The Oakhaven Town Hall was a building designed to intimidate. It was all dark mahogany wainscoting and vaulted ceilings that trapped the heat, making the air smell of floor wax and the nervous sweat of a hundred people crammed into a space meant for fifty.
I stood at the back of the room, my back pressed against the cold plaster wall, watching the town commit suicide by committee.
“Order! Order, please!” Mayor Sterling banged his gavel. It was a theatrical gesture, useless against the roar of voices arguing about parking permits and vendor stall fees.
Sterling was new money trying desperately to look like old logging royalty. He wore a suit that was too shiny and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He was the kind of man who would sell lifeboats on the Titanic to the highest bidder.
“We have a schedule to keep,” Sterling bellowed into the microphone. “The Doll Festival begins at sundown tomorrow. We need to finalize the security budget.”
“Security?” I shouted, my voice cutting through the din. “You don’t need security. You need an evacuation order.”
Heads turned. The room went quiet, the silence rippling outward from where I stood. I saw faces I recognized—Mrs. Gable from the library, clutching her purse; the grocer who had sold me the burner phone; Sheriff Miller, standing near the stage, his arms crossed and his face a mask of stone.
“Ms. Vance,” Sterling said, peering over his spectacles. “I was under the impression you were… indisposed. Or perhaps leaving town?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, pushing off the wall and walking down the center aisle. The crowd parted for me, not out of respect, but out of fear. I was the harbinger. The woman who found the bodies. “And neither should you. You need to cancel the festival.”
A murmur of dissent ran through the room like a current.
“Cancel?” a woman in the front row scoffed. “We’ve spent six months making the dolls. The vendors are already set up.”
“Three women are dead,” I said, my voice steady, though my hands were shaking in my pockets. I gripped the box of matches I had found on my dashboard. “Murdered. By a man who is still out there. A man who leaves clues about his next move.”
I reached the front of the room. I held up the matchbox.
“He left this for me today,” I said. “It’s a threat. He intends to burn something. And you’re building a sixty-foot pyre in the middle of the town square.”
“We burn the dolls every year, Elara,” Sterling said, his tone patronizing. “It’s tradition. Burn your burdens. It’s symbolic.”
“It’s not symbolic to him!” I snapped. “To him, fire isn’t a metaphor. It’s a weapon. He grew up watching this town burn effigies. What do you think that taught him? It taught him that if you want to get rid of something bad, you set it on fire.”
I turned to face the crowd.
“He thinks you’re the bad things,” I said. “All of you. You let him rot in a shed. You let him disappear in a flood and didn’t look for him. He remembers. And he’s coming back to return the favor.”
“That’s enough,” Sheriff Miller stepped forward. He didn’t look at me; he looked at the crowd. “We have state troopers coming in to supplement the force. We have a perimeter established around the square. The suspect is injured and isolated. We are not going to let a fugitive dictate our lives.”
“He’s not isolated,” I argued. “He’s watching us right now.”
“The festival brings in forty percent of the town’s annual revenue,” Sterling interrupted, dropping the pretense of safety. “Without this weekend, the mill museum closes. The library cuts hours. The road repairs stop. We are dying on the vine here, Ms. Vance. We cannot afford to be afraid.”
“Can you afford a massacre?” I asked.
“Sit down, Elara,” someone shouted from the back. “Go back to Seattle!”
“Yeah! Take your bad luck with you!”
The mood shifted instantly. They weren’t scared of the killer; they were scared of me. I was the outsider. I was the one pointing out the rot in the floorboards. They preferred the illusion of the festival, the bright lights and the music, to the ugly truth hiding in the dark.
I looked at their faces. Resentment. Greed. Denial.
They wanted the fire. They needed it.
“Fine,” I said, my voice cold. “Burn your dolls. But when the fire spreads… don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
I turned and walked out. I didn’t run. I let them see my back. I let them see that I was walking away from them, leaving them to their fate.
I burst out into the cool evening air, my lungs burning. The fog was descending again, blurring the edges of the streetlights.
“Ms. Vance!”
I didn’t stop.
“Elara, wait!”
I spun around. It was Sterling. He had followed me out onto the steps of the Town Hall.
“You think I’m a monster,” he said, adjusting his tie. “You think I’m trading blood for money.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m trying to keep a town alive,” he said, his voice dropping. “You left, Elara. You got out. You don’t know what it’s been like here. The logging contracts dried up. The young people leave and don’t come back. The shadows get longer every year.”
He looked toward the square, where the glow of work lights illuminated the construction of the pyre.
“If we cancel the festival,” he said softly, “we admit that the town is dead. We admit that the ghost stories won. And I won’t do that.”
“The ghost stories are real, Mayor,” I said. “And they carry matches.”
I turned and walked away, leaving him standing on the steps of his crumbling kingdom.
I needed to see it. I needed to see the stage he had set.
The Town Square was a block away. It was usually a depressing patch of dead grass and a gazebo with peeling paint, but tonight, it was transformed.
Strings of Edison bulbs were draped between the old oak trees, casting a warm, golden light that fought against the gray fog. Stalls were being erected—games of chance, food trucks selling fried dough, tables laden with handmade crafts.
But dominating the center of the square was the Pyre.
It was massive. A ziggurat of wooden pallets, old logs, and brush, rising twenty feet into the air. It looked like a scaffold. It looked like an altar.
And surrounding the base, piled like cordwood, were the dolls.
Residents had been dropping them off all week. They were crude things, mostly. Scarecrows made of old clothes stuffed with straw. Some were small, made of sticks and twine. Others were life-sized, limp and terrifying in their human proportions.
Each one represented a “burden.” A regret. A sin. You pinned a note to the doll, threw it on the fire, and watched your past turn to ash.
It was a beautiful lie.
I walked closer, the smell of sawdust and gasoline heavy in the air. They had already soaked the base logs. The accelerant stung my nose, mixing with the ubiquitous scent of cedar.
Flash.
I am ten years old. I am standing in the backyard of the Glass House.
Elias is there. He has a metal trash can.
“Watch,” he says.
He throws a match into the can. Flames whoosh up, bright and hungry.
He throws things in. A belt. A bottle of scotch. A tie.
“What are you doing?” I ask, terrified Richard will see.
“I’m burning the Dragon,” he says. His face is illuminated by the fire, eyes wide and ecstatic. “If you burn his things, he loses his power. Fire eats the bad magic.”
“It’s just stuff,” I say.
“No,” he insists. “It’s pieces of him. If we burn enough pieces… maybe he’ll disappear.”
Flash.
I blinked, the memory receding but leaving a residue of heat on my skin.
Elias believed in sympathetic magic. He believed that destroying the symbol destroyed the reality.
I looked at the town square. The people setting up the booths, laughing, shouting instructions.
To Elias, they weren’t people. They were pieces of the Dragon. They were the things that had hurt him, trapped him, starved him.
And tomorrow night, they were going to gather around a massive pile of fuel.
“He’s not going to pick us off one by one anymore,” I whispered.
The kidnappings, the staged bodies—those were intimate. Those were messages for me.
But the matchbox… the tooth…
That was a declaration of war.
He wasn’t just going to disrupt the festival. He was going to participate.
“Elara?”
I jumped, my hand flying to the pepper spray in my pocket (Julian had taken the gun back, or rather, I had lost it when I fled the hospital).
It was Julian.
He was standing near a stack of hay bales, leaning heavily on a cane. He looked terrible. His face was gray, his leg clearly agonizing him. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. He was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, looking like just another local, except for the hollowness in his eyes.
“I heard you at the Town Hall,” he said, limping over to me. “News travels fast.”
“They won’t listen,” I said.
“Of course they won’t. They’re broke and stubborn. It’s a bad combination.”
“He’s going to burn it, Julian. The whole thing.”
“I know,” he said. He looked up at the pyre. “I tried to get Miller to post a guard on the fuel supply. He told me to go home and take my pain meds.”
“Where is he?” I asked, scanning the shadows between the stalls. “Elias. Is he watching?”
“He’s always watching.”
Julian stepped closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I checked the perimeter of the square this morning. Before Miller kicked me out. I found something.”
“What?”
“Under the bandstand. Someone had cut the wire mesh. And inside…” He swallowed hard. “Inside, there was a pile of clothes. Rags. And a sleeping bag.”
“He’s sleeping here,” I said, the realization chilling me. “He’s not in the woods. He moved into town.”
“He’s embedding himself,” Julian agreed. “Hiding in the noise. When the festival starts, everyone will be wearing masks. It’s part of the tradition. The straw masks.”
“He’ll fit right in,” I said. A monster in a crowd of monsters.
I looked at the straw dolls piled at the base of the pyre. Hundreds of them. A chaotic jumble of limbs and empty faces.
“Julian,” I said, a terrible thought forming. “Did you check the pyre?”
“What do you mean?”
“The pile. It’s hollow in the middle, right? For the draft?”
“Yeah. It’s built like a chimney.”
“Did anyone check inside?”
Julian stared at the structure. “They built it today. Stacking pallets.”
“But did they check inside before they sealed it up?”
We both looked at the massive stack of wood.
If you wanted to burn something… if you wanted to make sure it disappeared forever… you wouldn’t put it on top. You would put it in the heart of the fire.
“The tooth,” I whispered. “In the matchbox. It was a molar. A human molar.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. But Elias pulled it out of someone.”
“We have to check,” Julian said, moving toward the pyre.
“Hey!” A voice boomed. A large man in a high-vis vest stepped in front of us. The construction foreman. “No unauthorized access. Step back.”
“I’m a police officer,” Julian said, reaching for a badge that wasn’t there. He faltered. “I mean… I need to check the structural integrity.”
“It’s fine, Thorne. Go home. Let us work.”
The man blocked our path, his arms folded. He was just doing his job. He didn’t know he was guarding a potential crematorium.
Julian looked at me, helpless.
“We can’t get close,” he said.
I looked at the pyre. The wood was dark, soaked in accelerant.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “When the festival starts. We have to be here. We have to watch the crowd.”
“He’ll be wearing a mask,” Julian said.
“I’ll know him,” I said. “I know how he walks. I know how he breathes.”
I looked at the dolls again.
One of them, near the top of the pile, caught my eye. It was wearing a yellow raincoat.
My breath hitched.
It was just a doll. Just straw and old clothes.
But its hand was raised, pointing.
Pointing at me.
“He’s ready,” I said. “He’s got the matches. He’s got the fuel.”
I turned to Julian.
“And tomorrow night,” I said, “he’s going to light the candles for the wedding.”