Pretty Lies, Ugly Truths

The Unquiet Past

Emily didn't sleep the night she returned from the asylum. The folder, still unopened since Maris saw it, lay on the coffee table. Emily sat across from it, wrapped in a blanket, the weight of everything settling in. She carried proof of people the world had tried to forget.

By morning, Logan arrived without a word, his eyes fixed on her pale face and the room's silence. Cass followed soon after, coffee in hand, a silent acknowledgment of a hard night in her eyes.

Maris placed the folder gently in the center of the table.

“This is real,” she said quietly.

No one disagreed. They sat together, a loose circle around a truth no one had asked for but could no longer ignore.

Cass opened the folder again. She lifted Clara's sketches, her fingers careful on the edges as though they were bones.

“This one,” she said, turning the page toward the others. It showed the forest layout, but there was something else: a second drawing, faintly pressed into the paper beneath it.

Emily tilted her head. “It looks like a tunnel.”

Maris leaned forward. “There's a trail behind the asylum. It was closed off years ago. What if the tunnel was part of the original grounds?”

Logan frowned. “Or maybe how they moved patients without being seen.”

They exchanged looks. None of them wanted to go back. But all of them knew they would.

That evening, at the edge of the woods behind the Ridgewood Asylum, a soft drizzle turned the earth to mud. Logan pushed back collapsed fencing, revealing a steep, ivy choked path.

“This is it,” he said.

They moved slowly, flashlights sweeping the overgrowth. The trail curved down a hill, ending at a sinkhole with remnants of stone walls visible beneath the soil and roots.

Cass knelt beside it, brushing dirt away with her sleeve.

“There's something here.”

It took almost an hour to clear enough debris, uncovering a circular hatch sealed by rust and time. Emily touched its warm metal, then pulled out the brass key.

“I think it is for this,” she whispered.

The key turned with resistance. Then, with a low groan, the hatch creaked open. The narrow, dark tunnel below seemed to breathe, rolling out cold air like breath from a long dead mouth.

They climbed down one by one. The passage sloped gently, stone walls shimmering faintly under their lights. Cass shivered, pulling her jacket tighter.

Maris walked behind Emily, her voice barely above a whisper. “Did Clara say anything about this place?”

Emily shook her head. “Only that they took her below. That the records were here.”

Deeper in, they passed small, numbered doors. Logan paused at C17. “It's not just a tunnel,” he said. “It's a holding area.”

Emily’s breath caught. “They weren't just storing files down here. They were storing people.”

Cass opened one of the doors. Inside was a metal cot bolted to the floor and a small chair. The walls were scratched with marks, days maybe weeks, counted in carved lines.

There was a name etched near the corner, L. Marsh.

Maris covered her mouth.

“That is one of the girls from the folder.”

They didn't speak for a long time. At the passage end, a larger door, sealed by a latch and rusted chain, bore the key’s symbol: a circle with a single eye. Emily used the key; it turned easily.

The door swung open to a circular chamber filled with cabinets and shelves, some broken, papers scattered. A metal table held a single item: a leather bound book. Emily picked it up. Its brittle pages, covered in looping handwriting, were not official or clinical. It was Clara’s diary.

She opened to the first page.

“If you are reading this, then I did not make it. But I have not forgotten. And I hope you have not either.”

Cass stepped beside her. “We need to take this.”

Maris nodded. “And scan every page.”

Logan opened another cabinet. “There is more. Dozens of files. Notes. Names.”

Emily turned another page, her hands steady now. She didn't flinch when the lights above flickered.

She didn't panic when the air shifted. She was not just a girl chasing shadows anymore. She was the one who remembered.

They returned home that night, heavy backpacks mirroring heavier hearts. But something had changed.

They were no longer haunted. They were driven. Over the next few days, they read, scanned, and pieced together Ridgewood's buried history.

They found records of trials, experimental sessions, unopened letters from parents, and doctors’ signatures absent from official documents. They uncovered other names: students, residents, staff, witnesses, victims. People like Clara and Eleanor.

Emily found a photograph folded between the diary pages. Two girls, arms around each other, laughing. One was Clara. The other was her grandmother.

She traced the image with her finger, her throat tight.

“They were just kids,” she said.

Maris placed a hand on her shoulder. “So were we.”

Logan stepped forward. “Not anymore.”

Outside the window, the wind rustled through the trees.

The town of Ridgewood still looked the same. It still smiled politely. It still watered its lawns and hosted Sunday bake sales.

But the ground beneath had shifted.

Truth, once buried, was clawing its way to the surface. And this time, they were not alone. Not anymore.

They had names. They had records. And somewhere in the dark, the ones who remembered were stirring too. Waiting for someone to finish what Clara started.

In the days that followed, Emily found routine difficult. Ridgewood’s streets now seemed a half finished painting, hiding more than they revealed. She couldn't unsee what lay beneath.

Cass stayed close, her restless energy now focused on building the archive: photographing pages, tagging files, creating spreadsheets to restore order. Logan worked quietly at night, mapping disappearances, charting timelines, tracing vanished names from yearbooks and public records. He discovered families had moved without explanation, or remained in town, unknowingly connected to the darkness. Maris handled research, contacting libraries and archivists, cross referencing records. The truth, she found, left fragments everywhere for those brave enough to follow. Emily, above all, listened.

She sat by the window most nights, holding Clara’s diary in her lap. Some entries made her cry. Others made her heart seize with fear. But every word stitched together something that had once been torn apart.

November 7th, 1968: They said remembering makes you sick. That forgetting is healing. But I think it is the forgetting that poisons us.

January 2nd, 1969: Eleanor told me to keep writing. Even when they take the paper. She said the words will find a way out. So I write them into the cracks in the wall. I whisper them when I think no one is listening.

March 15th, 1969: He came again today. Dr. Alden. He smiled when I cried. I do not think he sees people the way we do. I think he sees puzzles. And he likes to break them.

Every page was a small rebellion. Every word, a match lit in darkness. It was not just a diary. It was a ledger of resistance. And Emily had never felt more responsible for anything in her life.

One evening, Logan brought over a box of microfilm from the town archives. He had borrowed it from a former librarian who remembered just enough to be curious, but not enough to be frightened.

“There is a fire mentioned in an old council meeting,” he said, setting the box on the table. “At the east wing of the asylum. Supposedly an accident.”

Emily raised her eyebrows. “Let me guess. No casualties reported?”

“Exactly. But I checked. Two orderlies and a patient died that night. Or they were supposed to. No burial records. No obituaries. Just gone.”

Maris leaned forward. “Then the fire was a cover up. Not the end of something, but the start of something worse.”

Emily nodded slowly. “And maybe Clara survived longer than they said.”

They all looked toward the diary, open on the table.

Cass flipped the page.

April 1st, 1969: They are coming for me. Eleanor said she would try to stall them. She said Jonas might help. I hope so. I hope someone remembers.

Emily looked up. “She knew it was coming.”

Cass swallowed hard. “They all did. And they fought anyway.”

The silence that followed was not empty. It was heavy. Grieving. Proud.

Eventually, Logan spoke again.

“What if we go public?”

Maris stiffened. “With what? Scans of a diary and some sketches? They will call it fiction. They will call us conspiracy theorists.”

Cass glanced at Emily. “Unless we find something undeniable.”

Emily knew what she meant.

Proof.

The kind no one could ignore.

She stood up. “Then we keep going.”

That weekend, they returned to the tunnel.

This time, they came prepared. Gloves, portable scanners, a generator for light. They cataloged every file, photographed every cabinet, even unearthed a second diary from beneath the floorboards in Ward C.

It was not Clara’s.

It belonged to a girl named Eloise Reed.

A name they had seen before.

Emily read through the pages slowly, almost reverently. Eloise had drawn pictures too. Crude maps, timelines, faces. She described a machine used for “cleansing,” a procedure that stole pieces of memory like pages ripped from a book.

But one entry stood out.

“Dr. Alden said the forgetting is mercy. That he saved Clara from the sickness of knowing. But I remember. I remember everything.”

Below it, she had drawn a symbol.

Not the circle with the eye.

A mirror. Broken down the center.

They did not know what it meant. Not yet. But they would.

On the third night, while Logan and Cass stayed behind to document more records, Emily and Maris climbed the hill behind the asylum.

Emily stopped by an old tree, its trunk split down the center by age or lightning. Clara had drawn it in her diary. Said it was the only place she ever felt safe.

Maris sat down beside her.

“I used to think the worst thing was being forgotten,” she said. “But maybe the worst thing is forgetting yourself.”

Emily looked out over the valley. Ridgewood shimmered in the distance, neat and quiet. Like nothing had ever happened.

“We are not going to let that happen again,” she said softly. “Not here. Not anywhere.”

Maris nodded. “Then let us give them their names back.”

And for the first time in weeks, the wind did not feel like a warning.

It felt like permission.

The next day, they began to publish.

Not to the news. Not yet.

They started with an anonymous blog. A place where they posted pages from the diaries, scanned documents, transcripts from council meetings. They called it The Witness Room.

Within days, people were reading.

Within a week, messages began to pour in.

A woman in Vermont remembered a sister who disappeared from Ridgewood in 1971.

A man in Delaware said his mother spoke about a girl named Clara who “vanished into smoke.”

And one message came with no name at all. Just a sentence.

“I remember too. Keep going.”

Emily stared at it for a long time.

Then she posted the next entry.

The truth had a witness now.

And Ridgewood was beginning to listen.