Chapter 2: Gifts of Bone

Chapter 2: Gifts of Bone

A week was long enough for a town to forget how to breathe. The easy, familiar rhythm of Havenwood had been replaced by a suffocating, collective gasp. Police cruisers, once a rare sight, now drifted through the streets like sharks, their silent, flashing lights painting the evenings in anxious strokes of red and blue. The smiling, freckled face of Marcus Thorne was everywhere—stapled to telephone poles, taped to the windows of the grocery store, staring out from the local news. He was a ghost haunting the town before he was even declared dead.

Elara tried to convince herself that Leo’s chilling words had been nothing more than a child’s macabre attempt to process tragedy. Kids picked up on things, she reasoned. They heard whispers, felt the tension, and their imaginations filled in the blanks with monstrous shapes. “Joseph doesn’t like noisy boys.” The phrase echoed in her mind at the worst moments—in the dead quiet of the library stacks, or as she lay in bed, staring at her ceiling. She’d pushed it down, buried it under a thick layer of denial. It was just Leo being Leo. It had to be.

Then, Ben Carter disappeared.

He vanished from the town park, less than a hundred yards from his own front door. He was another of Leo’s classmates. A quiet boy with thick glasses who loved books about knights and dragons. Elara knew him from her part-time job at the library; he’d once asked her, in a very serious tone, if she thought a griffin could beat a hydra in a fight. Now his face was on a new set of posters, placed right beside Marcus Thorne’s.

The town’s gasp turned into a silent scream. A voluntary curfew fell over Havenwood. Porch lights stayed on all night. Parents walked their children to and from the bus stop, their hands clamped tightly on small shoulders. The fear was a physical presence now, a cold fog that seeped under doorways and through window cracks.

And with it came a new, personal dread for Elara. A feeling she couldn't name, a constant, unnerving prickle on the back of her neck. It started on her walks home from the library after her evening shifts. The familiar stretch of sidewalk suddenly felt longer, the shadows cast by the maple trees deeper and more menacing. She’d find herself quickening her pace, her keys clutched in her fist, certain that a pair of eyes was following her from the dark woods that bordered the edge of town. She’d whirl around, heart hammering against her ribs, only to find the street empty, the wind rustling the leaves on a thousand "MISSING" posters.

She told herself it was just the town’s paranoia infecting her. It was normal to be on edge. Everyone was.

The first gift appeared on a Tuesday night. The air was heavy and humid, promising a storm that never came. As she went to close her bedroom window, her fingers brushed against something small and smooth on the sill. She recoiled, her breath catching in her throat.

It was a bird’s skull, bleached white by the sun. It was perfect, delicate, the hollow eye sockets like two tiny, dark portals. For a long moment, she just stared at it, a wave of nausea rolling through her. Who would do that? Who would climb up to a second-story window just to leave something so… morbid?

Her mind immediately jumped to a few of the senior boys at school, the kind who found cruelty amusing. It was a prank. A sick, tasteless prank meant to capitalize on the town’s terror. Anger, hot and sharp, quickly replaced her fear. With a tissue, she snatched the skull from the sill, her lips pulled back in a snarl of disgust. She didn't examine it, didn't let herself think about it. She marched to the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet, the small porcelain swirl a satisfying act of defiance. She slammed her window shut and locked it, feeling a grim sense of victory.

For three days, nothing happened. The feeling of being watched lessened, and she almost convinced herself the skull had been a one-time event, the work of a bored, malicious teenager.

But on Saturday morning, she woke to the second gift.

It was laid in the exact same spot on her windowsill, right outside the glass. A length of old, grimy rope, about a foot long, tied into a complex, ugly knot. It wasn’t a neat knot, but a tangled, brutal-looking one, like something used to bind or trap. Its coarse fibers were frayed, and it looked like it had been pulled from some forgotten corner of a barn or a dilapidated shed.

This time, there was no anger. Only ice-cold terror.

This wasn’t a prank. A bird skull could be found by anyone. This rope, this knot… it felt intentional. It felt like a message. A threat. She stared at it, her own reflection a pale, terrified ghost in the window pane. The feeling of being watched came rushing back, ten times stronger than before, so intense she felt as if the watcher was standing right behind her. She backed away from the window, her body trembling.

She spent the rest of the day in a fog of anxiety, the image of the knotted rope burned into her mind. She didn’t tell her parents. How could she? “Someone left a piece of rope on my window?” They were already stretched to their breaking point with worry over the missing boys. They would dismiss it, tell her she was letting her imagination run wild, that it was teenage anxiety. They wouldn't believe her. No one would. She was utterly, terrifyingly alone in this.

That night, sleep was impossible. Every creak of the old house was an intruder. Every rustle of leaves outside was a footstep. She lay in her bed, curled into a tight ball, listening to the frantic thumping of her own heart. The house was silent, her parents and Leo long asleep in their rooms.

It was in that deep, suffocating quiet that she heard it.

A sound from the other side of the wall. From Leo’s room.

It wasn't a nightmare, or the mumble of a sleeping child. It was a whisper, thin and sharp with desperation. It was Leo’s voice, but filled with a terror she had never heard from him before, a terror that made the hair on her arms stand on end.

“No,” the whisper hissed, fierce and pleading. “You can’t. Stop it.”

Elara sat bolt upright in bed, straining to hear. A pause. The silence stretched, thick and heavy.

Then, the whisper came again, broken and trembling, a plea directed at someone she couldn't see, someone who was right there in the room with her little brother.

“You can’t have her, Joseph! She’s not a gift!”