Hello, Little Sparrow by Jordan Jones (the reading list .TXT) 📕

home as people continued to funnel out. “You’ve been reassigned to me, to help co-lead this investigation into The Sparrow. LT just gave me the word.”

“Are you serious?” she asked, almost jubilated.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I am ready for this, John. I promise, I’ll do anything I can to catch this guy.”

“You won’t be playing ‘Google girl’ anymore on the home front. You’re leading this thing with me, now. You know that, right?”

“I’m ready,” she said.

I looked across the street into the bustling city where a psychopath was still running free.

“I’m ready, too.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The door opened and Brooks barreled through, taking out an end table on his way.

He walked to his living room and cleared the items on his mantel in one fell swoop, sending all the trinkets and pictures crashing to the floor. The couch upended and lifted upside-down, cushions coming undone, and finding themselves scattered.

He then quickly sat in his chair and buried his head into his arms, rocking himself back and forth, comforting whatever inside of him that caused such madness.

Madison stood in the doorway to the hall unimpressed. He wanted to scream and curse her back to wherever she came from, but he couldn’t find the words.

His life was his for the living, not hers to push and pull the strings attached to his limbs at her beck and call. Brooks wanted his freedom back…he wanted to make is own choices again. He was sick and tired of being manipulated.

He wanted to find his true self.

“This isn’t me,” he said to the apparition in his doorway. After a long silence and her refusal to talk, he repeated, “This isn’t me!”

Madison glided forward and disappeared into the wall, something he’s never seen her do before. Her body wasn’t transparent; more so like an ashy skin, covered from head to toe in a darkened white pain. Her hair was like he’d seen in the newspaper the day after she died…straight, long, and parted in the middle.

She wasn’t a ghost.

She also wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

She was as real as she could be.

As real as he needed her to be.

The clock on the wall ticked with an uncharacteristically loud chirp, causing him to startle.

“Please, don’t make me do this anymore,” he said, facing the wall. “I stopped on my own. I was building a life for myself.”

“You were building a life inside your head,” the voice in the wall spoke back to him. “None of this is real.”

“How do I know you’re real?”

“You don’t have to imagine me like you did your wife and sister,” the voice said, growing more ominous. “Your nieces and nephew…they don’t exist. I, however, have been here from the beginning.”

Brooks pounded his temples with his fists trying to make the voices stop. They became unrecognizable, nothing like Madison had sounded like before.

“What if I say no?” Brooks asked, trying to sound confident. “What if I refuse to play by your rules?”

The voice growled from behind the outdated wallpaper. “These aren’t my rules. These are rules we both agreed upon, and you are to follow.”

“I can’t do it anymore…I just can’t.” Brooks stood up and went to walk out of the room.

“You can and you will,” the voice said, but Brooks had already left, turning right down the hallway and into his makeshift study. Behind his desk was a replica of the shrine he made in his office at work, though he ignored it. He knew Madison wanted to use it to conjure up some feelings of self-doubt within him.

The computer groaned as it booted up and he put in a disc to play a retro game. It was a mind-numbing adventure game he used to play for hours when he’d experience flashbacks many years ago.

He cranked up the speakers on his stereo, playing an unknown rock n’ roll song that was probably popular at some point. The music drowned our Madison’s voice, and the game rendered her manifestation useless.

The character on screen jumped around until they retrieved enough radishes to expand the farm, but then Brooks saw a notification on the bottom of the screen.

An email popped up and the subject line read:

Nightstalkers are back!

Click the link for a new catch!

This time it was a doctor!

 

His stomach flew up in his throat and he could barely breathe.  Without a second thought, Brooks clicked the link to the email, then clicked the blue underlined link inside.

It took him to a page on the Nightstalkers website, and a very conveniently placed video in the middle of the screen.

The video was of the vigilantes explaining that they were meeting an older man in the parking lot of a grocery store, though their intentions were unknown.

Brooks was familiar enough with their past work to know they were there to catch a grown man meeting a child at two o’clock in the morning. That’s how they got their name: The Nightstalkers.

Though the vigilante crew didn’t mention where they were, the livestream would’ve garnered some attention to locals. Brooks knew they were at a grocery store in Lincolnshire, although the name was blurred out.

The cameraman had shaky camera work, but the main person running the sting, Evan Crist, was as professional as they came.

Brooks wanted his autograph. He was handing sexual deviants over to Brooks on a silver platter.

On camera, Evan said, “Doctor James Montgomery. I’m Evan Crist and I’m with a group called The Nightstalkers. What are you doing out here so late at night?”

The man was caught completely off guard and came up with a half-hearted excuse, describing wanting to “help” the child overcome her Internet escapades.

They always tried justifying their actions with something implausible.

“No…no Doctor. You said some really grotesque things in your chat logs,”