“This is my ,” Belinda said. “I keep pieces of people’s memories. When someone feels they’re forgetting something important — a first love, a childhood home, a lost pet — they send me an object. I preserve it. And I never give it back. Because forgetting is a kind of death, don’t you think?”
She typed one more line into Yaelp:
The third result was a blog post titled “The Bely Collection Curse.” Anonymous commenters claimed that anyone who tried to reclaim an object they’d given to Belinda would suffer a strange fate: they would forget not just the original memory, but entire years of their lives.
“What you give cannot be taken back. What you take will cost you everything you remember of yourself.” Belinda Aka Bely Collection Yaelp Search
“I knew someone would come looking for the ,” she said softly, looking directly into the camera as if she could see Mara. “But you’re not here for the collection, are you? You’re here to get something back .”
She hit enter.
The second Yaelp result was a police blotter from a small town called . Date: November 14, twelve years ago, two weeks after the last video. “This is my ,” Belinda said
A woman sat in a dim room, surrounded by thousands of glass jars. She was older now, gray-haired, but her smile was the same.
The screen flickered. Then it went dark.
“Belinda Cross, known locally as ‘Bely,’ missing from her residence. Her personal collection of over 2,000 memory objects was found undisturbed. No signs of forced entry. No body. Case remains open.” I preserve it
“In this archive,” Belinda said, “every object costs a memory to remove. If you want your mother’s ribbon back… you’ll have to give me one of your own. Choose carefully.”
The cursor blinked on the empty search bar of — a deep-web search engine known for indexing abandoned digital archives, forgotten social media profiles, and the so-called “ghost collections” of the early internet. No one used Yaelp for ordinary things. You used it when you were looking for someone who had tried very hard to disappear.
Detective Mara Klein typed four words: Belinda aka Bely Collection .
The Yaelp search had one final link. It led to a live webcam feed — static-filled, but unmistakable.
Mara hadn’t come to Yaelp out of curiosity. Her mother had given an object to Belinda — a blue hair ribbon from Mara’s first day of kindergarten. Last week, Mara’s mother had forgotten Mara’s name. Then she forgot how to speak. Then she forgot how to breathe.