Chương 222: Chapter 222
There was a town, forgotten by time, where the hills rose like knuckles through a weathered hand, dark and stubborn. The kind of place you'd find if you kept driving down long roads that twisted into nothing but the promise of emptiness. It was a place where the sun broke in sickly rays, too tired to rise properly, casting an orange glow over the dry ground. Its name? Well, no one cared for names anymore. What mattered was what happened there, and what happened was worse than any story could tell.
Ella Marrow was a girl who lived in that town, a quiet, solitary thing who had never truly fit in. She spent most days alone, walking through fields that had dried up long ago, wondering about the things people didn't say. The townsfolk were the same—thin, pale faces that hardly looked up, hands that trembled as they worked. It was as if the whole place was caught between waking and sleep, like it hadn't quite decided which side it belonged to.
Ella had heard about the whistle before. Most people did, especially the ones who had lived here for years. It was a kind of folk tale passed around like a bad rumor. They said it started as an odd sound in the dead of night, a whistle, barely perceptible at first, that seemed to come from the wind itself. But it wasn't the wind. Not really. The sound always seemed to follow you, circling around, until you couldn't tell where it came from or why it felt so wrong.
And when you heard it, you knew. You knew you wouldn't wake up.
At first, Ella hadn't believed it. It was just a story, after all, an old warning given to children and drunks who had too much to drink on a slow night. But there was something about the way they told it that gnawed at her. The way the people avoided eye contact, their voices quieter when they mentioned it. As though speaking too much about it might draw the sound closer.
It was on a cold, gray evening when it happened. Ella was walking home, past the crooked trees and rusted fences, the wind biting at her cheeks. The sound came then. Barely a note, barely a shift in the air. But she heard it. A single, high-pitched note that cut through the air like a knife through fabric. She stopped dead in her tracks, looking around.
At first, she thought it was just the wind.
But there was something about it. It wasn't the wind. It wasn't anything natural.
Her heart raced, but she did not move. She stood there, staring out over the empty road, the world falling into a silence that felt heavy. It wasn't like anything she had ever heard before, not like birds or trees or the hum of the earth. It wasn't even the sound of a voice. It was... something else.
It didn't come again. Instead, the world felt like it had shifted, as though the earth itself had turned a little too far.
When she finally got home, she couldn't shake the feeling. Her head ached, but she didn't know if it was from the sound or from the unease that clung to her. She sat at her table, feeling the weight of her own thoughts pressing down on her chest. It wasn't much longer before she closed her eyes, exhaustion finally overtaking her.
The sleep she fell into was not like the sleep she had known before. It wasn't peaceful. It wasn't even restful. The sleep was as if her body didn't want to be there anymore, but it couldn't escape. And in that half-dream state, she heard it again.
The whistle.
It was louder now, clearer. It was a cold thing, like the sound of something dying. Her body trembled as the note wrapped around her mind. It was not a sound you could escape, not one you could push away. And once it took root, it twisted deep into your skull, filling the spaces between thoughts with a quiet kind of panic.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry out. But no sound came from her mouth. Her hands felt heavy, her body too tired to move. Every inch of her begged for release, for escape, but she couldn't find it.
Days passed, or at least she thought they did. The town grew quieter as the world around her stretched out into something that didn't seem to matter. The people, those pale faces, started disappearing one by one. They were never seen again, as though they had simply been erased from existence. The sleep came to claim them all, and once it took hold, it never let go.
It was when the first death happened that Ella realized how true the story was. Old Mrs. Walker, a woman who had lived in the town for as long as anyone could remember, had gone to bed one night and never woken up. Her family found her the next morning, her body cold and still, as if time had simply passed her by without a second glance. The doctors had no answers, nothing that made sense. But the people in the town... they knew.
They knew about the whistle.
Ella tried to leave after that. She packed up what little she owned and set out for the road, hoping that distance would make the feeling go away. But no matter how far she walked, it was always there. The whistle, echoing in the back of her mind, followed her. It whispered through the trees. It rang in her ears. It hung in the air like a cold mist.
The day she tried to escape, she could feel it. The sound crept up on her, like a shadow she couldn't outrun. When it came, she collapsed. Her eyes fluttered, but the world around her spun. Her body wasn't hers anymore, and her mind was floating far away, like a balloon tethered to a dying tree.
She never understood how long it took before she awoke, but when she did, everything felt wrong. The world had become dull, like a faded photograph. Her body ached, but she couldn't tell if it was from sleep or from the weight of the silence that filled the air. It was an absence of sound, but it felt heavy, like the kind of silence you can't escape.
She knew it had started. The thing they all feared.
The whistle.
She was already falling into it, deeper than she could have ever imagined. The sleep was claiming her. The town was dying, piece by piece. People were falling into their own darkness, drifting further into the void that had been awakened. Their bodies wouldn't move, and their minds were wrapped in a fog they couldn't fight.
Ella wanted to fight it. She wanted to scream. She wanted to claw her way out of the sleep that was swallowing her whole, but it was too late. Once it had its hold on you, there was no escaping.
As the days bled together, she saw it happening to others. Her neighbors, her family, the few people still left in the town—one by one, they fell, their bodies going limp and their eyes closing as though they were giving in to a deep, final slumber. But the thing was, no one ever woke up.
It wasn't just sleep. It was death.
And she was next.
It took a few more days before she realized she was already gone. Her body wasn't hers. She could no longer feel the warmth of the sun or the wind against her skin. It was all a memory, an echo of what once was. The whistle still rang in her mind, louder than ever, and she knew, deep down, that it was only a matter of time.
Time wasn't something she had anymore.
And so, in the cold grip of the whistle, Ella fell. Not into sleep, not into death, but into something in between. Something terrible, something worse than either. Her body had been claimed, but her mind was left to wander in that empty space between dreams and waking, knowing she would never find her way out.
She would never see another sunrise. She would never hear another sound.
The last thing she heard, before her mind faded into nothing, was the whistle, soft and cold, cutting through the silence. It was the sound of everything fading away.
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