved in patterns — forming sequences.

Zane filmed it.

Ran the footage through a frame-by-frame analyzer.

The patterns resolved into letters — old runic symbols no longer used in any modern language.

Eli peeked in from the kitchen. “You look like a man trying to decode a message from hell.”

Zane didn’t look up. “Worse. A message from someone who wants us to think it’s hell.”

The next anomaly hit at 4:03 a.m.

This time, it wasn’t a child.

It was a dog.

A golden retriever named Max disappeared from his owner’s fenced backyard in Cardiff.

Returned six hours later — completely clean, collar polished, teeth whiter than before.

And when the owner checked the security footage… Max didn’t walk in. He flickered into frame.

Lyra stared at the footage. “This thing is expanding. Testing older subjects.”

Zane scribbled furiously. “Trying to determine adaptability. Dogs remember in smells, not memories. Easier to fool.”

Eli looked worried. “So what happens when they move on to adults?”

Zane looked up, eyes cold. “Then we lose the ability to detect replacements.”

Three days later, they received a package.

No return address.

Inside — a single gear made of translucent material, etched with glowing lines.

And a note:

“Stillness is the space between now and never. Stop looking.”

Lyra stared at the gear. “This doesn’t look man-made.”

Zane held it up to the light. It refracted like a prism — and cast a shadow that pointed upward, against the laws of physics.

Eli whispered, “We’re being warned.”

Zane corrected him. “We’re being watched.”

That evening, Zane stood alone in his study.

He placed Maya’s photo beside Dylan’s. Then Clara’s. Then the dog. Then the gear.

Then he wrote two words on a blank sheet:

“Phase Shift.”

Because this was no longer about children.

It was about thresholds — between species, between memories, between identities.

And someone — or something — was pushing.

Hard.

                      
                          ************

The lab felt colder than usual.

Zane stood in front of a wide glass window overlooking Dylan, who lay asleep on the bed. Electrodes mapped his brainwaves onto half a dozen screens.

“Everything looks normal now,” Lyra said from behind him.

“That’s the problem,” Zane replied. “Normal doesn’t explain what we heard last night.”

Eli sipped coffee from a vending machine paper cup. “You mean the possessed robot-boy routine?”

Lyra gave him a look. “Not helping.”

Zane turned, his mind already far from their banter. “I want a full temporal resonance scan of the apartment building. Floor by floor. Especially where the photograph was taken.”

“You think the child in the hallway was… what? Another returnee?” Lyra asked.

“No,” Zane said. “I think it wasn’t a child at all.”

That afternoon, Zane stood beneath the alley’s lone streetlight, holding the printed surveillance photo again.

The child’s shirt bore the unmistakable logo from Redgate School, shuttered since 1974 after a tragic fire.

He flipped the photo over. Handwritten coordinates. Someone had added them afterward.

“Coordinates lead to an island off the Scottish coast,” Zane murmured.

Eli groaned. “Please no more cold, foggy islands. My nose hasn’t worked since last October.”

Two days later, they were on a boat slicing through gray water.

Lyra, clutching a thermos, watched the waves. “That school was rebuilt decades ago. Nothing’s supposed to be on this island now.”

“Exactly,” Zane said. “Which is why we’re going.”

The island was small — little more than a hilly stretch of overgrown grass and a few remnants of stone walls. But at its center stood something completely intact:

A white one-room schoolhouse. As if it had never aged.

Eli blinked. “Tell me that’s not real.”

Lyra raised her phone. “It’s not on satellite. Nothing here is.”

Zane stepped forward.

The schoolhouse door opened before he touched it.

Inside: chalkboard, desks, child-size coats hung neatly on pegs. Dustless. Timeless.

At the front of the room was a teacher’s desk — and on it, a ticking metronome. One tick per second. Precise. Eternal.

And a note:

“You’re early, Mr. Faulkner.”

Zane turned sharply. No one.

But then — faint footsteps above. A floorboard creaked.

Eli whispered, “It has an upstairs?”

It didn’t. From outside, the building was single-level.

Zane climbed anyway. The stairs shouldn’t have fit, but they did. Like the space had folded into itself.

At the top was a room filled with clocks. Hundreds of them. Each frozen at a different time.

And in the center: a child, back turned, scribbling furiously in a notebook.

Zane approached. “Who are you?”

The child turned.

It was Dylan — or someone who looked like him. But older. Eyes far too wise.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said calmly.

Zane felt the shift in air — like time had bent again.

“Where is the real Dylan?”

The boy blinked. “There is no ‘real’ Dylan. There are only versions. Copies. Failures. You’re not meant to remember.”

Zane took a step closer. “What is this place?”

The boy raised his hand — not threatening, but sad.

“A holding pattern. Between instants. The stillness between seconds. A place for sorting anomalies.”

“Who runs it?”

The boy tilted his head. “Not who. What.”

Behind him, all the clocks began to tick. Loud. Unified.

Then — silence.

The boy smiled. “They’re coming. And they’ve noticed you.”

Zane blinked.

He was back outside.

The schoolhouse gone.

Just open field.

Eli and Lyra stood behind him, confused. “You vanished,” Lyra said. “We turned around and you weren’t there.”

Zane didn’t speak for a long time.

He handed Eli the metronome.

“Keep this,” he said. “It was real.”

That night, as Zane stared at his board again, new reports flooded in — from France, Thailand, Norway, Chile.

All with identical disappearances.

All returned children drawing the same spiral symbol.

And then… the call came.

Private number.

The voice on the other end was deep, official.

“This is the Ministry. We need to see you immediately.”

One hour later, Zane arrived alone at a government building.

Eli waited outside.

He paced nervously, watching the entrance.

Exactly one hour later, Zane emerged. Calm. Focused.

Eli jumped up. “Well? What happened in there?”

Zane looked at him.

“These cases…” he said slowly. “They’re going to take us far.”

No more.

Just that.

And they got in the car.

Outside, the wind picked up. And far above, in the night sky, three distant lights blinked once — then vanished.

                           ***********

The sun dipped below the horizon as Zane, Eli, and Lyra sat in silence in Zane’s apartment, the wall behind them now covered with spirals drawn by returned children from around the globe. Eli paced while Lyra clutched her arms, trying to make sense of the horror creeping closer each day.

Zane stood before the corkboard, mapping red strings from one photograph to another. Something was beginning to form. Not an answer, but the outline of a larger puzzle.

Eli turned to him. "So what now? We just wait for more children to return like... like broken clocks?"

Zane shook his head. "No. We change the rhythm. We interrupt the loop."

He tapped on the spiral. "Every child drew this. It’s not just a symbol. It’s a construct. A containment field for memory. Each spiral is a closed circuit — except one thing: every single spiral drawn has a gap."

"Like a doorway?" Lyra asked.

Zane nodded. "Exactly. The gap always points west. Always. If we align all spiral gaps to magnetic west, they form a new shape — not a spiral. A sigil."

Eli blinked. "A what now?"

Zane paced. "A sigil is a symbol created through intention — in some rituals, even thought energy. Except this isn’t mysticism. This is science dressed in folklore. These spirals are coordinated beacons. The children didn’t draw them — they were programmed to draw them. Like broadcasting antennas."

"To send a signal?" Lyra asked.

Zane turned. "No. To receive."

That night, they drove to a quiet hilltop, far from the city. Zane had marked six locations based on the spirals. The seventh — the central one — was here.

They set up a crude triangulation grid using copper rods, conductive mesh, and Zane’s own custom resonance amplifier.

At 3:33 a.m., the device activated.

A soft hum filled the air, low and strange. Not sound, exactly. More like pressure. The trees didn’t sway. The clouds didn’t move. But the air vibrated.

Lyra clutched her coat. "I don’t like this."

Zane’s voice was flat. "We’re just tapping into a frequency. Nothing more."

But it was more.

The amplifier glowed — faint blue.

Then white.

Then pitch black.

Everything went silent. Even the crickets stopped.

A single tone pulsed — like a bell inside the bones.

Eli dropped to his knees, clutching his ears. "Make it stop, Zane—!"

Zane didn’t move.

Because something was materializing.

Just beyond the trees.

Not a creature. Not a UFO. But a shape. Tall, narrow, shifting.

Like a silhouette between dimensions.

Lyra gasped. "Zane... that’s the thing from Maya’s drawing."

The faceless figure.

Zane stepped forward, calm.

The silhouette tilted its head.

And for the first time, it spoke.

But not in words.

In images.

Zane blinked as flashes of light and pattern filled his vision — like a dream forming from geometric code. Binary emotions. Pulses of memory.

Then the image of a child — floating.

Frozen in time.

Followed by an infinite spiral collapsing into a single point.

Then a voice — soft, deep, mechanical:

"YOU SAW THE PATTERN. FEW DO."

Zane didn’t flinch. "What do you want from them? From the children?"

"PURITY. UNAFFECTED MEMORY. BEFORE CORRUPTION. WE OBSERVE. LEARN. EMULATE."

"You replace them."

"WE PRESERVE THE ORIGINAL. RETURN THE COPY."

Lyra’s breath hitched. Eli groaned behind her.

Zane’s jaw clenched. "You’re not preserving. You’re stealing."

"FROM CHAOS COMES ORDER. YOU DO THE SAME."

Then, just like that, the figure began to vanish. Folded into light.

Zane shouted, "Where are the originals?! Are they alive?!"

"TIME IS THEIR VESSEL. STILLNESS, THEIR HAVEN."

Gone.

The light vanished.

The tone stopped.

Eli collapsed, breathing heavily. Lyra rushed to him.

Zane stood frozen, processing every syllable.

Two days later, reports increased. Nine more cases — in different countries. Same pattern. Same spiral.

Zane spent the next 48 hours building a new board.

Not of clues.

But of coordinates.

He plotted all the cases. All the spirals. All the return points.

It formed not a circle — but a path.

Someone — or something — was testing Earth’s response time. Probing for patterns of behavior.

Eli stood beside him. "This is beyond just some rogue experiment, isn’t it?"

Zane didn’t answer.

Because at that moment, his phone buzzed again.

Caller ID: Minister of Interior Affairs.

Zane answered.

The voice on the other end was direct. “We’ve reviewed your findings. The global anomalies are accelerating. Several nations are aware. A summit is being called. We need you in person. Alone.”

Zane’s tone never changed. “Understood.”

The line went dead.

An hour later, a government car waited outside. Eli watched as Zane straightened his coat.

“I’m coming with you,” Eli insisted.

“You can’t,” Zane replied.

“The hell I can’t!”

Zane placed a hand on his shoulder. “They want me. Alone. I’ll be back.”

With a hesitant nod, Eli stayed back as Zane entered the black vehicle and vanished into the city.

Fifty-nine minutes later, Zane stepped back out of the ministry building.

His expression unreadable.

Eli jumped from the bench. “Well? What now?”

Zane looked toward the horizon.

His voice low, almost distant.

“These cases… they’ll take us far.”

No further words.

Just the stillness.

Between seconds.

[THE END]