The Old Sawmill loomed out of the fog like the carcass of a leviathan, its steel ribs stripped bare by decades of wind and neglect. I killed the engine of the truck about a quarter-mile out, rolling into the cover of a collapsed sorting shed.
The rain drummed a deafening rhythm on the corrugated tin roof above me. It was a violent, relentless sound, but it offered a strange kind of privacy. In the roar of the storm, I could think.
I checked the .38 revolver. Five rounds. No safety.
I put it on the dashboard and reached into my pocket. The composition notebook was damp, the cardboard cover warping under my fingers. It felt heavy, not with weight, but with the gravity of the secrets it held.
I needed to know.
Before I walked into that cathedral of rust to meet him, I needed to understand the rules of the game he was playing. I had seen the “Doctor” game at the hospital. I had seen the “Tea Party.” But there was a gap in the timeline. A hole in my own memory that was blacker than the space between the stars.
I clicked on the flashlight, shielding the beam with my hand, and opened the book.
I flipped past the drawings of the house. Past the maps of the vents. I stopped at a page where the handwriting changed. It wasn’t the jagged scrawl of the feral boy, nor the sharp marker of the man. It was shaky. Pressing hard into the paper.
July 4, 1999.
The Dragon put her in the hole. The deep hole. He turned the lock.
She is screaming. I can hear her through the ground. The grass is vibrating.
He went inside to drink the brown water. He left the Beast to watch the door.
I have to go down. I have to go into the dark.
The words blurred. The smell of the rain and the rusty truck cab vanished.
Suddenly, I wasn’t sitting in a truck. I was cold. Freezing.
The air tasted of coal dust and heating oil.
Flash.
I am twelve years old. I am wearing my Fourth of July dress. It has red and white stripes. Richard bought it. He said I looked like a patriot.
But I spilled. I spilled grape juice on the white stripe.
Richard didn’t yell. Yelling was for small mistakes. For big mistakes, he got quiet.
“You need time to think about gratitude, Elara,” he said.
He dragged me by the arm—not my hand, my upper arm, his fingers digging into the soft flesh—through the kitchen, through the mudroom, to the heavy oak door that led to the old coal cellar beneath the garage.
“Richard, please,” I begged. “It’s dark. There are spiders.”
“Then you’ll learn to be brave.”
He shoved me down the stairs. I stumbled, scraping my knees on the rough concrete.
The door slammed shut.
Click.
The lock engaged.
Total, absolute darkness.
I screamed. I pounded on the door until my fists bled. I cried until my throat was raw meat.
“Mom!” I shrieked. “Mom, help me!”
But Mom was upstairs, probably turning up the volume on the television, pretending she couldn’t hear. That was her survival skill. Deafness.
Hours passed. Or maybe minutes. In the dark, time dissolves.
I curled into a ball on the bottom step, shivering. The darkness pressed against my eyes, heavy and suffocating. I could hear things skittering in the corners.
I’m going to die here, I thought. He’s going to leave me here until I turn into a skeleton.
Then, a sound.
Not from the door at the top of the stairs. From the small, rectangular coal chute high up on the wall.
Scrape. Thud.
Something hit the glass of the chute window.
I stood up, trembling. “Richard?”
Smash.
The glass shattered, raining down onto the coal pile in the corner.
Moonlight poured in. A single, jagged beam of silver.
And then, a shape blocked the light.
“Princess?”
The voice was a rasp. A whisper.
“Sandman?” I choked out.
He slid through the broken window, dropping onto the coal pile with a crunch. He scrambled down, ignoring the sharp black rocks, and ran to me.
He was filthy. He smelled of the river and sweat. But his hands—when they touched my face, checking for blood—were gentle.
“Did he hurt you?” Elias asked. His eyes were wide, reflecting the sliver of moonlight.
“He locked me in,” I sobbed, clinging to his dirty t-shirt. “He locked me in the dark.”
“I heard you,” he said. “I heard you calling.”
He looked up at the door. “I can’t open it. The lock is on the other side.”
“I want to get out,” I wailed.
“We go out the window,” he said. “Come on.”
He boosted me up. I scrambled over the coal, cutting my hands on the glass shards remaining in the frame. He pushed my feet, lifting me until I could wiggle through the narrow opening.
I fell out onto the grass of the backyard. The night air was sweet, thick with humidity and the smell of distant fireworks.
I took a deep breath, ready to run.
Then I heard the growl.
Rex.
The Doberman was chained to the porch railing, but the chain was long. He lunged out of the shadows, teeth bared, a low rumble vibrating in his chest.
Richard had trained him to guard the perimeter.
I froze. The dog was huge. A monster made of muscle and teeth.
Elias dropped out of the window behind me.
Rex snapped, his jaws closing inches from my leg.
“Run!” Elias shouted.
He didn’t run. He threw himself between me and the dog.
Rex turned on him. The dog clamped its jaws onto Elias’s forearm.
Elias didn’t scream. He grunted—a guttural, wet sound.
And then he raised his other hand.
He was holding a rock. A large, jagged piece of granite from the garden border.
He brought it down.
Thud.
Rex yelped.
Thud.
The dog let go.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I watched, paralyzed, as the boy beat the dog. He didn’t stop when the dog stopped moving. He kept hitting it. He hit it until the rock was slick. He hit it until the black fur was matted with red.
He was crying. Silent, angry tears that cut tracks through the dirt on his face.
Finally, he stood up. He was panting. His arm was bleeding freely, three deep punctures from the dog’s teeth.
He looked at the dead animal. Then he looked at the house, where the blue light of the television flickered in the living room window.
He knelt in the dirt. He used the bloody rock to scratch something into the earth.
HE HURT HER.
He stood up and turned to me. He looked terrifying. He looked like a demon summoned from the pit.
“Go back to your room,” he whispered. “Climb the trellis. Don’t let him know you were out.”
“What about you?” I asked, staring at his bleeding arm.
“I have to go,” he said. “I have to hide.”
He touched my cheek with his clean hand.
“He won’t lock you up again,” he promised. “I won’t let him.”
Flash.
I gasped, dropping the journal on the floor of the truck.
I was back in the rain.
I touched my face. My cheeks were wet.
“He saved me,” I whispered.
The realization washed over me, colder than the storm.
I had blocked it out. I had repressed the cellar, the dog, the violence. I had rewritten the memory to make the dog’s death a mystery, a random act of a “feral boy” I feared.
But I hadn’t feared him. I had loved him.
He had taken a bite meant for me.
And Richard…
I picked up the journal again, flipping frantically to the end of that year. To November.
Richard had died in November. He had fallen from the balcony of the master bedroom. The police ruled it an accident—slick leaves, too much scotch.
I found the entry.
November 12, 1999.
The handwriting was different. It was shaky again, but triumphant.
The Dragon tried to fly.
He was looking for her. He was shouting her name. He was going to put her back in the box.
I greased the rail.
I used the oil from the shed. I put it on the wood where he puts his hands.
He slipped.
He fell.
Gravity is a good weapon.
The Princess is safe. The Dragon is dead. I am the Knight.
I stared at the words.
Richard didn’t slip on leaves. He slipped on oil. Elias killed him.
He killed my stepfather. He murdered him to stop him from locking me in the cellar again.
“You did it for me,” I said, my voice trembling.
Elias Thorne wasn’t a serial killer born of chaos. He was a weapon I had forged in the fires of my own abuse. I was the trigger. Every time I was hurt, he lashed out. Every time I was threatened, he killed.
And now?
He thought the town was the Dragon. He thought Julian was the Dragon. He thought everyone who had ever hurt me, or looked at me wrong, or tried to keep me away from him, was an enemy that needed to be put down.
I looked out at the hulking silhouette of the Sawmill.
He was in there. Waiting for me.
He didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted to be thanked.
He expected me to run into his arms and praise him for the slaughter. He expected me to marry him because he was the only one who had ever truly protected me.
And the terrifying, heartbreaking truth was… he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Julian hadn’t saved me. My mother hadn’t saved me. The police hadn’t saved me.
The monster in the walls had saved me.
I gripped the steering wheel. The empathy burned in my chest, hot and confusing. I felt a profound, aching sorrow for the boy who had been locked in a shed and then locked in the dark, watching the world through a peephole.
But then I thought of Ms. Albright’s hand glued to the cup. I thought of Becca’s face smashed against the tree.
He was a knight who didn’t know when the war was over.
“I owe you my life, Elias,” I whispered.
I picked up the revolver from the dashboard.
“But I have to take yours.”
I opened the truck door and stepped out into the mud. The Sawmill waited, a dark mouth full of jagged teeth.
I wasn’t going in there to catch a killer. I was going in there to put down a rabid dog that I had raised.