Chapter 9: The Confession

Chapter 9: The Confession

The weight of the truth was heavier than the four years of lies I had carried. The lie was a dull, constant ache, a part of my anatomy. The truth was a jagged stone in my hand, something I had to choose to carry, something that could be used as a weapon or a gravestone.

I stood across the street from the Blackwood Police Station, the photocopied image of Silas clutched in my sweaty palm. The station was a small, unassuming brick building, its windows glowing with a sterile, bureaucratic light against the encroaching dusk. This was it. The precipice. For four years, I had defined myself by a single act of cowardice. Entering that building meant finally choosing a different path. It meant walking back into the fire I had fled. For Jacob. The thought of his four years in the dark was the only fuel I needed.

My reflection in the station’s glass door was a stranger—a gaunt, haunted man in a wrinkled shirt, his eyes wide with a terror that was warring with a desperate, unfamiliar resolve. I pushed the door open.

The front desk sergeant looked up from his magazine with bored indifference, but his eyes sharpened slightly when he recognized me. I was the ghost of the town’s most famous tragedy, after all.

“I need to speak with Detective Harding,” I said, my voice steadier than I expected.

“Harding’s retired,” the sergeant grunted. “Years now.”

“I saw him at the funeral. He’s in town.”

The sergeant sighed, picking up his phone. “He’s not going to want to be bothered…” He paused, listening. “Yeah, it’s him. The Miller kid… Okay.” He hung up. “Back office, end of the hall. He’s using it to sort through some old files.”

I found him in a cramped, cluttered office that smelled of stale coffee and decades of cold cases. Piles of manila folders threatened to avalanche off every surface. It was his own lair, a tomb of forgotten victims and unanswered questions. He looked up as I entered, his sharp eyes missing nothing. He didn't seem surprised to see me.

I didn’t waste time with pleasantries. I walked to his desk and laid the photocopy on top of a teetering stack of files. The dead, black eyes of Silas stared up at us both.

“His name is Silas,” I said.

Harding leaned forward, his gaze fixed on the image. He didn’t say anything, just motioned for me to sit.

And then, I confessed. The words didn’t come out in a neat, orderly narrative. They spilled out of me, a torrent of poison I had held back for fourteen hundred and sixty days. I told him everything. The dare, the thrill of breaking into the school. The coach’s office, the ruffled sleeping bag, the strange, sweet, rotten smell. The pitch-black supply closet.

“There was something else in there,” I choked out, the memory searing my mind. “A body. A little one. A kid. It was… old. Mummified.”

Harding’s expression remained grim, but a muscle twitched in his jaw. He knew I was no longer telling him the convenient lie. This was the truth, ugly and raw.

I told him about the flashlight beam catching Silas’s face, the inhuman emptiness in his eyes. I described the impossible strength as he cornered us, the sickening, wet snap of Jacob’s leg. And then came the hardest part, the words that felt like swallowing shards of glass.

“He screamed my name,” I whispered, staring at my own trembling hands on the desk. “Jacob screamed for me… and I ran. I just ran. I heard him fall, and I left him there. I ran, and I lied to you. I lied to everyone.”

The confession hung in the dusty air of the office, absolute and damning. I had finally said it. I was a coward who had left his friend to a monster. I braced myself for the disgust, the anger, the cold dismissal of a cop who had been lied to.

Instead, Harding leaned back in his squeaking chair and took a long, slow sip from a mug of what was surely stone-cold coffee. He looked from Silas’s picture to my face, and his eyes held not contempt, but a grim, weary confirmation.

“I know,” he said, his voice a low gravel. “Not the details. But I knew the story was wrong. A predator like this, you can feel his shadow on a town, even if you can’t see him.”

He pushed himself up and walked to a large, corkboard on the wall, hidden behind a filing cabinet. It was a spiderweb of yellowed newspaper clippings, photos of smiling children, and maps of the county, all connected by a web of red string. Billy Peterson. Sarah Jenkins. Timmy O’Connell. Jacob. They were all there. But there were others. Photos of children from neighboring counties, all near the vast, interconnected state forest.

“I never thought he was just our boogeyman,” Harding explained, tapping a faded clipping from a town fifty miles away. “A boy vanished from a campground in ‘91. A girl snatched from a hiking trail in ‘06. Different towns, different police departments, all writing them off as isolated incidents. But the pattern is the same. Always on the edge of the woods. Always children. Silas… he’s not just the Caretaker of Blackwood. He’s a regional cancer. He uses those forests like his own private highway.”

The scope of it, the sheer scale of the horror, was staggering. Silas wasn’t just a town lunatic. He was a creature of the wild, a patient, dedicated predator who had been hunting for decades.

“So what do we do?” I asked, a new feeling beginning to replace the hollow shame of my confession: a cold, hard sense of purpose.

“Officially? Nothing,” Harding said, turning back to me. “I’m a retired cop with an obsession. You’re a witness who recanted a fourteen-hundred-day-old story. We go to the current chief with this? We’ve got a ghost story, a fifty-year-old photo, and the ramblings of a terrified old woman. Silas is a ghost. He probably doesn’t have a social security number or a driver’s license. We’d be buried in paperwork until another kid goes missing. No, the only way to get him… is to go into his house and drag him out.”

He looked at me, a silent question in his eyes. He was offering an alliance. An unsanctioned, dangerous, and probably illegal partnership between a broken old cop and the coward who started it all.

“The boiler room,” I said, the words tasting like metal. “The librarian said he made the old boiler room his workshop.”

A flicker of something—maybe respect—showed in Harding’s eyes. “Then that’s where we go.”

Leaving the station, I felt… different. The guilt was still there, a permanent resident in my soul, but it was no longer a paralyzing force. It was a catalyst. For the first time in years, I wasn’t running from the past. I was walking toward a reckoning.

The street outside was dark now, the only light coming from the lonely, buzzing streetlamps that cast pools of sickly orange onto the cracked pavement. A cold breeze rustled the leaves of the trees lining the sidewalk, making the shadows dance. I pulled my jacket tighter and started the short walk back to my motel.

That’s when I felt it. A prickling sensation on the back of my neck. The primitive, animal instinct that you are being watched.

I slowed my pace, my senses suddenly on high alert. The street was empty. The shops were all closed, their windows dark and vacant. I told myself it was paranoia, the residue of my confession, my mind playing tricks on me in the dark.

I kept walking, but the feeling intensified. It was a focused, malevolent pressure. I risked a glance at the reflection in the dark window of a closed hardware store. The street behind me was empty. But in the deepest part of an alleyway across the road, a shadow detached itself from the others. It was just a shape, a tall, gaunt silhouette against the brick. It stood unnaturally still.

My heart seized in my chest.

It couldn’t be.

I quickened my pace, my shoes scuffing loudly in the sudden silence. I heard a sound behind me. Not footsteps. A soft, dry scrape. Like a worn boot-heel dragging on pavement.

I didn’t dare look back. I knew, with a certainty that defied all logic, who was there. He knew. He knew I’d talked to Evelyn Gable. He knew I had just walked out of the police station. The note under my door hadn’t been a warning from a concerned citizen. It was a message from the monster himself.

He wasn’t just a memory in a decaying school anymore. He wasn’t a ghost in a photograph. He was here. He was real. And he was hunting me.

I broke into a run, my breath catching in ragged, panicked sobs. The hunter had become the hunted.