Reality...?
Far from the city lies a town called Citadel. No one ever leaves nor enter this
town. The reason no one wants to talk about. It’s a mystery whether even the
townspeople truly know the reason deep down. Disappearances are common in
Citadel. Once disappeared the person comes back after 1 week and again
disappears for good after 2 days. No one knows the reason why and no one talks
about it as if talking about it would make them die.
A new person steps into the town where no one new has stepped in it for years.
He introduces himself to everyone as Steve. He hears about people disappearing
and he starts to investigate about it but no one seems to answer him. One night
he gets a nightmare about his sister who died 6 months ago. She wears her
birthday dress with her name tag saying Elena. She asks Steve, “Why did you let
me die?” Immediately Steve wakes up from the nightmare and returns to sleep
after sometime. The next night he sees a dream about a place where every
memory of his is floating. For days, no one in the town talked to him until he saw
Mike. He tells about his dream of his memories to Mike hoping to find an answer.
Mike listens to all this and says that he too had the same exact dream about the
memory space. Mike tells him to ask the town kids about it and the kids tell Steve
that they had heard their elders talk about how the disappeared are the ones who
forget everything after returning, until they are disappeared again. Mike also acts
odd when other people cross them and he doesn’t talk to Steve at that point.
And so, Mike and Steve start to search for clues of disappearing and majority of
the clues were found by Mike. The clues were found by the CCTV footages set by
Mike. And all the clues led to an abandoned nuclear facility. As they went down a
staircase looking like leading to complete darkness, as they continued to go down
the darkness grew denser, almost suffocating.They were separated by the
darkness and no more together.
Steve wanders in the darkness for an hour as his watch shows. He sees one of his
memory playing in front of him which has him and his mother who died when his
sister was 2 months old. He hears a voice of his sister crying for “help” from
behind and as soon as he turns he doesn’t hear it. This happens for 6 continuous
days and he doesn’t feel hunger, pain, sleep or anything. He realises this place
does not have time in it. And every time he sees a memory for each hour he hears
his sister calling for help.
On the 12th hour of the 7th day he meets himself and the other him gives the Steve
two options one, to forget all the memories and be a new person or two, be the
same person and relive every worst moment of your life. At the same moment he
sees his sister with a pickaxe running towards the other Steve and Elena kills the
other Steve. As soon as she kills the other Steve she shatters into glass pieces and
falls. The place around him which is in complete darkness turns into a beautiful
night sky which has no clouds. All he feels is just mere emptiness. He gets dizzy
and falls.
And, as he wakes up he is in an old train station probably abandoned for 20+
years. He looks around to find there is no Power plant in the city. He understood
that the place with darkness was reality inside our very own but where time isn’t
the same as ours. The death of his sister marked a huge bruise on his mind. He
only escaped because he carried a memory that wasn’t his — his sister’s.He walks
to the town and still no elder talk to him so he turns towards the kids playing and
asks if Mike returned. And they reply with, “There is/was no Mike in this Town”.
Two days later Steve goes missing as the room he lived is vacated. We see a
memory of Mike making Steve to eat a Cake on his sister’s Birthday. He has a
name tag saying “Dad”.
The END
