Before she could even register what she was doing, Emily darted through the open front door and into the falling rain. Shadows were crawling over the house, the meadow, the trees, covering the land in a veil of darkness. She ran through the garden, cleared the gate, and turned the corner of the house.
Twigs and leaves crunched under her feet and loose soil sprayed into the air as Emily plunged into the forest. She stumbled blindly. Low branches whistled past her head. She slid to a halt, breathless and panicked, and disoriented by the darkness.
A beam of light cut through the trees. Emily stumbled backwards.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Jerome hurried towards her, torch in hand.
“You heard Helen!” she cried. “We have to find Melody, now!”
Jerome brought up his other hand, which was gripped around a broken table leg. “Then let’s not die trying.”
They found the shed minutes later, aided by the hammering of rain on its corrugated roof. The door was wide open. A quick scan of the ground revealed the broken padlock and the rock that Helen had used to gain access.
Impenetrable blackness filled the open doorway like a portal to an unknown realm. With Jerome by her side, Emily edged nearer. A rank, coppery odour permeated the air.
Emily hovered, suspended between curiosity and fear. “Melody? Are you in there?”
She waited for an answer. When none came, she and Jerome stepped inside.
The light pushed back the darkness, casting shadows against the mouldy walls. The shed was larger inside than the exterior suggested, and was partitioned by a shelving unit, which ran from ceiling to floor and contained tools and open cans filled with screws, nails, engine oil, old rags, and broken glass.
A carpet of leaves and dirt covered the floor, as if the forest had claimed the shed as its own. Gardening instruments hung from hooks on walls—a rake, a hoe, the curved blade of a scythe. A workbench sat in the corner. Metal scraps and wood shavings lay scattered on top.
Jerome swept the torch across the room. Light pierced through the junk on the shelves and hit the wall beyond, illuminating deep red splashes.
Holding her breath, Emily signalled to Jerome. Together, they moved forwards. Nausea frothed in her stomach. She did not want to see what lay beyond but her limbs betrayed her, forcing one foot in front of the other, until she moved past the shelves and stood on the other side.
Emily turned away, squeezing her eyes shut before she could see the body.
Jerome’s voice trembled over the din of the rainfall. “It’s not Melody.”
The dead man sat in the corner with his head resting against the wall. His legs were folded at the knees, his hands placed neatly in his lap. Blood swamped the front of his t-shirt and covered the wall behind. It smeared his neck and face, painting over skin that was as grey as wet cement.
“Sam...” Emily tasted bile in the back of her throat. He had been stabbed multiple times. She could see tears in his t-shirt where the blade had entered. Blood was thick and black around each entry point. Helen hadn’t been trying to tell them that Sam had attacked her. She’d been trying to tell them that he was dead.
The torch wavered in Jerome’s hand. “We need to go back to the house. We lock the doors. We all stay in the same room. We wait for Daniel and Janelle to return with the police.”
“Melody is missing,” Emily said.
“Perhaps she got scared and ran off.”
“Whoever did this, they attacked Helen. What if they’ve taken Melody? We can’t just leave her.”
“Do you think I’m right? Do you think it’s Franklyn Hobbes?” Jerome swung the torch towards the open door. The light cut through the rain, illuminating the trees. “What if he’s out there, right now, watching us.”
Emily reached up and took the torch from Jerome’s hand. As she directed it back to Sam’s body, something flashed in the corner of her eye.
“What is that?”
She had missed it before. Lost between the arterial splashes was a small symbol painted in blood. Eight arrows crossed each other like the points of a compass—four long pointing north, east, south, and west, and four short, placed symmetrically in between.
“It’s the same symbol,” she breathed. “The same one I saw on the tree Oscar was hanged from.”
Jerome’s eyes grew round and wide. “That’s a chaos star.”
“A what?”
He rubbed his jaw. “Law is represented by a single upward arrow. Chaos by the symbol of eight—eight arrows pointing to all possibilities.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily said, turning to face him.
“The chaos star originates from Michael Moorcock’s The Eternal Champion, a fantasy novel from the early seventies,” Jerome explained. “But pop culture ate it for breakfast and since then it’s appeared in all kinds of places—modern-day occultism, heavy metal album covers, films, TV, RPGs.”
“RP-what?”
“You never played Warhammer? Dungeons and Dragons?”
Emily swung the torch back towards the symbol. “How do you know all this?”
“At school I was a not-so-secret fantasy geek.”
Emily stared at the symbol, willing it to reveal its meaning. Why was it here? Why was it carved on Oscar’s tree? It was pointing her towards something, but what? Her mind pulsed with myriads of thoughts, none of which formed a cohesive explanation for what was happening at Meadow Pines. For the briefest of moments, she had suspected Sam. But now Sam was dead; murdered alongside Oscar, probably Marcia too. Was Jerome right? Had Franklyn Hobbes returned to Meadow Pines in a dangerous and delusional state? Could his belief that he had become nothing led him to transcend moral beliefs of right and wrong? If Franklyn Hobbes really had returned, how long did they have before Melody would be counted as his next victim?