The stopped house burns to foundation stones as the six vanish into the timber. A dog walker stumbles upon the harvest at the oak, a fire investigator casts a crucial photograph into the rubble, and Hazelwood falls into the grip of Satanic Panic over "The Hazelwood Five."
By the hour the morning paper hit the gravel driveways, the five and their guide were gone, swallowed by the deep timber as if the earth had opened to receive them.
The stopped house burnt down to its foundation stones. Black smoke spiraled into the cold autumn sky, carrying the vinyl records, the marriage bed, and the stained pantry into thin air.
Two miles out, along the unpaved logging track, a local man walking his hound was pulled into the brush when the dog caught the scent of severed flesh in the tall grass.
The hound led its master deeper into the hollow, baying at the foot of the ancient oak. There, bound to the bark, rested what remained of Walter; his sternum opened, his heart harvested, his husk charred by the flame.
In the damp mud fifty yards from the tree, state troopers found a crumpled page from a spiral pad. It bore a charcoal sketch of a bruised, bloody girl, scribbled over with wild, frantic strokes as if rejected and cast aside by the artist. They bagged it as trash, missing the hand that drew it.
In the ruined cellar of the house, a county fire investigator kicked through the sodden ash of the pantry. Beneath a pile of collapsed floor joists, his boot struck a broken picture frame.
Inside the cracked glass sat an old photograph: Sara’s mother as a young woman, laughing beside a familiar girl with long brown hair who held up a vinyl copy of T-Rex's The Slider. The investigator glanced at the faded faces, deemed it ruined debris, and tossed it back into the wet cinders.
By nightfall, the Satanic Panic gripped Hazelwood in a vice of terror. Searchlights cut through the woods; pulpits thundered against dark covens; news broadcasts blared warning banners across local television screens.
The authorities issued flyers for the missing teenagers, dubbing them "The Hazelwood Five."
In the days that followed, the school corridors filled with whispers. Teachers stepped forward with uneasy recollections, reporting that in the weeks leading to the fire, the five had acted strangely; frequently heard murmuring to empty spaces as if conversing with someone invisible standing beside them.
A algebra teacher remembered how, on a Tuesday between third and fourth period, Deanna had stopped in the middle of the crowded hallway, pointing a trembling finger at the empty air, shouting warnings at a shadow no one else could see.
The hallway had gone silent then, but because the five were already regarded as strange, no one had dared intervene.
The search dragnet continued through the winter, turning up no tracks, no vehicles, and no bodies. The forest kept its counsel.
By the following summer, the outrage had exhausted itself. The flyers peeled from the telephone poles; the news cameras departed; the town closed its ranks and returned to its quiet, rhythm of work and sleep.
As the years turned into decades and new generations filled the desks at Hazelwood West, the horror of the stopped house faded from living memory.
What remained was a ghost story; an urban legend whispered around autumn campfires about five children who walked into the woods and left a tyrant bound to an unburnt tree as they became the “witches in the woods”.
Praise be to the sovereign flesh.
Praise be to the missing six.
End of Mark IX.
