The river that runs through Hallowbridge is narrow and slow, but it remembers everything.
It remembers the weight of a girl's boot as she stepped onto the wooden planks that night, her breath fogging in the cold air. It remembers the creak of the bridge beneath her and the way her scarf fluttered in the wind. It remembers the silence—the thick, listening kind of silence that always comes before something ends.
No one in the village speaks of that night anymore. Not directly. Some offer knowing glances. Others cross themselves quietly, as if to shield their minds from the memory. The children are told vague stories about a storm, a fall, the kind of tragedy that simply happens. But the river knows the truth.
Helen never came back.
She walked onto the bridge, and she did not walk off.
No one saw her fall. No one heard her scream. Her body was never found. Only her scarf remained—knotted tightly to the middle rail, as if left with intention. Like a mark. Like a warning.
They searched the woods. Dragged the river. Whispered about heartbreak, maybe suicide, maybe something else. But after days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the town did what it always does with tragedy.
It buried it beneath routine.
And with time, the village rewrote its own story. Helen became a name not quite spoken, a face half-remembered. A girl who once was. One of many things Hallowbridge has learned to forget.
But Arthur never did.
Even now—years later, long after he left the village and built a reputation for unraveling other people's mysteries—hers remained. Not just in his memory, but in the weight behind his eyes, the distance in his voice, the careful way he avoided rivers and bridges and spiral symbols that looked too much like the ones he'd once drawn for her in jest.
He had been in London when the first murder happened.
He wasn't even looking back.
But then came the letter—unsigned, untraceable.
"Come home. You missed something."
It wasn't a demand. It was a hook.
And Arthur, who had learned to mistrust memory and despise closure, packed a single bag and returned to the place that had swallowed her whole.
He found Hallowbridge much the same. Timeless in its rot. Quiet in the way rural towns become when their soil is soaked in things unsaid. A place where old secrets settle like dust—heavy, familiar, and nearly invisible until you disturb them.
But something had shifted beneath the stillness.
The silence didn't feel empty anymore.
It felt… watched.
The village greeted him with tight smiles and eyes that slid away just a little too quickly. Doors that didn't open as easily as they used to. Conversations that halted when he passed by.
And when the second body appeared—with a crude spiral drawn nearby in charcoal—Arthur knew he hadn't just come back for answers.
He had walked into something old.
Something unfinished.
Because this time, the river wouldn't be the only one that remembered.
And not all the names would stay forgotten.
Some were already starting to rise to the surface.