The Town That Sleeps Once Every Ten Years

No one knows exactly when the curse began. Some say it was punishment for a forgotten crime. Others claim it’s a gift—a blessing disguised as a pause. But every tenth year, without fail, the town of Darrington falls asleep.

Not just the people. The entire town.

Streetlights stop flickering. Clocks freeze at midnight. Fires smolder out, food rots untouched on plates, and dogs curl up mid-bark. It’s as if someone presses a cosmic pause button, locking the town in a dreamless stillness.

And for one full year, the town disappears from maps, from satellite signals, even from memory.

I shouldn’t have remembered Darrington. That’s the first thing the man at the edge of the woods told me.

“You remember it?” he asked, wide-eyed. “You must be one of them.”

“One of who?”

He didn’t answer.

I first heard about Darrington from my grandmother. It was her hometown—before she left, before she stopped speaking of it entirely. As a child, I thought it was just one of her strange stories, like the talking crows or the mirror that drank your reflection. But in her final days, she whispered it again.

“Darrington… next year… the sleep ends. You must go.”

She died that night. A month later, I found her journal hidden in a hollowed-out copy of Wuthering Heights. Inside: maps, dates, strange sketches of a clocktower with thirteen hours.

And a note: "Remember what they forget."

I arrived on May 17th, exactly ten years to the day since the last sleep began. The town looked like it had been frozen mid-scene. Dust clung to windows. Lawns were overgrown but somehow untouched by weather or decay. It was eerie, how pristine the rot felt.

And then, at midnight, they woke.

It was like watching a film unpause. A child’s ball resumed bouncing. A kettle whistled from a kitchen window. People stepped out of their homes, blinking at the sunless sky.

Not one of them seemed surprised.

“Excuse me,” I called to a woman adjusting her porch swing. “Do you know what day it is?”

“Of course,” she replied cheerfully. “It’s May 18th, 2015.”

It was 2025.

They hadn’t aged. They didn’t know they had slept. To them, it was simply the next morning.

I stayed for a week, pretending to be a travel writer. The townspeople welcomed me with politeness, if not warmth. But I noticed things—how no one used phones or computers. How every newspaper was dated the same day. How the children seemed to repeat the same games, word for word, every afternoon.

They were stuck. Not just in time, but in behavior. A loop of forgotten lives.

And at night, they whispered in their sleep. I stayed at the old inn, where the wallpaper peeled like dried skin. On the fifth night, I heard the innkeeper mumbling through the walls.

“They come when we’re awake… they feed… remember, remember…”

On my last night, I climbed the clocktower. I needed answers.

At the top, I found the mechanism frozen at thirteen o’clock. A small door stood behind the gears. Inside, carvings lined the walls—names, dates, and symbols I didn’t understand.

And a mirror.

As I approached, my reflection didn’t match me. It blinked a second too late. Then it smiled.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” it said.

I ran.

The next morning, the town was still. They had returned to their slumber, mid-sentence, mid-step. I walked through the silent streets, hearing only my breath.

Before I left, I carved one more line into the clocktower wall:

"I remembered."

Now, I wait.

It’s been ten years. Darrington will awaken again next May. I’ll be there—because someone has to remember.

Because I think they’re trying to forget something terrible.

And maybe next time, I’ll find out what.