Grandpa didn’t like the word brat being used to describe Millie. She wasn’t a bad kid. She was just at a difficult age. She would come around. He crouched under the Christmas tree and arranged all her presents in a big pile so they’d be there for her when she came back.
Scott Cawthon is the author of the bestselling video game series Five Nights at Freddy’s, and while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart. He is a graduate of The Art Institute of Houston and lives in Texas with his wife and four sons.
Elley Cooper writes fiction for young adults and adults. She has always loved horror and is grateful to Scott Cawthon for letting her spend time in his dark and twisted universe. Elley lives in Tennessee with her family and many spoiled pets and can often be found writing books with Kevin Anderson & Associates.
Propping his foot on an open drawer, Detective Larson leaned back in his wooden desk chair. Its typical creak sounded unusually loud in the absence of the daytime chaos of the divisional office. The bullpen was crammed with twelve desks, double that number of chairs, triple that number of computers and monitors and printers, a smattering of bulletin boards and storage cabinets and work tables, and the lone malfunctioning coffee maker stuck in the corner. The coffee maker spewed out abysmal coffee, but it made a musical hissing sound that a couple of the detectives thought sounded like “Ride of the Valkyries.” It was on one of its more screeching crescendos right now.
Larson shook his head. He only noticed how depressing the place was when all the people were gone, as they were on this late Monday evening. He should have been gone, too, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get back to his empty apartment. Ever since his wife, Angela, left him, filed for divorce, and embarked on a mission to be sure he saw their seven-year-old son, Ryan, as little as possible, Larson didn’t see the point of going home. Home wasn’t home. It was a two-bedroom walk-up that, according to Ryan, smelled like pickles and had the “ugliest carpet ever.”
He’d told himself he’d stay late and catch up on reports, but he was really just sitting there feeling sorry for himself.
Was he really the horrible dad Angela accused him of being? Sure, the job forced him to miss a lot of Ryan’s games and school events. Yes, he’d broken a lot of promises to his son.
“I’ll be home in time to throw the ball, Ryan,” turned into, “Sorry. I got a new case.”
“I’ll take you camping this weekend,” turned into, “Sorry. The chief called me in.”
“He’s your son, Everett,” Angela kept saying to him before she left. “He’s not an afterthought. He should be your reason for being, not something you’ll get around to someday.”
Angela just didn’t understand. He loved his son, of course, but this job wasn’t just a job.
Yep, he was definitely feeling sorry for himself. Not the best use of his time.
Larson shifted, trying to find the ever-elusive comfortable position in his desk chair. He looked around at the place where he’d spent two-thirds of his life over the last five years. It really was a bleak room. Dingy beige walls, flickering fluorescent lights, scuffed gray linoleum floor, all that furniture in perpetual disarray … Were detectives so lowly that they deserved such surroundings, or were they just too darn busy to do anything about it?
Larson shifted his gaze to the line of narrow windows that marched along the outside wall of the room. At the end of the row, he noticed a skinny ivy vine growing through a gap between the window frame and a dirty window that let in the sickly yellow glow of a street lamp.
“There’s my favorite sucker.”
Larson suppressed a groan. That’s what he got for not going home.
“Chief,” he said.
Chief Monahan wended his way through the empty desks, wrinkling his nose when he passed Detective Powell’s monument to slobbery. “What is that stench?” The chief looked down at the piles of paperwork and empty food containers.
“Don’t know. Don’t want to know.” From where Larson sat, the office smelled like disinfectant. His partner, Detective Roberts, whose desk faced Larson’s tidy domain, sprayed the stuff incessantly to mask whatever it was that seemed to have died in Powell’s desk.
The chief propped a foot on the extra chair next to Larson’s desk. He held out an envelope. Larson eyed it. He had strong suspicion he wasn’t going to like what was in it, so he made no move to take it.
The chief tossed the envelope onto Larson’s smudged green desk blotter. It landed next to the row of freshly sharpened pencils Larson had lined up for his evening’s drudgery.
“The Stitchwraith,” the chief said. “No one else wants it.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Tough.” The word sounded exactly that when the chief said it. A compact, prematurely gray-haired man, the chief made it clear early in his career that his size and hair color had nothing to do with his ability to kick ass. He wasn’t big, but he could do what any big man could do. And he sounded like a big man, with a loud, rough voice you didn’t argue with unless you absolutely had to.
Larson had to. He did not want to see what was in the envelope. “The Stitchwraith is an urban legend,” Larson protested, still not touching the envelope, which lay like a big slug next to his foot.
“Not anymore. You heard the latest?” Chief Monahan clearly wasn’t going to listen to dissent.
Larson sighed. How could he not have? It was all over the news, and the public was demanding answers.
A local teen, Sarah something, disappeared a week before, and the detectives assigned to the case—not Larson, who gave thanks for small favors—had several dozen eyewitnesses who claimed the girl turned into garbage right before their eyes. Now admittedly the eyewitnesses were public school kids, not always the most stellar purveyors of truth, but in this case, their stories had a ring of authenticity, in spite of the outlandish content.
“I heard,” Larson admitted.
“Can’t make heads or tails of it, I know. But this morning, we had most of the witnesses back in to see the psychologists. The shrinks confirm the witnesses believe what they’re saying. Same goes for the people who’ve seen The Stitchwraith.”
Larson rolled his eyes then said in a deep voice, “ ‘A strange cloaked figure roaming the streets.’ ” He returned to his normal unremarkable voice, “Did I go to sleep and wake up in a horror flick?”
The chief snorted then indicated the envelope with a shift of his square jaw. “You haven’t heard the best part. Open it.”
Larson took a deep breath and put his foot on the floor. He tipped his chair forward. It creaked again, this time louder, as if it, too, had no interest in The Stitchwraith and needed to voice its own objection. Larson picked up the envelope. Pulling an inch-thick stack of papers from it, he flipped through a few witness reports. Like the schoolkids’ reports, these witnesses’ testimonies all sounded similar, though they still had enough detail to diminish the possibility of a hoax.
The Stitchwraith, witnesses said, was a shrouded figure in some sort of cloak, cape, or hooded coat. It had a lurching walk, a complete disinterest in others unless bothered, and an obsession with dumpsters and trash bins. It was usually seen dragging garbage bags full of no-one-knew-what. He’d heard all of this before. He and most of his fellow detectives had dismissed it as bunk.
Setting aside the witness reports, Larson flipped through the next few sheets in the envelope. They were all suspicious death reports.
Larson kept his face blank as he read, and he was glad the chief couldn’t see the frisson of dread that skittered along his nerve endings. He felt like the reports dropped a stone into the pond of his life, and now their impact was rippling inexorably outward toward some future he wasn’t going to like.
Larson flipped through the stack. “Five? Five withered bodies with,”—he looked down and read from the top report stack—“ ‘eyes that bled black down the sides of the face.’ More of that?” The manner of death wasn’t new to Larson, unfortunately, but he�
��d only known of one victim. And he didn’t know it had anything to do with The Stitchwraith.
Chief Monahan shrugged.
Larson read more carefully. Two of the dead men found had impressive criminal histories. Larson recognized one of the guys—he’d collared him for assault a few years back. He separated out the two reports and tapped them. “I bet these two tried to mug the guy.”
The chief, who had finally sat down in Larson’s visitor chair, nodded. “I agree.” He leaned forward and pointed to a stack of photographs Larson hadn’t looked at yet. “Look at those.”
Larson flipped through the photos taken from security cameras near The Stitchwraith sightings. He squinted at one that showed the figure pulling what seemed to be a mannequin’s torso from a dumpster. “What the heck is he doing?”
The chief didn’t answer.
Larson kept going through the photos. He stopped again. From under the hood of what looked like maybe a long trench coat, a bulky white face peered out at the night. Larson stiffened so he wouldn’t recoil. He wanted to drop the photo and get as far from his desk as he could. But he didn’t do that. He just stared at the strange visage and concentrated on breathing normally. He wasn’t going to let this craziness rattle him, especially not in front of the chief.
The face wasn’t a face, not a human face anyway. Unless it was a damaged human face covered in bandages maybe? It looked more like a mask. The face was round, and its features were drawn onto the curved white surface. Done in thick black marker, the black features looked like a child had made them.
Larson deliberately relaxed his shoulders, which he realized had been creeping toward his ears. It’s just a stupid mask, he told himself.
Larson looked up at Chief Monahan. “A mask?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Larson looked back at the face. It had dark eyes, one of which looked blackened, and it had a terrifying mouth with a missing tooth and something stuck between the remaining front teeth. Were those blood stains around the mouth?
“We got a match on it.” The chief pressed his thin lips together in what could have been a smile. He liked dropping bombshells.
“A match on what? This?” Larson pointed at the blurred and bizarre face.
The chief nodded. “And you’re not going to believe where we got it from.”
Copyright © 2020 by Scott Cawthon. All rights reserved.
Photo of TV static: © Klikk/Dreamstime
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Cover design by Betsy Peterschmidt
e-ISBN 978-1-338-62696-4
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