We Don’t Talk About This

“Some truths aren’t heavy because they’re big—they’re heavy because no one else is carrying them with you.”

The colours were gone.

Not faded. Not dimmed. Simply erased from existence, as if they had never painted the walls with impossible light, never torn reality open like wet paper. The memory of them remained, vivid and violent behind my eyes, but the physical evidence had vanished without a trace. No scorch marks on the metal wall. No lingering glow. No proof that anything extraordinary had happened at all.

The girl was gone.

Not just missing or lost—the kind of gone that gets reported on the news, that prompts searches and posters and worried faces. She was gone-gone. The kind of gone that leaves no trail to follow. The kind that can't be found because the place she'd been taken to wasn't on any map. Wasn't even in our world. She had been erased not just from her life but from reality itself, pulled through a doorway to somewhere beyond understanding, beyond reach, beyond help.

The man was gone.

His absence felt strangely more significant than his presence had been. While he had stood there, watching us with those empty eyes, he had seemed almost ordinary—a shape, a silhouette, a figure of roughly human proportions. But now that he had vanished, the memory of him expanded, grew larger and more terrible. The way he had looked directly at me and decided I wasn't worth the trouble. The absolute certainty that what he was doing was permitted, expected, right.

And the night settled back in like a heavy blanket — scratchy and sour, and too big for the smallness I felt inside. Darkness reclaimed the corners of our shelter, pooling in the places where the colour’s light had briefly banished it. But it felt different now. Tainted. As if the darkness itself had witnessed what happened and changed in response, becoming denser, more watchful.

The wind outside stopped completely, as if it had only ever existed for him. As if it had been his breath, his presence, creating currents in the air that had nothing to do with weather or season or the normal movements of the world. The sudden stillness felt wrong, artificial. A held breath. A waiting.

The silence didn't feel like safety.

It felt like someone had shut a lid on the world and left us inside, trapped with the memory of what we'd seen. Like being buried alive with only our thoughts for company, and those thoughts were too big, too strange, too frightening to be contained within the fragile shells of our skulls.

I didn't move.

Not right away.

My legs had gone stiff from crouching, pins and needles prickling along my calves and feet, but I didn't uncurl them. My muscles had locked, frozen in the position they'd held while witnessing the impossible. As if movement itself might draw attention back to us, might remind whatever forces had been at work that they'd left something unfinished. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around Ribbons' neck that I could feel her seams pressing into my skin, the worn fabric bunching between my knuckles. I thought about letting go, just to give her a break — but I didn't.

Because I needed to hold something.

Something soft. Something dumb. Something that hadn't seen what I'd seen. Something that belonged entirely to the world I'd known before tonight, before everything changed. Before I learned that reality had tears in it, doors that shouldn't exist, people who weren't people at all.

Mack sat down again, slowly, like all the bones had gone out of him. Like his body had suddenly realised it was made of flesh and blood, not stone and steel. Like the weight of what we'd witnessed had physically crushed him, compressing him into something smaller than he'd been before.

He slid back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms resting on top. A position that could have looked casual, relaxed, under different circumstances. Now it looked defensive. Protective. The posture of someone trying to make themselves a smaller target. His breath was shallow but even, like he was counting each one without letting it show. Inhale for three, exhale for three. A rhythm to cling to when everything else had come unmoored.

We didn't speak.

Not for a long time.

What was there to say? What words existed in our vocabulary, in our experience, that could possibly contain what we had just witnessed? Language itself seemed inadequate, a child's tool trying to capture something vastly beyond its capacity.

The air inside the old building felt thick. Heavy. Still buzzing in a way that had nothing to do with electricity or sound. As if the colours had left something behind—not an object, not a trace, but an alteration in the fundamental properties of the space it had occupied. A residue of wrongness that couldn't be seen or touched but could be felt, pressing against the skin, seeping through pores, infiltrating lungs with each breath.

It buzzed inside my skin.

Like a leftover vibration from something wrong. Something that didn't belong in our world, something that had violated the natural order simply by existing. A discord in the music of reality. A false note that continued to ring long after the instrument had been silenced.

I looked at Mack.

He didn't look at me.

He stared at the floor between his knees — not blinking, not blinking, not blinking. His eyes fixed on a point that might have been a crack in the concrete or might have been nothing at all. Just somewhere to direct his gaze that wasn't the wall where the colours had been. That wasn't my face, which might have reflected the terror he was trying so hard to control. His jaw was clenched, the muscles twitching now and then, like they wanted to say something but wouldn't let themselves. Like words were building up inside him, pressing against teeth and tongue, desperate for release but forbidden from emerging.

Then he whispered.

Barely a sound. So soft I might have missed it if I hadn't been watching his face so intently, desperate for some signal, some guidance on how to process what we'd just experienced.

“We can't tell anyone about this.”

The words sat between us like a brick. Solid, immovable, undeniable. They fell into the silence and settled there, creating a new reality of their own—a pact, a shared burden, a secret too heavy for children to bear but too dangerous to release.

Not a suggestion.

Not a maybe.

Just truth.

Final. Flat. Like a rule that had always existed — we'd just never known it before. Like a law of nature, as fundamental and unquestionable as gravity or time. As if the knowledge had been downloaded directly into his consciousness, bypassing the need for reason or explanation.

I nodded.

Not because I agreed — not really — but because there wasn't anything else to do. Because the alternative was too frightening to contemplate. Because deep down, in the place where certainties lived, I knew he was right.

Who would we tell?

Grandma? Who had left us here, who had her own secrets, her own burdens, her own reasons for hiding us away?

Mum? Who had disappeared into her own troubles, who had abandoned us to whatever fate awaited, who might not even be able to find us if she tried?

The police? With their notepapers and protocols and need for evidence? With their requirements for logic and sense and explanations that fit into the narrow boxes of the world they understood?

And what would we even say?

That a man dragged a girl through a hole in the world? That colours danced where they shouldn't, that physics bent like rubber, that reality itself had proven to be as fragile as tissue paper?

That the wind disappeared when he left? That the building remembered? That something fundamental had changed in the composition of the air, the properties of matter, the nature of existence itself?

That he looked at me and I didn't scream because somehow I knew it wouldn't matter? That there was something in those dark eyes that recognised me not as a person, not as a child, but as an object catalogued and dismissed? That he had marked me somehow, seen me, and decided—for reasons I would never understand—that I wasn't worth collecting?

No one would believe us.

They'd say it was a dream. Or a story. Or a trick of the dark. They'd say we were confused, frightened, making things up to cope with being abandoned in a strange place. They'd say we had fallen asleep and shared a nightmare, influenced by the spooky surroundings and the stress of the day.

But it wasn't.

It was real.

And it had left something behind. Not a footprint. Not a note. Not a physical trace that could be photographed or collected or analysed. Nothing so simple, so provable, so easily explained away.

Something deeper.

Something inside.

A knowledge that couldn't be unlearned. A vision that couldn't be unseen. A fundamental rewriting of everything I had believed about how the world worked, what was possible, what existed beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception. My reality had been fractured, and the pieces would never fit together quite the same way again.

Mack pulled his jumper over his knees and turned slightly away from me. Not rejection—protection. As if by breaking the line of sight between us, he could somehow shield me from whatever might still be lingering, whatever might still be watching. Or perhaps he simply needed to hide his own face, to have a moment of privacy with the fear that I knew was coursing through him as surely as it was through me.

I crawled back onto the mattress, careful not to let the springs squeak. Each movement felt deliberate, exaggerated, as if my body had forgotten how to move naturally. The mattress dipped beneath my weight, the familiar sensation strangely comforting in its mundanity. At least some things still behaved as they should.

The cold was worse now — not sharper, but more settled. It had crept into my clothes, my hair, my bones. A chill that seemed to emanate not from the outside air but from within, as if my core temperature had been permanently lowered by proximity to something not of this world. As if part of me had been pulled through the colours too, leaving behind a hollow space where warmth should be.

I lay on my side and tucked Ribbons under my chin. Her familiar scent—dust and fabric softener and the indefinable smell of something long loved—offered a thin thread of comfort. A reminder of the before-time. The time when the world made sense, when reality was solid and dependable, when doors stayed doors and walls stayed walls and people stayed where they belonged.

The old building creaked once. A long, low groan in the metal above. Not the wind. Not the night settling. Not the ordinary noises of an old building cooling as night deepened. Something else. Something intentional, almost sentient.

Just the building remembering.

Recording in its beams and joists and rusted panels what had transpired within its walls. Adding this night to the chronicle of strange occurrences it had witnessed, collected, stored away in whatever memory old places possess. Perhaps it had seen this before. Perhaps that was why it had been abandoned—not because the mine had failed, not because jobs had been lost, but because something had happened here that couldn't be explained, couldn't be forgotten, couldn't be reconciled with the orderly functioning of a normal workplace.

I didn't cry.

Not then.

Though the pressure built behind my eyes, the familiar ache of tears gathering but not falling. They wouldn't come. As if my body knew that ordinary grief, ordinary fear, ordinary responses were inadequate to what had happened. As if weeping was a luxury reserved for normal tragedies, normal losses, normal terrors.

I just lay there with my eyes wide open. Until the world pretended it hadn't changed.

But I had.

And I knew — without words, without reason — that what I saw that night would never leave me. That it had altered something fundamental in my understanding, my perception, my place in the universe. That I would carry it with me always, a secret too strange to share, too heavy to set down.

Even if I never spoke of it. Especially because I never spoke of it.

The silence would give it power, would let it grow in the dark of my mind, would allow it to take root and spread until it coloured everything I saw, everything I thought, everything I believed. Until the world was divided not into safe and dangerous, good and bad, known and unknown, but into before and after. Before the colours. After the girl. Before the dark-eyed man. After the knowledge that reality was thin, permeable, vulnerable.

Mack stirred on the mattress, his breathing changing rhythm as he moved.

“You awake?” he whispered, his voice rough with fatigue or emotion or both.

“Yeah,” I replied, not turning to look at him.

“Do you…” he began, then stopped. Swallowed audibly. Tried again. “Do you think it was real?”

The question hung between us, heavy with implications. Was he asking because he doubted? Because he needed confirmation? Because he was hoping, desperately, that we had shared a dream rather than witnessed something impossible?

“Yes,” I said simply. Because there was no other answer I could give. Because lying would have been worse than acknowledging the truth, however terrifying that truth might be.

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: “I think... I think it happens a lot.”

I turned to look at him then. He looked older somehow. Changed. The child I had known replaced by someone who had seen too much, who knew too much, who carried a burden too heavy for his age.

“What do you mean?” I asked, though part of me already knew. Already understood what he was trying to say.

“I think... people go missing. All the time. And no one finds them because…” He trailed off, unable or unwilling to complete the thought.

“Because they're not here anymore,” I finished for him. “They're somewhere else. Somewhere we can't go.”

He nodded, a small, tight movement. His hands were clenched, knuckles white with tension.

“Do you think anyone knows?” I asked. “Grown-ups, I mean. Do you think anyone knows this happens?”

Mack looked at me, really looked at me for the first time since the colours had vanished. His eyes were bloodshot, the blue of his irises standing out starkly against the red. But they were clear. Focused. Certain.

“Some do,” he said. “That's why we're here.”

The words settled into me with the weight of absolute truth. Of course. Of course that was why Grandma had brought us here, had left us in this specific building, this specific corner of nowhere. Not just to hide us from whatever was happening back home, whatever had made that terrible bang that had split the morning in two.

But because she knew. Somehow, she knew. About the empty-eyed man. About the colours. About the girl. Not the specific details, perhaps, but about the general shape of the danger. The nature of the threat. The fact that the world was not what it seemed, and that sometimes things came through from elsewhere. Things that collected people, like specimens. Things that looked human but weren't.

Things that, for some reason, might be interested in us.

“What do we do now?” I asked, the question sounding small and lost in the vastness of the room, in the enormity of what we faced.

Mack was quiet for a long time, thinking. Then he said, with a calmness that belied the fear I knew he must be feeling: “We wait. Like Grandma said. We stay here. We don't make noise. We don't draw attention.”

“For how long?”

He looked away for a long time.

“Until it's safe,” he said finally.

But we both knew the truth, unspoken but undeniable.

It would never be safe again.

Not really.

Not now that we knew.