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Once upon a time in Port Townsend, a twelve-year old girl picked up a copy of Stephen King’s IT and read it cover to cover. In it, she read about a weird creature from outer space that showed up every thirty or so years to eat children in a town called Derry. Not Derry in Ireland, though, Derry in Maine. Not that the child-eating alien thing cared.
It all sounded very familiar to her, except their creature wasn’t kind enough to wait a few decades.
That young girl didn’t know the exact average, (police were loath to share time of death and crime scene information with a literal child,) but kids definitely went missing in Port Townsend more than usual. Always little girls, always unsolved.
There was the girl down the street who wanted to be a circus acrobat, and the only thing they found of her was her ribbon on a stick outside her gymnastics glass.
And the toddler who lived across from the library who was shy and quiet and never would’ve gone with a stranger.
Not to mention, her own little cousin who just vanished out of her bed in the middle of a warm summer night.
Everything was blamed on kidnappers or freak accidents or, especially, falling off the cliffs. Occasionally, someone asked why the cliffs were so exposed and why there were no fences or warning signs. They never got a proper answer because the real answer was that if the cliffs were dangerous, they could blame them for the vanishing kids.
It wasn’t the cliffs.
It wasn’t an animal either, thought the young girl who read ‘too many’ horror novels. It wasn’t a bear or a wolf or a wayward orca.
It was a beast.
Nothing else could’ve been stealing children from in and around Port Townsend for so long without being caught. Animals and humans always left traces.
She liked the library, and since she always made an effort to be polite to the books, (and the people,) she got away with more than most residents. Namely, she was trusted with old records and the old old records that needed to be handled with gloves and only viewed in certain light. Still, all the faff and kissing up to the librarian was worth it.
Little girls had been getting snatched for centuries.
They disappeared from cottages where families slept six to a room and they disappeared from nice little bungalows where they lived with their grandmas and they disappeared from cosy beds covered in teddy bears and pillows.
There were a couple cases that drew a bit of attention. One in the thirties, one in the sixties, one in the eighties, and mostly recently, Becky Aspen.
No-one really seemed to care outside of that.
Every time the police showed up, the young detective-in-the-making wanted to tell them they were wasting their time. Whatever took them didn’t have fingerprints or a search history or a scent for dogs to follow or bootprints or witnesses.
Of course, people did what they could. Sensible people had big dogs that barked in the middle of the night and idiots had CCTV that showed nothing.
Everything showed nothing.
The young girl told herself that one day she would be brave enough and smart enough to figure it out and stop it. One day, she’d march into Tragic Mick’s, (who definitely knew something about the whole mess,) and she’d get answers and she’d kill the beast.
Until then, she slept with the light on and with her husky at the foot of her bed. She never walked anywhere alone, and especially not at night. She wrote to Mr King on the slim chance that he knew something.
She was more surprised than anyone else when Becky Aspen came home, not just alive, but in one piece.
No one had come home before.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Port Townsend breathed a sigh of relief. Young girls dared to close their eyes for a single minute more. No-one truly let their guard down, since they didn’t know the details, but the fact that Becky Aspen had returned meant one thing-
Someone, something, had found the beast.