The wind howled outside a now deserted street, making the windows rattle. The battered signboard creaked and swayed on rusted hinges:
"FERRY LANE ORPHANAGE"
Letters peeling. Paint faded. But still standing under the moonlight.
Inside, silence blanketed the halls, save for the low ticking of a wall clock. It read:
12:43 a.m.
Room 17, a dimly lit room on the third floor, a lone glow flickered from an aging desktop computer.
A young boy, around seventeen, sat hunched forward—glasses slightly crooked, his jaw tight with focus. Every other person in the building had long fallen asleep. But not him.
The green hue of old web code lit up his sharp, pale features. Around him, scattered pages, sketches, and pinned photographs crowded the walls. It wasn't just a desk—it was a detailed sign of obsession.
Above the screen, a large black-and-white photo:
A man in a crisp black suit, smiling. His father.
A former Heldale police detective.
Although it had been years ago,he and his father had once lived in Heldale but he was brought to this orphanage in a small community after the death of his father.
He literally grew up and lived all his life here within the old crampy walls of the building. He had went through the few belongings he had stored with him—his dad's. It rendered him with insights on what his dad had been chasing way before his demise.
His firm resolve to uncover the truth his father had been pursuing and prove that his father's elaborate speculation of a killer robot that had been haunting every parts of Heldale was true. No one believed him then.
"A killer that's not human."
That had been his father's final theory on his journal. The Police force called him paranoid. Said he had gone mad.
But the boy knew better.
His fingers danced across the keyboard, clicking through files, encrypted directories, scanned images of incident reports long erased from public record. Hidden behind forgotten bulletin boards and outdated domains.
One thread connected them all:
The shut-down lab.
Funded generously by Mayor Ronald Myers multiple times than any other organizations operating in Heldale at that time. The Mayor was most popular for generous fundings of many enterprises in the town and the lab was no exception.
However, it was shut down years ago under this same Mayor's authorization which was amusing. The reasons or motives behind it were never clearly stated on the town's news headlines.
Moreover, the scientists who all worked at the lab were never heard of or seen again in the town.
The boy's eyes narrowed.
> "Why fund a lab just to bury it?"
The deeper he dug, the more disturbing the puzzle became. The year the lab was shut down was the same year the brutal murder cases were recorded—in the year 1997.
First victim: a teenage girl, 1997, deep stab wounds, found at an open square outside Heldale Supermarket.
Second: two men in their late forties, limbs separated from their bodies, thick blood mixed in the waters pulled out of the pond.
Third: a middle aged woman who people had said worked at the town's mill factory and was on a night shift that day, Her dead body was found the next morning butchered and shredded in small fleshy pieces inside the mill's grinder.
The most disturbing part of the incident was that blood was already splattered on the ground in front of the grinding machine. It rounded up to the conclusion that she might have sustained an intense injury beforehand and might have been pushed into the machine.
Each image was printed, pinned to the wall above his computer. Neatly arranged in order of the timelines of each victim's death. Year by year. No witnesses. No public mourning. No justice.
The haunting thread tied to the whole situation was that there were no witnesses who had attested to the horrific scenes. More like no one in town remembered those victims anymore.
It was as though the town had been drugged or silenced. Eyes shut. Mouths sewn.
Only one person had ever truly spoken to him about it—the insider. An anonymous person who claimed to have seen what happened at the mill factory. He had helped the boy for months, providing names, hints, even footages—but vanished after a final call:
"I'm done. Heldale... it's cursed. If you're smart, kid, don't go looking for ghosts. Not the ones in Heldale."
The call cut off that night. The line disconnected. The boy never heard from him again.
But he couldn't stop now. Not after everything. Not with the body counts rising again. The concealment of each murder.
The recent trash files of the police department's office he had been able to hack into of mysterious killings still left unsolved. The estranged bloodthirsty robot.
His eyes concentrated on the images of the laboratory. In the grainy photo: men in white coats. One stood out — slightly hunched, thick glasses, clipboard in hand. The image distorted, flickering before it stabilized again.
He rose slowly, walking to the photo of his father. He touched the photo gently.
"I'm going to Heldale, Dad," he whispered. "I'm going to finish what you started."
His eyes burning with a quiet resolve.
"You weren't crazy,. And I'm going to prove it. "