Chapter 4: A Map of Monsters

Chapter 4: A Map of Monsters

The daylight felt like a lie. After what they had seen in the shadows of the gym, the bright, cheerful morning sun seemed obscene, a gaudy mask hiding the town’s rotten core. The memory of Silas whispering to the locker, polishing its blank face with the reverence of a priest at an altar, had burned itself behind Alex’s eyelids. Sleep had offered no escape, only fractured nightmares of scraping sounds and satisfied smiles in the dark.

He met Jason at their usual spot by the library bike racks. Jason looked even worse than Alex felt. The grim resolve from the night before had settled into a heavy, haunted certainty. The question wasn't if Silas was a monster, but how to prove it.

“He talks to it. He takes care of it,” Jason said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, as if he’d spent the whole night repeating the words to himself until they lost their power to shock. “Whatever he did to Junie… the proof isn’t going to be in the locker. The locker is the… the end. The proof has to be where he is. In his office.”

The janitor’s office. A small, windowless door off the main hallway, always locked. It was Silas’s private kingdom, the one place no one ever went. The thought of breaking in was terrifying. The thought of not doing it was worse.

Their new mission required a different kind of courage. Not the frantic, heart-pounding bravery of hiding in bushes at midnight, but a cold, methodical patience. They needed to map their monster’s habits. For the next three days, they became spies, shadowing Silas with a dedication born of fear and purpose. They used their bikes for quick getaways and their small-town-kid invisibility to their advantage. No one ever notices a couple of twelve-year-olds loitering.

Their surveillance revealed a man who lived by the clock. Silas Croft was a creature of absolute, unwavering routine.

He arrived every morning at 7:00 AM sharp, his old Ford pickup rattling into the staff parking lot. He spent the first hour on a silent, sweeping tour of the facility. From 1:00 to 1:30 PM, he would lock himself in his office for lunch, the only time of day the door was occupied. The most crucial window of opportunity came in the late afternoon. From 3:00 to 4:30 PM, he was in the pool area, the roar of the industrial pump and the slosh of his cleaning equipment creating a cocoon of noise that deafened him to the rest of the building. He was utterly predictable, a ghost in a machine of his own making. His consistency, which should have been boring, was deeply unnerving. It felt less like discipline and more like a ritual he was forbidden to break.

On the third day, while Silas was wrestling with the heavy pool cover, they did a reconnaissance of the building’s exterior in the stark afternoon light. They found his office’s only weak point. Tucked away in a forgotten corner at the back of the gym, behind a row of overflowing dumpsters buzzing with flies, was a small, grimy window. It was set high on the wall, just below the roofline, and caked with a decade’s worth of filth. A thicket of thorny bushes grew below it, guarding it like a natural barbed wire.

“I’ve never even seen this before,” Jason murmured, staring up at it.

“We could get a ladder,” Alex suggested.

“He’d see it. Someone would see it,” Jason countered, his mind already working the problem. He pointed at the dumpster. “We push that against the wall. We can climb on top of it. It’ll be loud, though. We’d have to do it when he’s at the pool.”

The plan began to solidify, a fragile, terrifying blueprint taking shape in their minds. They had their target, their timeline, and their point of entry. It felt possible. It felt real. And that was the most frightening thing of all.

As they planned, Alex started to feel the town in a new way. Before, it had just been boring and unfamiliar. Now, it felt actively hostile, its placid surface concealing a conspiratorial silence. He’d tried, just once, to learn more. At the general store, buying a soda, he’d asked the teenager behind the counter, an older boy from the high school.

“Hey, I’m new here,” Alex had started, trying to sound casual. “I heard some kids at the gym talking about a girl who had an accident last year? Junie Pierce?”

The teenager’s friendly demeanor vanished. He stopped wiping the counter, his hand freezing in mid-air. His eyes flicked away from Alex’s, settling on something over his shoulder. “Tragic accident,” he said, his voice clipped and final. “She fell in the river.” He shoved Alex’s change into his hand without making eye contact, his body language a solid wall that screamed end of discussion.

The silence was everywhere. It was in the way mothers at the park pulled their kids a little closer when Jason walked by. It was in the tight, forced smiles of adults who remembered Junie but refused to speak her name. It was a willful, collective amnesia. Havenwood hadn't forgotten; it had chosen not to remember. The town itself felt like an accomplice, guarding the secret not with threats, but with an oppressive, suffocating quiet. The boys weren’t just up against a strange old man; they were up against the town’s desperate need to believe in the simple, logical lie. They were utterly alone.

Their planning session on the fourth day took them back to the gym’s entrance, where they sat on the curb pretending to fix the chain on Alex’s bike. It gave them a plausible reason to be there. As Jason worked a non-existent kink out of the chain, Alex’s gaze drifted to the large community notice board bolted to the brick wall. It was a chaotic collage of town life: flyers for a church bake sale, a tear-off ad for guitar lessons, the little league team photo.

And tacked among them, faded and curling at the edges, were the flyers for missing pets.

Alex had seen them before, but he hadn’t looked. Now he did. His eyes scanned the board. A tabby cat named Patches, missing since May. A beagle named Copper, vanished in March. A fluffy white Persian, gone since last October. A golden retriever puppy. Another cat. A dog.

They weren’t scattered randomly. They were clustered, a sad little constellation of lost companions, pinned right here, on the wall of the one place they all now feared.

“Jason,” Alex said, his voice low. “Look.”

Jason followed his gaze. He squinted, his brow furrowed in confusion, then his eyes widened in dawning horror. He’d lived here his whole life. He’d seen this board a thousand times. But he was seeing it for the first time through the lens of their new, terrible knowledge.

The smiling, furry faces on the posters seemed to mock them. Patches. Copper. Daisy. Each one a tiny, forgotten tragedy. Each one a small, unanswered question.

“He’s feeding it,” Jason whispered, the words from the other night returning with sickening force. The phrase was no longer a wild, terrified guess. It was a theory, gaining weight and substance with every faded picture of a lost pet.

The scope of the horror they were facing suddenly expanded beyond a single, tragic night. It wasn’t just about Junie anymore. It was a constant, gnawing hunger. The town of Havenwood didn’t just have a monster lurking in the shadows. It had a process. A cycle. And these flyers, fluttering innocently in the summer breeze, were a map of the monster’s appetite. The boys looked at each other, the same terrifying thought reflected in their eyes. The break-in wasn't just for justice anymore. It was to find out who—or what—was next on the menu.