She sat in the dark, heart slamming. The well. There was no well at her apartment. No well at her mother's house. But her grandmother's old farm—the one sold ten years ago—had a stone well in the back, boarded over after a child fell in during the war. 1967.

The screen flickered. A single line of text glowed against the black: .

Mai stared at it, her thumb hovering over the cracked screen of her old phone. It was 2:17 a.m. She hadn't searched for this. The notification had simply appeared—no app, no number, no sender. Just those fourteen characters, as if typed by a ghost.

Mai approached slowly. The phone in her pocket buzzed again. She didn't look. She knew what it would say.

Against every instinct, she tapped.

And Mai ran, not stopping until dawn, when she finally checked her call log. The 2:17 a.m. notification was gone. No record of it at all.

Mai stumbled back, phone slipping from her pocket. It clattered on the stones, screen still lit. One final message:

It was not her grandmother. The face was younger, harder, with hollow cheeks and eyes that reflected no light. But the mouth moved, forming words Mai could not hear. The phone's speaker crackled, and then a voice—thin, distant, as if shouted through a tunnel—said: "Mai. Don't go to the well."

At the edge, she peered down. Water shimmered far below—and in its reflection, not her own face, but the woman from the screen. Smiling now.

The phone went black. The hand retreated. The well fell silent.

The drive took an hour. The farm was a skeleton now, roof half-collapsed, grass waist-high. But the well was still there, its wooden cover rotted through. Moonlight fell into the open mouth like a pale tongue.

She grabbed her jacket.