The Girl Who Remembered Too Much is a contemporary psychological thriller with elements of mystery and fantasy, centering around Ellen, a young woman who has lived her life with a fractured sense of self due to a mysterious loss of memory. Following an unforeseen chain of events, Ellen embarks on a quest to recover her lost past, only to discover that the truth she discovers is far more nuanced-and perilous-than she could have ever dreamed. Other Info
Chapter 1 Ellen's Curse
Greyhollow had the appearance of a town that people only visited. Old houses that leaned slightly from age, as if listening to secrets whispered by the wind, flanked narrow, fog-filled streets that wound between hills. The kind of town where nothing ever changed-and that was exactly the way it liked things.
From the outside, sixteen-year-old Ellen Voss looked just like any other teenager in Greyhollow. She wore oversized sweaters, scribbled in notebooks, kept to herself, and had the haunted eyes of someone who did not get much sleep. However, there was one distinctive quality about Ellen that her parents hoped no one would ever notice.
She remembered everything.
Ellen remembered every detail, not just the colour of a dress someone wore ten years ago or special moments from her early years. The pattern of cracks on the ceiling above her cot came back to her. She recalled the precise tone of her father's voice when he first expressed his pride in her, despite the fact that she was only three years old and that he had only said it in a whisper, assuming she was asleep. She remembered the taste of iron when she lost her first tooth, the words of every book she'd ever read, and the sound of rain on the night her grandmother died.
Her memories weren't foggy impressions. They were perfect, vivid, and inescapable.
At first, it was a marvel. Her mother would beam when Ellen answered every trivia question, every historical date, and every multiplication table before the teacher finished asking. But by age ten, it had stopped being cute. By age thirteen, it had become terrifying.
Because Ellen's memories were starting to go... beyond her own.
It began slowly. A dream of a little girl falling down a well-one she didn't know. A whisper in the back of her mind told her where an old key was hidden behind a loose floorboard in the school library. At first, she thought it was her imagination. But the key had been real. The floorboard was loose. And the key unlocked a forgotten cellar that smelt of smoke and regret.
Ellen never told anyone. Not even Lila, her best friend since childhood.
Now, at sixteen, Ellen had learnt to act normal. She laughed when expected. She pretended not to remember things she hadn't seen. But inside her, there was a storm of memories-other people's memories-that she couldn't turn off.
That morning, she woke up from a dream where she was drowning. Not just any drowning. He had been a little boy, five years old, with a cracked blue marble in his pocket, sinking into a dark lake while someone above screamed his name: "Matthew."
With her skin damp with fear and her heart racing, she sat up in bed. It was an unfamiliar name. However, the sensation was, the choking panic and the cold.
She looked at her notebook, which she kept tucked away beneath her mattress. She turned to the page she had completed following her most recent dream-memory. Once more, she wrote:
"April 12th." Have another dream. Boy, around 5. Name: Matthew. Drowning. Marble in left pocket. Heard someone calling him. Smell pine and smoke."
As she closed the book, her hands trembled. The memories were getting stronger. More vivid. More real. She wasn't sure how much longer she could take it before she lost track of what was hers... and what wasn't.
And as she stared out her window at the fog creeping through the trees, she didn't see the figure watching her from the woods. Tall, still, almost blending with the shadows. Its eyes were locked on her window.
It remembered her too.