Part Three: The Silence After

The night ended not with a scream, but with silence. Charles’ mother lay writhing on the cold tiled floor, her arms and legs already gone. One of the masked men pressed a glowing-hot iron to the raw stumps, sealing flesh with fire. The smell of burning skin rose thick in the air, drowning the house in a nauseating mix of iron, blood, and smoke. Her mouth was tied with cloth—her cries locked inside her chest—but her eyes screamed louder than anything the walls had ever heard.

Then, as though satisfied with their craft, the men turned to the smallest life in the room. The baby girl was lifted, not violently, but carefully, as though she was the very reason for all this orchestrated horror. Charles, chained in shock, watched his daughter’s soft whimpers vanish into black cloth as one attacker muffled her cries.

A fist struck Charles’ temple—darkness swallowed him whole.

When he awoke, the world had been rewritten. The blood, the bodies, the chaos—gone. His wife, his son, his father—gone. The parlor gleamed as though nothing had happened, no trace of carnage, no scent of death. Only silence. His mother was gone too. His baby’s crib was empty. The walls whispered nothing.

He stumbled through his home in madness, hands dragging across polished wood where only hours ago he had fed his father his own flesh. Now—emptiness. The attackers had not only stolen his family, they had stolen proof they ever existed.

Charles reached for his phone. Nothing. No photographs. No call history. No record of Henry, or his wife, or even his parents. Social media—blank. Every image, every trace of his family erased as though they were shadows burned out by the sun. Even neighbors spoke differently: “You live alone, don’t you, Mr. Ifeanyi?”

Somewhere in the backstreets of the city, his mutilated mother was dumped like waste among drug dens and forgotten souls, barely alive, her name already erased from the world that once called her mother.

Charles fell to his knees in his living room, the silence echoing louder than any scream. What happened was not a robbery. Not revenge. Not senseless violence. It was a cleansing—an erasure.

The attackers had no need to kill him. His punishment was worse: To remember what no one else would ever believe. To live with a family the world insisted never existed. To wake up every day in a house that pretended nothing had happened.

The night without echo had ended. And Charles was its last prisoner.