CASE FILE 002-B – SALT HOLLOW, PART 2: THE WHISPER THAT FOLLOWED

This file was flagged for deletion twice.

The audio was corrupted. The memory cards were cracked. The operative who submitted the final pages requested immediate reassignment to an Arctic post… and then vanished mid-flight.

Only one document remained intact. A journal... It smelled like salt.

🧾 FIELD ENTRY – INVESTIGATOR C. MARROW

DATE OF ENTRY: March 9, 2023

LOCATION: Salt Hollow (Site Revisit Protocol – Vault Access Alpha)

“This is C. Marrow. Solo recon, per standard protocol. Temperature stable. Equipment functional.

Arrival at Salt Hollow confirmed. Nothing’s changed… but it feels like everything’s waiting. There’s no wind. The town looks like a painting. Static. Unblinking.

The well’s still sealed. Or pretending to be. I don’t trust the earth here. It doesn’t hold weight right. Feels like stepping on breath.

I haven’t said a word out loud in hours. But I keep hearing someone say my name.”

📸 ATTACHED IMAGE – SURFACE DISTURBANCE

[IMAGE UNAVAILABLE – FILE CORRUPTED]

Caption originally read: “Well cap intact, but salt displaced. Spiral pattern forming outward.” The spiral was traced in boot prints. None of them matched Agent Marrow’s boots.

🕯️ JOURNAL PAGES – HANDWRITTEN

Found lodged in a crack in the Salt Hollow post office floor, beneath the slot where unmailed postcards still gather like dust.

Page 1: “There’s something in the salt. Not buried—grown. It listens through the minerals. Through the static. I dropped a recorder and the ground ate the sound. It didn’t bounce. It didn’t echo. It just stopped.”

Page 2: “Saw a reflection in the window of the diner. It was me. Only older. And wet.”

Page 3: “There’s a child humming inside the general store. She stops when I breathe too loudly. I haven’t opened the door yet.”

🧊 RECORDED TRANSMISSION — PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

*“…I know now the water doesn’t remember us. It remembers FOR us... It’s storing the pieces we leave behind—our thoughts, our names, our footsteps… And when it’s ready, it puts them back in the wrong order.”*

🔍 FINAL LOG – C. MARROW (BURNT FRAGMENT)

“I left. I walked out of Salt Hollow. I made it 12 miles on foot. No radio. No comms. I climbed a ridge and looked back... And the town wasn’t behind me. It was in front. I never turned around.”

— Last page recovered from backpack left outside Vault 4-C. Operative not recovered.

🧍‍♂️ UNVERIFIED ENCOUNTER – TRUCKER "LINDA"

Location: HWY 80, Utah

Date: April 2023

Statement to State Trooper:

“I saw a man walk out of the desert in the middle of the night. No light. No shoes. Just a cracked cassette player around his neck. He handed me a postcard. It said ‘Wish you were here’ in red ink. There was salt stuck to the edges. I looked down for one second to read it. When I looked up, he was gone.”

She kept the card. But when the officer examined it… There was no writing. Just a faint, circular stain that looked like a mouth.

📍 CURRENT STATUS – UNSTABLE

Salt Hollow has since reappeared on certain analog maps. Each appearance is slightly farther east than the last. Coordinates fluctuate hourly. Compass behavior remains erratic.

Attempts to photograph the well now return a warning:

"Image could not be captured. You are facing yourself."

⛔ THEORIES UNDER REASSESSMENT

Not a haunting. Not a loop. Salt Hollow is a sentient structure, built from sound and memory. The well is no longer a passage. It is a mouth. The voice that calls to you is not calling you in. It’s calling pieces of you back...

FINAL DIRECTIVE

Salt Hollow is not to be entered again.

We did not find closure. We did not escape with truth. We escaped with just enough wrongness to poison everything we remember.

If you dream of children humming… If your voice echoes before you speak… If you receive a postcard from a town you don’t recall visiting… You’ve already been there.

🧪 POST-INVESTIGATION ADDENDUM — SITE RESIDUALS

Filed by Caelum Directive, Division: Field Residuals & Post-Exposure Containment

Date of submission: 3 weeks following Salt Hollow Event Revisit (Ref: File 004-B)

Residual phenomena detected up to 3.2 miles outside the primary basin. EM scanners register periodic pulses underground at irregular intervals. Magnetometers behave erratically—clockwise drift in compass needles continues for 4 minutes after agents leave the zone.

When recordings of the original Salt Hollow field logs are duplicated (analog or digital), they reverse direction automatically. Audio plays backward. Timestamp metadata becomes corrupted. Several files begin with a brief whisper:

“Don’t drink the names.”

Two analysts from the internal transcription team reported persistent whispers during sleep. One described a repeated loop of a child’s voice saying:

“I left you a mouthful.”

One requested immediate transfer. The other stopped responding altogether.

🧾 ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE – POSTCARD INCIDENT LOG

Filed by: Regional Postal Archive, Flagstaff, Arizona

Date Range: 2017–2023

A series of undeliverable postcards postmarked “Salt Hollow” have surfaced in multiple states. None contain barcodes or traceable printing origin. Several were returned to senders who had been deceased for decades.

Incident 1 – Santa Fe, NM

Elderly couple receives a Salt Hollow postcard addressed to a “Henry.”

Text reads:

“Coming home soon. The water missed me.”

No signature... No ink... Forensics found salt fingerprint ridges pressed into the paper—loop pattern consistent with a child’s thumb.

Incident 2 – Pueblo, CO

Local man finds a postcard in his mailbox—no stamp, no return address.

Message:

“The mirror cracked. I’m walking out of it now.”

Next morning, all mirrors in his home had fine horizontal scratches. His phone camera could no longer capture his reflection.

Incident 3 – Bakersfield, CA

A librarian receives a sealed envelope postmarked “Salt Hollow.”

Inside is a photograph of her as a child, standing in front of a well she doesn’t recognize.

She insists the image is doctored.

But when scanned, the digital version includes metadata:

"Image Captured: Salt Hollow // 1912 // Unit 004-B”

She was born in 1991.

⚠️ FINAL NOTES:

This case is not closed... It’s receding. Shifting. Watching. The well may have been sealed… But the voice beneath it is still learning how to say your name.

“We weren’t finished.” — Partial transmission, flagged & contained.