The Wrong Turn
The Island of Souls
By Amy Sadler © 2026
Author’s notes:
This story is inspired by the movie: Spirited Away, by Hayao Miyazaki, but this version deals with a male lead with an unexpected twist. I have been trying to do this story for an exceptionally long time. This story is my own take on the movie, but it is a completely different story than that of the movie itself.
The Wrong Turn
A 12-year-old boy with short blonde hair practically looked bored, as he sat in the back of a red Hitachi Car, sat at the front was the boy’s parents. The Boy was-called Christopher Walker, and his parents were-called Harry and Susan, they had left England, to go and live in China, as Chri’s dad had gotten a job offer there, one that he simply could not refuse. So, it meant leaving home, it meant for Chris, leaving the life he knew behind.
Chris pressed his forehead against the car window, watching the dry fields blur past. His mom was humming an-old song up front, the kind she would play on vinyl when she thought no one was listening. His dad gripped the wheel too tight, knuckles white. The shortcut was supposed to save time. Instead, the road narrowed into dirt, then into nothing at all.
(The Family Car)
“Harry,” Susan said, voice sharp. “This isn’t right.” The car rolled to a stop in front of a wall so tall it blocked the sun. Chris squinted. There was an archway, dark as a throat. The statue beside it was not a statue at all—it was egg-shaped, pockmarked with holes, and if he stared too long, the hollows rearranged themselves into something like a face.
(The Stone Face & The Tunnel)
Harry killed the engine. The sudden silence pressed against Chris’s eardrums, heavy and wrong. The statue-face twitched—just a trick of the light, surely—but Chris scrambled out of the car before it could happen again. His sneakers hit cracked earth, sending up little puffs of dust that hung in the air like suspended breath.
Susan hesitated halfway out of the passenger seat; one hand braced against the doorframe. “This is private property,” she said, but her voice wavered. The archway yawned before them, its edges worn smooth by time or something less natural. Inside, the tunnel exhaled a damp, metallic smell, like wet pennies.
“Let’s just take a quick look,” Harry muttered, already stepping forward. His shadow stretched long and thin as it crossed the threshold, swallowed whole by the dark. Chris did not want to follow. But the alternative—waiting alone in the car with that not-statue watching—was worse.
The tunnel was colder than it should have been. Chris’s breath fogged in front of him, and the walls, when he dared to brush his fingers against them, were slick with condensation. Then, abruptly, they were not walls at all. The darkness peeled away to reveal an expanse of open field, studded with more of those egg-shaped things, their hollow eyes tracking the family’s progress.
Chris’s sneakers sank into the damp earth as they emerged from the tunnel, his parents’ silhouettes ahead of him already blurred by the thick mist curling up from the ground. The statues—no, the *things*—stood motionless, but the holes in their surfaces pulsed faintly, like slow, deliberate breaths. His mother reached back blindly for his hand, her fingers icy. “Stay close,” she whispered, but the words dissolved into the humid air before they reached him properly.
