The winter night pressed in on Philadelphia, thick and suffocating, as Eliot made his way down the icy streets, hands buried deep in his coat pockets. His breath came out in uneven clouds, hanging in the cold air before dissolving into the dark.

Above, the sky was a dull, oppressive gray, the city’s lights swallowed by the creeping fog. Everything felt wrong. The city, the streets, and the people walking past him seemed like shadows of their former selves, as if they were fading into the same void that had swallowed Ida.

It had been weeks since she disappeared—vanished, erased, whatever it was that had happened to her. And now Eliot was sure of one thing: this was no ordinary disappearance. This wasn’t someone slipping away into the cracks of life; this was something else entirely. Something bigger, darker, something that crept along the edges of reality and peeled back like old wallpaper.

It was Ida’s words that had started the unraveling of his mind. They echoed in his head, growing louder each time he tried to silence them: “I feel like something is after me.”

That afternoon, she had said it so casually, almost like a joke, before she vanished. He remembered the way she had stared into her coffee cup, her fingers tracing the rim absentmindedly, and the chill that had run down his spine when she finally looked up at him with those piercing green eyes.

“I’m serious, Eliot,” she had said. “There’s something… off. Like I’m being watched. Like something’s wrong with the world, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

At the time, he had brushed it off and laughed it away as a passing paranoia. But now, those words felt like a warning, a prelude to the horror that had consumed his life since.

He replayed that conversation endlessly in his mind, trying to tease out some clue, some information that might help him understand what was happening. But every time, he came up with nothing but fear and regret.

—

Eliot’s apartment had become a shrine to his obsession with Ida’s disappearance. Books and notebooks were strewn across the floor, filled with desperate scribblings and half-formed theories.

The walls were plastered with timelines, locations, connections—anything that might help him find a pattern. But no matter how many sleepless nights he spent piecing things together, the answers remained just out of reach, like a puzzle with too many missing pieces.

He had started with the rational explanations, of course. Maybe Ida had run away. Perhaps she had gotten involved with the wrong people. Maybe she had simply chosen to disappear. But those theories had crumbled like paper under the weight of the evidence—or rather, the lack of it. There was no trace of her anywhere. No records, no witnesses, no memories. It was as if she had been systematically erased, not just from his life, but from existence itself.

Desperate for answers, Eliot turned to more unconventional means. He started delving into fringe theories, dark corners of the Internet, and conspiracy forums where people whispered about shadowy forces that controlled the world and beings that could rewrite reality itself. 

Most of it was nonsense, wild speculation with no grounding in reality. But there were threads, small pieces of information that tugged at something deep in his gut, something that made a terrible kind of sense.

One night, while scrolling through a particularly obscure forum, Eliot stumbled upon a reference to an old book—The Book of the Forgotten. The post was cryptic, written by someone claiming to have been “touched” by the entities it described.

According to the post, the book contained ancient knowledge about beings that lived outside of time and space, creatures that fed on memory, erasing people from existence and devouring the fragments of those left behind. They were called The Forgotten, and once they chose their victim, it was only a matter of time before reality itself would forget them entirely.

Eliot’s heart raced as he read the post. Could this be what had happened to Ida? The more he thought about it, the more everything clicked into place—the disappearing records, the corrupted photos, the way everyone around him had slowly started to forget her.

—

The library felt colder than the streets outside. The air was thick with dust, and the shelves stretched endlessly in every direction, rows upon rows of forgotten knowledge. After reading about The Book of the Forgotten, Eliot had come here on a hunch. According to one of the few reliable sources he had found, the Philadelphia Public Library’s Special Collections housed some of the oldest and rarest occult texts in the country.

If the book existed, this was where he would find it.

He navigated through the maze of shelves, his footsteps echoing in the empty, cavernous space. The dim light cast long shadows across the worn wooden floors, and for a moment, Eliot could swear he saw something—someone—move at the edge of his vision. He stopped, turning quickly, but there was nothing there. Just the shadows. He shook his head, trying to focus. He was on edge and paranoid, but he couldn’t let it distract him.

Finally, he found it: a hidden corner of the library marked only by a small, faded sign that read “Rare Manuscripts.” The heavy door creaked as it opened, revealing a cramped, musty room lined with glass cases and ancient books. Eliot’s breath caught in his throat as his eyes scanned the shelves.

And there it was.

The book looked older than the room itself. It was bound in cracked, weathered leather, its cover marked with strange, unreadable symbols. Eliot hesitated momentarily before reaching out and pulling it from the shelf. The weight of it in his hands felt heavy with a kind of gravity he couldn’t explain, as if the book itself were alive with the knowledge it contained.

He opened it, and his breath hitched.

The text was written in an archaic language that Eliot couldn’t decipher. But there were drawings—detailed, intricate illustrations of shadowy figures, monstrous and formless, hovering above people, their mouths open as if they were devouring something unseen.

There were passages he could half-understand, fragments of English interspersed with the cryptic script. The Forgotten, the book called them. Beings that consumed memory erasing their victims so thoroughly that even the world around them forgot they had ever existed.

Eliot’s hands shook as he turned the pages. The book described how these entities operated, feeding on the memories of those closest to their victims and slowly erasing them from reality, bit by bit—first, the small things—messages, photos, mementos. Then, the people themselves would forget, their minds wiped clean of any trace of the victim. Finally, the victim would disappear entirely, leaving behind nothing but a hollow, aching absence in the world.

It was Ida. It had to be. The Forgotten had taken her.

—

As Eliot pored over the book, a strange sense of clarity washed over him. He wasn’t crazy. Ida had been real, and something had taken her beyond his understanding. He had to find her. He had to bring her back before it was too late.

He turned the page, scanning the strange symbols, trying to find anything that might offer a way to reverse what had happened. Then, he saw it—a passage at the bottom of the page, written in flowing, almost delicate script.

“Those who The Forgotten takes are not lost. They remain trapped on the other side of the veil in a world just beyond reach. But time is a cruel master, and the longer they remain, the more they fade into nothing. Only those who remember can pull them back before it is too late.”

Eliot’s heart raced. Ida was still out there. Somewhere. But the clock was ticking.

—

The following days were a blur. Eliot barely slept and barely ate. He spent every waking moment pouring over the book, deciphering its cryptic warnings and instructions. He filled notebook after notebook with his findings, desperate to understand how to bring Ida back. His apartment had become a fortress of paper and ink, a chaotic testament to his obsession.

And then, late one night, his phone buzzed as he sat hunched over his journal.

The message was short, almost curt, and came from an unknown number.

“She’s still out there. But time is running out.”

Eliot stared at the screen, his heart pounding in his chest. He didn’t know who had sent the message or how they learned about Ida, but it didn’t matter. Someone else knew. He wasn’t alone in this.

His fingers trembled as he typed a response.  

“Who are you? Where is she?”

The reply came almost instantly.

“The mirror.”

To Be Continued …

Read Part I here

Read Part II here

Read Part III here

Read the entire story on Kindle here.