Camp Verity had been shut for nineteen years. The cabins smelled like wet paper and the dock sagged under your feet. Mara set the recorder on a tree stump while Devon clipped on the mics and Priya filmed the dead waterfront of Signal Lake. "Episode one," Mara said. "Why does a whole town pretend this place never existed?" Then they noticed something weird. When Priya yelled across the water, the lake gave back no echo at all.

Mara decided to test the echo thing properly. She clapped, shouted, and banged a paddle on the dock. Nothing came back. "That's not normal," Devon said, checking his audio levels. The waveform showed their voices, then flat silence where the bounce should be. "Something here is eating sound," he whispered.

Devon followed the dead spot with his headphones on. The closer he got to the water, the quieter the world became, until he couldn't even hear his own footsteps. Then, faintly, through the silence, he heard a kid's voice counting. "One. Two. Three." He ripped the headphones off. The lake was empty.

Devon refused to go near the lake again and waited in the car. Through the windshield he watched Mara and Priya shrink into the dusk by the dock. He honked the horn to call them back, but the sound just died in the air, swallowed like everything else. They never turned around, and he never saw either of them again.