The darkness that swallowed Number 4 Bittersweet Court wasn’t natural. It didn’t fall; it slammed shut.
One second, the kitchen was bathed in the warm, recessed glow of the under-cabinet LEDs, the refrigerator humming its steady, domestic tune. The next, the world was a void. The hum died with a robotic whimper. The air conditioning handler in the attic groaned and fell silent. Even the ambient light from the streetlamps outside vanished, leaving only the afterimage of the kitchen island burned into Maya’s retinas.
“Maya?” Dan’s voice drifted down from the top of the stairs. It was thin, stripped of its usual pragmatic confidence. “Did we blow a breaker?”
Maya didn’t answer. She stood frozen in the center of the kitchen, her hand gripping the edge of the countertop until her knuckles popped. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs—thud-thud-thud—like a fist on a door.
This wasn’t a breaker. The storm outside hadn’t broken yet; the thunder was still a low rumble in the distance, miles away over the wetlands. The wind hadn’t touched the power lines.
This was a cue.
“Lighting change,” Maya whispered to the dark. “Fade to black.”
Her mind, sharpened by weeks of terror and years of investigative logic, began to race. She wasn’t thinking like a victim anymore. She was thinking like an editor. She was looking at the structure of the events, the pacing, the beats.
The Podcast. The Release Schedule. The Escalation.
Episode One: The Hook. Episode Two: The Evidence. Episode Three: The Threat. Episode Four: The Character Assassination.
And then… The Lull. The forty-eight hours of silence. The time for the audience to breathe, for the tension to coil tight like a spring.
What came next? In every thriller, in every slasher movie, in every piece of genre fiction ever written—what happened after the heroes retreated to their fortress and the police arrived to stand guard?
The Isolation.
Maya turned toward the front window. Through the sheer drapes, she could see the only light left in the world.
The police cruiser.
It sat at the end of her driveway, a heavy, metallic beast idling in the gloom. The light bar wasn’t fully engaged, just the low-profile amber running lights and the occasional lazy flash of blue that swept across the white picket fence like a lighthouse beam.
Officer Miller. That was his name. He was twenty-four years old. He had acne scars on his chin and he chewed spearmint gum with his mouth open. He had told her earlier that he was saving up for a jet ski.
He thought he was the safety net.
Maya stared at the car, horror rising in her throat like bile.
“He’s not the safety net,” she realized, the words tasting of copper. “He’s the Red Shirt. He’s the Sacrificial Lamb.”
The killer wasn’t waiting for the cop to leave. The killer needed the cop to be there. The narrative demanded it. You can’t have a helpless protagonist if there’s a man with a gun and a radio standing between her and the monster. To raise the stakes, the protector has to fall.
It was a trope. A deadly, predictable, necessary trope.
And he’s sitting right there on the X.
“Dan!” Maya screamed, the sound tearing out of her throat. “Lock the bedroom door! Don’t come down!”
“Maya, what is going on?” Dan shouted back, panic edging into his tone. “I can’t see anything!”
“Just stay with Leo!”
Maya fumbled for her phone in her pocket. She brought up the flashlight app, the beam cutting a jagged cone through the dusty air of the hallway. She ran to the front door.
The smart lock was dead. The keypad was dark. But the manual thumb-turn still worked. She twisted it, the metal cold under her sweating fingers.
Click.
She threw the door open.
The humidity hit her like a physical blow. The air outside was heavy, saturated with the smell of ozone and the rotting sweetness of the vanilla mulch. The wetlands were suspiciously silent. No frogs. No crickets. Just the rustle of the wind in the reeds, sounding like dry whispers.
Maya sprinted barefoot onto the porch. The cold concrete bit into her skin.
“Officer!” she yelled. “Officer Miller!”
The cruiser sat fifty feet away. The windows were rolled up. The engine hummed.
He didn’t hear her.
She ran down the steps, her feet slapping against the wet pavement of the driveway. The darkness of the cul-de-sac was absolute. The other houses—Sarah’s, Chloe’s, Elena’s—were black shapes against a black sky. The killer had cut the main line to the transformer. He had blinded the entire street.
She reached the driver’s side door and pounded on the glass with her fist.
“Hey!”
Inside, Officer Miller jumped. He dropped his phone into his lap. He looked up, his eyes wide, hand dropping instinctively to his holster before he recognized her.
He rolled the window down three inches. A blast of cool, conditioned air escaped the car, smelling of stale coffee and spearmint.
“Mrs. Lin-Baker?” he asked, his voice cracking slightly. “Jesus, you scared me. Stay inside, ma’am. The power is out.”
“You have to leave,” Maya panted, gripping the door handle. “You have to move the car.”
Miller frowned, his brow furrowing. “Ma’am? I’m here to protect you. Dispatch knows about the outage. A crew is on the way.”
“No,” Maya shook her head frantically. “You don’t understand. It’s not a power outage. It’s a scene. He cut the lights because the next beat is the assault.”
Miller looked at her like she was speaking in tongues. He gave her a pitying, condescending smile—the kind men gave hysterical women right before they died.
“It’s just a blown transformer, Mrs. Lin-Baker. I saw a spark down the road. It happens.”
“It happens because he made it happen!” Maya screamed. She looked around the darkness. The shadows between the houses seemed to be moving. The perfectly manicured hedges looked like crouching figures. “He’s following a script! Don’t you see? You’re the obstacle. He has to remove you to get to me.”
Miller sighed. He picked up his radio mic. “Dispatch, this is Unit 4-Alpha. The resident is distressed. Requesting an update on the power company ETA.”
“Don’t call dispatch!” Maya reached through the crack in the window, grabbing his sleeve. “Get out of the car. Come inside. Or drive away. Just don’t sit here!”
“Ma’am, please remove your hand from the vehicle,” Miller said, his voice hardening into official police cadence. “You need to go back inside your home and lock the door. You are safer inside.”
“I’m not safe!” Maya cried. “And neither are you! You’re sitting in a fishbowl!”
She pointed at the interior dome light he had turned on to see her better. It illuminated his face, his badge, his neck. In the darkness of the cul-de-sac, he was the brightest thing for miles.
“He writes the story,” Maya pleaded, her voice breaking. “In the story, the cop dies first. Please. I’m not crazy. I’m a writer. I know how this works.”
Miller looked at her. For a second, just a fraction of a second, the certainty in her eyes seemed to pierce his boredom. He looked past her, toward the deep, impenetrable black of the wetlands. He looked at the shadows stretching from the side of the house.
He shivered.
“Okay,” he said, softening. “Okay, Mrs. Lin-Baker. Tell you what. I’ll do a perimeter check. I’ll shine the spot, make sure everything is clear. Then will you go inside?”
“No,” Maya whispered. “Do not get out of the car.”
If he got out, he was vulnerable. If he stayed in, he was a target. There was no winning move. That was the point of the trap.
“I’m going to check the side yard,” Miller said, his masculinity reasserting itself over his unease. He unbuckled his seatbelt. “Just to give you peace of mind.”
“Don’t,” Maya begged.
But he was opening the door. The chime of the car door alarm pinged—ding, ding, ding—a cheerful, digital countdown.
Miller stepped out. He adjusted his belt. He clicked on his heavy Maglite flashlight.
“Go inside, Maya,” he said, using her first name for the first time. “I’ve got this.”
He turned away from her, swinging the beam of light toward the side of the house, toward the narrow easement that led to the Sinks.
The beam cut through the humid air, illuminating moths and drifting pollen. It swept over the white fence. It swept over the hydrangeas.
It swept over the recycling bin.
Maya saw it before he did.
A shape. Not a shadow. A displacement of the darkness.
Something was standing behind the fence. Something that didn’t reflect the light, but absorbed it.
“Behind you!” Maya screamed.
Miller spun around, his hand going to his weapon.
But the trope was already in motion. The narrative gravity was too strong.
A sound came from the other side of the car. Not from the fence. From the woods.
Crack.
It sounded like a branch snapping. Or a suppressed gunshot.
Miller flinched. He turned his head toward the sound, distracted.
“No!” Maya lunged for him.
But she was just a character in the scene. She wasn’t the director.
The darkness seemed to detach itself from the side of the house. A figure, dressed in matte black, moved with fluid, terrifying silence. It wasn’t coming from the fence. It wasn’t coming from the woods.
It had been underneath the porch.
The killer had been waiting there before the lights even went out. He had been waiting for the cue.
Maya saw the glint of metal—not a gun, but something long and curved. A tire iron? A machete?
“Miller!”
The young officer turned back, his flashlight swinging wild. The beam caught Maya’s face, blinding her.
“Run!” she shrieked.
She didn’t see the impact. She heard it. A wet, heavy thud. The sound of meat and bone meeting steel.
Miller’s flashlight spun through the air, a mesmerizing arc of light, before crashing onto the driveway. It rolled, the beam strobing across the wet asphalt, illuminating a black boot, a fallen badge, and the widening pool of red that looked black in the shadows.
The trope was complete. The Guardian was down.
And Maya was standing alone in the dark, ten feet from the monster who was rewriting her life.