I slammed the brakes, the tires of Julian’s truck skidding on the loose gravel of the shoulder. The seatbelt dug into my collarbone, a sharp reminder of the physical reality I was still trapped in, but my mind was spinning somewhere in the past.
The engine idled, a rough, chugging rhythm that vibrated through the steering wheel. Outside, the fog was beginning to reclaim the road, swirling in the rearview mirror like the ghosts I was trying to outrun.
I snatched the photo from the passenger seat.
My hands were shaking. Not with fear, but with the vibrating frequency of a realization that was too big to hold.
I held the picture up to the weak light filtering through the windshield. It was grainy, taken with a telephoto lens from a distance—my mother’s paranoid eye watching the perimeter of her kingdom. The date stamped in the corner was August 02, 1999. Two weeks before the flood. Two weeks before Elias supposedly died.
In the center of the frame, Elias stood by the edge of the Weeping Woods. He looked exactly as I remembered him—wild hair, dirty clothes, a posture of constant, coiled tension.
But he wasn’t looking at the house. He was looking at the person holding his hand.
A girl.
She was smaller than him, slight and pale, almost swallowed by an oversized yellow raincoat. Her face was turned partially toward the camera, a blur of dark eyes and a sharp chin.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
The raincoat triggered a synapse in my brain, a memory that tasted of cold water and terror.
Chapter 4. The night I returned to the Glass House. I had found a yellow raincoat hanging on the back of my bedroom door. It had been dripping wet. I had assumed it was a prop, a theatrical device Elias used to scare me.
But Elias didn’t wear raincoats. Elias wore filth and layers of scavenged wool.
The coat in my room hadn’t been a costume. It had been a garment.
Someone else had been in the room with him.
I twisted around, reaching into the back seat where I had tossed the box of “keep” items from the attic. It was a cardboard coffin of my adolescence—diaries I couldn’t bear to burn, awards I didn’t deserve, and books.
I dug through the strata of my history until my fingers brushed against the glossy hardback cover of the Oakhaven Middle School Yearbook, 1998-1999.
I pulled it into my lap, the binding cracking as I forced it open.
I didn’t need to look at the index. I knew the faces. Oakhaven was a small town; we were a closed ecosystem. I knew the bullies, the victims, the invisible kids who hugged the lockers when the bell rang.
I scanned the seventh-grade portraits.
Adams. Baker. Clark.
I flipped the page.
Davis. Evans. Fisher.
And then, G.
My finger stopped.
Lily Gable.
I stared at the girl in the photo. She wasn’t smiling. In a sea of awkward braces and forced grins, Lily Gable looked out at the world with a flat, unnerving intensity. Her hair was dark, cut in a severe bob with bangs that shadowed her eyes. She wore a high-collared blouse that looked like it belonged in a different century.
I looked at the surveillance photo. I looked at the yearbook.
The chin. The eyes. The way she held her head, slightly tilted, as if listening to a frequency no one else could hear.
It was her.
“Lily,” I breathed.
I remembered her now. Not as a friend—Lily didn’t have friends—but as a presence. She was the girl who sat in the back of the library while her mother worked. She was the girl who never played tag, never joined the cliques. She was a ghost before she was even gone.
And then, she was gone.
I racked my brain, trying to remember when. It was the same summer. The summer of ‘99. The rumor was that she had been sent away to live with an aunt in Spokane. “Behavioral issues,” the teachers had whispered.
But here she was. In August. In the woods. Holding hands with the boy everyone called a monster.
I slammed the yearbook shut.
Mrs. Gable.
The librarian. The keeper of the archives. The woman who had handed me the file on the “feral boy” with a cryptic warning about digging up worms.
She lied.
I thought back to that day in the basement (Chapter 5). Mrs. Gable had told me the Sandman was a legend. A story to frighten children. She had watched me search for Elias with a bemused, detached curiosity.
She knew.
She knew Elias wasn’t a legend. She knew he was real because her daughter was his friend. Or his accomplice.
A chill that had nothing to do with the damp interior of the truck spiderwebbed down my spine.
If Lily was with Elias in August of ‘99… and Elias survived the flood… did Lily survive too?
I thought about the wet raincoat in my room. It was small. Child-sized. Or… woman-sized, if the woman was petite.
Elias hadn’t been working alone. The elaborate stagings, the movement of the bodies, the surveillance—it wasn’t just the work of a feral man living in a hole. It was a partnership.
The Shadow.
Elias was the brute force. But who was the architect?
I grabbed the steering wheel, my knuckles white.
“You didn’t move away, did you, Lily?” I whispered to the empty truck.
The implications were terrifying. If Lily was still here, hidden in the folds of this rotting town, then the “Sandman” wasn’t dead. Elias might be buried in the mill, but the mind behind the game—the person who understood the narrative, the person who had access to the library, to the history, to the secrets—was still active.
And her mother was running the information hub of Oakhaven.
I started the engine. The truck roared to life, a sound of aggression that matched the sudden fury in my chest.
I had felt pity for Elias. I had wept for the boy who was twisted by cruelty into a weapon.
But I felt no pity for the liar who had watched me stumble around in the dark for weeks.
Mrs. Gable had sent me to the archives. She had pointed me toward the police reports. She had fed me just enough truth to keep me hooked, to keep me playing the game. Why?
To bring me back?
Let’s Play.
The writing on the polaroid. The block letters.
I grabbed the yearbook again, flipping to the back, to the autograph section. It was mostly empty—I wasn’t popular—but there were a few scribbles from teachers.
I looked for Lily’s signature. She hadn’t signed my book. Of course not.
But I remembered something else. The library overdue notices. The handwritten cards in the back of the books I borrowed as a kid.
Mrs. Gable’s handwriting.
Sharp. Angular. Precise.
I closed my eyes, visualizing the note found on Becca Trent’s back. SHE PEEKED. And the note on the back of the first polaroid. LET’S PLAY.
It wasn’t Elias’s jagged, feral scrawl. It was controlled.
“It was you,” I hissed.
I put the truck in gear. I didn’t check the mirrors. I didn’t check the fuel gauge.
I had killed the body of the Sandman, but the brain was sitting behind the front desk of the Oakhaven Public Library, stamping books and smiling at children.
The urgency was a physical pain now. Julian was safe, resting, healing. He thought it was over. The town thought it was over. They were preparing to rebuild, to move on.
But there was a loose thread. A thread that led all the way back to a yellow raincoat in 1999.
And if I didn’t pull it, the whole tapestry would unravel around our throats.
I spun the truck around, gravel spraying into the ditch.
The library closed at five. It was 4:15.
I had forty-five minutes to get the truth out of the woman who had turned her daughter into a ghost.