Pretty Lies, Ugly Truths

The Truth Needs a Witness

The town of Ridgewood didn’t change overnight. But something beneath its skin had begun to shift.

People still walked the same streets, stopped at the same cafés, waved to the same neighbors but the air felt charged. Heavier in the mornings. Quieter at night. As if the ground itself was holding something back.

Emily noticed it first in the eyes of strangers. A flicker of recognition that shouldn’t be there. Like they’d seen her somewhere before in a memory they didn’t know they had. And then they’d blink it away, smile too wide, or fumble with their car keys a second too long. Something was stirring. Three days had passed since the house in the woods opened its door.

Three days since Clara Vane had whispered, “Remember me,” and Emily had promised she would.

But promises, she’d come to learn, had weight.

That night, as she sat in her room watching shadows crawl up the walls, her phone buzzed.

Unknown Number, One New Message: “You’ve seen her. Haven’t you? Clara. Meet me where she was taken. Midnight. Come alone.”

Emily stared at it, the air tightening around her like a noose. No name. No number. Just that eerie certainty.

She didn’t tell the others. Not yet.

At 11:56 p.m., she stood at the edge of the abandoned Ridgewood Asylum huttered since the '70s, now nothing more than a skeleton of moss-eaten brick and soot-streaked windows.

The town didn’t talk about it. Like it had been scrubbed from the map. But it stood still. And tonight, its lights flickered.

Emily stepped through the rusted gate. Vines pulled at her coat like fingers trying to stop her. Inside, the old corridors groaned and whispered with time.

At the end of a hallway lit by dying bulbs, a door clicked open. She stepped into a room that smelled of soot and iodine.

He was there. An old man, hunched in a moth-eaten coat, eyes clouded with memory but sharp.

“You came,” he said, voice gravel and ash.

“Who are you?” Emily asked.

“Jonas,” he replied. “Used to mop these halls. Cleaned up after the doctors. Hid the things they left behind.”

Emily’s breath caught. “You knew Clara.”

He nodded once. “They said she was unstable. Said she saw things, remembered things that didn’t happen. But I saw her. Writing. Hiding notes in vents, slipping paper into books.”

“You read them?”

Jonas’s lips twitched, something like a smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Every word. She said they were erasing children’s memories. Said the Headmaster was using some kind of chemical therapy—memory extraction, they called it.”

Emily’s skin prickled. “Alden.”

Jonas’s expression darkened. “He wasn’t just a principal. He was part of a private research grant funded by some corporation out East. Memory manipulation. Psychological control. But when Clara refused the treatment, she became a liability. She knew too much.”

“They silenced her,” Emily whispered.

“She wasn’t the only one,” Jonas said, pulling something from his coat.

A charred student roster. Half of it was gone, blackened by fire. But names were still visible. Clara’s was there. And beside hers Emily gasped was another name. Eleanor M. Webb. Her grandmother. “She was here?”

Jonas nodded slowly. “And she tried to help Clara. That’s why she was erased too.”

Emily staggered back, everything shifting under her feet.

“But I saw her die at home, years later”

Jonas raised a hand. “The body remembers. The soul remembers. Even when the town forgets.”

Emily clenched the brass key in her palm. “What happened to Alden?”

Jonas’s eyes went distant. “He didn’t die in the fire, like they claimed. He went underground. Some say he’s still alive, working from the shadows, keeping Ridgewood quiet.”

Emily's voice came out barely a whisper. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because Clara’s memory survived in you,” he said. “And because the truth needs a witness.”

He reached into his coat once more, pulling out a slip of yellowed paper.

“Clara’s final note,” he said, placing it in her hand.

It read: “If they silence me, let them know this—I remember everything. And someone else will too.”

Jonas looked at her one last time. “Do not come back here,” he said. “Next time, the doors won’t open for you.” Then, without another word, he slipped into the shadows.

Emily stood alone, the note clenched in one hand, the brass key in the other. Somewhere deep in the asylum, a light flickered out.

She returned to the group the next morning.

Cass was furious. Maris, hurt. Logan, silent. But when Emily showed them the paper—Clara’s final words, and her grandmother’s name, they all understood.

“It’s not just about what was erased,” Logan said. “It’s about who survived it.”

“And who’s still watching,” Maris added.

Cass turned toward the old map of Ridgewood on the wall, tracing her finger over the asylum’s location. “If Clara and Eleanor were connected, then we need to find everything they left behind. Notes. Clues. Anything.”

Emily nodded, her pulse finally slowing. “Jonas said the truth needs a witness.”

Maris looked her dead in the eye. “Then let’s make sure it has four.”

Outside, the wind stirred the trees. And far off, in the woods where the asylum slept, something shifted in the ash. The story wasn’t over.

The moon hung low, a pale eye behind frayed clouds, casting long silver shadows over the crumbling ruins of Ridgewood Asylum. The air had grown still again, but not peaceful—more like breath held in anticipation.

Emily didn’t know how long she had been standing at the rusted gates, the brass key pressed so tightly in her palm that its shape was etched into her skin. Her heart drummed with an unfamiliar rhythm—not just fear. Something older. Something remembered.

A c***k echoed in the silence. Somewhere within the asylum, a door had closed. Or opened.

She moved forward.

The metal gate gave way with a groan, swinging open without resistance. A gust of wind rushed past her as she stepped inside, carrying with it the faint scent of antiseptic and smoke. The path ahead was overgrown but still visible, lined with brittle grass and scattered fragments of tile. Vines had crept up the walls like veins, gripping the asylum’s bones.

She crossed the courtyard, flashlight beam trembling across shattered windows and graffiti-tagged stone. The front doors stood ajar, yawning wide like the mouth of something too long silent.

Inside, the air was colder. Cleaner. As if the rot had been held at bay—deliberately.

Emily stepped through the vestibule, each footfall echoing louder than it should’ve. Her breath fogged the beam of her light. The brass key burned faintly in her jacket pocket.

At the end of the corridor stood a woman.

She wasn’t there a second ago.

She wore a nurse’s uniform—old-fashioned, the kind with starched sleeves and a high collar. Her posture was rigid. Her skin pale and smooth like wax. And her eyes glowed. Not with light, but with awareness.

“You came,” the woman said. Her voice was soft, clipped, like she hadn’t spoken in years. “Clara told me you might.”

Emily stiffened. “Who are you?”

The woman didn’t move. “My name was Nurse Delphine. I cared for the girls in Ward C. The ones no one else wanted. The ones who remembered.”

A sound, sharp and close, like something shifting behind the walls.

“Clara was one of them,” Delphine said. “They brought her here after she started telling stories. About the school. About what she saw. The others listened. And that made her dangerous.”

Emily took a step closer, heart pounding. “What happened to her?”

Delphine’s lips trembled. “They took her down below. Where the records were kept. Where the light didn’t reach.”

Emily’s voice cracked. “Is she still here?”

Delphine tilted her head. “Not in the way you mean. But yes. In the way that matters.”

Before Emily could speak again, Delphine turned and walked toward the elevator at the far end of the hall, an old brass cage suspended between floors.

“I can take you,” she said without looking back. “But you must go alone.”

Emily hesitated, but followed. The elevator groaned to life, rattling as it descended past layers of dust and time. The air grew denser, laced with copper and mildew. As they passed the third floor, Emily saw something flicker in the corner of her eye—faces pressed against glass, watching.

When the doors opened, the hallway beyond was darker, quieter.

Too quiet.

Delphine stepped out. “The records room is at the end. They tried to burn them, but some things won’t stay gone.”

Emily stepped inside alone.

The hallway felt longer than it should have. Each step echoed behind her, though she didn’t dare look back.

The door at the end was marked with the same symbol etched into the obsidian key: a circle with a single eye inside.

She unlocked it.

The room was filled with cabinets—hundreds of them. Many were scorched, but some drawers remained untouched. She pulled one open.

Inside were files. Folders with names written in hasty script. Clara Vane. Lillian Marsh. Eloise Reed. Dozens. Hundreds.

Girls.

She flipped through Clara’s file with medical records, disciplinary notes, drawings. One was a map of the woods. Another, a sketch of a man’s face with hollow eyes and sharp teeth. Beneath it was written, “He hides behind rules. He feeds on forgetting.”

Emily turned to leave but the door slammed shut. The lights blinked out.

And then a whisper: “You should not have come.”

A presence filled the room, colder than air, heavier than shadow. Emily gripped the brass key, heart hammering.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

A laugh echoed. Dry. Hollow.

“Then you haven’t remembered enough.”

A flash of light filled her vision not real, not external. A memory, forced into her mind like fire through a wire.

She saw Clara screaming. Strapped to a gurney. Nurses holding her down. And a man in a white coat, calm, humming to himself as he scrawled her diagnosis.

“Acute memory fabrication. Institutionalized indefinitely.”

She gasped and stumbled back, the vision searing her skull.

But she didn’t drop the key.

“You erased them,” she said aloud. “All of them. You tried to silence them. But they remembered.”

The darkness shifted, like it was retreating. The door creaked open behind her. Emily turned and ran.

Up the hallway. Into the elevator. Through the main corridor where Delphine now stood in shadow.

“You saw it,” Delphine whispered.

Emily nodded. “And I’m going to show everyone.”

Outside, the clouds had broken. Moonlight spilled across the overgrown path as she stumbled into the woods. She didn’t stop until the asylum was out of sight.

When she reached Maris’s porch an hour later, she was pale and shaking. But she carried the folder in her arms.

“She was telling the truth,” Emily said, holding it out. “All of them were.”

Maris took it slowly, her eyes wide.

And far off, in the woods where the asylum slept, something shifted in the ash once more.

This time, it wasn’t hiding. It was waiting. Because the story wasn’t over.

And Ridgewood had more to remember.