The Fourth Child

The rental car’s tires crunched up the gravel drive, a sound like chewing on old bones. Tall grass, green and greedy, swallowed the path on both sides, wrapping around the wheels as if trying to pull the vehicle back into the past. May Dawson hadn’t seen the house since she was eight years old, but it stood at the end of the drive just as she remembered: a skeletal silhouette sagging under the weight of time and rot. The Dawson House. That’s what the newspapers had called it in 1986, when the world had cracked their lives open for a brief, horrified look.

Now, on May 3rd, 2024, the only sound was the whine of cicadas. She parked under the rusted remains of a carport whose roof had slumped in the middle like a broken spine. The house beyond was two stories of peeling paint and sun-bleached windows that stared back like vacant eyes. It looked exactly as it should. Haunted.

The last time she’d stood in this yard, social workers were dragging her and her younger siblings through a sea of beer bottles and sour-smelling trash bags. She’d blocked most of it out, or so she’d told her therapists. Now, the smell of damp earth and decay brought it all rushing back.

She climbed the three front steps, the wood groaning under her weight. From her messenger bag, she pulled the laminated photograph she’d printed from a microfilm archive two weeks earlier. August 14, 1986. Three children being led away by child protective services: May, her twin brother Mark, and their four-year-old sister Bethany. But in the photo, just over May’s shoulder, stood another child. A girl, maybe six or seven, with long, dirty-blonde hair and bare feet. Her eyes were cast toward the camera like she’d been caught mid-breath.

She wasn’t in any of the follow-up photos. Her name wasn’t in any of the reports. May had spent weeks combing through case files. Not one mention. She’d shown the photo to Mark. He’d shrugged. “Probably a neighbor.”

But May remembered something else. A tug. A name she couldn’t place. A voice in the dark.

She crouched on the porch, looking at the spot where the girl had stood. The floorboards were warped, and a long crack ran down the center. May ran her fingers along the edge of one plank. It was softer, with a slight give. She felt it before she saw it: a seam in the wood, not from rot, but from a clean cut. A square, maybe three feet across. A door.

Her heart thudded against her ribs. She pulled on a pair of gloves and took a crowbar from her bag. The wood groaned as she worked the metal into the seam. With a final, splintering crack, the board shifted, then lifted. The trapdoor was real.

Beneath it was a pitch-black cavity. The stench that rose from it was immediate and suffocating—rotted fabric, mold, and something metallic. May shone her flashlight down. It wasn’t empty. Inside was a mound of tattered blankets, a few plastic utensils, and a single child’s shoe. A pink canvas Mary Jane with a star patch on the side. In the dust along the inside of the hatch, someone had scratched four words: I am the fourth.

Her phone buzzed. It was Mark.

“Hey, you at the house?” he asked, his voice flat.

“Yeah,” she said, her own voice unsteady. “I found something. Mark, there’s a hatch under the porch. With… stuff inside. I think she was real.”

A long pause. Then, his voice tight, different. “I didn’t think she’d still be there.”

The six words echoed louder than the cicadas. Not who? Not what are you talking about? He knew.

“What do you mean, still be there?” May snapped. “Mark, I found her shoe. There’s writing. Somebody was kept here.”

“No one was—”

“Don’t lie to me!” Her shout cracked through the trees.

Silence. Then a click. He’d hung up.

May turned her flashlight back to the hatch. She had to go down. She started a video recording on her phone, narrating through ragged breaths. “Entering the crawl space. Evidence of a concealed compartment.”

She lowered herself into the claustrophobic dark. Her head barely cleared the joists above. In the corner was the shoe, a tiny plastic mirror, and a pile of torn pages from children’s books. On the wall behind her, carved deep into a wood support beam, was a drawing: four stick figures. Three of them had X’s scratched over their heads. One, with long hair, was circled.

A creak from above. May scrambled up, switching off her light, holding her breath. The sound of a car pulling up the gravel drive.

“Miss Dawson?” a voice called out. “Sheriff’s department. Neighbor reported a break-in.”

Two uniformed deputies stood at the edge of the yard. May pulled herself from the hatch, covered in dust and sweat. “I own the house,” she managed. “But you’ll want to see this anyway.”

Detective Howerin arrived thirty minutes later. He was a man who looked like he’d grown up in town and seen every flavor of its decay. He knelt by the trapdoor and whistled softly. May handed him the laminated photo.

His face tightened. “She’s not listed,” he muttered, tapping the girl’s image. “No name, no record of a fourth child.”

“Her name was Kala,” May whispered, the name finally surfacing from the depths of her memory like a bubble of air from a sunken ship. “She used to sing at night. She would tap on the wall between our rooms.”

Howerin looked back at the house, now glowing amber in the late afternoon light. “We’re going to secure the site,” he said. “Forensics will need to go over every inch.” He paused, his eyes meeting hers. “The story they told us in 1986 was a lie.”

That evening, a message appeared on her phone from an unknown number. Stop digging. There was no fourth child.

But May knew better. She zoomed in on the photo on her laptop, enhancing an area near the girl’s feet she hadn’t noticed before. It was blurry, but unmistakable. A thin, dark line running from the girl’s ankle into the grass. A chain. Kala hadn’t just been there. She’d been tethered.

The forensics report confirmed the crawl space, which the team had dubbed the “Princess Pit” after a hand-carved sign they found nailed to a joist, had been occupied for an extended period. They found a child’s mattress in a shallow dugout, a mummified bouquet of dandelions on a ceramic dish, and a note written in red crayon, which they found passed through a small ventilation chute connecting the pit to the main house.

Dear May, it read. You knocked back. Thank you. I’m still waiting.

The knocking game. She remembered it now. Four taps, then three, then one. She thought she’d been playing with Mark. It had been Kala.

This wasn’t just neglect. This was imprisonment. But the most chilling discovery came not from the pit, but from a hidden compartment behind the peeling wallpaper in the living room. Inside was a single cassette tape.

At the sheriff’s office, they played it. The tape hissed, then a man’s voice, monotone and familiar, filled the small room. Her father.

“Documentation. Subject #4 continues to resist sleep and food conditioning. Isolation protocol resumed.”

A child’s faint whimpering. “Please, I’ll be good.”

Her father’s voice again. “Begin reinforcement cycle. Repeat the rhyme.”

Then a chorus of three small voices, chanting robotically. Her own, Mark’s, and Bethany’s. “One for food and two for light, three for sleep, and four for night.”

May covered her mouth, a sob catching in her throat. This wasn’t a family. It was an experiment. And Kala, the fourth child, was Subject #4. The one who had failed.

The anonymous texts continued. She never had a name. She was discarded. The words were clinical, detached. Someone was watching her, someone who knew the specific, cruel language of the house. May knew she had to confront the only other person who might hold a key: her mother.

Delia Dawson was a ghost in a state-run nursing home, her mind ravaged by dementia. May sat across from her in the sunroom, placing two photos on the table between them: the cropped version, and the original. Delia’s eyes, cloudy and distant, flickered toward the fourth child.

“Who is she?” May asked softly.

Her mother’s head tilted. Her lips, dry and cracked, moved. The words were a rusted whisper. “Four was too loud. Four tried to bite. Four didn’t listen. So four had to be… quiet.”

“What happened to her, Mom?” May’s voice trembled.

Delia’s eyes drifted to the window, to the dark soil of the garden beyond. “He buried her where the light doesn’t go.”

“He buried her where the light doesn’t go.”

The words led them back to the house, to a place forensics had missed. Beneath the living room floor, sealed under a bolted metal grate that didn’t appear on any blueprint, was a tunnel. It was a narrow, man-made shaft, sloping downward into the cold Indiana earth. At the end was a wood-planked wall with a heavy padlock.

They cut the lock. Behind it was a buried room, eight by ten feet, with insulated walls and no windows. In the center sat a small, child-sized wooden rocking chair. The walls were covered in thousands of desperate scratch marks. In a corner was a rusted bed frame, and on top of it, something wrapped in plastic sheeting.

May fell to her knees as Howerin gently unwrapped the bundle. Inside were the small bones of a child, curled into a fetal position. Clutched in the skeleton’s hands, miraculously preserved, was a tiny ceramic butterfly.

“I gave her that,” May whispered, her voice breaking. “I dropped it through the grate. When she cried at night… I gave it to her.”

On the wall behind the bed, etched with a fingernail, was a final, desperate message. My name was Kala. Please don’t forget me.

The discovery of the remains changed everything. This was no longer a cold case of neglect; it was a homicide investigation. But Kala’s story was even more complex than they imagined. In May’s old closet, hidden inside a stuffed rabbit, she found a small notebook wrapped in plastic. It was Kala’s.

The pages were filled with drawings of butterflies, each with a name next to it. Tessa, green butterfly. Meera, orange spiral. Angela, pink butterfly. Me, blue butterfly, alone. Beside each entry was a location: under the stairs, inside the trailer, behind the wall.

Kala hadn’t been the only fourth child. She was just the one who had been left behind.

The trailer in the yard yielded three more index cards hidden in a false panel. Subject #5, Tessa, too small. Relocated. Subject #7, Meera, defective. Quiet Room. Subject #8, Angela, compliant. Transferred.

This wasn’t a family secret. It was a system. A selection process.

The investigation led them to a defunct organization, the St. Augustine Center for Behavioral Alignment, a name they found on documents buried in a lockbox under a dead tree in the backyard. It was a private, well-funded research institute from the 1980s that specialized in “childhood behavioral modification.” Their parents, they realized, hadn’t been the masterminds. They had been the wardens, running a trial site out of their home. Children, unregistered and taken from desperate situations, were brought to the house to be “conditioned.” The ones who were compliant were transferred. The ones who failed… expired.

The case exploded. The media dubbed it “The Butterfly Case.” The house on Firebrush Lane was just one of many suspected sites. But the St. Augustine Center had officially dissolved in 1987 after a convenient “fire” destroyed all their primary records. No one was ever charged. The people behind it were ghosts.

But they hadn’t erased everything. They had missed the voices.

In Elise’s wall cavity, they found a cracked tape recorder. Elise, the fifth child, the one Kala had called “the one who doesn’t speak.” The tape was her final testament, a whispered account of her time as a “watcher,” forced to record the others.

“They said I was a good ghost,” her small voice echoed from the past. “When Kala disappeared, I stopped pressing the button. This is my last tape. If they find it, I’ll be gone. But maybe you’ll hear me. Maybe you’ll remember me.” And then, a final, chilling warning: “Don’t look under the back steps. That’s where they bury the ones that don’t listen.”

Another search. Another grave. This time, it was Juniper, a girl who never even received a number.

On May 17th, May buried her sister. A simple headstone was erected in a quiet cemetery. Kala Dawson. 1979-1986. She Remembered. And Now So Will We. Mark and Bethany stood beside her. Mark was in therapy now, his own fractured memories slowly, painfully, slotting into place.

The story didn’t end with a trial. The people who ran the St. Augustine Center were too well-protected, their tracks too well-covered by the passage of time. But May had started something else. She scanned and uploaded every document, every tape, every drawing. She created a public online archive: The Butterfly Project.

The night she launched it, a message pinged on the secure forum she’d created. “I was Subject #9. I remember the tree. I remember her voice. Where do we go next?”

Epilogue

One year later, on a green hillside in Floyd County, a circle of smooth gray stones was arranged beneath a copper sculpture of a child’s hand releasing a swarm of butterflies. It was a memorial, funded by anonymous donations that had poured in after The Butterfly Project went viral. It was dedicated to the unnamed, unnumbered, and unchosen.

May stood at the edge of the circle. She was no longer just a survivor; she was a custodian of memory. Her project had connected dozens of other survivors from similar sites across the Midwest. They were a fractured but resilient family, piecing together a history that had been stolen from them.

A young woman with hair the color of bright copper approached her. “I was in the house in Ohio,” she whispered. “The one with the star symbol. I was Subject #12.” She held out a small, folded piece of paper. On it was a drawing of a butterfly with three eyes. “I remembered this from a dream. The girl in the wall gave it to me.”

May took the drawing and gently folded it into Kala’s notebook. She didn’t know how many more butterflies there were to find, how many more stories were waiting in the silence. But she knew she would not stop looking. She had given her sister a name. Now, it was time to give the others back theirs.