The world was reduced to the primal elements of destruction: fire, water, and the crushing grip of a madwoman’s hands.
Mrs. Gable wasn’t a librarian anymore. She was a force of nature, fueled by the hysterical strength of a mother watching her nest burn. Her fingers were iron bands around my throat, forcing my head back into the rising black water that swirled across the archive floor.
The sprinklers hissed above us, a relentless mechanical rain that turned the smoke into blinding, choking steam. The fire I had started in the chemical storage locker roared in the background, defying the water, feeding on the acetate film and the old, dry paper of Oakhaven’s history.
I clawed at her wrists, my fingernails digging into her papery skin, but she didn’t flinch. Her eyes were wide, magnified by her water-spattered glasses, reflecting the orange glow of the flames.
“You ruined it!” she shrieked, her voice bubbling as the water lapped at her chin. “You broke the quiet! You woke them up!”
My vision starred. Black spots danced in the periphery, merging with the smoke. The water filled my ears, a muffled roar that sounded like the ocean, like the river that took Elias.
I kicked out, my boot connecting with her shin, but she was dead weight, pinning me to the submerged floor. The ink from a thousand dissolved police reports was getting into my mouth, bitter and metallic. I was drowning in the town’s secrets.
This is it, I thought, the realization cold and detached. I survived the Sandman. I survived the mill. And I’m going to die in a basement with a librarian.
My lungs burned. The instinct to inhale was becoming unbearable.
Then, a new sound cut through the roar of the fire and the hiss of the water.
A crash. Wood splintering against concrete.
“Elara!”
The scream was raw, tearing through the smoke.
Mrs. Gable stiffened. Her grip on my throat loosened for a fraction of a second—just enough for me to suck in a ragged breath of smoke and steam.
I thrashed, surging upward, breaking the surface.
Through the haze, I saw a silhouette at the top of the stairs. It wasn’t the hulking shape of the Sandman. It was leaning, crooked, braced against the doorframe.
“Get off her!”
Julian didn’t run down the stairs. He fell. He threw himself down the wooden steps, ignoring his bad leg, ignoring the pain, moving with the desperate, tumbling momentum of a man who has nothing left to lose.
He hit the water with a splash that sent a wave of black ink washing over us.
Mrs. Gable turned, snarling, releasing my throat to face the new threat. She raised a heavy, waterlogged ledger like a weapon.
“Get out!” she screamed. “No boys allowed! This is a sanctuary!”
Julian didn’t hesitate. He lunged from his knees, tackling her around the waist.
They went under.
I scrambled backward, coughing up water, my throat raw and stinging. I pushed myself up against a metal shelving unit, watching the water churn violently where they had disappeared.
For a terrifying heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, Julian emerged. He was behind her, his arm locked around her neck in a chokehold. He wasn’t being gentle. He wasn’t the polite detective anymore. He was a man putting down a rabid animal.
Mrs. Gable clawed at his face, drawing blood, but Julian held on, his face contorted in a grimace of exertion and pain.
“Stop fighting!” he roared, tightening his grip.
She thrashed, kicking up clouds of silt and paper pulp, but the fight was draining out of her. The cold water, the smoke, the age—it all caught up to her at once. She went limp.
Julian dragged her backward, away from me, toward the base of the stairs where the water was shallower. He shoved her against the bottom step, pinning her with his good leg while he fumbled at his belt for the zip-ties he had carried since the mill.
I slumped against the shelf, gasping for air, watching as he secured her hands behind her back.
The fire alarm was still blaring, a rhythmic whoop-whoop-whoop that synced with the pounding of my heart.
Julian checked her pulse, then shoved away from her, turning toward me.
“Elara?”
He crawled through the water toward me. He looked wrecked. His face was gray, streaked with soot and blood. His clothes were soaked, heavy with the weight of the water. He was favoring his left side heavily.
“I’m here,” I rasped. My voice sounded like it had been put through a cheese grater.
He reached me and pulled me into his arms.
It wasn’t a movie embrace. It was a collision. He buried his face in my wet hair, his hands clutching the back of my coat, holding me so tight I thought my ribs might crack. I felt him shaking—violent tremors that racked his entire body.
“I thought I was too late,” he whispered into my neck. “I saw the smoke… I thought…”
“You weren’t,” I said, gripping his wet jacket. “You found me.”
“I remembered,” he said, pulling back just enough to look at my face, his hands framing my cheeks, his thumbs wiping away the ink and grime. “When I saw the empty house… I remembered the archives. You said you found the reports here. You said she was the keeper.”
He looked over my shoulder at the fire, which was beginning to lose its battle against the sprinklers, turning into a thick, suffocating smog.
“We have to move,” he said. “The smoke is getting too heavy.”
He tried to stand, but his leg buckled. He hissed in pain, grabbing the shelf for support.
“Julian,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Your leg.”
“I’m fine,” he lied, gritting his teeth. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“We walk together,” I said.
I wedged my shoulder under his arm, taking his weight. We stumbled toward the stairs, trudging through the knee-deep sludge of destroyed history.
Mrs. Gable was sitting on the bottom step, rocking back and forth. She wasn’t looking at us. She was staring at the water, at the pieces of paper floating past—birth certificates, death records, the police reports of missing children.
“They’re melting,” she whimpered, tears streaming down her face to mix with the soot. “My babies. They’re all melting away.”
She looked up at me, her eyes empty and terrifyingly lucid.
“Who will remember them now?” she asked softly. “If I don’t keep the names, who will remember they existed?”
I stopped. I looked down at the woman who had twisted a lonely boy into a monster, who had orchestrated a decade of pain just to feel needed, to feel like the mother of a ghost town.
“We will,” I said, my voice hard. “We’ll remember what you did to them.”
Julian pulled me forward. “Leave her. The firefighters are coming.”
We climbed the stairs, leaving the darkness behind.
The lobby of the library was filled with smoke, but the glass doors at the front were shattered, letting in the cool, clean night air. Red lights washed over the walls.
We stumbled out onto the sidewalk.
The scene was chaos. Fire trucks, police cruisers, an ambulance. A crowd had gathered behind the police tape—the residents of Oakhaven, drawn by the spectacle of their history burning.
Sheriff Miller was there, shouting orders at a group of firefighters. He saw us emerge from the smoke, huddled together, wet and broken.
He stopped shouting. He took off his hat.
Paramedics rushed toward us with blankets and oxygen masks, but Julian waved them off for a second. He didn’t let go of me. He turned us away from the crowd, away from the flashing lights, creating a small, private space in the middle of the bedlam.
“It’s over,” he said. He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Elias is gone. Gable is done. It’s over, Elara.”
I leaned my head against his chest, listening to the steady, frantic beat of his heart. I looked down at my hands. They were stained black with ink. The ink of the files. The ink of the story.
“Is it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said fiercely. “I promise you. No more games. No more secrets.”
I looked past him, toward the library. Two police officers were dragging Mrs. Gable out. She wasn’t fighting anymore. She hung limply between them, a wet, gray rag doll. As they passed us, she didn’t even look up. She was muttering to herself, reciting names.
“Billy. Sarah. Elias. Becca…”
A litany of the dead.
I shivered, and Julian wrapped the shock blanket tighter around my shoulders.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
And for the first time in fifteen years, standing in the wreckage of my hometown, shivering and stained with the muck of the past, I believed him.
The fog was still there, clinging to the edges of the street, but the fire was brighter. The archives were gone. The proof was gone.
But we were still here.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of smoke and rain.
“Take me home, Julian,” I whispered.
“To the Glass House?” he asked, hesitation in his voice.
“No,” I said. “Take me to the bridge. I need to see the river.”
I needed to see where it started. And I needed to know, once and for all, that the water was just water.