The Silent Pulse

In the small town of Willowbrook, where the fog rolls lazily through silent streets, a very strange phenomenon has its locals on edge. Every single night, right past midnight, strange rhythmic pulses start beating through the air. Nobody knows where they come from. It's faint, but unmistakable; it's almost like a distant heartbeat pounding through the quiet.

At first, people ignored it, dismissing it as some weird natural phenomenon or hum of nearby machinery. But as days turned into weeks, curiosity—and fear—grew. After all, Willowbrook had always been an ordinary town. There were no factories, no underground railroads, nothing that could explain the eerie thumping.

Then, as if on cue, strange things began to happen. One by one, the residents of Willowbrook started waking up in places they did not remember going. Old Man Jenkins, a farmer living on the outskirts, showed up miles into the woods, muttering something about "following the beat." The librarian, Alice, was found in the town's ancient cemetery, wide-eyed and whispering about shadows moving through the mist.

The sheriff of the town, a pragmatic man named Cole, had at first dismissed the stories. But when his own daughter began sleepwalking, he had to concede that something very strange was going on. He began to reconstruct the timeline, finding in every account an odd pattern. Each incident did seem to correlate with the pulse—almost as if the beat was drawing them somewhere.

One night, Sheriff Cole decided he was going to follow the sound himself in order to solve it. He armed himself with only a flashlight and a radio and then disappeared into the foggy woods. The beat was there, softly at first but growing stronger with each step. As he followed the pulsing sound, he noticed strange carvings on the trees—a series of concentric circles that seemed to match the rhythm. He followed the markings, his heart thudding along with the beat.

Finally, he came to a clearing bathed in an eerie light from a pale, otherworldly source. In the middle of it all, an ancient stone slab, its surface similarly scarred with the same symbols, seemed to pulse with an inborn rhythm that filled the air around it with a deep, resonant beat. Sheriff Cole could feel an almost magnetic compulsion that compelled him to reach out and touch the stone. The moment his fingers brushed its surface, the beating stopped, plunging the forest into an unnatural silence.

Search parties found Sheriff Cole the following morning lying unconscious beside the stone slab. When he finally came to, he couldn't remember anything after touching it, but he carried with him an unshakable feeling of foreboding. The pulses never returned, but for the townsfolk, that night remained a haunting enigma—one they would never fully understand.

As for Sheriff Cole, he found himself often returning to that spot, staring at the stone, tormented by a question that would eternally wait for an answer: What was calling them? And why had it suddenly stopped?