Six weeks ago these pages carried a warm and admiring account of a new attraction in the Whispering Groves. A restored lodge off the Misthollow fire road, a proprietor called Madame Solace, an hour inside that everyone described the same way and no one could explain. Our correspondent called it the most important wellness opening of the season. She was not wrong that people came out changed.

I have confirmed the names of nine people who traveled to the Misthollow lodge to experience the Reverie and who have not come home. There are almost certainly more. These are just the accounts I could confirm. Note that all names have been redacted for privacy reasons.

The Millhaven man

Start with the one the earlier piece named, because he is the reason I began. A Millhaven man, unmarried, in his middle years, was quoted in these pages after opening morning saying the inside was realer than real, sharper than waking, that he had not felt so awake since before the Silence. The piece noted that he intended to go back that Saturday. He did and his sister has not heard from him since. His room above the cooper’s in Millhaven is as he left it, rent paid two weeks past due, a kettle still hung over a cold hearth. “He would never have gone quiet on me,” she told me, twice, as though saying it again would make it reach him. “He went out to that lodge and he was so happy about it and then there was just nothing.”

The students

The University has a quieter but similar story. The Reverie became, in a matter of weeks, the trendy thing to do, a forty minute broom run out to the Groves and back with a dazzling story. Who wouldn’t want that? It is the ones who kept going that concern me. Two students on the same corridor of the same residence hall have not been to a lecture in twelve days. A third, questioned, would not meet my eye and said only that her friends had “gone on ahead” and that I should not worry, that they were “somewhere better than a lecture.” She said it with the particular calm of someone repeating a thing she has been given rather than a thing she has decided. When I asked if this is something she truly believes or if it is a mere explanation, she shut down.

What the proprietor will say

I went out to the lodge. The queue on the fire road was shorter than the opening-morning crowds our earlier piece described. However, the line was still there, steady, quiet, oddly patient: families, students, and one old woman, who told me it was her third day running.

Madame Solace received me on the porch and gave me the warmest evasion I have ever been handed. I asked her about the nine, and she put her hand on my arm, which I am told she does, and said, “No one is missing, dear. They are exactly where they wished to be.” I asked whether anyone had ever failed to come out. “The door,” she said, “opens for everyone.” When I asked whether it opened the other way, the warmth held its place on her face for a moment with nothing behind it, then blew away. Then she smiled again and asked if I would like to go in myself, at no charge, as her guest. I declined. She said, still kind, “You will change your mind.” I have thought about that sentence every day since.

There is no ledger of who enters. When I asked the Groves Council, whose representative you will recall found the time to hold one end of the opening ribbon, whether anyone was keeping account of the traffic to the lodge, I was passed between three offices and finally told that the Reverie is “a private establishment on restored private land” and that no permit of the kind that would require records had been sought or issued. So there is no list. There is only Madame Solace, and Madame Solace does not count.

Marigold Fenn

I have saved for last the name this newspaper is least comfortable printing. It is also the one name in this piece we print in full, an exception to the redaction above that we make at her family’s explicit request: they are desperate for any word of her, and want her named so that anyone who has seen her will come forward. Marigold Fenn, our own health and wellness correspondent, wrote the piece that praised the Reverie. In it she told readers to go early, go curious, and tell her what they found. She has filed nothing since. The editors last had word from her more than three weeks ago, when she mentioned she meant to go back out to Misthollow. No one has heard from her since and her rooms in Vaelthir are undisturbed.

I want to be careful here, because Marigold is a colleague and I would give a great deal to be wrong. It is possible she is simply away, gone quiet on a story, as reporters do. But she is the tenth name on a list that establishes a pattern. She went out to the lodge and the trail of her stops there.

I do not have an ending for you. That is the honest shape of this piece. I cannot tell you what happens on the far side of that door, because everyone who could is either still inside it or came back out unable to find the words and unwilling to want them. What I can tell you is that people are walking into the Misthollow lodge and not walking home, that no one official is counting them, and that the woman who greets them at the door says, warmly, that nothing is wrong.

If you have family or friends who have gone out to the Reverie and not returned, this newspaper wants their names. Send them by owl to the Vaelthir desk. We will keep the list Madame Solace will not.

Merritt Vance is a staff reporter for the Chronicle’s Vaelthir section. Anyone with information about a person missing after a visit to the Misthollow lodge, or about the ownership and history of the property, is urged to write to the Vaelthir desk by owl. Correspondence will be held in confidence.