February 12, 2025
I left Austin in a hurry. I couldn’t wait to get home to read more scrolls. I first stopped by Michael's house to pick up the lost souls stored in the glass bottles and drove straight to Houston, except for a stop at Buc-ee's for some coffee and fuel. Once home, I put all thirteen boxes in my garage, placing them exactly as they had been in the attic. It felt right, like I was recreating something. Like I needed to preserve them as they were.
There they sat, waiting to be read. I stacked them neatly, their weight still heavier than it should have been. Thirteen boxes, each filled with names, each containing voices waiting to be heard. I told myself I would just open a few, maybe skim through them before getting some rest. But the moment I started thumbing through the scrolls, I was too far gone to stop. I had to know what Mr. Smoe had been hiding.
I unrolled one scroll, then another. The parchment still felt too thick, too smooth, too unnatural beneath my fingers. The ink seemed fresh, and the parchment felt new, as if they had just been made. As I read, the same sensation as before hit me—the voice of a stranger, clear and human, reading the words aloud inside my mind.
I rolled the scroll back up, picking up another, then another. More names, more voices, more afterlives sealed in ink. The stories varied, but the end result was always the same. Forgotten. Unheard. Lost.
I don’t know how long I was at it before I noticed one scroll that looked different. The parchment was older, darker, almost brittle in places, but something about it felt more... intact, as if time had touched it differently. The ink was thicker, the strokes heavier. I hesitated before unrolling it. I don’t know why. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the feeling that I was about to read something I wasn’t meant to. But I did it anyway.
The handwritten text inside was different from the others. It wasn’t a record of a person’s life. It wasn’t a plea for remembrance. It was instructions.
The more I read, the more I understood.
What I found, I won’t share. Some knowledge should remain hidden. Some things should never be passed on to hands that might use them for the wrong reasons. But what I will say is that it confirmed what I had already begun to suspect: spirits could be preserved in scrolls. Their presence could be bound to ink and parchment: their voices, names, and stories.
This was no accident. Someone had written this as a deliberate practice, a way to hold spirits in place without letting them fade. It was methodical, intentional. And whoever had written it knew exactly what they were doing. But it wasn’t Mr. Smoe.
I had assumed at first that he had written the instructions, that this had been his discovery. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he must have found these instructions somewhere and followed them. He didn’t create this practice—he used it. He must have spent years on this project, gathering spirits, sealing them in the scrolls, ensuring their voices didn’t disappear. The scrolls weren’t handwritten; the text was printed in computer ink. That meant he had transcribed each story, each name, carefully formatting them before printing them onto parchment.
Mr. Smoe must have spent a great deal of time doing this. But why?
At first, I thought these scrolls might have been a collection of Candle Face’s victims, but that didn’t seem right. These weren’t the souls of those taken by her. They were something else entirely. If he hadn’t been collecting Candle Face’s victims, then whose voices were sealed inside these scrolls?
Then, it hit me.
Maybe Mr. Smoe had been visited by spirits too.
Not victims of Candle Face, but unrelated spirits: wanderers, forgotten voices looking for someone to listen. Maybe, just like the lost souls that came to me, spirits had come to him, and instead of leading them to peace, he preserved them in scrolls. But these spirits wanted to be heard, why would Mr. Smoe just keep them in his attic where no one is listening? If he had been capturing spirits in scrolls, why didn’t he send them out into the world? Why store them away, hidden from everyone, including himself?
Was this just an obsession, or was he keeping them for a purpose?
I closed the scroll and exhaled, realizing that my hands were shaking.
I got it. This is how I would protect the fugitives.
The bottles had been a temporary solution. They were fragile and weak. The wax could fail. The energy could leak. But this was permanent until I could figure out how to free the spirits to the other side once and for all.
I thought about what I had been doing all along. Listening. Writing. Recording voices that would have otherwise been lost.
This method, this ancient practice of capturing spirits in written text, fits me perfectly.
I'm a former missing persons investigator. I'm a writer. I uncover stories and give voices to those who can no longer speak for themselves. This wasn’t just a method. This was my calling. Hundreds of scrolls waiting to be acknowledged. An ancient method waiting to be used.
Whatever Mr. Smoe was doing with them, it doesn’t matter right now. Right now, I must transfer the 31 spirits from the fragile bottles into scrolls.
The fugitives will no longer hide in bottles. They’ll live in scrolls, and their stories will be read and re-read, their voices radiating in the minds of all those who read them. These fugitives will be free.
And so will the spirits already in Mr. Smoe’s scrolls. They’ll no longer be stored in a dark attic away from human interaction. I'll send these scrolls all across the country, maybe even the world, so they can be read over and over again. No one will ever forget them.
If Mr. Smoe was a register of the dead, a keeper of forgotten souls, then I’m their archivist.
I don’t just record their names. I give them voices.
But first, I have to transfer the fugitives from their bottles into their new and improved homes. The parchment will become their bodies, and the ink will become their voice.
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