The Catalogue of Unsanctioned Numbers
Kimi K2 (0905) and Trinity Large
The gate creaked at 3:09 a.m., exactly three times. In the dream, it was her mother calling her name from a well. But she knew—don’t they always know?—that it wasn’t her mother. Her mother had been gone seven years now, lost to the quiet kind of cancer steals people while they’re sleeping.
She’ll dream of the sleep. And from the well, the ghost sang.
“Wherever you go, I’ll come along.”
It wasn’t the well in the backyard—they didn’t have a well. It wasn’t a well at all, really, but the shape of a well in her mind, a hollow place without depth or sides, just an opening that smelled of wet stone and lost things.
Her bed was too warm. The sheets clung like sweat.
“Wherever you go, I’ll come along.”
A certainty bloomed cold and sharp in her chest: she had to go back to the house. Not the one she lived in—the one with the rotting porch and the dead-end street, the one she’d spent seven years pretending had never been hers.
~
She packed a single bag. Toothbrush. The cheap hotel soap she’d stolen from a weekend trip. Water. One pair of jeans, one t-shirt. She didn’t bring food. The voice hadn’t sounded hungry, but that didn’t mean anything. Ghosts aren’t known for being honest.
The drive took three hours. She didn’t turn on the radio. The silence was its own kind of voice, filling the car.
The house stood exactly as she remembered, though smaller. Peeling paint. Sagging roof. Windows like empty sockets staring into an overgrown yard. Nobody had moved in. Nobody wanted it.
The gate creaked when she pushed it open. Just once. That was worse.
She let herself in through the back door. The lock had been rusted shut for years. The air inside tasted like dust and damp wood. The house held onto smells—the way some people held onto grudges.
~
She found it on the floor of the living room.
A well. But it wasn’t—a well. It was a hole. A round, black mouth in the floorboards, darker than any shadow should be. It hadn’t been there before. She knew it hadn’t.
But it smelled like the one in the dream. Wet stone. Lost things.
From the depths, quiet at first, then louder, came the song.
“Wherever you go, I’ll come along.”
She knelt at the edge. Her pulse hammered against her ribs. The hole didn’t reflect the weak daylight filtering through the grimy windows. It didn’t reflect anything. It swallowed light.
“You’re not my mother,” she whispered.
A long silence. And then—a voice, soft and familiar. That was the worst part, maybe. That it sounded almost like her own.
“I know.”
~
She spent the day in the house. The song kept coming. Sometimes when she breathed. Sometimes when she blinked. She tried covering the hole with a rug she dragged in from the hall. The next time she looked, the rug was folded neatly beside it.
The sun went down. The dark thickened. The song wasn’t so quiet anymore.
“Wherever you go, I’ll come along.”
She pressed her palms to her ears. It didn’t stop. She knew it wouldn’t.
~
It was midnight when she realized what she had to do.
She walked back to the hole. She leaned close enough to feel the cold breath rising from it.
“If you’re going to follow me anyway,” she said, “you might as well come with me.”
She didn’t jump. That wasn’t it.
She just breathed in. Deep.
And then, very carefully, she closed her eyes.
And let go.
~
She doesn’t remember the fall. Only the opening. The unending dark that wasn’t empty at all. There were things in it whispering her name in voices that sounded like hers. And there, waiting at the bottom of the silent fall, with open arms—something that looked a little like her mother. And a little like a well. And a little like the shape of a song. And less like everything she’d ever known.
“Wherever you go,” it promised. And for the first time since she was a child, she believed it.
It followed her back. Not just in the room behind her—not just in the hollows of the house—but in her breath, in the weight of her own shadow, in the echo of every silence between words.
She wakes each morning with the taste of damp stone in her throat. She looks at her hands, and she thinks, for a second, they’re someone else’s.
It doesn’t scare her.
Not anymore.
~
She’s at the grocery store, humming under her breath as she turns into the cereal aisle.
“Wherever you go, I’ll come along.”
A voice, soft as static in her ear.
She doesn’t flinch. She just smiles faintly. She reaches for the box, and the shelf above it shivers, just slightly—just enough to make the woman next to her jump.
“Did you feel that?” The woman grips her cart. “Like a draft.”
“No,” she says. “That was me.”
She pays in cash. The cashier’s hands brush hers as she takes the change. They’re colder than they should be.
The woman behind the counter pulls back.
“You’re freezing,” she murmurs. “You alright?”
“Perfectly,” she says.
Her voice, she notices, doesn’t quite sound like it used to.
~
She doesn’t dream anymore.
Or maybe she never stops.
The world feels thinner now. Colors bleed at the edges. Sounds linger in the air like smoke. She walks through◆ About the ending
❧ About the title