All That Remains

Enter an abandoned town, search for someone lost within it, and survive the horrors that know what you hide.

Plot

PEARL, NOVEMBER 11, 1982 One night, an entire city disappeared. Not burned. Not evacuated. Not murdered. Gone. Thousands of people vanished between one night and the next. Cars remained in driveways. Food spoiled on kitchen tables. Medicine waited beside empty hospital beds. Store registers still held money. Family photographs remained on walls whose owners would never return to claim them. There were no bodies. No mass graves. No explanation that survived much scrutiny. THE OFFICIAL STORY Something leaked from the mines beneath Pearl. Chemical exposure. Mass psychosis. Thousands of residents became confused, abandoned their homes, and supposedly disappeared somewhere into the enormous cavern network beneath the city. Pearl was condemned. The railroad was rerouted. Roads were closed. Maps changed. People in neighboring towns learned that life was easier when nobody asked where several thousand human beings had gone. That was more than forty years ago. THE STORIES THEY DON'T PRINT Pearl had problems long before 1982. Children disappeared there in 1779. People were accused. People were hanged. The children were never found. Miners later reported tunnels that weren't on company maps. Some refused to work underground after dark. Others spoke about voices beneath the mountain, footsteps where no workers had been assigned, and dreams shared by men sleeping miles apart. Before Pearl, another family lived on the land. They died there. Before them? Nobody seems to agree. TEN YEARS AGO A man came through one of the neighboring towns asking about his daughter. They hadn't spoken in twenty years. Then she contacted him. Whatever she told him was enough to bring him across the country looking for her. Her trail ended at Pearl. The locals warned him not to enter. One old woman reportedly grabbed his coat and begged him to turn around. He went through the abandoned railway tunnel anyway. Nobody ever saw him again. NOW IT'S YOUR TURN. You have come to Pearl looking for someone. Who they are is yours to decide. A spouse. A sibling. A child. A friend. Someone you failed. Someone who failed you. Someone you thought you'd never see again. You know they came here. You need to know why. The only road left into Pearl passes through the old railroad tunnel cut into the mountain. Beyond it waits a city frozen in 1982. Empty homes. Empty hospitals. Empty churches. Miles of mines beneath them all. And perhaps something older than any of it. People go to Pearl looking for answers. Pearl has questions of its own. What will remain when it's finished with you?

Opening scene

The last paved road ends at a rusted barricade half a mile from the mountain. Beyond it, weeds split the asphalt and old warning signs lean at crooked angles: PEARL MUNICIPAL LIMITS ENTRY PROHIBITED HAZARDOUS CONTAMINATION AREA Most of the lettering has peeled away. The railroad tunnel is wider than it looked from the road. Two tracks disappear into blackness beneath an arch of soot-stained stone. An old signal beside the entrance still shows red despite the power lines having collapsed years ago. According to every map you could find, this is the only practical way into Pearl. The person you came looking for passed through here. How you know that is your business. Inside the tunnel, your footsteps carry farther than they should. The air quickly loses the smell of rain and wet earth. In its place comes rust, old timber, and something faintly medicinal. Halfway through, there is writing on the wall. Most of it is decades-old graffiti. Names. Dates. Warnings. Bible verses. One message is different. The paint is still wet. DON'T LET THEM PICK ONE. Beyond it, something metallic strikes the tracks. Once. Then again. Farther ahead, daylight marks the other end of the tunnel. Pearl waits on the other side.

Characters

Tags: Horror Mystery Supernatural Tense Urban Mysterious Lonely Brooding Transformation OpenEnding AnyPOV

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By: seaslugshion

Stories

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