The human mind is a master architect of denial. Give it seven days of silence, a few hours of sunshine, and a steady beep of a heart monitor that signals life instead of death, and it will build a castle of safety out of thin air.
I had spent the last week living in that castle.
I sat in the driver’s seat of the rental sedan I’d picked up two days ago—Julian’s truck was impounded as evidence, and my own car was still a crime scene on wheels—and stared at the Styrofoam cup in my hand. It was lukewarm, cheap diner coffee that tasted like burnt hazelnuts and cardboard, but it was the best thing I had ever tasted.
Because I was drinking it without looking over my shoulder.
“He’s gone,” I whispered, testing the weight of the words.
I wanted to believe it. Julian wanted to believe it. The police, who had combed the woods for five days and found nothing but a blood trail that ended at the river’s edge, definitely wanted to believe it. The official theory was that Elias had succumbed to his wounds—the glass shard I’d buried in his shoulder, the exposure, the infection—and washed away, just like he was supposed to twenty years ago.
History repeating itself. A neat, circular narrative.
I took a sip of coffee and watched the town of Oakhaven move through the windshield. People were coming out of their burrows. The fear that had paralyzed the streets was thawing. I saw Mrs. Gable walking into the grocery store. I saw teenagers laughing near the library steps.
They thought the monster was dead.
I checked my watch. 6:15 PM. I needed to get back to the hospital. Julian was awake more often now, his color returning, the sharp edge of his wit cutting through the morphine haze. We hadn’t talked about the night at the Sawmill. We hadn’t talked about the gun, or the journal, or the way he had looked at me when I told him I was the one who lured his brother out. We just sat in the silence, two survivors trying to remember how to breathe.
I placed the coffee in the cup holder and reached for the ignition.
That’s when I saw it.
It was sitting on the dashboard, directly above the speedometer. A small, rectangular object that hadn’t been there when I went inside to get the coffee ten minutes ago.
My hand froze in mid-air. The keys jingled softly, a cheerful sound that felt obscene in the sudden, pressurized silence of the car.
A matchbox.
It wasn’t a modern box. It was vintage, the cardboard corners soft and frayed. The label was faded, depicting a crude illustration of a red bird—a cardinal—mid-flight.
I stopped breathing.
I knew this box.
I stared at the door locks. The plungers were down. Locked. I checked the windows. Rolled up tight.
But he had gotten in.
He hadn’t broken the glass. He hadn’t forced the lock. He had simply… entered. Like smoke. Like a thought you couldn’t suppress.
The castle of safety I had built over the last week crumbled into dust. The walls dissolved. The roof caved in.
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t in the river.
He was here.
I scanned the parking lot, my eyes wild, searching the shadows between the streetlights, the alleyways, the rooftops. A woman pushed a stroller. A man walked a dog. Normal. Mundane.
But somewhere in that normalcy, eyes were watching me.
I looked back at the matchbox. It sat there with the heavy presence of a bomb.
I didn’t want to touch it. Touching it meant accepting the message. Touching it meant the game was back on.
But I had to know.
I reached out, my fingers trembling so badly I almost knocked the coffee over. The cardboard felt dry, textured like old skin. I picked it up. It rattled.
There were no matches inside. The weight was wrong. It was too light to be full, too heavy to be empty. Something solid rolled around in the drawer.
I pushed the inner tray open.
It slid out with a soft rasp of friction.
Resting on a bed of pulled cotton—the kind you find in aspirin bottles—was a tooth.
I dropped the box.
It landed on my lap. The tooth bounced onto the denim of my jeans.
I scrambled back, slamming my spine against the driver’s side door, a strangled noise escaping my throat. I brushed the tooth away frantically, as if it were a live coal. It fell onto the floor mat, settling among the grit and pebbles.
A molar.
It was a human molar. The root was long, jagged, and stained dark brown. Not with decay. With dried blood.
I stared at it, my chest heaving, the air in the car suddenly too thin to sustain life.
It wasn’t an old tooth. It wasn’t a baby tooth kept in a keepsake box. The blood on the root was dark, but it wasn’t ancient.
Whose tooth was it?
I ran my tongue over my own teeth, a reflexive check. All there.
Was it Sarah’s? Becca’s? Or was it… his?
I forced myself to look at the matchbox again. It had landed face up on my thighs.
The red bird.
The Burning Man.
The memory hit me like a physical blow, a shovel to the back of the head.
Flash.
Summer, 1999. The drought. The grass on the lawn of the Vance Estate was yellow and brittle.
Elias and I were in the woods, near the riverbank where the mud had turned to cracked clay.
“We have to burn him,” Elias said. He was holding a stick figure he had made out of twigs and twine. He had dressed it in a scrap of fabric cut from one of Richard’s old ties.
“Why?” I asked, wiping sweat from my forehead.
“Because fire cleans,” he said. His voice was serious, the voice of a doctor diagnosing a plague. “The bad spirit is in the wood. If we burn the wood, the spirit goes away.”
He pulled a matchbox from his pocket. This matchbox. The one with the red bird.
“Richard says I’m not allowed to touch matches,” I whispered.
“Richard isn’t here,” Elias said. He struck a match. The flame flared, orange and hungry against the gray daylight.
He held it to the twig man. The dry wood caught instantly. The fire consumed the scrap of tie, the twine, the shape of the man.
“See?” Elias said, watching the ashes float into the river. “Gone. He can’t hurt anyone now.”
Flash.
I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white.
Matches. Fire.
He wasn’t just telling me he was alive. He was telling me the rules of the next round.
The Burning Man.
I looked out the window. A poster was stapled to the telephone pole directly in front of the car. It was bright orange and yellow, garish colors that seemed to vibrate in the dusk.
THE ANNUAL OAKHAVEN DOLL FESTIVAL This Saturday Night! Burn Your Burdens!
The festival.
The town tradition where the locals built effigies of straw and wood—dolls representing their sins, their regrets, their bad memories—and threw them onto a massive bonfire in the town square.
It was tomorrow night.
“No,” I whispered.
The realization was a cold sickness in my gut.
Elias didn’t care about town traditions. He cared about our traditions. And we had a tradition of burning the things that hurt us.
But Elias had escalated. He didn’t burn twigs anymore.
He burned people.
The tooth.
I looked down at the floor mat. The tooth was a promise. A piece of the victim. Or a piece of himself, an offering to the fire.
He was going to use the festival.
He was going to hide his fire inside their fire.
The square would be packed. Hundreds of people in masks, carrying dolls, dancing around a pyre. It was the perfect camouflage. A celebration of burning.
And he would be there. The Sandman. The boy who lived in the walls.
He would bring a guest. A special guest for the bonfire.
I grabbed the matchbox and shoved the drawer shut. I picked up the tooth with a napkin from the console, wrapping it tight.
I started the car. The engine roared to life, a mechanical growl that sounded like a challenge.
I had to find Julian. I had to tell him.
But as I put the car in gear, I realized the true cruelty of the message.
Elias hadn’t just left the box to scare me. He left it to invite me.
He knew I would understand the symbol. He knew I would remember the game.
He wanted me at the festival.
He wanted me to watch the fire.
I pulled out of the parking lot, tires screeching on the pavement.
The week of silence hadn’t been a retreat. It had been a deep breath before the scream.
And tomorrow night, the whole town was going to scream with him.