The Plot Calls #10 : "Silent Specter"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Natalie Specter was brilliant—unquestionably so. Her professors called her the most promising scholar they’d ever had, and even her peers knew she could outthink them without trying. But she never submitted her papers for publication. She didn’t enter competitions. She didn’t attend panels. She watched them all pass her by.

“They’re not ready for my work,” she’d say with a shrug. “I’m not either. Not yet.”

She believed what she said. She had to. Because if she didn’t, she’d have to admit something worse—that she was terrified of being seen. Not of rejection. Of recognition. Of what comes after.

To be seen meant being asked to show up again. To be consistent. To be responsible for her brilliance—things she had already been doing without awareness.

Natalie sat in the back of lectures. She deleted half-finished submissions the day before deadlines. She made excuses about her “process.” She told herself that timing was everything—and right now wasn’t her time.

One late evening, frustrated with her own excuses, but more frustrated with the potential outcome of turning in her exemplary work, Natalie wandered into the basement archives—her favorite place to hide.

The main library annex, a place she knew well, had a door she’d never noticed before. It wasn’t labeled. She felt like it shouldn’t be there.

The door was open. It was inviting her.

Inside, she found shelves filled with forgotten documents and outdated microfilm. Fluorescents flickered overhead. And in the back corner—near the wall with exposed pipes and dust-coated storage boxes—she saw something pulsing faintly. A soft shimmer. A dim glow.

Then, she saw it—a patch of dark violet-black soil. In the center, a porcelain hand reaching upward.

Natalie didn’t speak. She didn’t gasp. She sighed, relieved. As if by instinct, Natalie folded her handwritten draft—her boldest, most unapologetic paper—and placed it into the porcelain palm.

The hand sank. So did the light.

The next day, no one spoke to her. No one greeted her in the halls. Her name didn’t appear on group emails. She slipped through crowds without being noticed.

It was… peaceful.

She could hide without guilt. She could think without pressure. She could live without being seen.

She whispered, “This is what I always wanted.”

But then, weeks later, she tried to reconnect. She asked a classmate to coffee.

He blinked and said, “Do we know each other?”

“I—I sit right behind you,” she replied.

He furrowed his brow. “You’re just so easy to miss.”

He turned and walked away.

Natalie stared, heart pounding.

The next day, she tried again—with a professor she admired.

“You were in my seminar last year?” they asked politely. “I’m sorry—I don’t remember you.”

Each attempt at connection made her feel more exposed. Not seen—misseen. As though she had never mattered.

In anger, she returned to the annex. “This is what people do to me,” she whispered, placing her student ID into the soil. “They require me to earn their attention. To earn their friendship. Why do I have to prove I’m worth seeing?”

The soil accepted the offering. The glow dimmed.

From then on, she stopped trying.

She told herself: “I’m safer unknown. The world never deserved me anyway.”

But with time, her thoughts dulled. Her writing stalled. She stopped challenging herself. She told herself she was free—but really, she was fading.

When she caught her reflection, she flinched. Not because she looked ugly. Because she barely looked there.

Then, one evening, she saw him.

A boy she’d admired from afar for months—her quiet crush. They crossed paths in the stairwell.

She smiled.

Confused, her crush looked around, then back at Natalie. He forced a slight smile. Then, maneuvered around her—awkwardly.

“Am I not enough?” Natalie asked, crestfallen.

Her crush paused.

She covered her mouth when she realized she was seen.

Her crush shrugged, then sighed, pausing beside her. “You aren’t enough. You don’t want to be.”

Natalie frowned. “I said hi.”

“I’m sorry, Natalie, you’re a few months too late. We smiled, winked, grinned and passed each other for months. I was never invited. You never approached,” he said, walking away.

“But, I—I, I,” Natalie stuttered, fidgeting with her delicate hands.

“I understand, and I’m sorry. Trust is built on consistency. I can only trust that you’ll consistently hide until you have an excuse not to,” her crush said. “I’d rather share my love than split your pain. How can we share our strengths—our truths—when you avoid yours?”

Natalie stared in disbelief.

“Everyone’s like that…” she muttered.

“Like what?” he asked.

“We all hide. We’re all fake. We do things we don’t want, so we can do the thing we know we should, way later. That’s why we work jobs we can’t stand at companies we hate with people we secretly despise until we can retire. The security is better than living. It’s how everyone, everywhere, is,” Natalie said, hollow, empty, but certain.

“Being everyone sounds exhausting. I’m just one lazy, limited, weird person. See you around,” he said, walking away.

Natalie collapsed under the weight of her almost-life. Trembling. Alone.

“I would rather be liked for who I’m not than rejected for who I am. It’s not fair. If he knew I was watching why didn’t he approach me.” Then, something inside of her mind clicked.

“He was giving me a chance to be someone better. I failed. That’s what I am.”

Something in her hollowed further. She didn’t fear being misunderstood. She feared emotional effort.

“It’s easier to have a pet than deal with a secure man. It’s easier to have a lesser man I can boss around and exploit than a man who requires me to show up and accept his humanity. I’m a fraud. I’ll always be a fraud. I’m too scared to change.”

Natalie paused. Then she had a thought: the One Below sees her. The One Below asks for things, not for her. She can give that. She can give her papers, her thoughts, her combs, her brushes, her clothes, her photos, her phone, and her treasured collectibles.

The One Below didn’t require her to show up, it didn’t require her to be present, it didn’t require her to be real. It was like a man who only wanted sex, if she gave it what it wanted, she can use it for something she didn’t need.

Natalie shuddered. “That’s what I am. Cowardice garbage. Filth.”

The bell rang and she stood in waves of people passing by—an ocean of faces who neither saw nor cared. They simply maneuvered around her.

“I could be someone else. I could be myself,” she thought, then Natalie heard whisper with no voice.

“I can do that tomorrow,” she whispered with a hollow smile.

Natalie felt something leave her body—a light, imperceptible weight rising from her gut and then through her head. A warmth she didn’t know she had faded. She saw her reflection in a nearby window—the light in her eyes—the last thing she’d still recognized as herself—was gone.

Natalie couldn’t cry. She couldn’t frown. She couldn’t scream.

The body in the reflection was what remained. Flesh that was more just moments ago.

Natalie was cold. The world was empty.

The halls didn’t stretch. Faces had no features. Lights overhead had no luminosity.

Sun shining through the university hall windows seemed to guide her somewhere where it was always night. A nowhere that was everywhere—if you embraced it. In that moment, Natalie followed the voiceless whisper.

There was only one thing left to offer. Though she maintained it, she realized her life was a reflection she never appreciated nor cared about—she reduced it to less than what it was worth, her whole life. By choice. By fear—fear of effort.

She walked to the room beyond the library. Pale. Thinning hair. Dull eyes. A presence that barely cast a shadow. Her voice faded into the air around her. Like the voiceless whisper of The One Below, Natalie’s own voice had no sound.

Natalie lay over the soil. She stared at the purple glow reflecting off of the unlit ceiling. She pulled a small blade from her coat. The last real thing she owned—she’d given all to The One Below. She’d give what she couldn’t give the world—herself.

She couldn’t unsee what she was now aware of. It was too late anyway. The only thing left was feed The One Beneath the soil.

Natalie pressed her little knife below her right ear, and pressed until she felt a tiny pop—a tear.

With a quick motion, she carved a smile that spanned ear-to-ear.

Natalie stared at the unlit ceiling in the stagnant room—warmth rolling down the sides of her neck. Her body convulsed as her torn esophagus leaked the life she refused to live. As if by instinct, she reached up to the ceiling.

“Forgive me,” she tried to whisper, gurgling blood. “God,” she tried to say.

There was only the passive darkness—the darkness she chose with her free will to exist within. As her sight faded, God didn’t respond.

Only a tall pale man appeared. Neither waiting, nor expecting. He stood idle. Gazing through her and into the soil beneath her.

The Idle Man’s pupils were dull, lifeless. And yet, a flicker—brief, almost imperceptible—betrayed something like sorrow. Not regret. Not mercy. Just recognition.

Natalie’s lifeless body folded inward into the plot, as if her corpse were being pulled through a small window, a portal to a place somewhere beneath—somewhere where The One Beneath whispers to all who can listen to its voiceless call—a silent siren’s song.

The Idle Man knelt over the empty plot, emotionless. Void of humanity.

It gazed into the black and purple shimmering soil, looking into a space that existed in a strange direction—a sideways boundary that ran between life and death.

Except, where the Idle Man stared, the space was a darker-than-black pocket—no, a prison—lit by a slow purple glow that contained something that once had a name, but was now simply referred to as The One Beneath.

The One Beneath’s porcelain face moved in slow, mindless, feral gestures, searching for food—staring expectantly at the Idle Man.

Its mannequin-like face was smooth—horrific, haunting, and… beautiful.

Its featureless eyes were smooth blank spaces.

Even in the darkness, The One Beneath sparkled with a once holy and radiant beauty.

Its porcelain lips remained shut as it whispered something only an Idle Man, a plot person, could hear.

“…”

The Idle Man stared at its master. Neither waiting nor expecting. Idle.

Then, The One Beneath said, soft, delicate and voiceless, “. . .”

“Yes,” the Idle Man responded. “Pride be thy prestigious vessel.”

The One Beneath seemed to smile though its face remained still.

The plot closed—slow and smooth—like a window shutting in a stop-motion dream.

It vanished.

Dusty tiles remained.

The door to the room behind the annex disappeared leaving behind a smooth wall.

The Idle Man faded into the darkness, turning in a direction without a name—a liminal sideways orientation—as it whispered,

“The Plot Thickens.”

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