Pages of the Silver Queen

“Buildings don’t forget—they just wait for someone foolish enough to listen.” — Michelle Richards

The morning sun spilled across Broken Hill, casting its golden wash over corrugated rooftops and the pale, red-dusted streets. Its rays pierced through the haze that always seemed to linger in the mining town, soft at first but already hinting at the spring warmth that would soon settle like a weight upon the earth.

Violet pedalled beside her friends, the steady grind of tyres over loose gravel their only soundtrack for long stretches. The cool air rushed against her cheeks, but beneath it the tension between them was palpable. Only an hour earlier, in Michelle’s living room, they had clasped hands and sworn themselves to secrecy, promising to move carefully, to start with the library. Yet here they were, steering their pushbikes not towards the safety of shelves and newspapers, but towards something altogether darker.

It hadn’t been decided aloud. No vote, no debate. Yet somehow, the mine had pulled them. The pact bound them still, but its first test had already twisted it: together, yes—but together in disobedience of their own plan. Violet wondered, fleetingly, if this was how secrets began to erode—not through betrayal, but through small, silent compromises no one wanted to name.

She glanced at her friends as they rode. Mandy kept her body low over the handlebars, her jaw set, pedalling hard, every line of her posture daring the world to challenge her. Michelle rode more cautiously, her skirt catching at her knees, her eyes darting from side to side as though measuring every risk. Rebecca lagged slightly behind, her back straight, her brow furrowed with the kind of doubt she never quite voiced.

Violet’s backpack bumped lightly against her spine with each turn of the pedals, the envelope inside pressing against her like a second heartbeat. The words of the letter threaded through her thoughts—beware the shadows… trust no one in uniform… Emily Sullivan wasn’t the first. They had sounded urgent in the safety of Michelle’s home. Out here, under the wide sky, they sounded like a prophecy.

The houses soon fell away, replaced by scrubland and the husks of old industry. Ahead, the outline of the Silver Queen’s office building loomed against the horizon. Its windows were black and hollow, its brickwork scarred by decades of wind and dust storms. What had once stood as a monument to prosperity now squatted like a ruin, its silence unsettling, its shadow long.

Violet shivered despite the morning sun. The place seemed alive in its decay, as though it held not just the memory of men who had once laboured there, but the weight of something unspoken, something still lurking.

And as they rode closer, she felt the certainty take root in her chest: this was no ordinary ruin. The Silver Queen Mine did not merely hold the past—it held secrets that had waited far too long to be uncovered.

The crunch of tyres slowed to a halt as the girls wheeled their bikes off the gravel road and leaned them against a rusting length of fence. The air out here felt different—drier, emptier—carrying only the faint hum of insects and the occasional cry of a crow circling high above. For a moment, none of them spoke. They just stood side by side, staring at the hulking remains of the Silver Queen office building.

Its walls, once proud and whitewashed, were now a canvas of peeling paint and long cracks that spidered across the surface. Windows gaped like hollow eyes, their glass long gone, their frames blackened with age. Tangled vines clawed their way up the brickwork, obscuring the entrance as though nature itself had tried to seal the building away.

“Are we sure about this?” Rebecca whispered, breaking the silence. Her voice, usually so calm and assured, wavered with unease. “We could still turn back… pretend we never got that letter.”

Violet turned to her, catching the flicker of doubt in her dark eyes. She felt it too—God, she felt it—but something heavier pressed her forward. “We can’t, Bec,” she said quietly, her tone carrying more conviction than she truly felt. “We’ve come too far to turn back now. Sally needs us.”

Mandy’s chin lifted at that, her eyes hard with determination. “Vi’s right. We might be the only ones who can figure out what happened to her.” She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her trainer, as though the earth itself might yield an answer if pressed.

Michelle’s gaze stayed fixed on the looming building, her expression serious. “But we need to be careful,” she murmured, her words edged with gravity. “This isn’t a game. Whatever Sally uncovered… it was dangerous enough to make her disappear.”

The words hung between them, heavy and undeniable.

As they moved closer, Violet felt the air thicken around her. Each step stirred up little clouds of red dust that clung to her shoes. The building’s silence pressed in on her, so absolute it seemed almost unnatural, as though even the birds refused to sing too near.

The long shadows of the mid-morning sun stretched across the façade, exaggerating the cracks, deepening the scars of neglect. The structure seemed to hum with the weight of all it had seen—prosperity, ruin, abandonment. Violet’s skin prickled as though it were whispering secrets too old and too dangerous for her to hear.

Her heart beat faster as she reached for the door, its handle rough with rust, the metal unexpectedly warm against her palm. She swallowed, aware of her friends’ eyes on her, their breath held as one.

“Here goes nothing,” she murmured, pushing against the wood. The hinges protested with a long, aching groan that shivered through the air, echoing into the hollow dark within.

Inside, the building swallowed them whole. The door groaned shut behind them with a reluctant thud, muting the brightness of the morning and leaving them adrift in a labyrinth of shadows and stale air. Dust hung thick in the beams of sunlight that pierced through the broken windows, floating like tiny, restless spirits disturbed by their intrusion.

The smell struck Violet first—a heavy, sour tang of decay mixed with the dry musk of paper and wood long forgotten. It clung to her throat, making her wrinkle her nose as she drew a cautious breath. Each inhalation seemed to taste of history left to rot.

The floorboards beneath their trainers creaked with every step, sharp little betrayals of their presence. Violet glanced down, half-expecting the timber to splinter beneath her weight, plunging her into some hidden void. Their footfalls echoed through the rooms, bouncing off peeling plaster and bare rafters, until it seemed the building itself was whispering their trespass back to them.

The walls were a patchwork of faded posters and paint curled away from the surface in brittle strips. Once, these notices must have been bright and official, warning men of dangers in the shafts, promising prosperity in exchange for labour. Now they were nothing more than brittle ghosts of another time, silent testaments to how quickly life could be abandoned.

The silence pressed in heavy, broken only by the occasional rustle of leaves that had found their way inside through shattered panes, or the distant, lonely call of a crow wheeling above. Every sound seemed magnified, warped in the emptiness, until the scrape of Violet’s shoe or the brush of Rebecca’s sleeve against the wall sounded almost deafening.

“Look at this,” Michelle whispered, crouching to point at one of the posters. Her fingers traced the faded ink of blocky letters. “It’s a notice about safety procedures in the mines. Dated… 1962.” Her voice was hushed, as if raising it might wake something that still lingered here.

Mandy leaned in, running her finger along the edge of the poster. A clean trail appeared in the thick film of dust, the contrast stark. “It’s like time stopped in here,” she muttered, her eyes glinting with something between fascination and unease. “Creepy.”

Violet swallowed hard, the dryness of her throat making the action feel jagged. Her pulse thudded in her ears, quick and insistent. It wasn’t just that time had stopped inside the Silver Queen—it was as though the place had been holding itself in reserve, waiting for someone fool enough to come searching. Waiting for them.

She moved forward, taking the lead without speaking it aloud, each sense stretched taut. The air seemed thicker the deeper they went, carrying with it the smell of dust, old paper, and rusting metal. Their footsteps were slow and deliberate, each one carefully placed as though the wrong step might draw attention from something unseen.

Every doorway they passed felt like a threshold, each room beyond whispering its own story in the language of decay: a collapsed desk piled with brittle files; a calendar frozen decades in the past, its pages curled and brown; a chair tipped onto its side as though its occupant had abandoned it mid-shift, never to return.

Dust motes swirled in the thin shafts of sunlight that sliced through grimy windows, turning the air itself into something tangible, alive. Violet found herself staring at them, almost mesmerised, before forcing her eyes back to the dim corridor ahead.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Rebecca asked at last, her voice barely above a whisper. Even hushed, it seemed to echo, carried along the bare walls until it was uncomfortably loud.

Violet shook her head, the strap of her backpack shifting slightly with the motion. “I’m not sure,” she admitted, her own voice low, careful. “The letter wasn’t specific. But…” She hesitated, her gaze flicking across the shadows where the dust hung thickest. “We’ll know it when we see it.”

The others nodded, though unease lingered in their eyes.

As they pressed deeper into the building, the silence thickened. It was no longer the quiet of an abandoned place but something heavier, almost deliberate, as if the Silver Queen itself was watching them. The peeling walls and sagging ceilings seemed to lean closer, holding their breath, biding their time, waiting for just the right moment to let its secrets slip free.

Time stretched inside the Silver Queen, every corridor blurring into another, every room offering nothing but decay. It felt as though they had been searching for hours, their patience thinning, nerves fraying with each creak of the floorboards. Just as frustration threatened to boil over, Mandy gave a grunt, shoving against a dilapidated cabinet that leaned drunkenly against one wall of what had once been an office. The cabinet scraped across the boards with a protesting groan, dust billowing into the air.

Behind it, the wall looked… different. The plaster was smoother, less stained, as though it had been patched or tampered with long after the rest of the building had begun to rot.

“There’s something here,” Violet breathed, her heart hammering in her chest. She pressed her hands against the wall, her palms sweeping across its surface. The skin of her fingers tingled as they caught on a small indentation, barely visible in the dim light. “I think I’ve found something!”

Her breath quickened as she pressed against it. The panel gave with a faint click, a sound so out of place in the silence that all four of them stiffened. With trembling hands, Violet prised it open, the edges flaking against her nails.

Inside lay a narrow compartment, dark and secret, its contents undisturbed for who knew how long. Violet’s fingers brushed something smooth and cold, and she drew it out: a leather-bound journal, its cover cracked but intact, the initials S.H. pressed faintly into the surface. Beneath it, folded and brittle, was the torn edge of a map.

“Oh my God,” Michelle whispered, leaning in so close Violet could feel the warmth of her breath against her shoulder. “You’ve found it.”

They crowded nearer, the air thick with dust and anticipation. Violet unfolded the map with delicate care, the paper threatening to crumble in her hands. Faded ink traced the outline of Broken Hill and its surrounds, several locations marked with dark, deliberate crosses. She recognised them instantly—the Silver Queen itself, Penrose Park, Silverton. Each place suddenly glowed with a new, unsettling significance.

Her hands shook as she set the map aside and pulled open the journal. The pages crackled in protest, dry with age, releasing a musty scent that filled her nostrils. Black ink, hurried and uneven, sprawled across the paper in a familiar hand.

Sally Harlow.

The missing backpacker.

Her words stared back at them, alive and desperate, written long before her name became a whisper of tragedy in Broken Hill.

Violet’s heart raced so fast she could feel it in her throat. She tightened her grip on the fragile journal, her friends pressing in close around her, the shadows of the abandoned office stretching long over their shoulders.

Violet’s fingers trembled as she turned the brittle pages, each one fragile as autumn leaves, the edges browned and flaking. Her pulse quickened with every line she scanned, the hurried slant of Sally’s handwriting pulling her deeper into the girl’s final days. The entries were raw and vivid—detailed sketches of landscapes, scraps of overheard conversations, restless reflections that shifted from excitement to unease. With each page, the foreboding deepened.

“Listen to this,” Violet whispered, her voice barely steady. She held the journal closer to the thin shaft of sunlight slanting through the cracked window and began to read aloud.

“‘September 15th: The deeper I dig into Broken Hill’s history, the more I’m convinced that there’s a connection between the old mining operations and the disappearances. It’s not just Emily Sullivan. There have been others, scattered throughout the years. Always explorers, always people asking questions. I’m close to something big, I can feel it. But I also feel like I’m being watched. The shadows here seem deeper, more alive somehow.’”

Her voice faltered on the last words. The silence that followed was thick, pressing in on all sides, the dust motes suspended in the air as though holding their breath with the girls.

Mandy swallowed hard, her usual bravado dimmed, while Rebecca drew her arms tightly around herself, her face pale in the half-light. The mention of shadows—alive, watching—echoed too closely the cryptic warnings of the anonymous letter, and further still, the haunting final words attributed to Emily Sullivan that Mr Clarke had shared with the class.

It was as though the voices of the missing—the dead, perhaps—were overlapping, their fears circling back across time.

“This is incredible,” Michelle murmured at last, breaking the silence. Her eyes shone with a mixture of awe and dread as they flicked from the page to Violet’s face. “Sally was definitely onto something. But what?”

Her question lingered like smoke, curling through the room, and Violet felt the weight of it settle in her bones.

The further Violet read, the tighter her chest became. Each entry carried the weight of a mind pushing closer to something forbidden, something that had swallowed Sally whole. The neatness of the early pages gave way to scribbles and jagged lines, the writing hurried and uneven as though scratched down in stolen moments. The words seemed to grow darker with every page, brimming with urgency, with fear.

It was clear now: Sally had stumbled upon something monumental—something she was never meant to uncover. And whatever it was, it had cost her everything.

“Look at this entry,” Rebecca whispered, her usually steady voice taut with unease. She leaned closer, pointing to a page near the back, her fingertip hovering just above the ink.

Violet read the words aloud, her mouth dry. “‘I’ve found the old mine shaft. It goes deeper than anyone realises. There’s something down there, something they’ve been hiding for over a hundred years. I’m going in tomorrow. If I don’t make it back, everything I’ve discovered is hidden in the place where the sun touches the earth at dawn.’”

The room seemed to shrink around them, the shadows lengthening as the words settled into the air. A faint breeze hissed through a cracked windowpane, stirring the dust so that it swirled above the pages like restless ghosts.

Violet’s heart pounded. She turned the next leaf, her fingers trembling, the dry paper rasping under her touch. The final entries were almost illegible, the writing smeared and blotched as though her pen had dug into the page in frantic haste. Whole words blurred into one another, as if Sally had been scribbling in fear of being caught—or worse, chased.

The last page was a mess of smudges, the lines slanting wildly, the ink pooled where it had been pressed too hard. Violet’s eyes raced over the fragments she could decipher, but the sense of panic in the writing mattered more than the words themselves. The journal did not simply end. It broke off, abruptly, violently, leaving the impression of something interrupted.

Her hands shook as she closed the book halfway, the musty scent of old paper rising up like a sigh. Sally’s voice, frantic and unfinished, seemed to echo in her ears.

Mandy leaned over the map. Her finger traced the dark crosses one by one, leaving smudges in the dust. “These places…” she murmured, her voice taut with urgency. “They’re all connected somehow. We need to visit them, figure out what Sally found.”

Rebecca adjusted her glasses, ever the pragmatic one, though Violet saw the tightness in her friend’s jaw. “But we have to be careful,” she said quietly. “Whoever sent that letter wanted us to find this, but they also wanted to stay hidden. There’s a reason for that. A dangerous one.”

The words seemed to thicken the air around them.

The sense of being watched, that lingering paranoia in Sally’s entries, pressed suddenly against Violet’s own skin. The silence of the building was no longer empty; it was crowded with possibility. Every creak of the warped floorboards beneath their feet, every sigh of the wind slipping through the broken windows, made her shoulders tighten. Shadows gathered in the corners like watchers, patient and unseen.

Her heart leapt into her throat when a sharp crack split the silence. Something had fallen in the corridor beyond—an abandoned chair tipping onto the boards with a clatter that echoed through the hollow rooms.

All four girls jolted, breath catching in unison. Mandy swore under her breath. Michelle’s hand shot out, gripping Violet’s wrist so tightly her nails pressed into her skin.

For a long moment, they froze, listening. The sound of their own breathing filled their ears, harsh and uneven. Nothing followed. Just the groan of the building, as though mocking their fear.

Violet forced herself to swallow, her skin prickling with cold despite the warmth of the morning sun filtering in. She couldn’t shake it—the absolute conviction that something had shifted with them in this place, that the Silver Queen was not as empty as it seemed.

“We should go,” Michelle whispered urgently, her eyes darting to the darkened doorway where the noise had come from. “We’ve been here too long already.”

Violet nodded quickly, though her hands shook as she gathered the journal and folded map, sliding both carefully into her backpack. The weight of them pressed against her spine as if reminding her that secrets had a way of following you.

The girls moved towards the doorway in silence, their nerves wound tight as wire. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a warning, every sigh of wind through the fractured windows like a whisper urging them back. Violet’s hand tightened on the strap of her bag, the journal and map inside heavy as lead.

As she pushed the warped door open, the hinges screamed again, the sound echoing far too loudly into the emptiness behind them. Then came another sound—low, ragged, unmistakably human. A groan.

The girls froze, eyes wide, their breaths caught.

From deeper inside the building came the faint scuff of movement, slow and dragging, as though someone—or something—was shifting in the dark. A shadow slid across the far wall, tall and unmistakably male, its outline framed for a moment in the fractured light spilling through a broken window.

Violet’s blood ran cold. Her throat tightened so much she couldn’t breathe. The shadow lingered, wavering, before disappearing back into the gloom.

“Go,” Michelle hissed, shoving hard at Violet’s back, her voice breaking with panic. “Now!”

They stumbled out into the glare of daylight, blinking hard as their eyes adjusted. The sudden brightness should have brought relief, but it didn’t. The air outside carried the same suffocating weight. The wind dragged through the dried grasses around the mine, their brittle stalks rasping together like whispers in a language none of them could understand.

Violet dared a glance back over her shoulder. The black windows stared out, hollow and watchful. For an instant, she thought she saw the shadow again—long and deliberate, framed in the dark of the doorway. Her heart lurched violently in her chest. Then it was gone.

They wheeled their bikes from the fence in a flurry, hands fumbling, tyres crunching against gravel as they mounted. None of them spoke; they didn’t need to. The only sounds were the frantic clatter of pedals, the rasp of dry air in their lungs, and the knowledge—each of them carried it—that they had not been alone in the Silver Queen.

By the time the streets of Broken Hill came into view, the normality of backyards and verandahs should have steadied them. But the weight of what they carried—the map, the journal, and now the memory of that shadow—clung like a haunted memory.

Violet slowed her bike just long enough to glance at the others. They avoided her eyes, each locked in their own thoughts, but she knew they felt it too. The pact they had made that morning bound them tighter than words, yet already it felt like a chain. They had crossed a threshold, and whatever was waiting for them next, there would be no turning back.

As Violet wheeled her bike into her yard, she reached down to touch the bag, her fingers brushing the shape of the journal. For a fleeting second it gave her courage.

But even as she stepped towards the safety of her front door, the unease gnawed at her. She couldn’t shake it—the groan, the shadow, the sense that the Silver Queen had not let them go unseen.

Something had been inside. Something had watched. And something would be waiting still.