Vanishing Acts Novels & Stories

Now, I wanted to really experience a healthy, positive romantic relationship. In truth, the relationship Jayce and I had right now was already far stronger than what I'd had before. Within two days, Jayce informed me that he'd already helped clear my name in the necklace incident. Everyone in the company now knew that Vivi had orchestrated the entire incident herself, and her goal had been to drive me out of the company. On the day the surveillance footage was leaked, Vivi was taken away by the cops for investigation on slander and defamation charges. Jayce had also immediately dismissed her from her position of technical director.

*The message* Dr. Emma Taylor's eyes widened as she stared at the cryptic message on her phone: "They're watching me. I have to escape." The words sent a chill down her spine. It was from her sister, Sarah, who had been missing for weeks. Emma's mind racing, she replayed the events leading up to Sarah's disappearance. They had been arguing about their estranged father, and Sarah had been acting strangely in the days before she vanished. Emma had dismissed it as paranoia, but now she wondered if something more sinister was at play.

"And focus on what actually matters here." Grace's smile didn't fade, but she did stop talking. "You need to disappear," I continued. "Completely. Never to be seen again. Can you do that?" Grace tilted her head, considering. "That depends," she said. "On how much you're willing to pay to make it happen." Of course it came down to money. It always did with people like Grace. "Ten million," Grace said. "Cash. And I'll vanish so thoroughly the police will never find me."

The chandeliers swung wildly, candles flinging red wax everywhere. Then pieces of the floor **vanished**. One second, there was marble under a group of players near the left wall. The next, there was a yawning chasm—black, bottomless, hungry. They screamed as they dropped, fading too fast, swallowed by nothing. The edges of the hole frayed like torn cloth. The main staircase twisted, steps warping into a spiral that led up to nowhere and down to a door that hadn’t been there before. Railings stretched like taffy, then snapped back, flinging a player across the hall.

When I looked up, Violet had already disappeared into the darkness. But the more I drank, the more wrong everything felt. My body started to heat up, and my head started to spin. I realized too late that she had slipped something into my drink. My hands trembled as I fumbled for my phone, but my emergency contacts list was empty. I tore at my collar, feeling unbearably hot, and staggered toward the door when a group of men grabbed my arms. "Hey, beauty. All alone? Come on, have a couple of drinks with us," said one of them.

“…What happened to them?” Serena’s throat tightened. Eyes locked on the screen. Because the pattern didn’t just show involvement. It showed trajectories. Rapid rise. Sudden influence. Critical inflection point. Then... disappearance. Collapse. Withdrawal. Institutional erasure. Serena’s chest constricted. “They didn’t fail…” Ethan’s pulse spiked. “What?” Serena looked up slowly. Voice hollow. “They were removed.” Silence detonated across the room. Ethan staggered back slightly. “No.”

Becoming someone new. Or maybe just becoming someone better than who she was. On the train, she watches New York disappear. The city where she tried to take down a billionaire’s girlfriend and ended up taking down herself. Poetic. Pathetic. Fitting. She opens her phone. Deletes I*******m. T*****r. All of it. Vanessa Hart, influencer, is dead. Maybe Vanessa Hart, human, can survive. She doesn’t know. But she has eighteen months to figure it out.

“Do it now! Check every communication log, every bank account, everything!” But a terrible premonition was already taking root in his heart. Molly was too smart. If she had decided to disappear, she wouldn’t have left a single trail to follow. He returned to the empty art studio. Her cherished paintings were gone too. Clarence collapsed onto the floor in the center of the room, finally grasping the gravity of the situation. This wasn’t an impulsive act of anger. This was a meticulously planned, complete and total vanishing. Molly had erased every trace of herself, as if she had never lived here at all. She had ripped herself out of this home, out of his life, as completely as she had ripped

“Mmph–” Vanessa’s voice was instantly cut off. The rancid stench of the rag shot straight up her nose, making her vision go dark as her stomach churned. However, the nightmare was far from over. After gagging her, the two matrons exchanged a look. Then, their fists and boots rained down upon Vanessa like a relentless storm. From that day forward, the person “Vanessa York” vanished from high society. In her place, in that old, isolated manor on the island, there was only a crazy, blind, and crippled woman whose sole purpose was to scrub the manor’s chamber pots and filthy toilets.