The Whimwick Harvest

The Last Harvest at Whimwick

GIDEON VEY

Chapter One

Every Door Opened

At sunset, every dead child in America received a coupon.

The offers appeared on phones belonging to parents, siblings, teachers, caseworkers, police officers, and strangers who had once stopped beside a missing-person poster long enough to remember the face.

Each message contained a photograph.

Some showed children as they had looked before they disappeared.

Others showed them older.

Alive.

Waiting beneath orange lights.

Beneath every photograph was the same invitation.

COME FIND ME.

ONE NIGHT ONLY.

Neris Vallowen saw the first family cross the parking lot before the black page finished opening.

A woman ran toward Whimwick Halloween without shoes. A man followed carrying an infant beneath one arm and a phone in his opposite hand. Two boys hurried behind them, still wearing matching soccer uniforms.

The woman was crying.

“My daughter is inside.”

The plywood covering the abandoned storefront had become glass.

Warm light filled the building beyond it. Costumes hung from black metal racks. Mechanical ravens turned their heads above displays of plastic gravestones, rubber masks, orange lights, and smiling skeletons.

The store looked exactly as it had before Neris destroyed it.

Except every item faced the entrance.

Masks.

Mannequins.

Painted animals.

Hundreds of artificial eyes watched the approaching families.

The woman reached the doors.

Neris caught her before they opened.

“Let me go.”

“Who sent you the message?”

“My daughter.”

The woman held up her phone.

A girl of approximately eleven stood inside a dressing room. She wore a yellow sweater and pressed one hand against the mirror.

Her lips formed a single word.

Mama.

“When did she disappear?” Neris asked.

The woman tried to pull free.

“Six years ago.”

“Where?”

“Lornbridge Community Pool.”

“Was her body recovered?”

The woman stopped fighting.

Her husband did not.

He struck Neris in the shoulder and shoved her against the glass.

“Get away from my wife.”

Toren Brask intercepted him before he could reach the doors.

The man swung again.

Toren caught his wrist, turned him, and forced him against the wall without drawing his weapon.

“Your daughter isn’t in there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know what this place does.”

The man looked through the glass.

The photograph on his phone changed.

His daughter was no longer inside the dressing room.

She stood immediately beyond the entrance.

Yellow sweater.

Wet hair.

Bare feet resting in a shallow puddle.

She lifted one hand.

Her father stopped resisting.

“Lacey.”

The girl smiled.

Neris looked at the store.

No child stood beyond the glass.

Only the man saw her.

The first black page of the registry completed its turn.

White letters appeared.

ANNUAL HARVEST: ACTIVE.

COLLECTION PERIOD: SUNSET UNTIL SATISFACTION.

AUTHORIZED LOCATIONS: 18,406.

EXPECTED ATTENDANCE: 312,000,000.

Neris read the final number twice.

The parking lot filled around her.

Cars stopped wherever their drivers abandoned them. Doors remained open. Engines continued running. Families emerged carrying phones, tablets, printed photographs, toys, urns, and clothing that had belonged to the dead.

Some called names.

Some apologized.

Some laughed with the wild relief of people whose grief had been declared a mistake.

A city bus stopped in the middle of Mercy Bell Drive.

Every passenger got off.

Beyond the shopping center, vehicles filled the road in both directions.

“They’re not all looking for children,” Dr. Drove said.

She stood beside the evidence container, holding her phone away from her body.

Its screen showed a man in a hospital gown.

He sat beneath an orange EXIT sign.

“My husband died twelve years ago.”

The man looked directly at her through the screen.

He raised his left hand.

Two fingers were missing.

Drove turned the phone facedown.

“He lost those in a press accident before I met him. No public photograph showed that hand.”

Caldra stared at the approaching crowd.

“They’re using the dead.”

“Not only the dead,” Orenza said.

Her phone showed a woman standing inside the Whimwick store.

The woman was approximately fifty, with gray threaded through her dark hair and a pale scar dividing one eyebrow.

“She’s me.”

The woman on the screen wore clothing Orenza did not own.

A wedding ring rested on her hand.

Two children stood beside her.

Orenza had never married.

The older version of her smiled.

A message appeared beneath the image.

THIS IS THE LIFE THEY STOLE FROM YOU.

ENTER TO RESTORE.

Orenza dropped the phone.

It continued playing from the pavement.

The imagined children called her mother.

Across the parking lot, hundreds of devices spoke at once.

Different names.

Different voices.

One invitation.

Neris felt Ione move beside her heart.

Don’t listen to mine.

Neris looked at her own phone.

The screen remained black.

“That’s reassuring.”

It means they don’t need a phone to reach you.

“Less reassuring.”

Toren released the father after Caldra moved between him and the entrance.

The man immediately returned to his wife.

Their missing daughter still waited for them beyond the doors.

The woman placed both palms against the glass.

“Lacey?”

The doors opened.

Warm air moved across the parking lot.

It smelled like caramel corn, cinnamon, new plastic, and the inside of a cardboard costume box.

Beneath those scents waited something damp.

Soil.

Deep water.

A closed room where too many people had breathed for too long.

The crowd surged.

Neris opened the registry wider.

The black page reflected the store.

Every person in the parking lot appeared on its surface as a thread of orange light.

Thousands of threads moved toward the entrance.

Neris placed her hand against the page.

The nearest threads stopped.

The people attached to them did not.

Pain cut across her palm.

The registry resisted her.

“They changed the permissions,” Loray said.

Neris’s biological mother stood behind her, carrying a box of recovered Orison records against her chest.

Three weeks of natural aging had deepened the lines around Loray’s eyes. Her hair was almost entirely white now. She looked exhausted, finite, and more human than Neris had ever seen her.

“What permissions?” Toren asked.

“The registry once recognized collectors, mothers, placements, and reserves. Maura used it as an authority ledger.”

“And now?”

Loray looked at the page.

“Now it recognizes customers.”

Neris pressed harder.

The pain entered her wrist.

The false placement mark beneath her skin turned black.

Words appeared.

CUSTOMER INTERFERENCE DETECTED.

FORMER RESERVE NERIS VALLOWEN.

ACCOUNT STATUS: OVERDRAWN.

PROPERTY IN POSSESSION: ONE.

Ione’s warmth contracted inside her.

Neris closed the book.

“Still think they came for everyone?” she asked.

No, Ione said.

They came for me.

The store doors reached their widest point.

The missing girl in the yellow sweater stepped backward.

Her parents followed.

Neris caught the mother’s coat.

The fabric tore.

The woman entered Whimwick.

Her husband crossed behind her.

Their two sons slipped past Caldra.

The infant remained in the father’s arm.

The doors closed.

All five vanished.

The crowd became quiet.

Not frightened.

Expectant.

A bell rang inside the store.

The entrance opened again.

The family stood on the opposite side.

The mother no longer cried.

The father held the infant against his chest.

Their sons smiled.

Between them stood Lacey.

Her yellow sweater was dry.

Her hair reached her shoulders.

She looked exactly as she had in the message.

Someone in the crowd gasped.

Another person began praying.

The mother touched her daughter’s face.

“Lacey?”

The girl leaned into her hand.

“I waited.”

The woman made a sound that did not belong to language.

She pulled Lacey against her.

The crowd moved forward.

Toren raised his weapon and fired into the air.

The shot stopped no one.

People pressed around him.

A man carrying a child’s red bicycle struck Caldra with the handlebars. Two elderly women stepped over Orenza after she fell. A teenager climbed onto the hood of an abandoned car and jumped toward the entrance.

“They saw it work,” Drove said.

“No,” Neris answered. “They saw what they needed.”

The returned girl looked at Neris.

Lacey smiled over her mother’s shoulder.

Her eyes were completely black.

The infant began screaming.

His father tried to comfort him.

Lacey reached toward the baby.

The crying stopped before she touched him.

The infant’s face changed.

His cheeks thinned.

His arms lengthened inside his clothing.

His soft hair darkened.

In less than three seconds, the child became a boy of approximately seven.

The father dropped him.

The boy struck the pavement and continued aging.

Ten.

Fourteen.

Twenty.

His mother screamed.

Lacey held out both hands.

Orange light traveled from the aging body into her fingers.

Her face matured.

Eleven became twelve.

Twelve became sixteen.

Her wet hair lengthened down her back.

The yellow sweater stretched across an adult body.

Her mother tried to release her.

Lacey held on.

The woman’s skin loosened.

Her hair whitened.

The sons collapsed beside them.

Their soccer uniforms hung from rapidly shrinking shoulders.

The father reached for the infant who no longer existed.

The person on the pavement became older than him.

Thirty.

Forty.

Fifty.

The man’s life passed through Lacey without producing a single memory in his changing face.

Neris opened the registry.

The nearest black page filled with numbers.

FAMILY UNIT 07119.

ANTICIPATION: RECEIVED.

REUNION: RECEIVED.

RELIEF: RECEIVED.

MATERNAL ATTACHMENT: RECEIVED.

YEARS COLLECTED: 226.

TRANSACTION COMPLETE.

Lacey released her mother.

The entire family fell.

Their bodies did not remain on the pavement.

They flattened into photographs.

Five glossy pictures moved across the wet ground.

Each showed Lacey at a different age.

The returned girl stood alone.

Now she appeared approximately thirty-seven.

She turned toward the store.

The doors opened for her.

“Don’t let her inside,” Loray said.

Toren fired.

The bullet entered Lacey’s back.

No blood appeared.

The yellow sweater collapsed inward.

Something turned inside the body and caught the bullet before it reached her chest.

Lacey looked down.

She opened her mouth.

The bullet rested on her tongue.

She spat it into her palm.

“Ballistic interruption,” she said.

Her voice belonged to an adult woman.

Another voice moved beneath it.

Then another.

Dozens of people spoke from the same throat.

“No additional fee.”

She entered Whimwick.

The doors closed behind her.

A display mannequin near the entrance changed.

Its blank plastic face became Lacey’s.

The yellow sweater appeared on its body.

A price tag unfolded from the sleeve.

FAMILY RESTORATION PACKAGE.

ONE MEMORY REQUIRED FOR ENTRY.

ALL REMAINING YEARS DUE UPON REUNION.

The crowd continued forward.

They had watched five people die.

It did not matter.

The phones showed them different endings.

On every screen, the family walked away with Lacey.

Alive.

Whole.

Together.

“That isn’t an illusion,” Drove said.

“What part?” Caldra asked.

“The phones aren’t showing what happened. They’re showing what everyone else remembers happening.”

Neris understood.

Whimwick had never needed to conceal a body when it could replace the memory of the death.

The families entering the store would be consumed in front of witnesses.

The witnesses would remember miracles.

“Turn off the cellular towers,” Toren said.

Caldra pulled out her radio.

“It won’t stop the store.”

“It might stop more people from coming.”

Every screen in the parking lot changed.

No signal bars remained.

No wireless symbols.

The messages continued.

Loudspeakers activated inside the abandoned businesses surrounding Whimwick.

The invitation played from a bankrupt pharmacy.

A closed restaurant.

A former shoe store.

The empty anchor department store at the opposite end of Mercy Bell Commons.

COME FIND ME.

The voices no longer came from individual phones.

They came from the shopping center itself.

Neris looked beyond the crowd.

Orange light filled every vacant storefront.

Signs appeared above them.

Different names.

WINTERVALE WONDERS.

THE EASTER ATTIC.

HEARTSONG EMPORIUM.

THE PATRIOT MARKET.

MIDSUMMER HOUSE.

HARVEST TABLE.

Each business opened its doors.

The crowd divided.

People followed whichever voice belonged to the loss they carried.

Whimwick was not one store anymore.

Mercy Bell Commons had become an entire calendar.

Loray dropped the box of records.

Files spread across the pavement.

On each paper, the Orison Foundation name disappeared.

A new logo replaced it.

A black sun surrounded by twelve doors.

ASTERRA SEASONAL EXPERIENCES.

Drove picked up a page.

“I saw this company in the banking records.”

“So did I,” Neris said.

“It officially owns nothing.”

“It owns the names.”

The seasonal stores brightened.

Music emerged from each entrance.

Christmas bells.

Fireworks.

A carousel organ.

A wedding song.

Children laughing beneath all of them.

Toren reloaded.

“We can’t hold every door.”

“We don’t have to,” Neris said.

He looked at the registry.

“You have a plan?”

“No.”

“Good. I was worried this might become reasonable.”

Neris turned to Caldra.

“Get everyone who isn’t affected inside the evidence office. No screens. No windows.”

“How do we know who isn’t affected?”

“You don’t.”

Caldra looked at the people surrounding them.

Some fought to reach the stores.

Others stood motionless, listening to voices only they could hear.

A police officer removed his badge and walked toward HeartSong Emporium.

An elderly man crawled beneath a parked vehicle because a woman called him from the far side.

A little girl stared into the dark window of the closed pharmacy.

“What do you see?” Caldra asked her.

“My grandmother.”

“Is she dead?”

The girl shook her head.

“She doesn’t know me yet.”

The pharmacy doors opened.

Caldra lifted the child and carried her away.

“Anyone can be affected,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That isn’t useful.”

“No.”

The registry turned another page.

A global map appeared.

Orange lights spread across it too quickly to count.

Some locations occupied shopping centers.

Others opened inside schools, churches, hospitals, stadiums, train stations, airports, and private homes.

One appeared beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

Another glowed at the center of Antarctica.

The doors did not require customers to reach them.

They opened wherever a person remembered wanting something back.

Neris’s phone rang.

Elsin.

She answered.

The girl did not speak immediately.

Behind her came bells.

Hundreds of bells.

“Elsin?”

“I’m here.”

“Where?”

“The identification center.”

“Who is with you?”

“Calla. Renn. Pella. The Founders Day children.”

“What opened?”

“All nine doors.”

Neris heard children crying in the background.

“They don’t lead to the House of Good Mothers anymore,” Elsin continued. “One opens into a hospital. One opens into a school. One opens into somebody’s kitchen.”

“Do you recognize the places?”

“The children do.”

Neris understood.

Each door led back to the moment before a child had been surrendered, altered, injured, or killed.

Whimwick was offering them their original lives.

“Keep everyone away from the doors.”

“We tried.”

A crash sounded.

Calla shouted from somewhere near the phone.

Elsin’s breathing changed.

“Pella went through.”

“Which door?”

“The white one.”

“What did she see?”

“Her mother.”

Neris looked at Loray.

“What happened after she entered?”

“She came back.”

“That isn’t good.”

“I know.”

“What changed?”

Elsin lowered her voice.

“She remembers living with her mother.”

Pella spoke in the background.

Her voice sounded calm.

Too calm.

“She says the archive never took her. She says we’re the ones who kidnapped her.”

“Keep her away from the others.”

“She already touched Renn.”

“What happened?”

“He forgot Bellwether.”

Toren heard enough to understand.

“They’re contagious.”

“Memories are,” Neris said.

The black pages turned faster.

Images appeared.

People emerged from stores throughout the world carrying restored relatives, recovered childhoods, erased marriages, unborn children, healthy bodies, and futures that had never happened.

Every false restoration rewrote nearby witnesses.

A woman entered a store alone and emerged with a husband.

Everyone waiting outside remembered attending their wedding.

A man emerged twenty years younger.

His adult daughter forgot he had ever aged.

A missing child returned to a family that had never lost him.

The police officers who investigated his disappearance forgot the case.

The case file became blank.

Whimwick was not hiding the harvest.

It was making the harvested world remember consenting to it.

Neris heard Ione whisper.

They’re preparing the witnesses.

“For what?”

The answer did not come.

“Ione?”

A pressure formed behind Neris’s ribs.

Her sister was listening to something beneath the music.

Something Neris could not yet hear.

Then every store became silent.

The crowds stopped.

Phones lowered.

Music ended in the middle of notes.

Across Mercy Bell Commons, thousands of people turned toward Whimwick Halloween.

The doors opened.

No employee stood inside.

No cashier waited behind the registers.

A black carpet unrolled from the store entrance.

It crossed the sidewalk and stopped at Neris’s feet.

The crowd moved away from it.

Not because they were frightened.

Because something had instructed them to make room.

Lights inside the store went out aisle by aisle.

The final illumination remained above the checkout counter.

A woman stood beneath it.

She wore an orange vest over a white blouse.

Her hair was pinned behind her head.

A rectangular badge rested above her heart.

ASTERRA.

GUEST RECOVERY.

She looked approximately sixty.

Then forty.

Then nineteen.

Her body did not transform.

Neris’s understanding of it did.

Each time she blinked, the woman became the age most likely to earn her trust.

When Toren looked at her, his expression tightened.

“What do you see?” Neris asked.

“My mother.”

“What age?”

“The last time she recognized me.”

Drove stared at the same woman.

“I see my daughter.”

“You don’t have a daughter,” Caldra said.

“I know.”

Loray turned away.

“What do you see?” Neris asked her.

“No one.”

The woman behind the counter smiled at Loray.

“That is why you failed.”

Her voice crossed the parking lot without becoming louder.

The words reached every person in the language they had first heard from someone who loved them.

Neris heard Ione.

Not an imitation assembled from recordings.

Not a stolen memory.

The exact private voice that existed beside her heart.

“Neris.”

Ione answered from inside her.

I didn’t say that.

The woman stepped from behind the counter.

Her shoes touched the black carpet.

The crowd lowered its head.

“Welcome,” she said. “We apologize for the interruption in seasonal service.”

Toren aimed at her.

She continued walking.

“Asterra recognizes that regional management failed to preserve customer confidence. The individuals responsible have been recalled.”

“Recalled where?” Neris asked.

The woman stopped halfway down the carpet.

“Into usefulness.”

The windows behind her changed.

Faces appeared inside the glass.

Morwen.

Ysoria.

Maura.

Women Neris had seen inside Whimwick photographs and Bellwether records.

The escaped First Mothers stood among them.

Their mouths were open.

Orange light passed through their bodies and collected inside clear tubes running toward the ceiling.

The witches were not employees anymore.

They were inventory.

Loray stared at them.

“They’re being harvested.”

“Reclaimed,” the woman corrected. “Every intermediary eventually becomes inefficient.”

“You fed on them?” Neris asked.

“We fed through them.”

The woman looked at the families waiting outside the other stores.

“Human emotion is difficult to collect without damaging its source. Fear collapses when sustained too long. Wonder diminishes with repetition. Anticipation ends when fulfilled. Nostalgia decays under examination. Your species exhausts what it feels almost as quickly as it produces it.”

“And the witches stored it for you.”

“They refined it.”

The orange tubes brightened.

Morwen’s body aged inside the glass.

Her face became the face Neris had seen in photographs taken more than a century apart.

Then it became older.

Skin tightened around bone.

Her open mouth continued feeding light into the ceiling.

“The annual distributions kept them alive,” Loray said.

“They were compensated according to function.”

“You made them.”

The woman smiled.

“They made themselves. We merely taught them that hunger could become an industry.”

The registry moved in Neris’s hands.

Its pages tried to turn toward the Asterra representative.

Neris held them closed.

The woman noticed.

“You are carrying obsolete company property.”

“I’m carrying a dead woman.”

“No distinction exists in your account.”

Ione’s anger burned beside Neris’s heart.

Tell her to come collect me.

Neris almost smiled.

“She says you can come collect her.”

“I heard.”

For the first time, the woman’s expression became something other than courteous.

Not anger.

Interest.

“She persists independently.”

“You didn’t know?”

“We knew the container retained a voice.”

“I’m not a container.”

“That belief is also retained.”

The woman resumed walking.

Toren fired.

The gunshot became a bell.

The bullet left the barrel as an orange ticket.

It drifted to the carpet.

Toren looked at his weapon.

The metal had become painted plastic.

A price sticker covered the grip.

ADULT HEROISM SET.

ACCESSORIES SOLD SEPARATELY.

He threw it aside.

The woman reached the end of the carpet.

Up close, she had no pores.

No pulse moved in her throat.

Her eyes reflected shelves that did not exist behind Neris.

“You should not have been able to open the registry,” she said.

“People keep telling me what I shouldn’t be able to do.”

“They were people.”

“What are you?”

The woman looked toward the sky.

Clouds separated above Mercy Bell Commons.

No stars appeared.

Thousands of orange doors covered the darkness.

They stood upright without walls.

Some were painted.

Some were metal.

Some belonged to hospital rooms, bedrooms, classrooms, basements, nurseries, offices, and houses that had been demolished generations earlier.

Every door opened onto a different human memory.

“We are what waits after wanting becomes larger than the life containing it.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It is the first answer your species gave us.”

The crowd began whispering.

Names passed among them.

The dead.

The missing.

The children never born.

The parents who had failed them.

The people they might have become.

Each name opened another door in the sky.

Neris felt the scale of the collection.

Whimwick had harvested emotions during one season.

Asterra harvested alternatives.

Every unlived life.

Every choice reconsidered.

Every person who had stared backward long enough to become dissatisfied with the world in front of them.

The stores did not merely consume grief.

They made reality compete with the offer.

Drove stepped toward the black carpet.

Neris caught her.

The physician watched her dead husband inside the store.

“He knows what I said at the hospital.”

“So does your memory.”

“He answered a question I never asked out loud.”

“Drove.”

“He said he forgives me.”

“That is what you need him to say.”

“What if it’s what he needed to say?”

The question weakened Neris’s grip.

The Asterra woman saw it.

“Every customer understands eventually,” she said. “A false restoration that heals the living possesses greater value than a true loss that destroys them.”

“The family you restored died.”

“They experienced reunion.”

“For less than a minute.”

“Duration does not determine authenticity. You carried your sister for three weeks and call her real.”

Ione became still.

The woman reached toward Neris.

Loray stepped between them.

The Asterra representative touched Loray’s forehead with one finger.

Nothing visible happened.

Loray fell.

Neris caught her before her head struck the pavement.

Her mother’s eyes remained open.

Empty.

“What did you do?”

“Returned her to the last life she considered acceptable.”

Loray smiled at someone Neris could not see.

“Sylvi,” she whispered.

Neris had never heard the name.

The representative tilted her head.

“Her first daughter.”

Loray reached toward the air.

A little girl laughed beside her.

Neris heard the sound but saw no child.

“Bring her back.”

“She is not gone. She is receiving the experience she selected.”

“She didn’t select anything.”

“She spent three hundred years remembering it.”

Neris opened the registry.

The page beneath her hand showed Loray standing in a sunlit kitchen.

She appeared young.

Human.

A dark-haired girl sat at the table, drawing circles on a sheet of paper.

Loray placed a bowl of fruit beside her.

The child looked up.

“Mama.”

Loray’s real body exhaled against Neris’s arm.

One year disappeared from her face.

Then another.

The life inside the registry consumed the life outside it.

Neris pressed her palm against the page.

“Loray.”

Her mother did not respond.

“Your daughter is dead.”

The child inside the image turned toward Neris.

Her face sharpened.

“She doesn’t have to be.”

Neris tore the page.

The registry screamed.

The sound moved through every open store.

Glass cracked.

Mannequins turned.

The image of the kitchen split down the center.

Loray convulsed in Neris’s arms.

Her hair whitened again.

Age returned to her face.

She inhaled.

The first breath became a sob.

“Sylvi.”

“I’m sorry,” Neris said.

Loray struck her.

The…

“You…