A serial killer?
I click on the video, trying to connect the dots here. What does a serial killer have to do with a boy who was killed in the 1960s? How many fucking ghost stories are there about this place?
It does explain Oliver’s story, though. He probably heard bits and pieces about it. Then, when he went exploring on the peninsula, he saw the name on the gravestone and ran with it. It’s certainly the most logical explanation.
The video isn’t long, just fifteen minutes of a pleasant man’s voice speaking over a stock video of a tree-lined lake that looks almost but not quite like the lake outside my back door. “It all happened here,” the voiceover says. “In the small town of Veritas, North Carolina, on the shores of Hanging Lake. Theo Shorn, a mute teenage boy?—”
I freeze, press my finger down on the video to pause it.A mute teenage boy.
Nonverbal, he means. Like Oliver.
I glance over at my window, although of course I don’t see anything, not with the curtains drawn. What did Oliver say?He uses ASL, too. Like me.
I start the video again.
“—was drowned off one of the town’s piers. It was ruled an accident, a terrible tragedy. But his mother, Ruth Shorn, maintained that he had been murdered by a group of four local teenagers.”
Their faces flash on the screen, portrait photos like the one I saw of Theo himself. Black and white. Old-fashioned. Three boys and a girl.
“Ruth’s pleas to investigate her son’s death went unheard, and she eventually disappeared. Because the Shorn family had been outcasts, living in an isolated cabin on a small peninsula that juts into the belly of the lake, no one checked up on her. It was assumed by many that she had left town.
“Until 1965.”
The screen flashes with a scan of a newspaper headline: the Veritas Reporter, the same newsletter I had seen earlier. But this is the front page, and the headline reads,Seven Dead in Mass Slaying.
My heart leaps up in my chest. An old, icy fear surges through my body.
“It was August,” the voiceover says, the image fading to a stock photo of a man wearing a balaclava, some cheesy photographer’s idea of a killer. “A masked attacker came into Veritas and slaughtered seven people with an ax. Four of the victims were the same four people whom Ruth Shorn had accused of killing her son, Theo.” Their photos flash on the screen, only this time they’re a little older, and they aren’t portraits but photographs. The woman’s photograph is from her wedding, and a man smiles pleasantly beside her. “Maggie Putnam’s husband, Ralph, was also found among the dead, although their eight-month-old daughter was left alive, screaming for her parents.” More pictures, blurry and black-and-white. “The other deaths were the sheriff, Walter Mandle, and a sheriff’s deputy, Joe Seager.
“The killer was never caught,” the voiceover continues. “Although rumors spread. The most common was that it was Ruth—at least, until they searched her cabin.” A long, dramatic pause. “There, they found her body laid out on her bed: a skeleton, long since dead.”
My blood pounds in my ears. I’m afraid of what I’m going to hear next.
“But that wasn’t the end of it.” Another image of the Veritas newspaper, this one from 1971. “There was another spree six years later that left five people dead. Three dismembered, one who was bludgeoned to death, and one who was drowned in the lake.” The image on screen fades to a ghostly forest. “Just like Theo Hartshorn, nine years earlier.
“There were two more attacks in the following years that followed similar patterns, the most recent in 2001. They would occur at night, always on a full moon. Survivors would report seeing a large figure stalking through the street. Theo Shorn’s father, who has never been identified? Or perhaps, Theo Shorn himself, come from the dead to enact revenge on the living?”
This last question is punctuated with Theo Shorn’s portrait, his pale eyes looming heavily on my phone. For a moment, it feels like his image is staring up at me, watching me from sixty-five years ago.
“Fuck,” I whisper, closing out the app before the video can finish and then tossing my phone onto the coffee table. I sink back into the couch, staring at the darkened TV hanging above the big fireplace. I’ve heard a story like this before, but not about Theo Shorn.
About Penelope’s mother.
A Hunter, that’s what Penelope called her.My sister’s one, too. Killers who can’t die. But she assured me they were rare.You’ll probably never meet another one in your life,Penelope said the night I found out, my skin slicked with cold sweat.
I look over at my closed curtains, hiding the dark crush of the woods. The last attack happened over twenty years ago. There’s no reason to think a Hunter, or anyone, lives out there. After all, I made it out unscathed. So has Oliver.
It’s just a ghost story, I tell myself. Oliver’s just a weird, lonely kid with an overactive imagination. He heard a ghost story about a nonverbal teenager who used to live across the lake.
I keep telling myself this, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m wrong.
“I’m sorry.What is this about, exactly?”
Blaire Jenkins frowns at me from where she’s leaning against the frame of her front door, her expression one of bored annoyance.
I had a hard time sleeping last night. That stupid YouTube video kept playing in my head, and I composed and deleted about a dozen messages to Penelope asking if her family knows someone named Theo Shorn. When I learned about it five years ago, she swore me to secrecy, her eyes dark and glinting.Don’t tell anyone, she said, the two of us huddled in the bathroom of her sister Callie’s apartment in Miami after a man attacked us outside a nightclub, and I saw something I absolutely wasn’t supposed to see.Not even Abi. Swear it to me, then just—forget everything I told you. Okay?
I didn’t forget, of course. How could I? But I’ve never brought it up since, and I can’t bring myself to do it now. It feels crazy, especially in the light of morning.
