Vol 4 Prologue (2/2)

The ball the children played as lying in a corner of the square The basketball net set up in front of a stone house creaked in the mountain winds

But they were gone

Every last one of theone

After the trepidation came sadness

He did not knohy they had disappeared

He did not know if they were even alive

Maybe everyone had siether

But no reason could hold back the sadness welling up inside

People who should have been there were not

Voices that he should have heard were gone

These two siulfed his thoughts

The post to see if anyone was there

And as he began to surrender, let down by the total stillness,

He saw so out of the corner of his eye

The ure, his mind went blank

It was one of the stone houses in the village

The old wicket gate opened, and eed—

A terrified little girl One he had seen often in the village

”Mr Postman…?”

The pigtailed girl, her face streaked with tears, ran up to the fa

Several days later, the incident made headlines in the newspapers

The surviving girl testified that the village had been attacked, and the cluttered state of several houses added credibility to her claim

But the fact that fifty people disappeared overnight, without leaving so much as a drop of blood, led people to murmur that this was, perhaps, not the work of humans

They were abducted by aliens

They were sucked through a tear in space-time

They committed mass suicide

They were attacked by people living in a fantastic underground world

Baseless rumors like 'There was a half-drunk cup of coffee and a s way to evenlabeled by some as a 'Modern-Day Mary Celeste'

Not only that, soan to hypothesize,

Perhaps this was the work of vampires

But this rumor alone had some basis in fact

The fact was never revealed to the media, but so believable was the rumor that it spread even to other countries

The fact was that on the neck of the lone survivor were two little s into her

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