017

Everything I had uncovered until now placed Zara’s final days in early 2025. 

Didn’t it?

I scoured every document again. Hospital records, school attendance, late-night texts exchanged with friends. All of it pointed to the beginning of 2025. 

But the letter… her words… the date... 

It pointed to something else entirely. 

The timelines didn’t align—as if they had fractured, like two threads running parallel only to twist into a knot of impossibility.

Was it a mistake? 

A forgery? 

I stared at the letter, heart pounding. Uncertainty sank in like cold water. I was losing the shape of things—of dates, of reality, of Zara herself. And then… 

My phone lit up…

A call. 

Unknown number.

I didn’t answer. 

Instead, I inserted the second cassette.

016

  As the ink bled into the paper, her mind drifted. Soon, she fell asleep. The next morning, she woke to find something pressed gently into her palm.

A button.

Worn, round, faintly scratched.

One she knew well—from Randy’s old coat. Her fingers curled around it instinctively. 

She didn’t cry. She simply sat up, eyes focused on the soft light breaking through the blinds. She would be leaving soon. The plane ticket had been arranged. 

But her gaze held a strange calm—not fear, not regret. As if, somehow, she already knew what was coming. 

I found another letter in Zara’s handwriting. It was dated March 8th—the same day she was supposed to board a flight to Europe. 

Only she didn’t. 

The letter was brief, but unflinching. She had changed her plans. She booked a different route—a flight MH370 bound for Beijing. 

Yes, that MH370—the one that vanished without a trace. The one that disappeared off the radar with 239 souls on board. The flight that left Kuala Lumpur on March 8th, 2014.

The realisation struck me like a tremor through the chest. No one had known—not her classmates, not her teachers. 

Maybe only her twin sister. A secret held tight. A secret heavy enough to drown in. But something didn’t make sense.

015

 “I don’t want to go… I don’t want to be sent away. Not abroad. Not now.” 

Still, the silence held. 

She reached for the doorknob with a fragile hand and turned it slowly. The door creaked open.

No one.

The corridor stretched ahead, empty, bathed in stillness. Not even a trace of a shadow. Zara sank to the floor, back against the wall. Her breath quivered. A soft sob broke the silence. 

She pressed her hand to her mouth, crying quietly—afraid someone might still hear. 

Or perhaps … afraid they wouldn’t.

Later, Zara stood at the window near her hospital bed, the glass sealed shut. She stared at the pale sky, lost in thought. The memory of the afternoon lingered. She knew it had been Randy. There was no doubt in her mind. And yet, a sliver of uncertainty remained. 

Was it all just a hallucination? 

The fever? 

The meds? 

Still… she had heard those footsteps. 

She had recognised them—the precise rhythm, the familiar weight of Randy’s shoes against the floor. 

She sat down quietly and began to write, her pen trembling slightly in her hand. 

A page. 

Then another.

014

 2

Cassette 01: BUTTON

It was the hottest day of 2025. The air hung thick like a fever dream. Zara lay half-awake, the lingering effects of her illness and medication clouding her senses. Sweat clung to her skin. She barely had the strength to lift her head, but her thoughts burned clearer than ever—she missed Randy. Even knowing he wouldn’t come, her heart refused to let go of the thought. 

The hospital was silent, unnaturally so. Afternoon light filtered weakly through the blinds, casting long, blurred shadows on the walls. Then came a sound.  

Soft at first—just a footstep. 

Then another. 

The quiet rhythm of someone walking down the corridor. Familiar. Quick, yet careful. Gentle. 

Zara’s heart stumbled. She pushed herself upright, her breath caught between hope and disbelief. 

The footsteps halted — just outside her door.

The silence returned, heavier than before. But something was different. She felt it. 

A whisper escaped her, almost involuntarily.

“Randy…?”

No reply. 

Only silence. 

And yet… she could sense it—someone was there. She leaned her forehead against the door, her voice trembling.

013

 I found an old cassette player—the same one I had used as a child.
It barely worked.
The buttons stuck.
The sound warbled like a voice lost underwater.
But when I pressed play, something flickered to life—not just sound, but memory. 
And suddenly, it was as if she was speaking directly to me, from a place suspended between the past and something far more haunted.

012

  I walked one evening to the place where Zara used to sit. The sun was setting. The wind carried the scent of lavender from nearby bushes. It was impossibly still. And for a brief moment, I understood—not what happened, but why it mattered. 
When I left Ampang, nothing had changed here. Yet on the other side of the country, the sky was turning gold with winter’s first breath. 
I returned to my apartment. For weeks, I wrote nothing. Then one morning, I sat at my desk and began this story—not for the world, perhaps, but for Zara. So that somewhere, somehow, she might not disappear entirely.
Some people are not meant to stay. They come to remind us—
to look more closely, to listen more deeply, to hold each other more gently.
I never published her story in the paper. But I wrote it here—for myself, and for those who still wonder whether kindness has a place in this world.
Because truth, like grace, begins with remembering.

Then…

…there were Zara’s cassettes.

011

  It was as if the whole town had conspired to remember her gently—and forget her entirely.

I met Zara’s twin sister, Sarah on a quiet afternoon in a GUMI Café. She spoke with clarity, not drama. She told me that Zara had been restless in her last weeks—dreaming strange things, whispering to herself, staring at the horizon as if she were waiting for something. Or someone. 

When I asked what Zara had feared, Sarah only said, “She began to feel that something was watching us. But it was only ever her who saw it.” 

She said Zara had loved to write. Pages of handwritten letters were found in her room—addressed to no one in particular. 

I began to dig. Among the boxes Sarah gave me to investigate her late sister’s death, I found her journal—its final pages filled with symbols and words scratched over in black ink.

I revisited their old school. I interviewed friends, teachers and even the gardener who used to see her at dusk, seated in the orchard, eyes shut as if listening to music only she could hear. 

I did not come to accuse. I came to understand. And in that mission, I found the story not in her death, but in her life. 

The ‘lyrics’ in her notebook, scattered cassettes, thirteen letters, faded photographs, thumb drives containing digital images of wall drawings Sarah had quietly captured, and the dreams she whispered into late-night messages—all of it held a truth more unsettling than I ever anticipated.

Zara was a victim. She was a voice that had not been heard in time. What I discovered was not a scandal, but a call. To look more closely at the quiet ones. To listen before it is too late. To believe that truth is not always found in facts we can prove—but in the humanity we refuse to ignore.

010

  It was June 2027 when I arrived in the town of Ampang Jaya, tucked between Cheras and Batu Cave. 
I came not with a breaking story, but with a broken thread—an email, anonymous, disheartening account, that spoke of a girl named Zara. She was seventeen. She was dead. And no one asked why. Though her death was spoken of as inevitable, attributed to an irreversible illness, no one could ever quite name the affliction that carried her away.
Soon I realised I was entrusted to find out the truth by a student named Randy whose heart has sorrowfully shredded apart.  He has a deep dark blackhole-like pupils—it seemed as though his soul had been buried along with her. 
I came with the naive courage of a seeker. I left with the solemn wisdom of a witness. It became clear that Zara had never been ill—not in the way the world understood illness. 
There were quiet accounts—soft, almost reverent—shared by local nurses, who spoke of it only as a tragic end. Nothing more, nothing less.
Zara, the daughter of the Chief Elder of Ampang was not a headline. She was a silence. One of those young lives that ends not in drama, but in a kind of collective forgetting. 
Yet as I walked through her school, spoke to her classmates, drank bitter coffee with a grieving close friend, Randy whose hands trembled at the memory of Zara—I knew this was not a simple case. 
They said Zara had committed suicide. Others hinted at something darker—a quiet despair, a private anguish. But no one spoke clearly. 

009 (Before the Gates)

 Before the Gate: 
The Quiet Truth

008

 These questions linger, unanswered. But the words remain—unshaken by time—carrying a secret meant for those who are willing to listen.
And so, here it is.
The Word, to me, are both lens and bridge—a means to see the world more clearly and to draw closer to the hidden soul.
In the quiet small town of Ampang, I once learned that truth rarely shouts. It whispers. And so I learned to listen—not only with my ears, but with the stillness of my presence. That skill served me well, especially in the story I’m about to tell. 
Take a good, deep breath. 
I’m about to share what I found—and reveal each piece of evidence.

007

1

    My name is Andre. I am a journalist and a novelist—but above all, I am a seeker of truth. Some stories come to us like whispers in the wind—fragile, yet persistent. This is one of them.
    I heard a secret—a name spoken in hushed tones: William. A man who, it is said, spoke of the future not as possibility, but as certainty. Who he was, where he came from, and how he knew what he did—these are questions I cannot ignore.
    His traces are scattered across time: manuscripts filled with enigmatic words, lyrics that hum with hidden meaning, sounds buried beneath the surface of the ordinary.
    I have been following his trail, searching for the unseen threads that connect his past to our present. And so, I write this—so that you may walk this path without the burden of searching alone as I have collected the fragments, traced the patterns, and inscribed every detail into these pages. This is a journey of mystery and revelation, where every word holds weight and every silence speaks.
    It may sound unbelievable—even impossible. But once you hear it, once the words settle into the quiet corners of your mind, you may find yourself believing.
    I came across something unusual—a thread of information buried within the walls of a hospital. Not in the usual way—not in ink and paper, nor in the hurried notes of a physician. Somehow, it was recorded—etched into existence, as if waiting to be found.
Who placed it there?
        Why was it hidden?

006 (The Author)

 The Author