MHATRE

Two years back in Maybrook, a teacher named Justine walked into homeroom and found one kid, Alex Lily, sitting there and seventeen empty chairs. Those seventeen had walked out of their houses at 2:17 a.m., caught on doorbell cams with their arms stretched out like sleepwalkers. No van. No kidnapper. Just kids leaving.

Cops questioned Alex and Justine over and over. Nothing useful came out of it. The school shut for a month while people searched woods and drainage ditches and found nothing. When classes were set to resume, the principal, Marcus, tried to steady the town at a meeting. Parents turned on Justine, said she’d pushed the kids somehow. She said she cared about them. They called her a liar. A detective walked her out so no one took a swing.

She drank more. Anonymous threats started. Someone painted her car. Marcus put her on leave and told her to get help. He also told her to stop contacting Alex and brought up examples that looked caring to her and boundary problems to everyone else. She cried in her car, then filed reports about the vandalism and calls. She ran into her ex, Paul, a cop. They met for a drink, slept together, and in the morning she drove him home and complained the investigation was lazy.

She went to watch Alex’s bus drop him off. No one answered when she knocked at his place. Every window was papered over. She peeked through a gap and saw his parents sitting very still. She told Marcus; he told her to stop stalking the boy. At a grocery store, Paul’s wife, Donna, confronted her and dumped alcohol on her. That night Justine dreamed of her class with faces down on desks; Alex looked up with clown makeup. She woke to a noise and a quick image of a red-haired woman on the ceiling. It vanished.

She tried to talk to Alex again. He said he was fine and ran inside. She sat outside the house in her car until she dozed off. Someone clipped a lock of her hair and left.

Elsewhere, Archer—one of the dads—was falling apart. He watched his home cameras on repeat, did badly at work, and bugged the cops. He’d been loud against Justine at the meeting and, later, he was the one who vandalized her car. He slept in his missing kid’s room. He had a dream where he chased his son outside, saw a big symbol over the house with the number 217, and then the boy’s face became the red-haired woman. He woke up and started thinking. He drew lines on a map from each kid’s house in the direction each had run, using other families’ footage when they’d show him. The lines converged.

At a gas station, Archer was yelling at Justine when Marcus ran up with blood on his face and his arms out like the kids, tackled Justine, and tried to choke her. Archer pulled him off; Marcus fought them both. It looked less like rage and more like someone running a program.

Rewind. Paul had chased a local addict named James during a break-in, pricked himself on James’s used needle, panicked about the dash-cam footage, beat James, then let him go and told him to leave town. Later, James saw Alex’s house looking abandoned—mail scattered, windows covered. He climbed in. Alex’s parents were on the couch with cuts on their faces, not reacting. He heard something in the basement, ignored it, stole what he could, then finally checked downstairs and found all the missing kids standing in the dark, turning in sync to face him. He fled, blocked a door with furniture, and the parents stood up at last and moved toward him. He ran for real, then saw a reward poster and called the cops. On his way to the station, Paul spotted him, scared him off, and hunted him into the woods. James hid in his tent, saw the red-haired woman outside, and when a shadow fell he stabbed through the tent with his needles. It was Paul. Paul dragged him out at gunpoint. James blurted that he knew where the kids were. Paul drove to the Lily house with James watching from the car. Someone opened the door for Paul. He went inside. He didn’t come out until night, moving strangely, dragged James into the house, and that was that.

Another rewind. Marcus had taken a call from Justine about Alex’s parents and planned to check on them. The person who showed up at the meeting instead was Alex’s aunt, Glattis—the red-haired woman. She said the parents were sick. Marcus said he needed to speak to legal guardians or call it in. The next day Glattis came to Marcus’s home, asked for water in a bowl, took ribbon from his office, bled on a small branch, cut a lock of hair from Marcus’s husband, Terry, and rang a bell. Marcus went slack and violent. He killed Terry with his hands while coughing up black fluid. Glattis switched the hair on the branch to a lock she had cut from Justine and broke the stick again. Marcus set off like a wind-up toy to kill Justine. That’s the gas-station attack. A car hit Marcus soon after; his head was gone. At the hospital, Archer told the cops what he’d seen. He told Justine his map showed a convergence point. She recognized it: Alex’s house.

One more rewind. Before any of this, Alex was a quiet kid bullied at school. His parents were fine until Glattis moved in. After she arrived, the parents went blank—sitting, staring, obeying. Glattis told Alex not to mention her or the “resting.” She’d snap a twig over a bowl of water, ring a bell, and the parents would stab their own faces with forks until she dropped the twig in the bowl. Alex cooked soup and fed them. She said she was sick and the parents were supposed to help but it wasn’t working anymore. She needed something from each of Alex’s classmates. Alex stole the name tags from their cubbies. Glattis spat into a bowl, burned the tags, rang the bell. At 2:17 a.m., the classmates walked out of their homes and filed into Alex’s house.

When police interest rose, Glattis put makeup on the father and told officers he’d had a stroke. She made Alex clean up and unpaper the windows for inspections. She cut the kids’ hair to push them into hiding in the woods, then brought them back and kept feeding them along with the parents. One afternoon Alex came home and saw Paul and James inside the house. Glattis said they were leaving town tomorrow. She laid down salt lines and told Alex not to cross them. The parents stood guard on her door.

Justine and Archer arrived and saw Paul step out and wave, then go back inside. They followed him. Justine broke a salt line without knowing. James attacked Archer. Archer beat him, but James kept getting up like pain didn’t apply. Paul hunted Justine into the kitchen. She hit him with a pan, then cut his cheek with a peeler. He didn’t react except to keep choking her. She got his gun and shot him in the neck. Black fluid came out. He stayed on his feet, so she shot him in the head. He finally went down. She went to the basement and shot James too.

Upstairs, Alex ignored the shouting, crossed Glattis’s salt line on purpose, which released his parents. They chased him. He wove room to room until he reached Glattis’s space, grabbed one of her twigs, smeared his blood on it, and wrapped a hair from Justine’s wig around it. He broke the twig. That flipped the board. The children in the basement woke and swarmed toward Glattis. She ran out, cut through a neighbor’s house; they smashed through glass and followed her over fences. Neighbors watched it happen. A girl knocked Glattis down; the kids piled on and killed her with their hands.

With Glattis dead, the spell broke. Archer stopped trying to kill Justine. Alex’s parents came back to themselves. Justine went upstairs and found Alex hugging them.