Ashwick, Massachusetts — 1983.
It was the kind of town that didn't make the news. One main street, two diners, a rusting water tower, and a library that still used index cards. The train passed through twice a day, its whistle echoing through the valley like a reminder that somewhere else, life moved faster. But Ashwick liked its quiet. It liked being forgotten.
That summer was unusually mild. The mornings came with soft fog that hung low over the fields, and the evenings smelled faintly of pine and rain. Kids rode their bikes down Willow Creek Road. The church bell rang every Sunday. There hadn't been a serious crime in almost a decade.
Until the morning Tom Reed didn't show up for work.
Tom owned the auto shop by the train tracks — the kind of man who waved to everyone and still mowed his neighbor's lawn. When he didn't open the garage that day, folks assumed he was sick. By noon, his apprentice went looking and found the truck parked by Miller's Bridge, the door half open, keys still dangling in the ignition.
The police found him half an hour later, lying near the riverbank.
No one screamed. No one fainted. It wasn't that kind of scene. He looked asleep — too still, but unmarked. His clothes were damp from the dew, his eyes closed peacefully, his face pale. There was no blood, no bruises, no sign of a struggle.
Sheriff Caleb Harris stood over the body, squinting against the sunlight. He was a broad man, mid-forties, with a calmness people mistook for indifference.
"Looks like he collapsed," he said quietly.
Deputy Lewis shook his head. "Collapsed? Out here? He's got no reason to walk to the river."
"Heart attack, maybe."
Lewis hesitated. "He's thirty-eight, Sheriff."
Caleb didn't answer. He crouched down, brushing his hand over the grass. The soil was dry, undisturbed. "Call the coroner. Let's get him out of the sun."
By afternoon, the town knew. Word traveled fast in Ashwick — faster than the police could make sense of anything.
They said Tom Reed had died of exhaustion.
They said he'd been drinking.
They said maybe something in the water had gone bad.
At the diner, old Mr. Jacobs told anyone who would listen, "It's the heat. That mist every morning — it ain't natural. You breathe that long enough, something's bound to happen to you."
Mira Holloway, reporter for The Ashwick Herald, sat in the corner booth with her notebook. She'd grown up in Ashwick, left for college, and come back when her mother fell ill. Writing for the local paper wasn't exactly her dream, but stories like this — quiet deaths in quiet towns — had a way of drawing her in.
When she heard Tom Reed was gone, she didn't think murder. Not yet. But something about the stillness around it felt… wrong.
The coroner's office was small — one room, one desk, one metal table under flickering light. Dr. Claire Monroe had seen plenty of deaths: accidents, old age, the occasional heart failure. But when she unzipped the body bag, she froze.
Tom Reed looked peaceful. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was what wasn't there.
She leaned closer, pressing her stethoscope against his chest out of habit — though she knew it was pointless. The hollow quiet that met her ears made her frown. She began the autopsy carefully, expecting a blockage, a rupture, something. But when she reached the chest cavity, she stepped back, her breath catching.
There was nothing.
No heart.
No blood.
No incision.
No trace of trauma.
Just an empty space, as though it had never existed.
By evening, Sheriff Harris got the call.
"You're going to want to sit down for this," Claire said, her voice shaking through the phone.
An hour later, he stood in the autopsy room, hat in hand, staring at the body.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I triple-checked," Claire said, running a trembling hand through her hair. "The chest cavity is… untouched. No wound, no cut, no scar tissue. It's like it was never there."
"That's not possible."
She laughed weakly. "I know. And yet."
Caleb rubbed his temples. "Maybe it's a misread. Maybe it's congenital—"
"It's not congenital," she snapped. "I've done hundreds of these. There's no heart. And no medical way that could happen without…" She trailed off, shaking her head. "Without leaving a mark."
For the first time in years, Caleb didn't know what to say. He looked down at Tom Reed's still face, then turned toward the window, watching the fog roll past the glass.
"Keep this quiet," he said finally. "For now."
The report leaked the next day.
Mira got the tip from someone inside the coroner's office — she never said who. The headline she wrote was restrained, careful:
LOCAL MAN DIES UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES. POLICE AWAIT RESULTS.
But she knew the truth was stranger than anything she could print.
That night, she sat by her window, watching the mist creep down the street like a living thing. She thought about Tom Reed's face — calm, unmarked, empty — and couldn't shake the image.
It wasn't just the mystery of it. It was the idea that something could be gone — utterly gone — without leaving a trace.
The sheriff didn't sleep much that night. He poured himself a drink, reread the coroner's report, and stared at the line that made no sense:
Absence of cardiac tissue — cavity intact — no incision detected.
He read it again. And again.
His mind went through every explanation he could think of — a medical error, a prank, a misdiagnosis — but none of it held.
At some point past midnight, he looked up and saw something move outside his window. A shape, faint, through the mist — too tall to be human, too still to be real.
When he blinked, it was gone.
He told himself it was nothing. Just the fog playing tricks. Just exhaustion.
But deep down, some part of him — the part that still believed in things science couldn't explain — whispered otherwise.
By morning, the town had returned to its routine, pretending everything was fine. But somewhere beneath the surface, something had already shifted.
The first death didn't feel like an accident anymore.
It felt like the beginning of something Ashwick wasn't ready to remember.