Cracks in the House
The house was too loud, and yet unbearably silent.
The clatter of casserole dishes, the murmur of neighbors, the scratch of police pens on paper—it should have filled the rooms, but instead every sound seemed to fall flat, swallowed by the walls. The mother couldn't stand it. She wanted the noise of her daughters again—the slam of Mara's door, the sound of Elena humming softly as she worked through her homework. Now the walls listened like graves.
At night she dreamed of them. Always differently, never gently. Sometimes she was in the woods, their names being pulled from her mouth in desperate shouts, only to hear their faint replies drifting back, muffled, as though they were buried beneath the soil itself. Other times she saw them in her dreams standing behind glass, faces pale, hands pressed against it. They mouthed words she couldn't hear, and she woke gasping, her throat raw, with the taste of dirt in her mouth.
She wanted to share this with her husband. She wanted to believe he was going through the same grief, that the silence in his chest was the same silence in hers. But he was moving somewhere she could not follow.
The sketchbook never left his hands now. Mara's sketchbook.
It had become a kind of scripture to him. He sat at the kitchen table long after midnight, lamp casting a pool of weak yellow light, his shadow crouched over the pages like a gargoyle. He flipped back and forth, scribbling notes in the margins, tracing pencil strokes with his fingertip as though they were codes. He muttered sometimes under his breath, syllables she couldn't make out.
At first she thought it was his way of coping, of clinging to something of the girls until they came home. But it was more than that. He had begun to treat the drawings as if they were answers.
One evening she lingered in the doorway, arms crossed against the chill. She had set the table, warmed the food, waited for him. He hadn't moved.
"Dinner's getting cold," she said softly.
He didn't answer. He didn't even blink.
"Are you even listening?" she pressed, sharper now.
Finally he looked up. His face startled her—drawn, shadowed, eyes burning with something restless. It was the first time she had seen a true wildness in him.
"It's here," he whispered. His voice was hoarse, as though he hadn't spoken in hours. "She knew."
The mother frowned. "What?"
"Mara." He lifted the book and jabbed a finger at a page, so hard the paper bent. "She drew the tree before it happened. She left us a map. A message. She was trying to warn us."
Her chest tightened. "You're scaring me."
"I'm telling you—this isn't random. Look." He spread the sketchbook open. The oak tree sprawled across the paper, roots curling downward like claws. "Look at how the roots twist, look at the hollow. It's not just a drawing. She saw something. She was showing us where they were going."
Tears stung her eyes. She shook her head. "They're children. They're not prophets, not messengers. Stop doing this. Stop turning their hobbies into—into ghosts."
He slammed the sketchbook shut with a crack that made her flinch.
"They won't come home," he said, voice flat, trembling with fury or fear—she couldn't tell which. "Not unless we follow where they've gone."
Her breath caught. "What are you saying?"
He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "Something took them. And I'm going to find out what."
The mother stepped back as if she had been struck. She stared at him, her husband, the man she had shared a life and children with—and for the first time, he seemed like a stranger. His hands clutched the sketchbook as if it were a lifeline, his eyes shining not with grief, but with obsession.
She wrapped her arms around herself. The girls were missing, yes—but she suddenly realized she might be losing him too.