Maliford Falls

Beckett Gallant glanced at the radio screen of his car as he drove. Somehow, he’d found himself in an area with no signal. The screen, which was displaying a map of the area around Beckett, didn’t even register that he was driving on a road. His radio, which he had turned up, now offered nothing but crackling static.

Lowering the radio down, Beckett sighed deeply. Around him, he saw nothing but grain fields, beige blurs on either side of his car as he drove.

“How did I even get here?” Beckett asked himself.

The answer, or at least part of it, was that he was searching for someone. His brother’s friend. Maddison Shields. She’d gone missing about seven months ago. It’d happened so suddenly, so mysteriously.

As Beckett sped down the back road, looking for any sign of civilization, his car’s engine roaring, making the floor of the car rumble under his feet, he went through the details of Maddison’s disappearance.

The day Maddison, or Maddie, as everyone knew her, disappeared, everyone was puzzled. People had always gone missing, but not like this. The day before, Maddie had been over at Beckett’s parents’ house. Beckett, a twenty-eight year-old private investigator, had moved out of his parents’ house about five years ago, but his brother, Adam, who was sixteen, hadn’t. Maddie and Adam had been very close since they met when they both were in grade five. As they both went on to high school, they’d become inseparable.

They weren’t a couple. Adam had made that fact very clear to Beckett when he and Maddie had started high school. Nevertheless, they still spent hours together every day. They had many classes together, and Maddie was over at Beckett’s parents’ house almost every day. That’s where Maddie was the night before she disappeared; she and Adam had decided to pull an all-nighter playing video games that Friday night. Beckett had been at the house too, for a family dinner. The last time he’d seen Maddie, she’d been happy, laughing as she won yet another game against Adam.

Beckett slowed his car a little as he spotted a road sign, the first one in a while. It read: 

Maliford Falls

Up Ahead

80 kms

 Maliford Falls? Beckett had never heard of such a town. And the only thing in sight was grain fields on either side of the one-way, two-lane dirt road. But with nowhere else to go, Beckett picked up speed again and drove onwards towards the town. Going the speed that he was currently driving at, Beckett reckoned that he could get to the town in about an hour, maybe less.

With nothing else to occupy his mind, Beckett thought back to the day that Maddie went missing. Adam, naturally, had been the first to notice. He had woken up on the pull-out couch bed in the living room, where he and Maddie had fallen asleep, controllers still in their hands. Adam had woken up Beckett, wild-eyed and in a frantic rush. He’d told Beckett that when he saw that Maddie hadn’t been where she’d fallen asleep, he thought that she’d left. But her phone was still where she had put it, on the coffee table in the living room. So, Adam had searched the house for her. He’d searched the kitchen, bathroom, backyard, even his room, but Maddie was nowhere to be found. Adam told his brother that he’d called Maddie’s parents to ask if she'd come home, but they told him that they hadn’t seen her yet. Adam had shown Beckett Maddie’s phone, hoping that he could use his skills as a private investigator to find her.

As a private investigator, he had tons of experience with using technology to find people. On Maddie’s phone, Beckett found several messages. There were two texts and three missed calls from Maddie's parents asking where she was.

Beckett went through everything on Maddie’s phone that could potentially help him locate her, but all to no avail. As he finished his fruitless investigation, Maddie’s phone began to ring, vibrating in his hand. Beckett looked at the screen to see that it was Maddie’s parents calling again.

“I’ll talk to them,” Beckett had told Adam. “You text your friends, Maddie’s coworkers, anyone who might know where she is.”

“Not the police?” Adam asked.

“Let’s see if we can find her before we go to the police,” Beckett said. “I don’t want to waste their time if this is a false alarm.”

As Adam walked out of the room, already calling a friend, Beckett answered Maddie’s phone.

“Maddison Elizabeth Shields,” a stern voice said through the phone. Maddie’s mom. “Where in God’s name are you? We’ve been trying to call you all day young lady–”

“It’s not Maddie, Mrs. Shields,” Beckett answered, calmly, before she could begin a lecture. “It’s Beckett Gallant. Adam’s brother.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Shields said, audibly disappointed. “Hello, dear. Why do you have Maddison’s phone?”

“Maddie left her phone here at my parents’ house,” Beckett answered. “When Adam couldn’t find her, he asked me to see if I could.”

“Right,” said Mrs. Shields, “you’re a private investigator. Maddison told me that.” A moment of silence. Then, “Have you found her?”

Beckett felt his chest tighten at the sound of fear and desperation in Mrs. Shields’ voice. It was a mother’s anxiety for her child’s safety. It pained Beckett to say, “Unfortunately, no. I’ve tried all I can to find her using her phone. I’m going to have to change tactics.”

Mrs. Shields took a shaky breath. “I’ll help you. I can be at your parents’ house in ten minutes.”

“I understand your concern for Maddie,” Beckett began, “but the best way you can help me is by talking to me. By telling me things about Maddie that might help me figure out where to find her.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Mrs. Shields said. There was a muffling on her line of the phone, suggesting that she was getting into a car. “But wouldn’t the police be better equipped to find my daughter?”

“Just let me attempt to find her on my own,” Beckett assured her. “If I have no luck, I’ll cooperate with the police. I promise.”

Mrs. Shields was quiet for a moment. Beckett could hear the engine of a car. “Okay,” Mrs. Shields said slowly, “okay, I trust you. Just … please find my daughter Beckett.”

“I will,” Beckett promised, and he was telling the truth. He was determined to find Maddie.

In the distance, Beckett slowly began to see a town. He could see an old windmill, a town hall, and a train station. At the back of the town, Beckett could see a large waterfall, which emptied out into a river.

“You must be Maliford Falls,” Beckett commented.

Beckett sped up.

Beckett had gone to his office, and Mr. and Mrs. Shields had officially hired Beckett’s agency, Gallant Investigations, to look into Maddie’s disappearance. When they had not been able to find her, they had told the police, who worked with them. Even with the resources the police had, they had not been able to locate Maddie. There was no sign that she had left the town, or had even left Beckett’s parents’ house. It was as if she had just vanished from existence.

But she hadn’t. And Beckett was determined to find her. Adam had been a mess. In the beginning, he had been the most vocal in the search for Maddie. He led search parties made of volunteers who went out looking for her with the police, had asked everyone he knew for information, had spent countless days with Beckett, at his agency, at the precinct, on searches, when he should have been at school.

But after two months of searching had brought them no closer to finding Maddie, Adam had become more withdrawn. He got less and less vocal, he began to shut himself in his room, he had plastered the walls of his bedroom with maps with pins on the locations he knew she’d been at on the days leading up to her disappearance, hardly sleeping or eating.

There had been one difference between how Adam had handled the situation versus the way Maddie’s parents had: Maddie’s parents had never given up hope of finding Maddie. Adam had.

After three more months of fruitless searching, Adam had begun to believe that Maddie was dead. It was a small possibility, the idea put in his head by a boy named Simon who enjoyed bullying Adam. At the time, Adam had been so enraged by the idea that he’d broken Simon’s collarbone. But as Beckett and the police got no closer to finding his friend, Adam had begun to believe that possibility. By the end of the fifth month of their search, it had been too much for Adam to take. Beckett and his parents had found Adam, hanging from the ceiling of the garage.

Adam’s suicide had devastated Beckett and his parents. According to the note Adam had left, the realization that he might have to live the rest of his life without Maddie, without his best friend, terrified him. He had written that he thought that the reason she was gone was his fault. That she had left because of something he had said, and that if she was taken, that he should’ve saved her. Adam said that it was all too much, that his head was in unbearable turmoil every waking moment that Maddie was gone. Beckett had done his best to console his parents, who were broken by Adam’s death, but struggled, as he too was grieving. 

Two months after his brother’s suicide, Beckett found himself here, in his car, finally entering Maliford Falls. He’d driven out this way because of something he'd found on Maddie’s laptop. He’d been going through the laptop for the twentieth time, looking for something, anything, that could help him find her. Beckett had already lost Adam. He would not allow Mrs. and Mr. Shields lose Maddie.

Sure enough, as Beckett opened the laptop, it displayed a black screen with green letters and numbers. The numbers read coordinates. The letters read: Find Me.

Beckett had quickly copied down the coordinates and sprinted out of his office. He had immediately hopped in his car, inputted the coordinates into his car’s navigation and sped away.

The coordinates had led him to the dusty, dirt sideroad in the middle of the fields of grain. Confused, Beckett had driven further. He felt so close to finding Maddie. He couldn’t turn back now. And now, seven months after Maddie’s disappearance, Beckett had arrived in Maliford Falls, this mysterious town where Maddie had led him.

Maliford Falls was a peculiar little town. The streets were the same as the side road: dusty and made of dirt. The buildings were old and decrepit, the whole place giving the vibe of an old western town. Most peculiar of all, Beckett didn’t see a single person in the town.

Beckett parked outside the town’s police station and got out of his car. He walked to the front of the police station and saw no one inside the dark, extremely outdated precinct.

“Hello?” Beckett called as he entered the police station, turning on the flashlight on his phone. “Is anyone there?”

The air inside the police station was heavy with dust. Beckett shined his flashlight on a newspaper on the front desk. The date read: February 10th, 1882. Beckett walked further into the precinct, shining his flashlight down the short hall to the right of the front desk, just long enough to fit two barred cells on either side.

Discovering nothing in the police station, Beckett left the building and walked down the main street of the town. He saw no sign of anyone living in the town, only dark, disused houses and various buildings.

Beckett entered the town’s doctor’s office, a little bell chiming as he opened the door. An uncomfortable feeling of dread mixed with anxiety panged in his stomach as he investigated the doctor’s office. Like in the police station, Beckett found no one in the doctor’s office, but he made a rather disturbing discovery in a back room of the small building, presumably where the doctor had conducted examinations on patients. A small portion of the wall was covered in tally marks, scratched into the plaster, accompanied by a small journal on the floor.

Intrigued and a perturbed, Beckett picked up the journal and opened it. Most of the later pages were filled with unintelligible scribbles, but it was one of the earlier pages that caught Beckett’s attention. It read:

November 16th

I’ve been trapped in Maliford Falls for two months now. I don’t know how I got here, only that someone took me here against my will. When he took me, I couldn’t scream, couldn’t move, nor did I want to. It was like he was controlling me – like he was in my head. I can still hear him. I’m scared. It’s only me and him in this town. I don’t know how much longer I can survive here. During the day, he hunts me. During the night, I can hear him laughing, hear him growling – hear him make noises I’ve never heard anyone make before. I don’t know what he is, but I know that he isn’t human.

Beckett’s heart skipped a beat. Whoever wrote the entry had been trapped in Maliford Falls for two months. And by November, Maddie had already been missing for two months. Beckett turned the page. This entry was written a month later. Beckett froze as he read its contents:

December 5th

I can’t leave the town. I’ve tried so many times, but he won’t let me. No, not he. It. I did research, or as much research as I can do in this awful ghost town. The thing that brought me here is called a skinwalker. It’s tall, slim, and wears pelts made of human flesh. It likes to hunt during the day, it looks like a human but twisted, and it can’t die. The only way to be rid of it is if it finds a different target, or it kills you. Seeing as I’m the only one in this town, I don’t like my odds. I don’t know what happened in Maliford Falls, but it seems like it’s the skinwalker’s domain. It controls who is allowed to enter and who is allowed to leave. To anyone who may read this, I have discovered three crucial facts for surviving the skinwalker. One, if it seems stationary, like a harmless mannequin, run. It’s not harmless, it’s hunting, and it’s luring you in for the kill. Two, it hates water. That’s why it keeps Maliford Falls a dry, humid wasteland and prevents you from going to the falls. And three, and most importantly, the skinwalker’s life is linked to the town. A couple days ago, I broke a window in the hotel while running from it, and it hurt it long enough for me to get away. Who am I kidding, no one’s gonna find me. This is where I die.

A skinwalker was what took Maddie? It made no sense. Terrified and with shaking hands, Beckett flipped to the last page of the journal that had writing on it. This page wasn’t dated, there was only three sentences, all in caps, written hastily:

IT FOUND ME.

IT’S ANGRY.

OH MY GOD, I’M GONNA DIE.

Beckett couldn’t breathe. Maddie sounded so terrified. He was prepared to have to square-off against an abductor. He was absolutely not prepared to fight a skinwalker. Beckett ran out of the doctor’s office, taking the journal, and threw open the front door of his car. He grabbed a plastic water bottle that he had in his front cupholder. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Just as Beckett was walking away from his car again, he spotted it. In the window of the town’s pub, there was a man, tall and skinny, staring out into the street. No, it wasn’t a man. No human could make the expression that that thing bore. It’s mouth was pulled up in a malicious, terrifying smile that curved up to the middle of its cheeks. Its mouth was open, revealing seemingly normal teeth, but its eyes. They were cloudy, as if it had cataracts. It had scraggly, spiky black hair and it wore pelts of human skin. The skinwalker.

Beckett didn’t realize until it was too late that he had taken steps towards the pub until he was a few feet from the window. Inhumanly fast, the skinwalker was in motion, sprinting towards Beckett. Beckett splashed some of the contents of his water bottle at the skinwalker, singeing its flesh. As it cried in pain, Beckett sprinted into a house and ran upstairs.

He froze as he entered one of the bedrooms. Sitting on the floor was Maddison Shields. She looked up at him, fear in her eyes.

“Beckett?” she asked, her voice raspy. Her clothes were ragged and torn. "What’re you doing here?”

“I’m here to save you,” Beckett said.

“No,” said Maddie. “It’ll kill us both. There’s no escaping the skinwalker.”

“There is one,” Beckett said. “You wrote that one of the only ways to escape the skinwalker is if it finds someone else to hunt.” He took her hand. “It’s hunting me now. Take this and run. Run out of this fucking town and get help.”

“I won’t leave you here,” Maddie said.

Downstairs, they could hear the skinwalker trying to get in, laughing ominously.

“You don’t have a choice,” Beckett said. “Go!”

And she did. She ran out the window, finally left Maliford Falls, and ran through the grain fields to help.

Beckett grabbed something that Maddie had been hiding: a makeshift explosive. Breathing deeply, Beckett stood in the middle of the room, water bottle in one hand, explosive in the other, awaiting his final battle.