The smoky scent that swept through the memorial ceremony was not an isolated incident.
Over the following two weeks, reports began trickling in from around Ashford Hollow, small and strange enough that most people dismissed them individually, but which Walter Prescott, ever the careful documentarian, began collecting with growing concern. A woman two streets from the mill reported waking to the sound of old machinery running, though the mill itself had been powerless for decades. A teenager walking home late one evening swore he heard voices calling out from inside the boarded up building, faint and overlapping, the way a crowd might sound from a great distance. Diane Bennett called Prescott directly, her voice shaking, to report a dream in which she had seen her son standing at the mill's broken front gate, looking healthy and unharmed, beckoning her to come find him.
"It's exactly the pattern we saw with Emma," Cassidy said, when Prescott relayed the reports during their next call. "The dreams, the sounds, the sense that something's trying to draw people back in. It's reacting to the memorial."
"I believe it is," Agatha agreed, her expression grave even through the grainy video connection. "And I believe, based on the intensity of these reports compared to anything we witnessed at Hollow Lane, that we may be dealing with something considerably more agitated than Thomas ever was. Thomas, after all, was anchored to one family's specific grief. What haunts that mill has spent ninety years absorbing an entire town's accumulated pain. I suspect it does not experience threat, or hope, in quite so contained a manner."
Emma felt a familiar tightness settle in her chest, the same wary alertness she remembered from the weeks leading up to the Ashgrove house confrontation. "Do you think it's dangerous to wait any longer?" she asked. "If it's already agitated enough to be showing up in people's dreams and around town, maybe giving it more time to build up isn't actually the safer choice."
Agatha considered this carefully. "That is a fair concern," she admitted. "I had hoped to give the town more time to settle into what the memorial accomplished before asking anyone to face the mill directly. But if the entity is already responding this actively, I agree we may not have the luxury of as much patience as I originally hoped."
Diane's Dream
Diane Bennett arrived at Prescott's house the following afternoon, her face pale and drawn, clutching a folded piece of paper in trembling hands.
"I need to show you something," she said, once Emma, Cassidy, and Agatha had gathered around Prescott's kitchen table. "I had another dream last night. Different from the others. Cole spoke to me directly this time, not just standing there smiling the way he usually does in these dreams. He told me something, and I wrote it down the second I woke up so I wouldn't forget any of it."
She unfolded the paper carefully, her handwriting hurried and uneven across the page. Mom, tell them it's not just me. There are others here, older than me, from a long time ago. They're tired. They want someone to know they're still here, that they never actually left. Please, someone needs to come and actually see us, not just build something outside where we can't reach it.
The room went very quiet. Emma read the note twice, feeling the weight of it settle heavily in her chest.
"Others," she said slowly. "Not just Cole and Priya. Older ones too."
"The fire victims," Agatha said quietly. "If my theory about the anchor is correct, and if this entity has genuinely absorbed the accumulated grief of every tragedy this mill has caused across ninety years, it stands to reason that whatever remains of those original eleven workers might still be trapped within it as well, alongside Cole and Priya."
"That would explain the note," Prescott said, his voice tight with a fresh wave of grief. "It's not just asking us to help two missing teenagers. It's asking us to actually go inside and address ninety years of accumulated loss directly, not simply from a memorial built outside the building where it happened."
Emma felt the shape of what awaited them sharpening into focus, heavier and more complicated than anything she'd expected even after everything Agatha had warned her about. "Then the memorial wasn't the whole answer," she said. "It was necessary. It mattered, and I still believe that completely. But whatever's trapped inside that mill needs something more direct too. It needs us to actually go find it, the way we went and found Thomas in that basement."
Preparing to Enter
Over the following days, the group worked quickly to prepare for what now felt like an unavoidable next step. Agatha revised the ritual language they had used at Hollow Lane, adapting it carefully to address not a single grieving family, but an entire community of workers whose deaths had gone unacknowledged for nearly a century. Father Callahan, who had remained in Ashford Hollow longer than originally planned, helped craft an opening blessing broad enough to speak to eleven different lives lost across decades of neglect, rather than the singular, focused grief of Thomas Ashgrove's death.
Diane Bennett and Arjun Nair both insisted on being present when the time came, despite Emma's careful, honest warning about the risks involved. "I've already lost my son to that place," Diane said firmly, when Emma raised the concern. "I am not staying home while strangers go in to try to bring him back. If there's any chance at all of seeing him again, even to say goodbye properly, I need to be there."
Mrs. Foster, too, insisted on joining, despite her age and the physical difficulty the old mill's condition would likely present. "My grandfather has waited ninety years for someone to come find him," she said simply. "I do not intend to let him wait a single day longer than absolutely necessary, and I certainly don't intend to send strangers to do it while I sit safely at home."
By the end of the week, the group that would eventually walk into the Ashford Hollow mill had grown considerably larger than the small, tight circle that had once descended into the Ashgrove basement. Emma, Cassidy, Nana Ruth, Agatha, Father Callahan, Walter Prescott, Diane Bennett, Arjun Nair, and Mrs. Foster, nine people in total, each carrying their own piece of the grief they intended to finally, collectively, help lay to rest.
"Nine people is considerably more than we had at Hollow Lane," Cassidy observed quietly, the night before they planned to go, as the whole group gathered one final time to review the plan. "Do you think that's actually going to help, or is it just going to make things harder to control if something goes wrong?"
Emma thought about the answer carefully before responding, drawing on everything she'd learned in the months since first walking through the Ashgrove gate alone.
"I think," she said finally, "that the entire reason any of this worked the first time was because we refused to let anyone face it alone. If this mill really is holding onto ninety years of grief from an entire town, then I think it needs exactly this, more people, more voices, more of the community it actually hurt standing together to finally say enough. We're not walking in there to overpower something with force. We're walking in to make sure it finally understands, beyond any possible doubt, that it isn't alone anymore either, and that it never had to be."