Chapter 7: A Library of Missing Children

Chapter 7: A Library of Missing Children

Neil’s warning echoed in Alex’s skull, a venomous whisper that poisoned every thought. It always takes what you love most… before it takes you. The words were a death sentence, not just for Jason, but for Alex’s own conscience. The locker hadn't chosen Jason at random. It had looked inside Alex, found the one, fragile point of light in his miserable new life, and decided to snuff it out. He wasn't just a witness to his friend’s erasure; he was the cause.

Guilt was a poor motivator, but desperation was a powerful one. Neil had spoken of an "old, old debt." History. The answers, if they existed anywhere outside the janitor’s terrified mind, were not in the gym. They were buried in the town's past.

“We’re going to the library,” Alex announced the next morning, pulling a listless Jason out of his house.

“The library?” Jason blinked, his eyes foggy and distant. “Why? I don’t… I don’t think I have a book checked out.”

“It’s not for a book. It’s for research,” Alex said, his voice tight with false confidence. He gripped Jason’s arm, a steadying, anchoring presence. The simple act of leading his friend, who now stumbled over familiar curbs and looked at street signs with vacant confusion, was a fresh torment.

The Burberry Public Library was a squat, brick building that smelled of dust, lemon polish, and decaying paper. It was a silent, sleepy place, run by a librarian with a formidable bun and glasses perched on the end of her nose. She gave them a suspicious glare as they walked in, Alex’s frantic energy and Jason’s dazed shuffling a stark contrast to the library’s sacred quiet.

Alex led them to the back, to a cramped, poorly lit room labeled ‘Town Archives.’ It was filled with filing cabinets and a single, hulking microfilm machine that looked like a piece of Cold War-era spy equipment.

“What are we looking for?” Jason asked, his voice a dull monotone. He picked up a heavy roll of microfilm, fumbling with it as if he’d forgotten how his own hands worked.

“Anything,” Alex said, taking the roll from him and carefully threading it into the machine. “Anything weird. Anything about the gym. Anything about… kids who went away.”

He started with the most recent years, scrolling through digital copies of the Burberry Gazette. The screen glowed with the mundane minutiae of small-town life: bake sales, high school football scores, town council meetings about zoning ordinances. It was a tedious, soul-crushing litany of normalcy. For hours, they found nothing. Alex’s initial fire of determination began to cool into a sludgy, hopeless dread. Jason had slumped in his chair, his head lolling to one side, his eyes unfocused. He wasn’t helping; he was a living, breathing reminder of the clock that was ticking away.

“This is useless,” Alex muttered, rubbing his burning eyes. He thought back to Neil’s words. A revival. A debt that Louis pays. Louis had been there for as long as anyone could remember. The disappearances weren’t new. Alex needed to go deeper.

He swapped the film roll for one from the previous decade. He ignored the bake sales this time and focused his search. "Burberry Gym."

He found it. An article from eleven years ago. The headline read: ‘Burberry Gym Reopens, A Beacon for Community Health.’ Below it was a grainy black-and-white photo. A crowd of smiling townspeople stood on the gym’s steps, and in the center, cutting a ceremonial ribbon, was Louis Alistair. His beard was just as silver, his smile just as wide, his eyes just as ancient. He looked exactly the same. Unchanged by a decade of time. Alex felt a cold lump form in his stomach.

He scrolled forward, his hands slick with sweat. He went past articles about a drought, a new mayor, a controversy over the school curriculum. And then he found it. A small, two-paragraph story tucked away in the back pages, dated three months after the gym’s grand reopening. ‘Local Teenager Still Missing.’ A seventeen-year-old boy named Michael had vanished after his shift at the local canning plant. The article mentioned he was a quiet boy with few friends. An outcast. The police had no leads. He was never mentioned in the paper again.

“I found something,” Alex whispered, his voice hoarse. He nudged Jason, who startled awake with a soft gasp.

“What?”

“Look.” Alex pointed at the screen. He went back another decade, to the early 1990s. The pattern was there, a monstrous echo in the past. Another headline: ‘Gym Sponsorship Revitalizes Youth Sports.’ Another picture of a beaming, ageless Louis Alistair shaking hands with the high school football coach. Alex scrolled forward. Two months later: ‘Two Friends Disappear After Fishing Trip.’ Their bikes were found by the creek. No trace of the boys. They were fifteen. The article described them as "inseparable, but known to keep to themselves."

Alex’s blood ran cold. He felt like an archaeologist uncovering a mass grave. He worked faster, his hands flying across the machine's controls, jumping back decade by decade.

The 1980s. ‘Louis Alistair Honored for Decades of Service.’ A picture of Louis, identical, eternal. Six weeks later, a fourteen-year-old girl who had just moved to town vanished from her own backyard.

The 1970s. A small announcement about new equipment at the Burberry Gym. Louis, smiling. A month later, a twelve-year-old boy, reported as a runaway. Never found.

Each entry was a new ghost, a new testament to the town’s cyclical curse. The disappearances were always brushed aside, treated as isolated tragedies, unfortunate but explainable. But laid out in chronological order, the pattern was undeniable, a horrifyingly consistent ritual. A revival of the gym, a celebration of its owner, and then a sacrifice to the hungry thing that lived in its heart. The town's prosperity that Neil had spoken of was bought and paid for with the lives of its most vulnerable children.

“So many,” Jason murmured beside him. He had been watching, and for the first time all day, a glimmer of his old self, a flicker of horrified comprehension, had cut through the fog.

Alex loaded the last roll of film, from the 1960s. He spun the dial, the years flying by in a black-and-white blur. He found the article he was looking for from 1968. ‘Burberry Gym Under New Management.’ There was a picture of a much younger-looking man with dark hair shaking hands with a beaming Louis Alistair. The caption identified the man as the ‘previous owner.’ Even then, over fifty years ago, Louis was the constant, the institution. He didn’t look a day younger than he did now.

Alex scrolled forward, a sick sense of inevitability settling over him. He knew what he would find. He stopped on a small, grainy article from the winter of 1969. The headline read: ‘Search Continues for Missing Boy.’

Jason, who had been staring blankly at the screen, suddenly sat bolt upright. His hand shot out, his finger pressing against the glass of the microfilm reader.

“That’s…” he stammered, his voice choked with a strange mix of recognition and terror. “That’s the picture.”

Alex looked closer. Beside the article was a school photograph of the missing child. He was smiling, a little awkwardly, a slight gap visible between his two front teeth. His hair was a wild mop. It was the boy from the Polaroid. The same face, but happy. Alive.

Alex’s eyes darted down to the text of the article. “The community of Burberry is praying for the safe return of 11-year-old Nathan Croft…”

Croft.

The name hit Alex like a punch to the gut. The same last name as the terrified, skeletal janitor who haunted the halls of the gym.

It all clicked into place with horrifying clarity. The boy in the photo, the first victim Alex could find in this long, bloody chain, was Neil’s younger brother. This wasn't just a job for Neil. It was a prison. A half-century of living and working in the very place that had devoured his family, consumed by a guilt so profound it had hollowed him out from the inside.

Alex looked from the smiling face of Nathan Croft on the screen, to the identical, fading face of his friend Jason sitting beside him, to the memory of Louis Alistair’s unchanging, predatory smile across fifty years of yellowed newsprint.

This wasn’t a haunting. It was a harvest. And Louis was the farmer. They were just the latest crop, and they were trapped in a town that had long ago made a deal to look the other way while its children were led to the slaughter. The quiet library no longer felt like a place of sanctuary; it was a mausoleum, its archives filled with the faded paper ghosts of the forgotten and the damned.