Hides - And Go Seek

A moon-pale boy, perpetually barefoot, haunts the liminal hours of a crumbling seaside town where lampposts flicker like faulty memories and salt-stung alleys echo with phantom counting. He is both seeker and sought, stitched into a recursive game that began generations earlier when a carnival photographer snapped a portrait that stole more than light. Each dusk, the child’s whispered numbers ripple through boarded-up arcades and mildewed manors, coaxing hidden townsfolk to exchange their last grain of identity for the fleeting safety of shadow. Parents, teachers, even the parish priest have learned to fold themselves into wardrobes, wells, and the hollow spines of books, terrified of being found—not by the boy, but by the camera he now carries, its lens a black iris that clicks once and erases a face from every mirror, every memory. When a storm-tossed librarian with a scar like a lightning bolt across her lip returns to settle her late grandmother’s estate, she becomes the first adult willing to be “it.” Her pursuit of the child unspools like a reverse reel of film: each revelation peels away another town secret until she discovers that every inhabitant still visible is, in fact, a negative image—spectral duplicates developed from the missing. To end the game she must step in front of the lens herself, exposing the final frame that will either restore the erased or doom her to replace them, perpetuating an endless hide-and-seek between the living and the light.