They unearthed the coffin by accident contractors digging up land for a new housing development. No records. No grave marker. Just a child-sized box sealed in iron and rot.

Detective Mara arrived before the news vans could. The coroner said the body inside had been buried for decades, but that wasn’t the unsettling part.

It was the object clenched in the child’s hand.
Not a toy.
Not a note.
A single, tightly knotted shoelace, wrapped over and over around their fingers, digging into the bone.

Mara held it up with tweezers. “Why this?” she asked. No one answered.

The body had no name. No fingerprints. No DNA match. The features were warped almost melting. Indistinguishablefrom wax.

Then came the dreams.

Mara saw a child standing in her room at night, silent, eyes black. Each morning she woke with the taste of soil in her mouth and the faint pressure of something thin tied around her wrist.

On the seventh day, her team opened another unmarked grave.

Same coffin. Same child. Same shoelace.

And no one could tell the bodies apart.

Not even Mara.

Especially not Mara.