Michael

Michael never cried when the earthquakes happened anymore. Instead, his body went paralyzed, still in time, similar to the demeanor of a doll.

The first one took his hearing when he was six years old. The second one took everything else.

Michael Holloway grew up in silence, pure quietude.

Not peaceful silence. Not comforting silence. The kind that wrapped around him like wet cement and hardened as time crept past him.

At school, teachers described him as “quiet but respectful.” Kids called him weird and freakish behind his back because he wore the same dull gray sweater every single day, and beige khaki pants, even during the hot, humid springs. His clothes always appeared too big for him, like he’d inherited them from somebody else, someone dead.

Maybe he had, or maybe his demeanor just emitted a lifeless ambience .

His parents worked at a pharmaceutical research facility outside the city called Novagen Laboratories. Nobody really knew what they did there, only that they left before sunrise and came home long after dark smelling like chemicals and antiseptic.

Michael barely spoke to them. They barely spoke to him.

His mother communicated through sticky notes.

Take your pills.

Laundry downstairs.

No dinner tonight, there's not enough for you.

His father rarely even looked at him.

The only real thing his mother ever taught him was sewing, prior to the first earthquake.

“When something breaks,” she signed slowly one afternoon while guiding a needle through fabric, “you stitch it shut before people notice.”

Michael remembered that sentence for the rest of his life.

When he turned sixteen, the murders started.

At first, it was just missing persons reports. A college girl from downtown. A homeless man under the freeway. A cashier from a grocery store nearby.

Then bodies began appearing.

Every victim had the same horrifying detail

Their mouths were sewn shut with thick black thread.

The media lost its mind.

News stations named the killer The Silence Surgeon.

Police blamed gangs. Cults. Organ traffickers. Experimental drugs.

But the city blamed and pointed suspicion at Michael’s parents.

People whispered about the lab they worked in. About illegal testing. About disappearances connected to pharmaceutical trials. Protesters gathered outside Novagen holding signs that read:

MONSTERS CREATE MONSTERS

HOW MANY BODIES ARE HIDDEN INSIDE?

Michael secretly believed them too, and began to feel more unsafe in his own home– which he didn't think was even possible considering how neglected he already was.

He knew his parents were cold enough to do it, as he lived with this progressively awful, gut feeling.

He remembered the first earthquake clearly.

The screaming. The collapsing ceiling. His mother dragging his father toward a hidden steel door behind a painting in the hallway.

He remembers them making eye contact with the terrified boy, and still shutting it in front of his face.

Their own son.

He remembers pounding on the door from the outside until his knuckles began to bleed.

Begging, crying.

Unable to hear his own screams as the world collapsed around him.

When rescuers found him hours later beneath concrete debris, blood poured from both his ears.

The doctors said he’d never hear again.

His parents never apologized, yet expressed the slightest bit of regret or remorse.

At eighteen, Michael came home to flashing police lights.

Another “accident”.

Another tragedy.

His parents were dead.

The officer signing to him looked uncomfortable, almost relieved.

“I'm so sorry for your loss..”

After the investigation was completed, Michael was told the house now belonged to him.

That night, Michael walked through empty rooms for hours. No grief. No sadness. Just numbness. The same quiet he's endured his entire life.

Like always, he found his medication bottle sitting on the kitchen counter.

Small white capsules, and the label had been scratched off years ago.

He swallowed four more than his usual two.

At 2:14 AM, the earthquake began.

Cabinets crashed to the floor, picture frames shattered, and dust rained from the ceiling.

Michael froze with panic, anxiety and fear crepy through hsi still body.

Then, memories flashed through his mind.

Memories he'd blocked out his entire life.

The bunker.

He ran to the hallway painting with shaking hands and ripped it off the wall. Behind it sat the same giant steel door from twelve years ago.

This time, he wasn’t locked on the outside; pounding and begging for mercy.

Inside, darkness stretched downward through concrete stairs.

Michael used his phone flashlight and descended down the steps.

The smell hit first.

Rot, copper, and decay.

Then the bodies appeared.

Dozens of them.

Lined across the bunker floor.

Some fresh. Some skeletal. Some wrapped in plastic sheets.

Every single corpse wore the exact same gray sweater and beige pair of khakis Michael had worn his entire life.

Every mouth sewn shut.

His flashlight trembled violently in his hands.

“No…”

He stumbled backward.

Then he noticed the sewing kit, covered in crusted, dried blood and finger prints.

His sewing kit.

Sitting neatly beside a stained mattress.

Black thread.

Bloody needles.

Photographs.

Victims.

Newspaper clippings.

And journals.

Journals filled with his handwriting.

Michael opened one with numb fingers.

They won’t stop screaming.

Mother says the medication helps, but it only helps numb the pain temporarily.

I don’t remember the nights anymore, but I always end up here again.

I woke up covered in blood.

I think I hurt someone, I don't want to hurt anymore.

Another entry.

I found a body downstairs.

Dad says I’m sick, but I don't feel sick.

He says the medicine keeps the bad version asleep, but I've never felt more alive.

Another.

I saw myself in the mirror last night.

He smiled at me.

I didn’t smile, I never smile.

Michael’s breathing became shallow.

He felt the nerves in his mind somehow split apart piece by piece.

The murders, the disappearances, the sewing, the clothes.

The grief he felt every morning reading the news, and the empathy he felt for the grieving families.

It had all been real.

As real as the tangy smell of blood lingering in the room.

A room that had become a prison of death, a prison of his corrupt mind.

His parents weren’t hiding a killer.

They were hiding him.

The medication hadn’t been curing him.

It had been pulling apart his consciousness into two different humans, two entirely different personalities – both unaware of each other.

Every night, after taking the pills, another version of Michael emerged. Violent, precise, and ultimately emotionless.

And every morning, his recollection of himself disappeared with it.

His parents had known the entire time.

That’s why they neglected him.

That’s why they feared him.

That’s why they locked him outside the bunker during the first earthquake.

Almost with the initiative to find an easy solution, a way to dispose of this unwell child without committing the ultimate sin of murder.

Michael looked around the bunker again.

At the decaying, bloody bodies.

At the identical clothing.

At the mouths sewn shut, silencing the souls that have tormented him his entire life.

For once in his life, he could audibly hear sounds around him – deaf felt like a blessing.

He heard the piercing screams of each child, the tears of torment wept, the muffled heavy breathing of suffocation, and the thumping heart beats of each body – that came to a sudden, still silence, once again.

Then he saw the final journal entry.

Written only days before his parents died.

We can’t control him anymore.

If the dosage stops working, he’ll remember.

And if he remembers…

The sentence ended there.

Above him, the house groaned as the earthquake intensified.

Concrete cracked overhead.

Michael slowly lifted his shaking hands to his own mouth.

Tiny puncture scars lined the edges of his lips.

Old sewing marks.

His mother might have taught him sewing to fix broken things, but Michael himself felt as if he were broken. One night he tried stitching his own mouth shut.

To stop the screaming only he could hear.

White light flooded Michael’s vision.

For a moment, he thought he was dead.

Everything felt numb. Heavy. His body wouldn’t move correctly, like his bones had rusted while he slept. A high ringing echoed through his skull.

Then silence.

Complete silence.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the hospital room around him.

Pale walls, bright white .

Machines blinking steadily beside him.

The smell of disinfectant is thick in the air.

And dolls.

Dozens of them.

Sitting on shelves. On windowsills. Across the counters.

All handmade.

All staring directly at him.

And every single one had its mouth sewn shut with black thread.

Michael’s chest tightened instantly.

A sharp panic crawled up his throat.

No.

No no no—

The hospital room door burst open.

A woman rushed toward him crying hysterically, nearly collapsing beside the bed.

“Michael!”

His mother.

Older. Exhausted. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face.

Behind her came his father, eyes red and shaking so badly he had to grip the doorway for support.

“Oh my God,” his mother sobbed, grabbing his face gently. “You’re awake. You’re finally awake.”

Michael stared at them blankly.

His father let out a broken laugh that sounded halfway between joy and grief.

“Twelve years,” he whispered. “Twelve years…”

Michael couldn’t process the words.

His mouth felt dry.

“What…?”

The sound barely escaped him.

His mother burst into tears.

“You were in a coma after the earthquake,” she said. “The doctors said you might never wake up.”

Michael’s heart stopped.

Coma.

The bunker.

The bodies.

The murders.

The journals.

The pills.

It all slammed through his mind violently.

“No,” he whispered.

His breathing quickened.

“No, that happened—”

“You’ve been asleep since you were six,” his father said carefully. “You’re eighteen now.”

Michael looked around frantically.

The dolls.

The sewn mouths.

The gray sweater folded neatly on the chair beside his bed.

His mother noticed his expression immediately.

“Oh,” she laughed nervously through tears, wiping her eyes. “The dolls scared you.”

She picked one up gently.

“You used to make these before the earthquake. You were obsessed with sewing.” Her voice softened painfully. “We kept them here while waiting for you to wake up.”

Michael stared at the doll in her hands.

Its stitched mouth curved slightly upward.

Almost smiling.

His pulse pounded harder.

Something felt wrong.

Terribly wrong.

He glanced toward the television mounted in the room corner.

A news broadcast played silently with subtitles scrolling underneath.

LOCAL SERIAL KILLER STILL UNIDENTIFIED

“SILENCE SURGEON” CLAIMS 38TH VICTIM

Michael froze.

The screen flashed images of police tape.

Bodies being wheeled away.

Victims.

Their mouths sewn shut.

His mother quickly grabbed the remote and shut the TV off.

Too quickly.

The room became painfully silent again.

Michael slowly looked back at his parents.

His father’s smile had disappeared.

His mother still clutched the doll tightly enough for her knuckles to whiten.

Then Michael noticed it.

Black thread.

Looped around his mother’s finger.

Fresh needle marks covering the tips of her hands.

A blank expression pasted across her face, and a white glaze darkening her eyes

He began hallucinating the shape of black beads and buttons in place of their sockets.

And for the first time since waking up—

Michael wondered if the coma was the lie.

Had he been deceived by his mind, or by the doll like figures standing in front of him.