Horror film characters sleeve on arm

Forty-one nights in one wet autumn the posters came. A doll with a stitched grin. A man with a glove of blades. A boy's face under a hockey mask. A grey puppet on a tin box. Each night a fresh bill went over the last, and each morning someone had torn a corner off the picture of a girl called Ada Pell, reported missing from a lock-keeper's cottage at Crystal Lake. Nobody in the county had heard of Crystal Lake. My father checked the atlas twice.

The clipping came last, tucked behind the Wanted bill, cut from the Evening Courier. It said the lock-keeper had been found sitting on his step, rocking gently, saying the same three words over and over to the empty road. He had been dead a week. Dad read it out to me, folded it small, and put it in his coat pocket. He never said where it went.

Rain came off the bridge that night in sheets. I took the bucket out myself to see the wall, and every face on it had turned a little toward the street, as if counting the lamps. The paste was still wet. Someone had already pasted a new bill along the bottom edge, and it said MISSING, and the name printed under the photograph was the name of the boy who had carried my father's bucket for him, which is to say, my name.