They always warned us not to go past the Old Turner Farm on Winter Ridge. I grew up with those words like a mosquito hum, the kind of thing you swat away without really thinking. But on a Thursday night in July, with the kind of full moon that looks like it was freshly peeled and hung up to dry, I ignored every warning.
Winter Ridge was mostly a forgotten bump of trees and rock on the outskirts of town, as lonely as a ghost story left too long in the telling. My friends used to call it “The Edge†— like it was the cliffside of the world. People disappeared out there, so they said. Whole families, some nights. “Gone into the Abyss,” they’d whisper when they thought I wasn’t listening.
An abyss that didn’t exist, they’d call it. Like it was there, but then again, maybe not. I thought it was a local tall tale — something to keep the little kids in line and make the parents feel better.
But that night, after a bad day that spiraled out of control with a vengeance, I was feeling reckless. I drove out past the Turner Farm, feeling the pull of the ridge like I’d hooked a line to it. I could practically smell the old wood of the farmhouse, still rotting from when the Turners left it. God knows what they were running from. Not a thing to see for miles out there, except for the tops of ancient pine trees clawing at the moon, and the stars shining in the stillness like pins against a velvet backdrop.
I parked the car, grabbed my flashlight, and followed a half-hidden trail past the farmhouse and into the trees. I’ll tell you, I wasn’t expecting anything more than a little solitude, maybe a moment to clear my head. But after maybe five minutes of crunching through fallen branches and tangled underbrush, I stopped dead in my tracks.
It was right in front of me — this strange shimmer in the air. Like a slice of nothingness, hanging in the trees. But it wasn’t nothing. No, it was something. The way water looks when it flows backward, or a night too quiet even for crickets. I tried to focus my eyes on it, but the more I stared, the more it seemed to squirm, like it was both a tear in the air and solid at the same time.
Something deep in me — call it instinct, call it madness — made me reach out. My fingers brushed it, and I felt a pull, like every regret I’d ever had was yanking me forward. I gasped, and the sound didn’t even echo. It just disappeared.
It was cold, colder than I’d felt in the height of July. My fingers trembled, gripping the flashlight as if it could save me, and I stumbled back, but my foot caught in a patch of undergrowth. I fell forward — through the shimmer, into the Abyss that didn’t exist.
If you’re expecting some neat and tidy black void, some poetic emptiness, you’d be wrong. It was a landscape, of sorts, but turned inside out. Everywhere I looked, the shadows danced. Shifting shapes loomed around me, stretched out like they had been pulled from a nightmare. And in every direction, faces flickered in and out, contorted, almost like they were screaming in slow motion.
“Hello?†I called, but my voice was barely a breath in that cold, thick air. There was no echo, no sound. Only the feeling of sinking, as though the ground was soft and swallowing me inch by inch.
The flashlight in my hand was flickering now, and with every flicker, the shadows seemed to inch closer. One of them was too familiar, the way a memory gnaws at you from the corner of your eye. I recognized it. It was me, but not quite. My face, etched in shadow, but twisted and old, like I’d been lost there for a lifetime. I tried to look away, but my own dark gaze followed me, hollow, empty. The face mouthed something I couldn’t hear, and its eyes widened in the dark, empty sockets where mine should have been.
The realization hit me like ice water down the spine. Every one of those flickering faces — the missing families, the vanished children, the parents who’d walked too far from Winter Ridge — they hadn’t disappeared. They were here, lost in the Abyss. In the place that didn’t exist but somehow did, a whole town of ghosts and echoes.
I scrambled backward, desperate to pull away, but the darkness thickened around me, the shadows reaching out with twisted arms and fingers as bony as branches, grasping, clawing. The air was thick with a whisper, like the voices of every person who had ever vanished, caught forever in the folds of that impossible place.
“You don’t belong here,†the shadow-me whispered finally, its voice a sick echo of my own.
I ran. I don’t know how I found the way back, but I ran harder than I’ve ever run, through the chill and the shadows, tripping over twisted roots, hands scraped on jagged rocks. And then, suddenly, I was out. Back in the quiet woods on Winter Ridge, with my car still parked under the trees, untouched.
They found me three days later, wandering on the outskirts of town, muddy, bleeding, and half out of my mind. I’d lost two days somehow — days I couldn’t explain. The doctors tried to make sense of it, but they couldn’t, and I didn’t try to help. You can’t explain what doesn’t exist, after all.
I stay out of those woods now. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see the shimmer, feel the tug. And sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear the whisper. It’s my voice, my shadow self, calling from the Abyss.
And I can’t help but wonder if, one day, I’ll find myself slipping back.
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