StoryTree
you are here

Signal Lake Has No Echo

mystery◐ Teen
5 contributors · 4 paragraphs deep

Priya backed away from the dock and tripped over a rusted speaker bolted to a post. Wires ran from it into the ground, toward the lake. "It's a sound system," she said. "The whole shoreline is wired." Someone, long ago, had set this place up to kill every echo on purpose.

Priya traced the wires to a locked shed. The door was old and the lock snapped easily. Inside sat a dusty mixing board and a reel of tape labeled SESSION SIX. "Somebody recorded what happened," she said. "And buried the proof out here so no one would ever hear it."

What happens next?

1 ways forward
Vote share across the top 1 branches
A possible continuation

They threaded the reel and pressed play. Through the hiss came a counselor's calm voice doing a headcount, one through six, then a splash, then her own voice cracking: "Where's number six? WHERE IS HE?" The tape cut to silence. Priya turned it off, hands shaking. "They lost a kid and recorded the whole thing."

BD
Bram de Vries
5 votes · future 1 of 1