I descended into the earth, one wooden step at a time.
The air grew heavier with every foot of depth, a physical weight pressing against my eardrums. It didn’t smell like a grave, though. It smelled of peppermint oil and damp wool, a desperate, domestic attempt to mask the underlying stench of wet soil and mildew. It was the smell of a home that shouldn’t exist.
At the bottom of the stairs, the tunnel widened into a room.
I stood in the doorway, my hand gripping the revolver so tight my fingers ached. I held the Maglite up, my thumb trembling on the switch. I didn’t want to see. I wanted to turn around, run back up the stairs, and drive until the fuel ran dry.
But the journalist in me—the part that needed to know the why of the horror—forced my arm steady.
I swept the beam across the space.
It was a box buried in the world. The walls were earth, packed hard and lined with thick, translucent plastic sheeting that rippled slightly in the draft from the open door. The floor was covered in a patchwork of scavenged rugs—Persian, shag, braided—layered three deep to keep the cold at bay.
It was warm. A propane heater hissed softly in the corner, its pilot light a blue eye in the dark.
“Elias?” I whispered.
The silence that answered me was absolute.
I stepped fully inside.
To my left was a living area. A mattress on a pallet, made up with military precision. The sheets were gray, worn thin, but clean. A stack of books sat next to it, not thrillers or horror, but fairy tales. Grimms’ Complete Works. The Arthurian Legends.
To my right was a kitchenette. A camping stove. Jugs of water. A row of canned peaches arranged by size.
It was pathetic. It was a bunker built by a boy who was waiting for the end of the world.
But then I swung the light to the back wall.
The air left my lungs in a sharp, painful wheeze.
The entire rear wall, from the dirt floor to the timber ceiling, was covered.
It was a collage. A mosaic. A shrine.
I walked toward it, the rugs muting my footsteps. The beam of light shook, dancing over the images.
Me.
It was all me.
There were photos from 1999, grainy and overexposed. Me sitting on the patio. Me reading in the garden. Me crying under the willow tree.
Then there was a gap. The years I was away.
But the gap wasn’t empty. It was filled with newspaper clippings. Every article I had ever written for the Seattle Chronicle. He had subscribed. He had cut out my byline from every piece and taped it to the plastic sheeting.
By Elara Vance. By Elara Vance. By Elara Vance.
And then, the recent ones.
High-resolution telephoto shots. Me walking into the Oakhaven Police Station. Me eating at the diner with Julian. Me sleeping in the motel room, taken through the gap in the curtains.
“He never stopped,” I whispered. “He never looked away.”
I reached out, my fingers hovering over a small plastic bag pinned to the wall. Inside was a blue hair ribbon. I hadn’t seen that ribbon since the seventh grade. Next to it, a tube of lip balm. A lost earring. A homework assignment from Mrs. Albright’s class with a gold star on it.
He was a curator of my existence. He had collected the debris of my life and built a religion out of it.
I felt a wave of nausea so strong I had to brace myself against a wooden support beam. This wasn’t hate. This wasn’t the anger of a rejected lover. This was worship. And that was infinitely worse.
In the center of the wall, resting on a wooden crate draped with a lace doily, sat the idol.
Annabel.
My doll.
She was pristine. The mud I had seen in the Polaroid—the mud from the garden—had been painstakingly cleaned off. Her porcelain face shone in the flashlight beam. Her blonde ringlets were brushed and curled. Her blue dress was pressed.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring at me with painted eyes.
“You dug her up,” I said to the empty room. “You saved her.”
Next to the doll lay a book.
It wasn’t a printed book. It was a composition notebook, the black-and-white marbled kind we used in school. The cover was battered, peeling at the corners.
I holstered the gun. I needed both hands for this.
I picked up the book. It felt heavy, dense with twenty years of silence.
I opened it to the first page.
The date was written in blue crayon. June 12, 1999.
The handwriting was jagged, a child’s scrawl.
The Princess is sad today. The Dragon yelled loud. I gave her a stone. She liked it. She is my friend.
I flipped the page.
July 4, 1999.
The dog tried to bite her. I stopped it. The Dragon was mad. I had to hide in the shed. It was cold but I remembered her face and I was warm.
Tears pricked my eyes. He was just a boy. A lonely, abused boy who projected all his need for love onto the girl in the glass house.
I flipped forward. The crayon gave way to pencil. The handwriting became tighter, smaller.
August 15, 1999.
The water is coming. I can hear the river roaring. Dad—Mr. Thorne—locked the shed. He said I have to stay. But I have to get to the high ground. I have to watch the Tower. If I drown, who will watch her?
I traced the words with my thumb. Who will watch her?
He survived the flood for me. He clawed his way out of that shed, not to save himself, but to keep his vigil.
I flipped through years of blank pages—or pages filled with drawings of the Glass House, diagrams of the heating vents, maps of the woods.
Then, the pen changed. Black permanent marker. Violent. Angry strokes that tore the paper.
2024.
She is coming back. I can feel it. The woods are waking up.
I turned the page.
She is here. She looks different. Harder. The Dragon is gone but she is still fighting. She needs me. She needs the Knight.
The Game must finish. We never finished the game.
I read the entry dated three days ago. The day Sarah Miller died.
I sent the token. The picture. She kept it. That means she accepts. She wants to play.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I didn’t accept. It was a threat.”
I read on.
The Sleeping Princess. She liked that one. I made it perfect for her. I used the ivy. I tied the knots the way she liked. But she was sad when she saw it. Why was she sad?
Maybe she needs a sacrifice. Maybe she needs blood.
Ms. Albright. The Tea Party. I made sure she held the cup tight. Pinkies out. Just like the Princess taught me.
My hands were shaking so hard the pages rattled. He wasn’t killing them for himself. He was killing them for me. He thought he was performing a service. He thought he was bringing my stories to life, gifting me with the violent delights of our childhood imagination.
I turned to the last written page. The ink was fresh. It smelled of solvent.
She came to the tree. She saw the one who peeked. Becca. Becca hurt the Princess. Becca made her cry in the gym. I made Becca cry. I made her scream.
The Princess watched. I felt her watching. She is proud.
But the Bad Prince is in the way. Julian. He tries to keep her in a cage. He lies to her. He says I am dead.
I am not dead. I am the King of the Woods.
It is time for the Wedding.
I froze.
The Wedding.
We had played that game once. I remembered it vaguely. A mock ceremony in the garden, where I married a tree stump because I said I would never marry a man like Richard.
But Elias… Elias had been the priest. And the witness.
I looked at the bottom of the page.
The Groom is ready. The Bride is ready. The guests are waiting in the dark.
I slammed the book shut.
The Guests.
The bodies. Sarah. Ms. Albright. Becca.
He wasn’t just killing them. He was collecting them.
But where were they? They were at the morgue.
Unless… unless he planned to take them back.
I looked around the room again, seeing it with new eyes. It wasn’t just a shrine. It was a honeymoon suite. The double mattress. The stockpiled food. The clean sheets.
He wasn’t planning to kill me.
He was planning to keep me.
“Oh god,” I choked out.
I shoved the journal into my coat pocket. I needed to show Julian. I needed to show him that his brother wasn’t just a killer; he was a force of nature driven by a love so warped it had turned into a black hole.
I grabbed Annabel from the crate. I couldn’t leave her here. She was the only witness to his madness.
As I lifted the doll, something fell from her lap.
A Polaroid.
It fluttered to the ground, landing face up on the rug.
I shone the light on it.
It was a picture of the Glass House. Taken from the treeline.
But it wasn’t taken twenty years ago.
In the window of the master bedroom, a silhouette was visible. A woman. Me.
I was holding a hammer.
The photo was taken last night.
He had been outside. Watching me smash the wall. Watching me find his nest.
And written on the white border of the photo, in that same jagged black marker:
I see you looking for me.
Turn around.
The air in the cellar shifted. The plastic sheeting by the door rustled, not from the wind, but from displacement.
The smell of laundry detergent spiked, overpowering the rot.
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. My muscles were locked in a paralysis of pure, primal terror.
But I heard it.
The sound of a boot stepping onto the bottom step of the stairs.
Creak.
I was underground. I was armed.
But the Monster was blocking the only exit.