Eleven Years

Eleven Years

Detective Corven Ash rang his wife when his Land Cruiser bogged on the Pale Hollow Trail within Ravenspine Forest. He stayed on the line with her for nearly an hour—until he suddenly said, “Oh…shit,” and the line went dead. Despite extensive searches, not a single trace of him has ever been found. No body, no phone, no sign of struggle. It’s as if he stepped off the map.

This is his story.

I wasn’t on the roster. Two days’ leave left, a weekend promising nothing but sleep and the smell of Mara’s hair in the morning. But the cold-case folder waited where I’d left it on the kitchen counter, fat and dog-eared—Hart, Abigail — Missing Person—and the newest note I’d added that day kept looking like it wanted to be understood—11 years. Ravenspine 735.

The clock on the wall read just past five, the hour when the light turns low and the shadows start to stretch long. Too late to be heading west, but I told myself it would be a quick look. I took the folder, kissed my wife on the forehead, and said I was popping out to the servo for milk.

“Uh-huh,” she said. Mara knows all my lies. “Bring back the truth while you’re there.”

“I’ll get a receipt,” I said, and she made a lazy noise that said I wasn’t fooling anyone.

The drive west was all the colours of drought. Paddocks like old paper. Gums lifting strips of themselves in long curled tongues. The sun hung low, right in my eyes, throwing the road into a wash of amber and shadow. By the time the paddocks gave way to scrub, the light was already bleeding thin, the horizon cut into dark teeth of pine.

The folder on the seat slid against the dash as I slowed, indicator clicking into the hush.

The Ravenspine trackhead gaped between the trees—just two leaning posts and a rust-flaked gate, marking the start of the Pale Hollow Trail. I slowed, one hand resting on the wheel, the other on the folder beside me. For a moment I thought about driving on, letting dusk have the place to itself.

But the file pressed against my arm, heavy as a hand. Eleven years and I was still circling.

I swung the wheel. The Cruiser bumped off the bitumen, tyres crunching gravel, then thudding into the paired ruts of the trail.

The woods closed in.

I’d been out here more times than made sense, long after the file was boxed and the label faded from white to bone. Eleven years since a woman whose age the reports never pinned—twenties, maybe—walked into these trees in a red jacket and did not return. Eleven years since I saw her photo the morning after I married Mara and felt that cold, wrong click in my chest, as if one life had begun because another had ended.

I’d met Abigail once. That’s the burr that wouldn’t let go. The day before the wedding, at the old corner shop down from the Catholic church, I was arguing with the ice-cream cabinet and she slid past with a chocolate milk and a grin you couldn’t file. Dark hair tucked into the collar of a jacket the colour of wine. She told the kid behind the counter the milk always went off faster than it should, “like it forgets the day.” Then she looked at me like we were mid-conversation already and said, almost idly: “It’s easy to get lost out there. Sometimes I think the forest remembers the paths better than we do.” I smiled the way you smile at strangers who say poetic things and she paid and left and I stood there holding a box of Paddle Pops like an idiot while the bell over the door rang its cheap farewell.

I tucked the memory back where it belonged, though it never stayed there long

Five k in, the track kinked around a fallen trunk that a trail bike had once used as a ramp. I followed the kink instead of the track and put both front wheels into a patch of clay disguised as ground.

The car slid forward with the grace of a drunk and stopped.

“Ah, hell,” I said, which is what passes for prayer when you’re me.

Reverse. Drive. Rock. The tyres polished their beds to glass. My dash clock read 6:48 p.m. It would be full dark in twenty, and I still had two bars of reception. I decided to ring Mara, and she could tell me the things I forget to say to myself when I want to pretend I’m not fallible.

I called her.

She picked up on the first buzz. “You didn’t buy milk.”

“So persistent,” I said. “You should be a cop.”

“Mm. I prefer a life.” She said. “Where are you?”

“Ravenspine.”

Silence on the line. Then: “Again?” A single word, thin as wire, carrying suspicion and worry in equal measure.

“Fresh air,” I said.

“Corven.” Flat, no patience.

I looked at the way the front tyres sat like dumplings in soup. “I’m a little—” I searched for dignity, found none— “situationally anchored.”

“Bogged.”

“Anchored,” I repeated, because words are spells, and some small, stupid part of me believed if I didn’t call it bogged it wouldn’t be.

“You’re serious?”

“Clay’s got me. I’ll lock her up, head back on foot. It’s not that far back to the gate. I’ll ping Zac to meet me there. We’ll haul her out in the morning.”

Saying his name felt like pulling a loose thread — I knew it would snag. Zac finished his shift at seven; by rights he should be at the pub with a beer in his hand or in the shower, not turning his cruiser round for a mate who’d managed to buy himself into a mud hole. He’d grumble, probably call me an idiot, and still be there.

“You’re going to walk at night through that bloody forest?” Mara said.

“You married a man who spends his days following trails. I can manage one back to the gate.” I said, trying for humour and landing closer to brittle. “I’ll keep you on the line while I walk.”

“Comforting,” she said dryly. “If you vanish, at least I’ll get to listen to you do it.”

“I won’t.”

I grabbed the folder from the passenger seat, tucked it under my arm, and started down the track.

At first it was simple: two ruts, bracken, the smell of resin. My boots struck hard clay. I counted my steps, muttered landmarks into the phone so Mara could picture me moving forward.

But when I rounded a bend, the track kinked around a fallen trunk I could’ve sworn I’d already passed. Same scar in the bark. Same tumble of bracken. I frowned, kept going.

Ten minutes later, I found the same trunk again.

“Corven?” Mara said. “You’ve gone quiet.”

“I’m fine. Just—just looking.”

“Looking at what?”

“The same bloody tree twice.”

“You’re tired.” She said. “It’s dark.”

“Maybe.” I kicked the trunk, hard. Bark flaked. My boot print was already there.

That was when I heard it—a sound too steady to be wind, too low to be any bird. A kind of hum, distant at first, like a generator buried under earth. It throbbed in my chest more than my ears, a pressure that rose and fell in long, slow breaths.

“Mara,” I said.

“What is it?”

I turned in a slow circle, torch beam jittering across trunks. Nothing moved, but the sound stayed, as if the forest had tuned itself to a single note.

Then the breeze fell away like someone had set a glass dome over the trees. The sound of insects stopped with that weird sucker-pop silence you hear when a freezer dies.

“You hearing anything weird your end?”

“Like what?”

“Like a low hum.” Fool’s hope, asking her to confirm it belonged to something ordinary.

“All I can hear is you swearing under your breath,” she said. “Line’s clear.”

I scored a cross into the trunk with my pocketknife, turned, and carried on.

Ten minutes later, the track kinked again. The same trunk. Same scar. My cross carved fresh and waiting.

“Corven?”

“I’m back where I started.” My throat felt tight. “I’ve walked straight, and I’m back where I bloody started.”

“Okay,” Mara said. “I’ll come to you now—swing past your brother’s, grab his strap—”

I froze.

Something moved through the air, not a breeze but the shape of one—cold against the back of my neck.

A whisper came with it. My name.

I spun, torch beam slicing between the trunks. “Who’s out there?”

“Corven?” Mara’s voice cracked a little. “Is someone there with you?”

“No.” My eyes narrowed. The hum found another thread in me. My hands prickled. The hairs on my arms rose in a neat, tidy row, like soldiers in a storybook.

The pines along the track inclined by a degree that made no sense. Not toward wind—they did not move together the way a group does under a breeze—but in, like tall women leaning to hear a secret at a party. Between them, a faint glow flickered, pale as breath on glass.

“Okay.” I took a breath, because fear makes everything stingy and you have to spend air to get some back. “There are lights in the trees. Don’t drive out here. If it’s kids mucking about I’ll book them and make them cry and come home smug. If it’s not…” I swallowed, watching the glow pulse once. “Well…you’ll be safer on the couch. Besides, even if you left now, Zac’d still beat you here.”

The line crackled. A pause, then a voice that wasn’t Mara’s slid through the static. Wry, almost amused: “That sounded rehearsed.”

My skin went cold. “Mara?”

“Corven?” she answered at once, tinny and far. But over her words, layered in the same channel, came the other voice—low, coaxing, close: “No… not Mara. Come on. It’s not far. We’ll walk out together.”

I jerked the phone from my ear, stared at it like it might sprout teeth.

“Corven, what’s wrong?”

“Someone’s in the line,” I said, throat tight, trying to make the panic useful. My torch was shaking now, but I forced the beam forward, toward the glow. I started walking, slow and careful, boots dragging so I could hear them scrape the clay. The folder was still under my arm, ridiculous ballast, but I clung to it anyway.

“I don’t hear anything,” Mara said after a beat, the sound from the phone tinny in the dark. Then, as if searching for the sanest explanation, she added, “Could be a crossed line—someone fiddling with a scanner.”

“Well,” I said, forced humor in my throat, “they picked the wrong man to spook.” Irritation sits better than fear; it makes you sound like you know what you’re doing. I tilted the phone a fraction, as if Mara could see the look on my face.

“You’ve never spooked easily, Corven. Not you.”

Mara would’ve called me stubborn, reckless maybe, but never that. It wasn’t Mara. “Whoever you are, you’ve picked a bad night to play games.” The words felt safer than a confession.

The voice lost its edge then, folded soft and close as a hand to the face. “You know who I am,” it said. “You just have to remember. It’s easy to get lost out here. Sometimes I think the forest remembers the paths better than we do.”

“11 years. Ravenspine 735—Thirty seconds.” The words slipped from my lips, stupid and precise.

I glanced at the phone. 7:33.

My eyes lifted back to the trees to the light that shimmered there—white at the edges, green where it caught resin on the bark—like someone had cracked glass and set a lantern behind it. It was sharpening, cutting itself into an angle that didn’t belong in the forest. The kind of shape you saw out of the corner of your eye and regretted turning toward.

The hum rose with it.

The phone slid from my fingers.

Gateways.

“It’s routine—collect readings, mark the anomaly, report back.” She said as they stepped in. The node sat on the shoulder of a dead plateau in some nameless range east of Andromeda’s fringe, mountains like teeth gnawing a horizon no map claimed.

I remembered the air there—thin, metallic, wrong in my lungs. I remembered her laugh as she clipped a marker to her belt, telling me the journals romanticised seams too much, as if they were doorways in fairytales.

My hand hovered uselessly, then reached down. The phone lay where I’d dropped it, screen throwing a ghost-light against the clay. I picked it up. Evidence. Anchor. Something ordinary in a night that was anything but.

“The storm hit us on the way back.” Abigail said.

The ones who study seams warn you they can close on a breath. We were mid-step when the seam snapped shut like a trap and spat us sideways. They also said that the likelihood of a cosmic storm intersecting a gateway was supposed to be what—one in a million? One in a billion? The kind of figure they wrote down so they didn’t have to print impossible.

“You walked for a time like a man in someone else’s coat,” she said.

In an emergency, when the throat bucked too hard, a man could come back wrong—wrapped in habits that weren’t his, wearing the shape of the life nearest to hand.

“I did too for a while.” Her voice thinned, then steadied. “But I found the way back. An old rite, one the journals barely whispered of—bound to the tilt of the stars. The kind of thing men dismissed as folklore, until you’re stranded and folklore’s the only map left.”

The glow flared between the trees, a breath sharper.

“You were too grounded here. Too much of you caught in the shape you’d worn. So, I promised I’d find my way back. I left you a thread to follow to the next alignment.”

The hum rose, a current under the words, and the forest leaned with it.

My mouth moved before the rest of me agreed. “Abigail?” The name sounded too small in the dark, as if it might break.

There was no canned echo, no cheap impression. The voice answered—warm, threaded with that bright disregard that had once made a corner shop better for a minute. “Yes.”

I closed my eyes, breathed sharp through my teeth. “I can’t,” I said. “Mara—my life—”

“You love her,” Abigail said, not accusing, not even questioning. Just stating it like weather. Then softer, almost pitying: “But it is not yours to keep. Not really. A coat you wore while the cosmos waited.”

“Feels mine enough,” I muttered, forcing the words like a shield. I tried to move, to take a step back, but the forest tilted wrong. The glow deepened, and my body balked—like a tether pulled tight.

“Once you remember, you cannot stay.” She said. “It’s time.”

My gaze dropped to the phone as the portal opened.

7:35

The words cracked in my throat. “Oh…shit.”