The playground was a graveyard of iron bones jutting out of the Oakhaven Shroud.
I parked Julian’s truck on the cracked asphalt of the old elementary school lot, killing the engine but leaving the headlights on. Two beams of yellow light cut through the mist, illuminating the rusted skeleton of the swing set where I had once promised to save a boy who didn’t exist.
Except he did exist. And now he was the one setting the rules.
I stepped out into the rain, the mud sucking at my boots. The silence here was different than the woods. In the forest, the silence felt like it was watching you. Here, amidst the overgrown weeds and the skeletal monkey bars, the silence felt like it was waiting for a bell that would never ring.
“I’m here,” I whispered, my breath pluming in the cold air.
I clutched the crayon map in my left hand and the revolver in my right. The paper was damp, the wax lines smearing under my thumb. Station One: The Slide.
I saw it looming in the darkness beyond the swing set. It wasn’t one of the safe, plastic corkscrews kids played on today. It was a relic from the eighties—a straight, twenty-foot shoot of galvanized steel that burned your legs in the summer and froze your skin in the winter. It stood like a monolith, the ladder rising into the fog.
I walked toward it, every step heavy with the memory of recess. I remembered the metallic smell of my hands after gripping the chains. I remembered the fear of being “It.”
Tag, you’re it.
I reached the base of the slide. The metal chute was slick with rain, a dark tongue lolling out of the mouth of the night.
I shone my flashlight up the ladder. The beam caught something white fluttering at the top platform, tied to the safety rail.
A ribbon? No. Too plastic.
I holstered the gun. I needed both hands to climb. The rungs were icy, biting into my palms.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
My boots rang out against the hollow metal steps. It was the sound of a prison break in reverse. I was climbing into the cell.
As I rose higher, the ground disappeared beneath me, swallowed by the fog. I felt a sudden, vertiginous sway, a reminder that this structure had been condemning to rust for two decades.
I reached the platform. It was a small metal square, a perch for birds and snipers.
I shone the light on the railing.
It wasn’t a ribbon.
It was a hospital bracelet.
I reached out, my fingers trembling, and ripped it free. The plastic snapped. I held it up to the light.
THORNE, JULIAN. DOB: 10/14/1988. BLOOD TYPE: O POS.
And smeared across the barcode, wet and sticky, was a thumbprint of fresh crimson.
“Julian,” I choked out, the sound turning into a sob.
He was alive. He had to be alive. This was a taunt, not a trophy. If Julian were dead, Elias wouldn’t need the bracelet. He would have left the body.
Next to the spot where the bracelet had been tied, a black object was duct-taped to the railing.
A tape recorder.
It was identical to the Walkman he had left on my pillow, but this one was smaller, a dictaphone used for voice notes. The PLAY button was painted with a dot of red nail polish.
Press me, it screamed.
I looked out into the void. The fog was a wall. He could be at the bottom of the slide, waiting with a knife. He could be in the trees with a rifle. Or he could be miles away, laughing as I danced on his strings.
I pressed the button.
The tape hissed. The sound of rain filled the tiny speaker—recorded rain, overlaying the real rain falling around me.
Then, the voice.
“Station One,” Elias rasped. His voice sounded wet, heavy with phlegm or excitement. “The Slide. Do you remember the slide, Princess? We used to sit up here and watch the Dragon’s car drive by.”
I closed my eyes. I remembered. We would hide up here, pressed shoulder to shoulder, shivering in the wind, tracking Richard’s movements like forward observers in a war zone.
“You wanted to push him,” the voice continued. “You told me that. You said, ‘I wish he would slide down into a hole and never come out.’ but you didn’t push him, did you? You were too small.”
A pause. The tape hissed.
“I pushed him for you. I greased the rail. I watched him fall. Splat. Like a pumpkin.”
I gripped the railing, the cold metal biting into my skin. I knew this. I had read it in the journal. He killed Richard.
“But I couldn’t get in,” Elias whispered. The tone shifted, becoming accusatory. “The doors were locked. The Dragon locked them every night. The alarm was on. The big red light.”
My heart hammered against my ribs.
“How did the Knight get into the castle, Elara? How did I get inside to grease the rail?”
I stared at the recorder. The question hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.
“You tell yourself a story,” the voice sneered. “You tell yourself you were asleep. You tell yourself the Knight was magic. That he walked through walls.”
The tape clicked. A new sound. The sound of a latch turning. Click-clack.
“Who opened the door?” Elias screamed. The volume spiked, distorting into a shriek of static. “WHO OPENED THE DOOR?”
The recorder clicked off.
silence rushed back in, louder than before.
I stood on the platform, the wind whipping my hair across my face.
Who opened the door?
I tried to retreat into the safety of my amnesia. I was asleep, I told myself. I was twelve. I was in bed. I heard the scream and ran to the balcony.
But the wall in my mind was crumbling. The hole I had smashed with the hammer in the Glass House was widening.
Flash.
November 12, 1999.
The house is quiet. Richard is in the study, drinking. Mom is asleep, medicated.
There is a scratching at the back door. Not the front. The mudroom door.
Scritch. Scritch.
I am in the kitchen, getting water. I hear it.
I go to the door. I see him through the glass. Elias. He is soaking wet. He holds up a bottle of oil.
He mouths the words: Let me in.
I know what he’s going to do. Maybe not the specifics. Maybe I don’t know he’s going to grease the balcony rail. But I know he is going to hurt Richard. I know he is going to stop the Dragon.
And I am tired. I am so tired of being afraid.
I reach out. My hand is small on the deadbolt.
Turn.
I unlock it.
I open the door.
I step back.
Elias slips inside. He doesn’t look at me. He moves like a shadow up the stairs.
I close the door. I lock it again.
And then I go back to bed. I pull the covers over my head. And I wait for the scream.
Flash.
I gasped, the air rushing into my lungs like ice water. I doubled over, clutching the railing, retching dryly.
“I did it,” I whispered.
I wasn’t innocent. I wasn’t just a victim. I was an accomplice.
I had let him in. I had unlocked the gate for the wolf. Richard’s death wasn’t just Elias’s sin. It was mine. I had pointed the weapon and pulled the trigger, even if I didn’t hold the knife.
“I unlocked the door!” I screamed into the fog.
My voice tore through the night, raw and ugly.
“I let you in! I wanted him dead! I wanted him dead!”
The confession hung in the damp air, vibrating against the metal slide.
Nothing happened. No lights flickered. No voice answered.
I panted, wiping tears and rain from my face. The shame was a hot, physical weight in my gut. I had spent fifteen years building a fortress of victimhood, and with three words, I had burned it to the ground.
I wanted him dead.
I looked at the tape recorder.
“I said it,” I hissed at the machine. “I said it. Where is he?”
I grabbed the recorder and ripped it off the railing, tearing the duct tape. I turned it over, looking for a note, a map, anything.
Nothing. Just cheap black plastic.
I shook it. Something rattled inside the battery compartment.
I jammed my thumbnail into the latch and popped the cover off. The batteries fell out, bouncing on the metal grate and falling thirty feet to the ground.
But stuck to the inside of the compartment lid was a small, folded piece of paper.
I pulled it out, my fingers clumsy with cold. I unfolded it.
It wasn’t a coordinate. It was a riddle. Written in red crayon.
The Dragon fell into the garden. The Boy fell into the river. The Princess fell into a lie.
Where do things go when they fall, Elara?
Go to the place where the water catches the lost things.
I stared at the paper.
Where the water catches the lost things.
The river.
But not just anywhere on the river. Elias “fell” into the river. But his shoe… Julian found his shoe caught in the drift wood.
There was a specific spot. The choke point. The place where the debris from the logging camps piled up against the pilings of the old infrastructure.
The Trestle Bridge.
The bridge I had crossed to enter town. The bridge where the signal died.
It was the only place high enough for a fall.
I looked at the map again. Station Two. It was marked with a crude drawing of an arch.
“The Bridge,” I whispered.
I shoved the note into my pocket, right next to the journal.
He was moving me around the board. From the slide where we watched, to the bridge where he “died.” He was forcing me to retrace the geography of our trauma.
And if the playground was about my guilt… what was the bridge about?
His sacrifice?
Or mine?
I looked down the slide. The dark tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, a metal throat waiting to swallow me.
I didn’t climb down the ladder. I sat down at the top of the slide.
I needed to feel it. I needed to feel the descent.
I pushed off.
I slid down into the dark, the metal screaming against my jeans, speed building, the wind rushing in my ears. For a second, I was twelve again, falling into a future I couldn’t control.
I hit the bottom, my boots skidding in the woodchips. I stumbled but stayed upright.
I was at the bottom now.
“I’m coming, Julian,” I said to the empty playground.
I ran back to the truck, the headlights guiding me like eyes in the fog.
I had confessed. I had paid the toll.
Now I had to cross the bridge.