Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The road to Silverbrook was a winding ribbon of asphalt, cutting through dense, towering pines that seemed to stretch endlessly toward the gray sky. Felix had always believed that inspiration thrived in solitude, in places where the mundane and that intangible strangeness people so often enjoyed linking to 'the paranormal' brushed shoulders. As he drove, the trees grew closer together, their branches knitting a canopy casting shadows over his car. The oppressive silence of the forest was both comforting and unnerving. The kind of thing so beautiful and quiet it was almost hard to imagine danger lurking until it was too late. Just like the stories he wrote.

Felix Lee, an acclaimed horror novelist, had always had a knack for capturing the essence of fear. At least that was the tagline his editor came up with. His novels were always meant to be a mirror to his own anxieties, a way to channel his darkest thoughts into something tangible, his fears into something comprehensible, something that couldn't hurt him or haunt him anymore. But lately, the well of inspiration had run dry. The city’s constant noise and distractions had become unbearable. Life had become mundane, monotonous, drab. He needed a change, a place where he could reconnect with his craft. Silverbrook presented itself as the perfect choice, a secluded town whispered about in writer’s circles for its eerie beauty, its haunting history and the urban legends that had kept writers of all sorts away from the place instead of being drawn by it.

As Felix approached the outskirts of Silverbrook, the trees gave way to a quaint town that seemed untouched by time. Cobblestone streets wound through clusters of Victorian-era buildings, their façades worn but charming. It was picturesque, almost dreamlike, but the slight fog permeating the town, the thick silence of each street - regardless if it was occupied or empty - gave the scene a hint of strangeness, of uneasy mystery that Felix couldn’t quite shake off. He parked his car in front of a small café, its sign swinging lazily in the breeze.

He stepped out of his car and stretched, feeling the cold bite of the late autumn air. The locals eyed him with a mix of curiosity and suspicion as he walked into the café. His long blond hair partially tied in a lazy ponytail at the back of his head, strands still messily falling on his shoulders, his young features that kept a boyish aspect despite his age and notoriety, the classy, fitting clothes he wore... All of it was just slightly out of place in a town like this, where bearded men in baseball caps and women with greying hair wearing all sorts of vintage floral skirts seemed to be the norm. The bell above the door chimed softly, and the warmth inside was a stark contrast to the chill outside. The scent of freshly brewed coffee and baked goods wrapped around him like a comforting blanket.

“New in town?” the barista asked, her voice friendly but cautious. She was a middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a tired smile.

“Just moved into the cabin by the lake,” Felix replied, offering a polite smile. “Looking for a fresh start.”

“Ah, the old lake cabin... Beautiful place." she paused for a second, as if she wasn't quite sure if she should voice her thoughts. Felix had heard a lot about the cabin he had impulsively bought himself. Almost as much as he had heard about the town itself. Surely the barista was no different. "It got its... quirks, I'd say” she finally said gently and left it at that, pouring him a cup of coffee. “Name’s Martha, by the way. If you need anything, just ask, I know just about everyone in town.”

Felix thanked her and took his coffee to a corner table. He pulled out his notebook, the blank pages taunting him. He knew the town would give him the material he needed, he could feel in his bones that the eerie atmosphere would be exactly what had been missing. But not just yet. Once he saw more of the town, experienced more of its daily weirdness, basked in the foggy morning by the lakeside, he would write, but for now the white canvas still stared at him back like the old archnemesis it was. He sipped his coffee, hoping for a spark of inspiration, just a sentence or a word, anything more than the nothingness he had put on paper for the last year. Instead, he felt a creeping unease, as if someone—or something—was watching him.

He welcomed the feeling for just a second, reminding himself this was exactly the kind of thing that led him to this sort of place, that would lead to a brand new story. He gave himself just a tick before he shook off the feeling and tried to focus on the terrifyingly white paper once more. His mind wandered to the reason he had come to Silverbrook. The pressure to produce another bestseller had been mounting, and his publisher’s constant calls didn’t help. Felix needed a place where he could escape, where the only sounds were the rustling of leaves and the calls of distant birds. The eerily silent streets and the haunting beauty of the lake his new residence bordered would be the perfect setting for his mind to quiet and his blank page syndrome to vanish. And maybe, just maybe, his publisher would finally give him a day or two without bombarding his phone then.

The tiny bell above the door chimed again, and Felix glanced up to see a young man walk in. He was tall and slender, with long, dark hair that framed his face like a curtain. He moved with a grace that seemed almost otherworldly, drawing the attention of everyone in the café. By the way people smiled, nodded, waved or greeted him, it seemed he was well known - and well loved - amongst this crowd. Felix found himself captivated by the stranger’s presence.

The young man ordered his drink and glanced around, his eyes locking with Felix’s for a brief moment. There was a spark of... something in the man's eyes and Felix felt it reverberate in his whole body, a slight sheen of goosebumps covering his forearms. A strange feeling, one he would no doubt analyze in every and any angles in the solitude of his room later, to understand how to put it into black words on a white page. The stranger gave a small, enigmatic smile before turning away.

Felix’s heart squeezed in a way that had become almost foreign to him with time, and he forced himself to look back at his notebook. The stranger’s face lingered in his mind for an unknown reason, a distraction he couldn’t afford. He pressed his pen firmly against the page, willing his hand, his brain to produce even a sentence, but all the words that came to mind felt hollow and the only vibrant image lodged there was the one of a lean figure with silky black hair and a mysterious smirk. Frustrated, he closed the notebook and finished his coffee.

___

Deciding it was time for him to get settled, Felix left the café and drove to the cabin. The lake was serene, its surface like glass, reflecting the overcast sky. The cabin itself was charming, with its weathered wooden exterior and large windows offering a panoramic view of the water. It looked slightly eerie, just like the rest of the town did, but from the outside it seemed like the perfect picture of where an author like him would reside: cozy with just a hint of unease. At least for those who hadn't heard the stories surrounding it. For the ones who had, the wooden house became its own legend, one people weren't keen on approaching close enough to disprove. Felix knew the stories were just that - stories. But being aware of the supposed 'past' of the place gave it a certain atmosphere in his eyes, no doubt one that would fuel his nightmares and - as a result - his writing.

He unpacked slowly, the silence of the cabin pressing in on him. Every creak of the floorboards, every rustle of the wind outside seemed amplified. By the time he lit a fire in the stone hearth, the shadows were already stretching long and dark. As night fell around the house, Felix sat at the small desk by the window, staring out at the moonlit lake, the empty notebook once more sitting neglected in front of him. He tried to write, but the words wouldn’t come, had refused him for months now. Instead, his mind wandered to the strange occurrences he had read about or heard his writer friends chatter about. The cabin’s previous occupant, a writer like himself, had supposedly disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leading the townspeople to imagine all sorts of otherworldly reasons for his vanishing. What had started as a rumor spread into a whole folklore - ghosts, demons, spirits, even aliens. Some called it small town hysteria, others supernatural. And as a writer, Felix was all too interested in a town that could claim it all for fact - despite the lack of any actual concrete evidence.

Maybe he had been lured into the forest surrounding the lake by a supernatural cult worshiping a dark god living at the bottom of the water. Maybe he had fallen in love with a ghostly apparition and, driven mad, had taken his own life to be with her, his body never found. Maybe he had been a town wide hallucination, a spirit himself that people remembered seeing only once. None of the stories were Felix's favorite, but they permeated the cabin - and the lakeside - with a slightly chilling atmosphere that had so many avoiding the place altogether.

Quickly enough his thoughts drifted to something even more intriguing, to the handsome stranger he had seen at the café. That mysterious smile the man had flashed him, the way his deep, seemingly fathomless eyes had bored into him for a moment, stole his attention. He conjured the image of the young man again and again, but no matter how vividly he tried to imagine him, Felix still couldn't, in his mind, recreate an image perfect enough to do the stranger justice. The fog rolling over the moonlit lake that he could notice through his window somehow seemed reminiscent to the depths of the man's irises, his features now dreamlike and blurry in Felix's head. He remembered him clearly, the memory should have felt easy and familiar and yet the more he thought about him, the more the details of his face became hidden, obscured and unattainable. The feeling was both unsettlingly strange and eerily striking.

He felt more and more tired the longer he looked at the lake, the longer he tried to lose himself in his imagination, aimlessly tapping the tip of his pen to the ever-so-white page in front of him. He sighed with a frown; he had expected something more productive from his first night in a town like this one, in a cabin far from civilization, with a creepy history and an even creepier forest and lake surrounding it. The setting was perfect to get his juices flowing, the strangeness of the town itself was on par with anything his own mind could've conjured in one of his previous bestsellers. Instead his eyes burned and his head lightly pounded, the light in the room suddenly seeming too dim for him to focus his gaze without straining his eyes. Either it was getting too late - or too early - or settling in had taken more out of him than he had thought. Felix stretched, rubbing his tired eyes with the back of his hand. The floorboards creaked as he dragged his chair back, ready to get up without having written a word. Again.

Tomorrow would be the day. Tomorrow he would sit and he would write. Tomorrow the page wouldn't be blank anymore, finally. As he pushed himself up, his eyes glanced at the dreaded piece of paper. It had become almost difficult to see how empty it was now. Maybe this was the reason why his entire body stopped in the middle of its movement, frozen between a sitting and standing position, eyes squinting at the paper. The paper he hadn't written anything on. The paper that had been blank for months. The paper that had been taunting him day after day.

The paper on which five words were now scribbled, in a handwriting that wasn't his own.

The darkness knows your name.

Chapter Text

By the time the sun rose the following morning, Felix could hardly remember where he was. The darkness still encroached the corners of the room when he groggily opened his eyes. The cabin felt comfortably warm, the only sounds the crackling of the fire, now almost extinguished, facing the old sofa he had fallen asleep on the night prior. In spite of the relaxing atmosphere, the air felt thick with a slight unease that made the tiny hair on Felix's nape stand on end. The event of the evening still had a hold of him. He had stared at the words for a solid minute, passing his thumb over the ink without it smudging under his touch. And then he had blinked and it was gone, the paper as blank as he had grown accustomed to seeing it. In the end maybe it had all been a part of his dream, - or nightmare - his vivid imagination already hard at work. Still, even now in the safety of the burgeoning daylight intruding through his windows, Felix couldn't ignore a chill running down his spine whenever he thought of it. The words themselves felt ominous, and even if it had been nothing more than a strange dream, a hallucination induced by his overactive brain, Felix couldn't help being affected by the mystery behind the sentence, by the threat encapsulated in the words.

Getting out of the cabin and into the town had quickly become his utmost priority, simply to find the inspiration he needed, he told himself. He was seemingly calm when he stepped outside, watching the clouds slowly move over the glassy surface of the lake while taking slow steps away from the house. There was nothing alarming about the day, nor about the very pretty landscape that greeted him, sun shining gently through fire-colored leaves, and yet a slight dread lingered over him like a dark cloak, five words in soot black ink imprinted on his mind.

A dream. That's all it had been. He had known himself that those would be inevitable in this kind of setting, after all. Creepy woods, abandoned cabin, a lake surrounded by its immense amount of urban legends and the tiredness of a day of driving and unpacking. Having a peaceful night would have been more surprising. Somewhat reassured and emboldened by his own train of thought, Felix tore his gaze from the lake and turned around to finally head towards the path, barely visible on the mossy ground, and into the town.

The streets were lined with even more quaint shops and houses than those he had noticed on his way in the day before. The dirt path had, at some point, turned to a cobblestone road winding its way between the buildings. Charmingly asymmetrical streets welcomed him, as quiet as the previous day despite a few passerby making their way up and down the roads. The morning fog pressed down on the town, seeping through the faraway trees and into the streets. The sight, as eerie as it was beautiful, felt alien to Felix, so far off from the bustling streets of the city, with its noise and neatly lined skyscrapers, each taller and more intimidating than the next. Out here, the sky seemed to stretch on forever, so distant and clear against the sea of red and golden treetops, even through the blurry fog. After having had his apartment in the middle of town the previous year, in a 35-story building where every room came with its own view of the tiny squares of greenery below, the sight left him breathless, a bittersweet feeling squeezing his heart for a brief moment. Here, no matter what, the mountains, the trees and the stars were within view, within reach. He couldn't remember if he had ever been able to admire a single constellation from his balcony before.

He hadn't realized that his feet were still taking him through the streets until he made his way to the café that had welcomed him on his arrival to Silverbrook. All the way there he gawked at the scenery. The town was so quiet it felt almost ghostly, fog billowing over cobblestone. And yet it still held an abundance of charm in its autumn hues. An array of houses whose colors dulled with time, stood on each side of the street, some larger, some smaller, each with its own character. From the trimmed garden to the messy barbecue spot, from the iron fence to the white picket palisade with its chipped paint, from the tiny hanging pots neatly placed over window sills to the ivy climbing wildly towards the roof. In the town's center, the small church with its bell tower watched over the valley. On the other side, more houses climbed a slopping hill towards a path disappearing into the woods, their steps and porches casting shadows that let sun rays filter through the red leaves. It gave Felix the otherworldly feeling of a town out of space and time, lost and unknown, right there between the overbearing forest and the bottomless lake. Hidden between the hills, obscured by the all-encompassing lush forest, Silverbrook was impossibly picturesque and perfectly isolated, the ideal place to get the creative juices flowing... or to disappear.

Without much intent, Felix wandered into the café where he had first seen the young man with a striking appearance. He almost hoped to meet him again, his gaze drifting among the morning patrons for a split second. No sign of that man here today. Pushing away his disappointment, Felix sat at one of the baristas' stools by the counter.

The barista was the same person he had met before - Martha - a woman in her forties with wavy blonde hair pulled back in a bun. She carried herself with an easy confidence that only people who knew everything and everyone around seemed to possess. She smiled, and although it seemed kind enough, Felix couldn't help but wonder, based on their last interaction, if he could detect a hint of secrecy in her features. Maybe the mystic atmosphere of this town, basked in too many urban legends to count, mixed with the nightmare that still lingered in a corner of his mind, was already starting to play tricks on him after all. A waitress, who had been taking an order at the front of the café, approached him and, after politely greeting him and inquiring about his coffee choices, left the menus on the bar and disappeared through a swing door towards the kitchen. He shot Martha a small smile back before grabbing one of the menus, trying to shake away the many eerie sensations that had started to build up inside his chest since the events of the previous night. No amount of fictional legends could cloud his judgement like that, if he ever wanted to make sense of reality and fiction like any good writer should. He knew all too well how easy it was - especially for one specializing in the horrific and the mystic - to blur the line between the words on the page and the world around a little too much.

On that thought, Martha turned to face him, drying a few cups and bowls with a stained towel. Her piercing blue eyes matched the white dress she wore that reminded Felix of a Victorian nightgown of sorts. The fabric flowed around her slender figure when she turned around, effortlessly graceful. Felix was one to take note of details, especially when it came to descriptions, from the cut of clothes to the shades of eyes, subtle behaviors, body language - everything that could be translated on the page later. Maybe Martha would be a character. Maybe the mysterious man from the previous day would as well. He never knew who or what could possibly make it into a manuscript before the ideas jumped on the page of their own volition usually.

"So, how was your first night in our good ol' Silverbrook?"

Martha's voice tore him away from his train of thought, the sound warm and soft and utterly welcoming. His body tensed slightly for a brief second, images of the black words swirling in his mind once more. An event he was sure townsfolk would be thrilled to hear about and twist every which way to fit their zealous beliefs of the many stories surrounding the cabin, the lake or the town itself. The fact that it was nothing but a strange dream fueled by his frustrations with his own inexistant writing and the tiredness of driving all the way to this new home of his, was one that his current company would probably purposefully dismiss. Felix was only partially aware of the stares against his back - curtesy of some of the few customers lingering in the café - as he chose his next words. Surely many were curious about a new face in a town as secluded as this, nothing out of the ordinary in small communities, he thought.

"Refreshing." he boldly lied. "It's impossible to get that kind of peace and quiet in the city." a soft laugh escaped his lips for emphasis. That part was far from a lie, at least. There had never been a day or a night when the city didn't pulsate with noises around him.

She nodded sagely.

"You have that right."

The corner of her mouth quirked a little and her sharp gaze washed over him for a split second, a glint in her eye leading Felix to think there was always more behind her words than what she was saying, like during their first encounter the day before. It seemed she was a bit more odd than he initially thought. But then again, living in a town like this, believing all those things going around, it was bound to make most of the locals pretty cooky. Felix was sure Martha would probably be the least alarming case of this he'd run in here.

"Same as usual?" Martha, completely unaware of the tumult she was causing in Felix's thoughts, asked in a slightly higher pitched voice. It took Felix a ridiculously long second, eyes quizzically trained on her, to understand the words hadn't been directed at him at all.

Looking up and turning his head, his eyes instantly held onto a figure that sucked his attention like a vacuum the same way it had the day prior. The mysterious man - his features crystal clear and not obscured by the blur shrouding his memory now - was indeed sitting on the tiny stool placed at Felix's right, his gaze steady on the writer's face, a satisfied smile lightly ghosting over his lips, making his visage all the more peculiar and striking. He was slightly hunched over, his elbow casually propped against the wooden surface of the counter while his chin rested gently on his half-closed fist, seemingly barely hovering over his knuckles without pressing against them, like a phantom touch. He wore the same long dark purple coat Felix had seen the day before, a sort of knitted sweater - in the darkest hue of burgundy he had ever seen - underneath, that seemed large for his frame, hanging on him elegantly despite its size. Everything about him, from his clothes to his eyes, seemed to be just a shade away from the same inky black as the hair that slowly fell across his face as he slightly tilted it to the side in his appraisal of Felix.

There was a slight tremble in the waitress' polite smile, when she walked out of the back room and acknowledged the new presence at the counter. If it was from admiration, fatigue or even a history he wasn't privy to, Felix couldn't quite tell, still feeling slightly out of sorts under the stranger's unwavering stare. It was strange, how some people had a natural magnetism to them that others were unable to replicate, even despite their best efforts. This man was one of those lucky few, without the shadow of a doubt. The writer, rarely at a loss for words unless for those he wanted to put on paper, suddenly felt foolish for having stared so long without uttering a sentence. Because it seemed like the thing to do, he opened his mouth to say something - what, he wasn't quite sure himself.

"I know who you are."