Day 1,402

I only wanted to find out what my mother had been hiding in the garage all these years, I didn't know they were there. They never made a sound, not that they really could from the looks of it. She'd always been a wizard with her chicken wire sculptures but I never thought she'd use those skills to wire their mouths open like that.

I even recognised a few of them from their old uniforms. Classmates who'd vanished after going camping in the woods the other side of town, a checkout girl who'd flirted with me, the guy who nearly hit mother's car that one time.

There were still so many more that I don't recognise and that's what scares me the most. The fact that she'd not only been doing this for years but long enough for all their flesh to have rotted to the bone and I'd never so much as caught a whiff of peculiarity coming from the garage.

I always assumed she was using it to store junk, not run her own laboratory and certainly not one that aimed to prove the existence of souls by attempting to extract them via extreme trauma. I don't even know where she could have gotten that idea from but its in all her notes, the undeniable proof is plastered all over the place.

Three weeks ago she went in and didn't come back out.

That's when I broke the door down and found it all.

But they still haven't found her.