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The truth was, he never really expected it to go this far. He’d dreamt of this house for decades, wondering how it had changed, how the many owners might have mutilated it over the years. But when he got here, he found it exactly the same as it was thirty years prior. So much so that, once his wife was absent, he crawled back into the vents and kissed the passageways.
But now it was time to end this. He very much doubted the police had figured his whole game out yet. He’d laid it out for them piece by piece, death by death. All they had to do was look beyond the surface and put the clues together. After all, wasn’t that the role of a detective? But no, they’d failed him, just like they failed him back when he was a young boy. They’d kept him locked up for ten years when all he’d been guilty of was hiding in someone’s house. They couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in so they just let him rot, wasting his youth, turning him bitter and vengeful.
Well, this was his payback to the profession that let him down. He wasn’t doing this for himself; he was doing this to make amends. He felt nothing anymore – no emotion, no joy, no fulfillment. Life was an endless, thankless chore, from his abused childhood to his disenfranchised adulthood. The guys in jail called him the creepy kid, the weirdo in the walls, the crawlspace pervert. The sad part about it all was that these fools weren’t aware of what he was capable of. He was a cold-blooded murderer by the age of 16, but he’d kept it a secret out of fear of life imprisonment or lethal injection. He thought someone smarter than him might have figured it out by now, but the years went by and all the facts faded into obscurity. He was now a free man, a master criminal that had gotten away with murder.
Something about the fact clawed away at him. He wanted the world to know who he was, and his unique anonymity allowed it to become a reality. To people in this town and true crime researchers across the world, he was nothing more than a nickname. No one knew his real name, no one knew what he looked like. They couldn’t even trace him if they did uncover his real identity because John Milton was a completely different man with a completely different backstory. He was a human phantom and considered it foolish to not take advantage of this unique position.
John walked out of his front door and got into his van. He told Charlotte he was doing a job up in Havre de Grace in Maryland in the morning, and a 5am start meant he may as well drive up tonight and sleep in his van. In a way, he was doing a job up in Havre de Grace, but it wasn’t a manual labor job. He was going back to the beginning, where it all started, where both his life of trauma and his murderous reign began. It was the end of the story, and once this was all over, he could finally get on with his life. Maybe it would free his soul and he could actually find joy in life.
They would see.
After three minutes of driving, his phone pinged. He checked it.
Doorbell cam.
There was a woman standing at his front door. A woman he’d never seen in his life. She had a gun holster on her belt and an inquisitive expression that said she knew.
His own zero victim awaited, but whoever this person was, she was a problem.
He pushed the speaker button.
“Who are you?” he asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Ella used the short journey time to reflect on the Crawler’s bizarre life and put it together in a linear fashion. She was traveling solo because Ripley was in no condition to fight. Her destination was 22 Coalville Street, less than four miles from the precinct.
In 1989, the family that lived at 22 Coalville Street found a strange boy living in the walls of their home. No one knew his name, his exact age or where he came from. He simply manifested out of the shadows.
The boy went to juvenile detention for this crime where he remained for ten years. During this incarceration, he developed a love for poetry. He was released back into the community under a new name – a nondescript name of his choosing – and the boy chose John Milton, the same name as his favorite author.
The Crawler hid away for twenty years in Baltimore. He assumed a new life where no one knew of his dark past. Not difficult, considering his relative anonymity. The Crawler had now returned to Hicksberg, perhaps due to his lifelong obsession with the house he secretly lived in as a child.
But there was one other component to the Crawler’s life – one that Ella didn’t fully understand herself. The Crawler had a zero victim, someone he murdered before he was discovered stalking. Ella still didn’t have that part of the puzzle solved, but it didn’t matter because she knew where he lived. Catch him first, ask questions later.
Ella found the home on the deserted street. There must have been a hundred feet between each house. At the back of the house was a flowing stream. Ella remembered the phone call when she’d heard running water in the background.
This was it. It had to be.
She parked the car out of sight and edged towards the house with her pistol drawn. First, she was going to ask nicely, then if no one answered, she’d barge her way in. The whole downstairs was steeped in darkness. Unsurprising considering it was getting close to 10pm. Anyone who had to work at an early hour might be asleep, and she noticed that people in this town tended to be early risers.
Ella rang the doorbell and waited. “Come on, come on. Please don’t be too late. Don’t have left the house already.”
The adrenaline began to surge despite the lack of activity. Something was brewing inside the house. She could feel it.
Ella went to try the handle, but a distorted voice spoke to her from the door cam.
“Who are you?”
The same voice. The one from the call. It was him. She was speaking directly to the killer, and she instinctively knew that he knew.
“Hello John Milton.”
A long silence. No words, only crackling and heavy breathing. Had he hung up on her?
“You are mistaken,” he finally said.
“Come out and talk to me, John.”
