The coffee in Park Trails tastes like battery acid and broken dreams. It’s the kind of suburb where the silence doesn’t feel peaceful; it feels like a collective holding of breath. Usually, the biggest scandal around here is a dispute over a property line or the local pub winning “Best Fish Taco in the Midwest”—a title that carries about as much weight as a polite lie at a funeral.
Then the Edmond house went up.
I stood on the sidewalk three days ago, watching the investigators pick through the blackened skeletal remains of a Victorian second story. The air smelled of burnt cedar and something sharper, something chemical. Arson. A Molotov cocktail through the bedroom window. In a place where people leave their back doors unlocked, that’s not just a crime; it’s a declaration of war.
I’m Detective Yuri. My job is to find the “who” and the “why,” but in Park Trails, the “why” usually dies of boredom before it can manifest into a felony. Not this time.
The Edmonds were “pillars.” That’s the word the neighbors used. It’s code for old, quiet, and affluent enough to be ignored. They’d climbed out of the wreckage with nothing but smoke in their lungs and the kind of shell-shocked stare you usually see in trench warfare. No enemies. No debts. No reason to be firebombed.
Then there was the boy.
“I’m telling you, Detective, he didn’t belong,” Miss Malone told me, her voice a sharp rasp. She was the head of the neighborhood watch, the kind of woman who treated her curtains like a sniper’s nest. “I saw him the night before the fire. Scrawny little thing, maybe eight or nine. Just roaming. I called the Edmonds, told them to keep the door locked, but they didn’t listen. They let him right in.”
I moved three doors down to the Smiths. The sun was setting, casting long, oily shadows across their manicured lawn.
“Thomas?” Mr. Smith chuckled, though there was no humor in it. “He’s been there forever. Good kid. Quiet. Always says ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am.’ Brought him to Bible study just last Wednesday.”
Mrs. Smith nodded, her eyes glazed with a strange, milky devotion. “The Edmonds are so blessed to have him. Such a well-behaved boy.”
I looked at my notepad. Malone says he’s a drifter. The Smiths say he’s a permanent fixture. A phantom child in a town where everyone knows everyone’s business. My head started to throb, a rhythmic pulsing behind my eyes that matched the strobe of the distant sirens.
I was back at the precinct, staring at a smudge of soot on my thumb, when the front doors swung open with a heavy, metallic clang.
He looked like he’d been pulled through a sewer backwards. Tall, maybe 5’10”, with the kind of hollowed-out eyes that suggest sleep is a foreign concept. His head was a jagged landscape of stubble and scars, his beard a graying thicket.
“It was me,” he rasped. The room went cold. “I started the fire.”
I stood up, my chair scraping against the linoleum like a scream. “Name.”
“Terrance Luke. I’m not crazy, Detective. Just… hear me out. Please.”
I ran his prints while he sat in the interview room, staring at the fluorescent lights as if they were holy. The file that spat out of the printer was a tragedy in three acts. Terrance Luke had lost everything a year ago. A freak construction accident. A crane operator had dropped a reinforced concrete pipe—tons of grey death—directly onto his family’s sedan. Wife, two kids. Gone in a heartbeat. Terrance survived with a shattered hip, a titanium rod in his arm, and a settlement check large enough to buy his silence but not his peace.
I stepped into the room, the smell of unwashed skin and desperation hitting me like a physical blow.
“Alright, Terrance,” I sat down, leaning into his space. “You’re claiming responsibility for the Edmond fire. You realize that’s a one-way ticket to a cage? Especially if there was a kid in that house.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt the Edmonds,” Terrance whispered. His voice was thin, like paper tearing. “But that thing… it’s not a boy. It’s a cancer with a face.”
“You’re not doing yourself any favors, pal. You tried to burn a child alive.”
“I tried to save them!” He slammed his good hand on the table. The bang echoed, dull and heavy. “That creature… it inserts itself. It finds a hole in your life and it fills it. It did it to me. It came to our door six months before the accident. Said its name was Jacob. My wife… she loved him. My real kids… they started to fade. Before I knew it, I couldn’t remember what our lives looked like before Jacob.”
“Terrance,” I said, my voice dropping into that low, dangerous register. “Are you on medication? Grief does things to the brain. It makes us see monsters where there are only tragedies.”
“Ask around,” he hissed, leaning closer. I could see the broken capillaries in his eyes. “I guarantee you, until a few weeks ago, nobody in this godforsaken suburb knew that kid existed. But if you ask them tomorrow? They’ll tell you he was born here. They’ll tell you they saw him take his first steps. It rewrites the script, Detective. It’s a changeling. It feeds on the ‘could-have-beens’ and the ‘never-weres.’ It drinks the grief of the parents until they’re nothing but husks.”
“This is insane,” I muttered, but I thought of the Smiths. The way they spoke about ‘Thomas’ with that vacant, rehearsed warmth.
“Lock me up,” Terrance said, a bitter, jagged smile twisting his face. “But by the end of the week, another family will be dead. It moves on when the house gets too hot. It’s a parasite, Detective. It’s in someone else’s living room right now, eating their dinner, calling them ‘Mommy,’ and waiting for the moment to snap the trap.”
I left him there. I told the sergeant to hold him, then I walked out into the rain. It was a cold, needles-on-skin kind of rain.
I drove back to Park Trails. Not to the Edmond house, but to the neighborhood. I cruised the streets, looking at the glowing windows, the blue flickering of television screens, the silhouettes of happy families. Everything looked so goddamn perfect, it made my stomach turn.
I pulled up near a small park. A swing set creaked in the wind—a rhythmic, metallic groan. Screee-errrk. Screee-errrk.
Then I saw him.
He was sitting on a bench near a streetlamp. Small. Scrawny. Wearing a yellow raincoat that looked too bright for the gloom. He was kicking his legs, staring at nothing.
I got out of the car, my hand instinctively resting on the grip of my piece. My heart was a frantic bird against my ribs. It’s just a kid, Yuri. Terrance is a headcase. Just a kid.
As I approached, the boy turned. His face was unremarkable—round cheeks, a small nose—but his eyes… they weren’t right. In the glow of the sodium lamp, they didn’t reflect the light. They swallowed it. They were two bottomless pits of oily black.
“Hello, Detective,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like a child’s. It had the resonance of an old recording, something scratched and distant.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“I’m whoever they need me to be,” he replied. He stood up, and for a second, the light flickered. In that split second of darkness, he didn’t look like a boy. He looked like something long and pale and jointed incorrectly, a shadow stretched too thin.
“Terrance Luke told me about you,” I said, drawing my weapon. My hands were shaking.
The boy tilted his head. “Terrance was loud. The Edmonds were much quieter. They were so lonely, Detective. Did you know that? They had so much love to give, and nowhere for it to go. I helped them.”
“You burned their house down.”
“No,” the boy smiled, and his teeth seemed too numerous for his mouth. “The man with the fire did that. I just moved on. There are so many lonely houses in this town. So many people with holes in their hearts.”
He took a step toward me. The air around him felt heavy, pressurized, like the moments before a massive storm. I smelled it then—the scent from the fire. Not just burnt wood, but something sweet and rotting, like lilies left in a vase too long.
“Stay back,” I warned.
“You look tired, Yuri,” the boy whispered. “I bet your apartment is very quiet. I bet you go home and sit in the dark, wondering why you do this. You don’t have anyone, do you?”
The words hit me like a physical weight. He wasn’t just talking; he was digging. I felt the walls of my mind thinning, the memories of my empty flat, the cold dinners, the silence that stretched on for years—it all started to feel like an invitation.
“I could be your son,” he said, his voice now sounding exactly like I imagined a son of mine would. “We could play catch. I could help you forget the blood and the soot. We could be a family.”
I looked at him, and for a heartbeat, the black eyes were gone. I saw a boy who looked a little like me. He had my chin. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheek. He looked like he needed a home.
He’s always been here, a voice in the back of my head whispered. You remember Thomas. You brought him to the park last week.
“No,” I gasped, biting my tongue until I tasted copper. The pain cleared the fog. “No!”
I leveled the gun and fired.
The muzzle flash blinded me. The report was a thunderclap that shattered the suburban silence. When my vision cleared, the bench was empty. There was no body. No blood. Just a small, charred circle on the grass where he had stood.
I stood in the rain for an hour, my gun hanging limp at my side.
The next morning, I went to the station. I was going to talk to Terrance. I was going to tell him I believed him.
“Terrance Luke?” the desk sergeant asked, frowning at his monitor. “Who’s that?”
“The arsonist,” I said, my heart starting to race. “The guy from last night. The guy who lost his family in the crane accident.”
The sergeant shook his head. “Yuri, you stayed here late doing paperwork, but nobody came in. I’ve been here all night. No arsonist. No confession.”
I pushed past him and ran to the interview room. It was empty. The chair was tucked neatly under the table. I checked the holding cells. Nothing. I went to my desk and looked for the file I’d printed.
The folder was there. But when I opened it, the pages were blank.
I sat down, the world tilting on its axis. My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from my landlord.
Hey Yuri, sorry to bug you, but your nephew left his bike in the hallway again. Can you tell him to move it?
I don’t have a nephew.
I stared at the screen until the words blurred. Then, slowly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. A small, cold hand.
“Are you okay, Uncle Yuri?” a voice asked. A voice I’d known my whole life. A voice I’d never heard before.
I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. I just stared at my reflection in the darkened computer screen. Behind me, standing in the shadows of the precinct, was a small figure in a yellow raincoat.
“I’m fine, Thomas,” I whispered, my voice sounding like a stranger’s. “I’m just fine.”
Outside, the sun was shining on Park Trails. The birds were singing. Somewhere, a pub was serving the best fish tacos in the Midwest. And in my head, the memories were shifting, sliding, rewriting themselves until the truth was just a puff of smoke in a house that never burned.
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