Chapter 4 - Sophie - Hidden Shadows
A dark, small-town mystery steeped in folklore. THE STUDY OF QUIET THINGS is a serialised fiction drama shared one chapter at a time.
This is a serialised fiction. If you haven’t read the previous chapters, you’ll find them here in order, so you can dive right in.
A tube squeals to a stop at the crowded platform. The doors swish open; inside, Sophie stands cramped amongst the throng. Commuters clamber inside, bustling and jostling for a human-sized gap that does not exist; there is no such luxury here as personal space. The crowd dwarfs her. A lanky student spins around, bashing Sophie in the face with his overstuffed backpack. She readjusts her position, head bowed.
The doors screech shut and the tube moves on from the station.
Sophie hates her commute; first a tube, then a train between London and her home on the outskirts of Reading, but needs must. Jessica’s scholarship, although rich in education, is piss poor in actual funds, and so the financial burden for the twins to survive rests firmly on Sophie’s aching shoulders and sore back. The commute takes her over an hour each way, but London elites pay far more than Reading housewives to clean up their mess.
Usually, with time to kill, Sophie would work on plotting her screenplay idea, but tonight, she has other things on her mind, and an aching nag in the pit of her stomach.
She scrolls through her phone, reading the last message Jessica sent three days ago.
Hey sis, don’t stress, I’m 100% fine. Reception is shite up here, that’s all. Literally the first time I’ve had a signal in days.
Take a chill pill. Enjoy the space… and not having to clean up my mess 🤣
Will call when I get proper reception. Promise. J x
Sophie blows out. Enjoy the space, she reads again, and considers Carmen’s words. Maybe she is being too clingy—as obsessed with her twin as the rest of the world seems to be. Sullen Sophie and Jovial Jessica, their nicknames first coined when carted off to their first foster home at the age of four years old, and the nicknames have still stuck over twenty years later. Still, something feels off. Sophie isn’t sure if it’s a twin-thing, but a tightening grip around her lungs causes her breath to shorten.
Fuck it.
Her finger hits the call button next to Jessica’s name. Immediately, a bright, light voice; words shaped by Jessica’s alluring smile—Sophie can tell by the warmth of the words curling up at the edges, melting like chocolate:
‘Hi, you’re through to Jessica, you know what to do’
“Jess—”
A tone sounds, interrupting Sophie, followed by an automated message: I’m sorry, this mailbox is full.
Sophie is not sure how many messages it takes to fill a voicemail box—that it is full only exacerbates the nagging sensation, so Sophie scans Jessica’s social channels: Substack, Instagram, X… but nothing. No posts for days, which in itself is out of character. But Sophie hears Jessica’s voice in her head as she reads the last message from her twin again.
Hey sis, don’t stress, I’m 100% fine. Reception is shite up here, that’s all.
Bad reception, that’s all, Sophie tells herself. Then, I’m being too clingy. Sighing out, she focuses her attention on something else, just as her therapist advises her when her breath gets short and sharp. Details, focus on details. She opens a podcast app, her finger stops and hovers over ‘Hidden Shadows Podcast by The Hamilton Twins.’ She presses play, and the sound of her twin’s voice blasts an introduction through her earbuds.
“Who am I? Who are you?”
Sophie’s gut clenches. Come home, Jessica. Her right leg bounces, self-soothing her rising anxiety, until a woman next to her huffs with annoyance. Sophie forces her leg to calm, and, as a way of distraction, she observes exhausted commuters around her as the podcast intro plays.
“We are never who we appear to be…”
Opposite, a suave businessman in a sharp suit and sharper eyes subconsciously rubs his wedding band while staring at a young girl’s exposed thighs. The podcast continues:
“We are just fractured reflections. Broken. Splintered pieces of ourselves mirrored back to us.”
The man feels Sophie’s gaze. Their eyes clash. Sprung. He scowls. Her eyes flash away to see her own reflection fractured between the tube windows—her face dissected down the middle between two panes; two half versions of herself stare back. This is how she feels without her twin close by - half of a whole.
“What do we choose to see? What do we choose to ignore?”
A toddler drops a soft toy, fur matted by sticky fingers. Sophie retrieves it, and with a wan smile, offers it back to the child, who breaks into a wail. The mother snatches it with a tired scowl. Sophie shuts her eyes, counting her breath, and allows the motion of the tube to rock her. She ups the volume, so Jessica’s voice is all she hears; reaching out across the void.
“We pretend we are content, that this is how life should be. We pretend we are happy with our jobs, our careers…”
Exhausted commuters stare at the floor or their phone screens. One balances a laptop on her knees, a perpetual frown between her brows as she pounds the keys.
“We pretend we are happy with ourselves…”
A shriek of laughter erupts from the other side of the tube. Two young women squeal, sharing a joke they view on a phone. Sophie can’t help thinking they look like clones, an amassing army with their matching caterpillar eyebrows, blow-up doll lips, and taped-in hair extensions. Their expressions frozen to show none of the emotion their laugh should evoke.
“We pretend this is all we want from life…”
The middle-aged mother tries to mollify the child Sophie upset, but her attempts to console the wailing toddler are useless.
“We pretend we are living the dream…”
Weary, the mother gives up, handing the toddler her phone. He quietens, content now Peppa Pig sings out into the evening. The woman slumps with an exasperated sigh, staring skyward to the metal tube ceiling where no dreams live.
“But all the while, we’re just distracting ourselves from our truths, our nightmares. Our secret horrors… Our hidden shadows.”
The tube doors scream open and Sophie shimmies onto the platform. The crowd charge like a swarm of ants, engulfing Sophie amongst the throng.
“But here’s the thing.” Jessica’s voice laments. “What if our nightmares are messages?”
The crowd bustles through the underground corridors under the stark white lights overhead—their moving shadows cast on the floor, looming ahead of them as they depart.
“What if the shadows in the corner of our eyes cast more than doubt?”
The crowd disperses and Sophie stands on an escalator heading towards Paddington train station.
“What if the answers to our questions are just more questions and it never, ever ends? There are darker things than secrets. But can we handle the truth? We’re the Hamilton Twins, and you’re listening to… The Hidden Shadows Podcast.”
A familiar tone startles Sophie, followed by a voice across the tannoy: The train at Platform 10 is the 20.05 Great Western Railway service to Newbury. Calling at Reading, Reading West, Theale, Alder—
Shit!
The hustle-bustle of nighttime London closes in, drowning Sophie with reality as she races towards the platform, barging past confused tourists or unhurried commuters. The doors of the train are already closing as she gets close. Nobody attempts to hold open the doors for her, and so, she misses her train by a fraction of a second.
“Shit!” she curses, watching as the train disembarks from Paddington station. She looks across the crowds to the timetable. Another twenty-five minutes to wait. But something else can’t wait, and before she knows what she is doing, Sophie is heading toward a pair of police officers chatting beneath the timetable.
The police don’t stop their conversation—they don’t notice the girl waiting for them to acknowledge her.
“Excuse me,” she says, then again, a little louder when they don’t look down the first time. “Excuse me, I’d like to report a missing person.”
Their lightweight banter falters. One of them straightens his hat.
“A missing person?” he asks. “Here, at the station?”
“What?” Sophie asks. She’s stunned. It’s as if she’s woken from a daydream. She hadn’t thought past her worry, and now someone—a policeman—is taking her seriously, asking her questions instead of fobbing her off. “No, not here. My sister—my twin. I haven’t heard from her in three days.”
“Were you expecting to hear from her? Do you have any reason to believe she is in danger?” The second officer asks.
“I, um…” Sophie thinks back to Jessica’s last reply. Take a chill pill. Reception is shite. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from her, but,” Sophie fumbles with the cuff of her jacket, avoiding eye contact. “Something feels wrong.”
The police officers turn to look at one another. One of them rolls his eyes, thinking she would not see it, and Sophie immediately hates him.
“Look, there’s not a lot we can do—”
“—But you’re the police?” Sophie interrupts, a little more forcibly than she intended.
“Yes, and we’re on the beat, not sat in front of a computer.” The first officer pulls out his notebook, jotting down a number. He rips off the paper and hands it to Sophie. “Give this number a call and you can file a missing person’s report. They’ll update the system and check if there is any record of her whereabouts. Okay?”
Sophie takes the note, nodding. “Okay,” she agrees. But she is already turning away, already dialling the number with trembling fingers. The unreal suddenly feels very real. The gut feeling in her stomach engulfing the rest of her body. As soon as the phone answers, she repeats herself.
“I’d like to report a missing person, my twin. I haven’t heard from her in three days.”
“Can I take your name?”
“Sophie, Sophie Hamilton.”
To Sophie’s relief, the woman on the other line doesn’t fill the conversation up with fluff, she gets straight to it. “Okay Sophie. Can you give me the name, age, and date of birth of your twin?”
“Her name is Jessica, Jessica Hamilton. She’s twenty-six, birth date is thirty-first of October 2001.”
“And when was the last time you saw her?”
“Last time I saw her, she was leaving for a research trip. That was a week ago.”
“And where was she going?”
“I’m not entirely sure. She left in a rush,” Sophie says, suddenly aware of how little detail she has about her sister’s whereabouts.
“And the last time you heard from her?”
“Three days ago, a text. She said she didn’t have much reception.”
There is a pause on the line. “Okay, so she doesn’t have much reception. Do you have any reason to believe she may be in harm or in danger?”
“We’ve never gone this long without speaking.”
“But she told you she has no reception?”
The woman’s tone has changed. She’s surly. She thinks Sophie is clingy, just like Carman does. Sophie can tell. God, she feels stupid.
“Sophie, I am sure you have nothing to worry about. But look, I’ll take more details to cross reference, but I’m sure you will hear from your sister as soon as she moves on to a place with more reception, okay?”
But it’s not okay. The more people tell Sophie everything is fine, the more she believes something awful has happened.
“Can you give me a physical description, including any tattoos, scars, birthmarks?”
Sophie sees her own reflection in a glass panel at the ticket booth, describing her sister and herself both. “She’s five foot two, slim with long, wavy dark hair. She’s got no tattoos, but a birthmark on the inner right thigh shaped a bit like Australia. And a small scar on her left index finger.”
Sophie thinks back to the time Jessica got that scar and shudders. Two soaked runaways on a rainy night, a foster home long behind them, and a too sharp knife trying to pick a lock to a holiday cabin left vacant. In a way, this has always been their lives—living on the knife-edge, running from one place to the next, trying to find a place to call home; only to get scarred by the experience.
The last few years, since Jessica’s scholarship started, has been the first time they have ever truly landed—moored in the safety of routine. But without Jessica, Sophie feels untethered again. Adrift. She is thankful when the woman asks more questions, interrupting Sophie’s melancholy thoughts.
“And what was she wearing when you last saw her?”
Sophie sees Jessica in her mind as she did then, glorious sunshine and warmth that disappeared as soon as her sister stepped out of their flat, leaving Sophie alone in the dark.
“A red jacket, tapered to her waist, with gold buttons, and black fur collar. Skinny black jeans and black ankle boots. A black beret…”
Sophie sees her own reflection; her tired clothes, her lack of style, her pale, drawn face. If Sophie’s reflection truly mirrored Jessica’s, she would have a flush to her cheeks, colour on her skin, lush red lips and liquid gold eyes. Not for the first time, Sophie wonders how they can be so identical and yet so unalike all at the same time.
“Any relevant medical conditions or diagnoses? Is she taking any mediation?”
And here is another example of just how different they are. “No, Jessica has no medical conditions and takes no medication.”
Because Jessica is perfect, Sophie thinks sadly to herself, while her own body craves for something to take the edge from the sharp sided anxiety constantly gnawing at her bones.
“Okay, I’ve filed the report. We’ll keep you updated on any leads, okay, Sophie? Have you got a pen handy? I’m going to give you a reference number you can use anytime you have any queries or updates, okay?”
“Go for it.” Sophie says, tapping the number into her Notes app on her phone.
After Sophie relays the numbers confirming it is correct, and confirms the number she is calling from is the best one to contact her, there is a gap in the conversation. The woman fills it with a sigh. “Sophie, I’m sure your sister is fine. We get people calling in all the time when friends and family lose their phones or don’t have reception. We’re all so connected these days, I guess we’ve got used to instant communication. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to hear silence.”
Sophie finds herself nodding at the truth of it.
“Oh, and Sophie? Don’t forget to update us when Jessica gets in touch.”
Sophie crosses her fingers with superstitious hope as she hangs up, and finally boards her train home.
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