Chapter 2: The Scars That Remember

Chapter 2: The Scars That Remember

Sleep, when it finally came, was not an escape. It was a trapdoor dropping him back into that humid summer night, twenty years ago. The dream was always the same, a high-fidelity replay of his worst memory. He was running, his twelve-year-old lungs burning with a fire that tasted of pine and panic. The forest floor was a treacherous landscape of grasping roots, each one feeling like a bony ankle trying to trip him, to drag him down into the loamy dark.

He could hear the sound behind him, the dry, slithering drag of wood on dirt. It wasn't the sound of pursuit; it was the sound of inevitability.

The girl was there, her face flickering in and out of the shadows. Her mismatched eyes—one ice blue, one earthy brown—were wide with a terror that was ancient and absolute. “Mother hears,” her whisper echoed, not in his ears, but inside his skull. “Long arms. So long.”

Then came the pain. A sharp, piercing cold that shot up his leg from his calf. He looked down in the dream and saw it: a pale, branch-like limb, impossibly long and thin, ending in four twig-sharp fingers dug deep into his flesh. It wasn't angry. It wasn't violent. It was merely possessive, like a gardener testing a plant.

He woke with a strangled gasp, the sheets twisted around him like a shroud. His apartment was cold and silent, the only light the blue glow of his still-open laptop screen displaying the news article. Lily Patterson’s smiling, gap-toothed face seemed to mock the sterile safety of his life.

A fierce, maddening itch radiated from his right calf.

Leo threw back the covers and stared at the marks he’d carried for two decades. The scar was a pale, ugly thing against his skin. Four parallel lines, each about two inches long, slightly raised and puckered. They looked like claw marks, but he knew they weren't from any animal. Doctors had called it a childhood accident, something he must have snagged on a broken fence or a piece of machinery. Leo knew better. It was the creature’s signature.

He scratched at it furiously, but the itch was deep, under the skin, a phantom pain that no physical touch could soothe. It only ever flared up like this when he let himself truly remember. Now, with the news of another missing child, it was on fire, a cold burn that felt like a signal, a tuning fork resonating with some distant, terrible vibration.

He stumbled into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, staring at the gaunt, sleep-deprived man in the mirror. Tired, haunted eyes stared back. He had built this life, this monastic existence of data entry and silent solitude, as a fortress against the memory. He had no close friends, no lover, no one who could ask the questions that might breach the walls. He had convinced himself, most days, that it was a trauma-induced hallucination. A child’s overactive imagination trying to process the tragic, accidental death of a friend. Billy had fallen, hit his head, and wandered off, succumbing to the elements. That was the official story. The story that let everyone in Blackwood Creek sleep at night.

But Leo never slept well. And he knew what he saw. He saw the faceless thing with its impossibly long arms. He felt its touch.

The itch on his calf intensified, a low, insistent thrum. It was more than memory. It was a connection. A brand.

"No," he muttered to his reflection. "It's not real. It's a coincidence."

But the words were hollow, a flimsy shield against an undeniable truth. A little girl was gone. From the same spot. In the same way. The guilt he had carried for twenty years, a cold stone in his gut, suddenly felt heavier. He had run. He had left Billy. Sadie had been too hysterical to make sense, and by the time the search party was organized, all they ever found was one of Billy’s sneakers near a creek bed miles away. Leo had tried to tell them about the girl, about the thing with no face, but they had looked at him with pity. The traumatized boy, spinning wild tales.

He had learned to be silent. The silence had become his shield, then his prison.

Now, the prison walls were cracking. The itching in his leg was a call to arms, a demand for an accounting. He couldn't sit here in his sterile gray box, inputting shipping codes while the past repeated itself, while another family was torn apart by the same silent horror. Atonement. The word surfaced in his mind, sharp and clear. He couldn't save Billy, but maybe, just maybe, he wasn't too late for Lily Patterson.

The decision was a physical release, a dam breaking inside him. The anxiety didn't vanish, but it morphed into a sharp, focused energy. He walked back into his living room, shut the laptop, and started throwing clothes into a duffel bag. T-shirts, jeans, a heavy-duty flashlight he hadn't used in years. He didn’t know what he was going to do. What could he do? But he knew he couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t be a ghost in his own life any longer.

The two-hour drive to Blackwood Creek was a journey through time. The concrete and glass of the city bled into sprawling suburbs, which in turn gave way to the two-lane highways and dense, suffocating forests of his youth. The trees grew taller here, closer to the road, their branches weaving a dark canopy overhead that dappled the asphalt in shifting, hypnotic patterns. With every mile, the air grew thicker, heavier with the scent of damp earth and pine. The itching in his calf subsided to a dull, constant ache, a reminder of his destination.

Blackwood Creek hadn’t changed. The same faded storefronts lined Main Street. The same chipped paint on the town hall sign. It was a place drowning in a quiet, stubborn sort of nostalgia, a town that preferred its secrets buried. He didn’t drive to his childhood home. He didn’t seek out the familiar landmarks. He followed a grim, magnetic pull toward the source of the rot: Hawthorne Woods.

He parked near the community park that served as a buffer between the town and the treeline. This was where they had started their game that night. The swing set creaked in the wind, an empty, mournful sound. His eyes were drawn to a telephone pole at the edge of the parking lot, right where the manicured grass gave way to wild undergrowth. It was covered in staples from a hundred forgotten flyers.

But one was new. A fresh sheet of white paper, its corners already curling in the humidity.

Leo got out of the car, his legs feeling unsteady. He walked toward it, each step heavier than the last. He already knew what it was, but seeing it was different.

MISSING.

The word was in a stark, bold font. Below it, the smiling, gap-toothed face of Lily Patterson. Her eyes, bright and full of life, seemed to bore right through him. He read the details, his heart pounding a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. Age 8. Last seen near the Hawthorne Woods trail entrance at dusk. Wearing a pink t-shirt and blue shorts.

It was a mirror. A ghost image of a poster that had hung in this exact spot twenty years ago, its paper softened by rain, Billy’s school picture smiling out over the same dark, watchful woods. A different face, a different name, but the same story. The same insatiable hunger.

He reached out a trembling hand, his fingertips brushing against the cool paper. Behind the pole, the forest stood as a solid wall of blackness, the trees packed so tightly together they looked like bars on a cage. The sun was beginning to set, and the shadows were stretching, reaching for him like long, thin arms.

The dull ache in his calf flared, a sudden, sharp sting of icy cold. He looked from the innocent face on the poster to the dark, waiting maw of the woods he had sworn he would never enter again.

The choice had been made. He wasn't just visiting his past. He had come to hunt it.