Dead girls always look smaller than they did when they were alive. That’s the first thing you learn on this beat. The life goes out of them, and the space they occupied in the world seems to contract, as if the universe is already rushing to fill the void they left behind.
I stood at the edge of the police tape, the relentless Seattle drizzle turning the crime scene into a watercolor painting of neon reds and grays. Detective Miller was arguing with a uniform near the dumpster, his breath pluming in the cold November air, but I wasn’t looking at him. I was looking at the girl.
She was curled on her side in the alley, wearing a yellow raincoat that was too bright for the grime surrounding her.
“You’re not supposed to be back here, Vance,” Miller called out, though his heart wasn’t in the reprimand. He knew I wouldn’t touch anything. I never touched. I only watched.
“Just doing my job, Miller,” I said, my voice steady, stripped of any tremor. “Same as you.”
I jotted down the details in my notebook—victim approx. 20s, no visible struggle, positioned facing the wall. I didn’t write down that she looked peaceful. Peaceful was an editorialization. Peaceful was a lie we told the subscribers of the Seattle Chronicle so they could sleep at night.
I felt nothing. That was my superpower. Fifteen years ago, I had stepped onto a Greyhound bus with a backpack and a bruise on my cheek that I told everyone was from walking into a door, and I had left the capacity for horror back in the valley. In the city, I was Elara Vance, the ruthless investigative journalist who could stare into the abyss and write a thousand words on its zoning laws before the deadline.
“Go home, Elara,” Miller said, finally walking over. He looked tired. We all looked tired. “Press conference is at eight. You’ll get your quotes then.”
I capped my pen. “Don’t bury the lead, Miller. If this is a serial, the public needs to know.”
“It’s not a serial,” he snapped, too quickly.
I didn’t argue. I just nodded, turned my collar up against the rain, and walked away. My pulse sat at a resting sixty beats per minute. The perfect, clinical observer. The woman made of glass—hard, transparent, and impossible to stain.
The newsroom was a sanctuary of controlled chaos. Phones rang in discordant harmonies, keyboards clattered like heavy rain on a tin roof, and the air smelled of burnt coffee and stale adrenaline. This was my world. It was loud, bright, and entirely devoid of secrets.
I dropped my wet coat on the back of my chair and sat down, booting up my monitor. The cursor blinked at me, a rhythmic demand for the truth, but my eyes drifted to the stack of mail the intern had dumped on my desk.
Utility bill. Press release. A hate letter from a city councilman I’d exposed last week.
And then, the blue envelope.
It sat at the bottom of the pile, heavy and distinct. It wasn’t the standard office-supply blue; it was a deep, slate color, like the sky just before a storm breaks. There was no return address. Just my name, Elara Vance, typed on an old typewriter where the ‘e’ sat slightly higher than the other letters.
My heart, usually so cooperative, skipped a beat.
I reached for it. The paper felt thick, textured, almost damp.
As I slid my finger under the flap to tear it open, a scent hit me. It wasn’t the smell of the newsroom anymore. It was the sharp, piercing aroma of cedar, mixed with the metallic tang of ozone and the sweet, cloying scent of wet rot.
The Oakhaven Shroud.
The smell of the valley.
My fingers trembled. Just a micro-tremor, invisible to anyone watching, but tectonic to me. I hadn’t smelled that scent in fifteen years. I had scrubbed it from my skin, from my clothes, from my hair. But here it was, rising from a piece of paper in downtown Seattle, instantaneous and suffocating.
I pulled out the contents.
It wasn’t a letter. It was a single Polaroid photograph.
The image was high-contrast, the flash reflecting harshly off wet leaves. It was a close-up of a garden—my garden. I knew the twist of those ivy roots. I knew the specific shade of gray stone that made up the retaining wall of the Vance Estate.
But it was the object in the dirt that made the air leave my lungs.
A doll.
It was a porcelain Victorian doll with cascading blonde ringlets and a dress of pale blue lace. Her left eye was cracked, a spiderweb fracture running down her ceramic cheek.
“Annabel,” I whispered. The name tasted like ash.
I hadn’t seen Annabel since the night I left. I had buried her. I had buried her deep in the sanctuary behind the rhododendrons, wrapped in a plastic bag, three feet down where the soil was cold and heavy. I had buried her to keep her safe. To keep her quiet.
In the photo, she had been dug up. The plastic was gone. Her dress was stained with fresh mud, and her hands—her delicate, porcelain hands—were posed. They weren’t just lying limp. They were brought up to her mouth, palms together, fingers splayed.
The Secret Keeper. That was the signal. That was the rule. Don’t speak.
I flipped the photo over.
On the back, written in thick black marker, were two words:
Let’s Play.
The newsroom vanished.
Suddenly, I wasn’t in an open-plan office. I was back in the Glass House. The walls were closing in, pressing against my temples. I could hear the rain drumming against the floor-to-ceiling windows, a relentless, trapping rhythm. The fluorescent lights overhead didn’t buzz; they hummed a melody. A nursery rhyme.
Box it up, lock it tight…
My chest seized. A phantom weight pressed down on my sternum—the specific, crushing pressure of claustrophobia. The air in the room was too thin, too hot. I clawed at the collar of my blouse, a button popping off and skittering across the desk like a frantic beetle.
Breathe, Elara. You are in Seattle. You are thirty-three years old. You are safe.
But I wasn’t.
The smell of the envelope was expanding, filling the cubicle. It smelled like the Weeping Woods. It smelled like the cellar.
I shoved the chair back, the wheels screeching against the linoleum. Heads turned.
“Vance? You okay?” It was Toby, the sports editor.
I couldn’t speak. If I opened my mouth, I would scream, and if I screamed, the glass would shatter, and if the glass shattered, everyone would see inside. They would see the frightened little girl I had spent a decade and a half drowning in whiskey and bylines.
I grabbed the photo and the envelope, shoving them into my bag. My hands were shaking violently now. I needed air. I needed to see the sky.
I stumbled toward the break room, pushing through the double doors. It was empty. I gripped the edge of the sink, leaning over it, gasping for breath. The porcelain of the sink was cool under my palms. Real. Solid.
Let’s Play.
The game. We used to play games. The dark games. The ones that made the hours pass when the shouting downstairs got too loud.
But I had played those games alone. That was what the therapists had said. Dissociative play used to manage trauma. I had invented the scenarios. I had invented the rules. I had invented… him.
The boy in the woods. The Sandman.
He wasn’t real. He was a coping mechanism. A ghost made of hunger and loneliness.
So who dug up the doll?
“Elara?”
I spun around. Mack, my managing editor, stood in the doorway. He was a bear of a man who had seen everything from war zones to corruption scandals, but he looked at me now with genuine concern. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I need time off,” I blurted out. My voice sounded foreign, raspy and small.
Mack frowned. “You’re on the Jane Doe case. You just started the profile.”
“I need to leave. Now.” I straightened up, forcing my spine to lock into place. I had to put the mask back on. I had to be the journalist. “Family emergency.”
“You told me you didn’t have any family,” Mack said slowly.
“I was wrong.”
The lie tasted metallic, like blood. But it was the only currency I had left.
Mack studied me for a long moment. He looked at the sweat beading on my forehead, the missing button on my blouse, the way my knuckles were white against the strap of my bag. He didn’t ask. That was the deal we had. I gave him the stories; he gave me the space.
“Take a week,” he said. “But Vance? Leave the phone on.”
“Thanks, Mack.”
I walked past him, moving fast. I didn’t go back to my desk. I went straight to the elevator.
As the doors slid shut, cutting off the noise of the newsroom, I leaned my head against the cool metal wall. The panic was receding, replaced by something colder, heavier. Grim determination.
Someone was in Oakhaven. Someone knew about Annabel. Someone knew where the bodies were buried—literally.
And they were mocking me.
The panic attack had been a reflex, a child’s fear of the dark. But I wasn’t a child anymore. I was a woman who hunted monsters for a living.
If someone wanted to play a game, I would play. But I wasn’t going to play by the rules I wrote when I was twelve.
I pulled my keys from my pocket. My car was downstairs. A tank of gas, four hours of driving.
The fog would be waiting. The damp rot of the woods would be waiting. The Glass House, with its transparent walls and dark corners, would be waiting.
I closed my eyes and saw the cracked face of the doll.
“Okay,” I whispered to the empty elevator. “I’m coming.”