Chapter 7: The Janitor's Eyes

Chapter 7: The Janitor's Eyes

Detective Harding’s words echoed in the stale air of my motel room, a relentless indictment that left no room for the self-pity I had wallowed in for four years. You’re the only living witness. The note in my pocket felt less like a simple accusation and more like a mission statement. YOU LEFT HIM. Fine. I did. But I was done running. Running hadn't saved Jacob, and it hadn't saved me. It had only bought the monster time.

My old life, the grey, monotonous loop of data entry, had honed one specific, unlikely skill: an obsessive patience for sifting through mountains of meaningless information to find a single, crucial pattern. My job had been to find anomalies in code, stray numbers in endless spreadsheets. Now, the spreadsheet was the history of Blackwood, and the anomaly was a predator who had operated in the margins for decades.

My first stop was the Blackwood Public Library. The archives were in the basement, a damp, low-ceilinged room that smelled of decaying paper and forgotten time. A stern librarian with a tight bun and suspicious eyes watched as I signed the logbook, her gaze lingering on my name. In Blackwood, the name Leo Miller was synonymous with tragedy and loose ends.

I started with the microfiche, the machine humming and clicking as I spooled through decades of the Blackwood Gazette. Harding’s words were my guide. I started in 1983, searching for any mention of Billy Peterson. I found it. A small, heartbreaking article on page four. A photo of a smiling, gap-toothed eight-year-old. He’d been playing on the swing set in his backyard, which bordered the state forest. His mother went inside to answer the phone. When she came back out, he was gone. No witnesses. No ransom note. He had simply vanished into the trees.

Next, 1995. Sarah Jenkins, age eleven. Her story was on the front page, the town’s fear more palpable this time. She was walking home from a friend's house, taking a well-known shortcut through a patch of woods that connected the residential streets to the old elementary school grounds. They found her backpack a week later, but nothing else.

2002. Timmy O’Connell, nine years old. His disappearance was almost identical to Billy Peterson’s. Playing in his yard. A moment of parental distraction. Gone.

I printed each article, the flimsy paper warm from the machine. Laying them out on the scratched wooden table, the pattern was chillingly clear. All children, all between eight and eleven. All taken from the edge of the woods, the liminal space between the safety of the town and the wild, dark unknown. And the epicenter of it all, the geographical point that all three locations triangulated, was the abandoned Blackwood Elementary.

The official stories were dead ends. Police reports spoke of massive search efforts that slowly wound down. They mentioned theories—a drifter, a kidnapping—that were never substantiated. There were no leads. No evidence. Just a void.

But the police reports weren't the only records here. Digging deeper into the local interest sections, the quaint human-interest stories, I found it. An article from the late seventies, a Halloween feature titled "The Spooky Legends of Blackwood County." Tucked between stories of a ghostly horseman and a lady of the lake was a short, almost dismissive paragraph about a local boogeyman. They called him the 'Caretaker of the Woods.' The legend said he was the ghost of an old janitor from the school who had gone mad and wandered into the forest, never to be seen again. The story claimed he watched over the woods, ‘tending’ to the things that were lost there, and that sometimes, if you were quiet, you could hear him humming to himself in the deep woods behind the school.

My blood ran cold. Tending to the things that were lost. The word sent a shiver down my spine. This wasn't a ghost story. This was a distorted reflection of a horrifying truth. The town had turned its monster into a myth to make it easier to sleep at night.

But a myth didn't give me a name or a face.

Frustration mounted. I had the pattern, I had the legend, but I didn't have a person. The school was the key. The Caretaker legend was tied to the school. The disappearances all orbited the school. I packed up the articles and left the library, my mind racing. The monster hadn't just appeared out of thin air. If he was a janitor, he was an employee. There had to be a record.

My next stop was the town hall, a stuffy, bureaucratic building that seemed even older than the library. I asked the clerk, a woman chewing gum with bored disinterest, for public employment records for Blackwood Elementary, specifically for its final years of operation before it was condemned and closed in the early ‘80s.

She sighed, annoyed by the unusual request. After a long, performative search on her computer, she declared that most of those physical records had been archived and stored. She pointed me toward a back room filled with tilting metal shelves groaning under the weight of dozens of dusty, unlabeled cardboard boxes. "Good luck," she said, popping a bubble.

It was another haystack. But this time, I knew exactly what my needle looked like. I spent hours, my shirt sticking to my back in the airless room, pulling down boxes, my hands turning black with grime. I found payroll ledgers, maintenance reports, supply invoices. Nothing.

Finally, in a box marked 'Misc. School Board Mementos,' I struck gold. It was a thin, cheaply bound book, its cover embossed with a faded raven and the words: "Blackwood Elementary - Our Final Year, 1982." It wasn't a student yearbook. It was a staff photo album. A memento for the teachers and faculty before the school was shut down for good.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I sat on the floor, the open box beside me, and carefully opened the album. My hands were shaking. I turned the brittle, yellowed pages. I saw the faces of the teachers, smiling for the camera, frozen in time. Mrs. Gable, the stern-faced librarian. Mr. Henderson, the gym teacher. Then, the group photos. The office staff. The cafeteria ladies.

And finally, the last page. ‘Support and Maintenance Staff.’

There were three men. Two were smiling, portly men in clean work clothes. The third man stood slightly apart from them, in the back. He wasn't smiling.

Time stopped. The dusty room, the smell of old paper, the hum of the fluorescent lights—it all vanished. I was twelve years old again, trapped in a pitch-black closet, the stench of bleach and death in my nostrils. My trembling flashlight beam was cutting through the darkness, illuminating the face that had haunted my every waking moment and ruled my nightmares for four years.

It was him.

The same gaunt, skeletal face. The same long, stringy grey hair. But it was the eyes. Even in the grainy, black-and-white photograph, they were the same. Utterly flat. Devoid of light, of life, of humanity. They were two black holes on the page, promising nothing but a cold, absolute void. The eyes of a shark. The eyes of the thing that had snapped Jacob’s leg and dragged him into the dark.

My gaze dropped to the small, typed nameplate beneath the photograph.

Silas. Maintenance.