"I love my family. Maman sings lullabies to me when I'm in bed. Even if I can't always understand the words, I think her voice is the most beautiful thing ever. Papa's voice is quieter for some reason, but if I sit really still I can hear him in the dining room. He tells me how big I've gotten almost every day. When I tell him of how well I've done in my lessons, he tells me how proud he is of me.

I try to talk to Maman during the day like I do with Papa, but I only hear her at night. Her voice comes from the corner where my bed is, so I hear her nice and clear when I lay down to sleep. I stay awake a lot and tell her about my day. She isn't as interested in listening about my toys or how easy arithmetic is. She usually asks me to listen, and not talk at all. She tells me the same story every time she makes me stay quiet. It goes sort of like this:

"There was once a little lamb who lived in a field far, far away from the village. He lived with Papa Wolf, who said he loved him dearly. But the lamb did not understand the wolf was dangerous. Papa Wolf had been there as long as the lamb could remember. The lamb didn't know the wolf was planning to keep him until he was big enough to make a juicy meal out of. It wasn't until the day a mysterious ewe came into the field and told the little lamb there was a village nearby where he could find other little lambs to play with. All he had to do was tip-toe away when Papa Wolf was asleep, and follow the road down the mountainside until he saw the lights of houses. She told him he should do so soon, because Papa Wolf was not as nice as the lamb thought he was."

Maman always asks me what I think the lamb should do, and I always say he should tip-toe away to see the other lambs – and so he doesn't get eaten up. Maman tells he I'm very smart for thinking that, and then she tells me that there is a path in front of our house that leads to a village just like the one in the story. She says if I tip-toe outside and run down the path until I see lights, then I'll be able to see how beautiful the end of the story is.

I always ask Maman if she or Papa can come with me, but she always says they can't. When I ask if it's because they're stuck in the walls, Maman never answers."

"Today, I decided to ask Erik if he can help me get Maman and Papa out of the walls. Erik looked at me funny, and said that he is my Papa. I told him he wasn't, because my Papa told me so. Papa told me that Erik's name was Erik, not Papa. Erik got really quiet after that."

"I don't hear Papa anymore.

Erik told me to study in my room, and locked the door. I heard lots of loud banging downstairs, and when Erik came to get me for supper I saw that the dining room wall was all broken up. When I asked Erik why the wall had a big hole in it, he said there was an animal that got inside and he had to help it get out. I tried later on to crawl inside and look for Papa, but Erik grabbed me by the ankle and pulled me back out. After that I got the belt for being naughty.

When Erik is gone for the day, like he sometimes is, I sit by the big hole where I used to hear Papa, but I don't hear anything anymore. I cry every night now, because I miss him. Maman doesn't talk anymore. She only sings to me, over and over and over until I stop crying and sleep.

I miss my Papa so much."

"I woke up last night and heard scraping coming from my corner – the corner where I hear Maman. It started small at first, but the longer I listened the louder it got. I noticed it was slowly moving up, as if it were trying to climb the wall. I whispered for Maman, but I didn't hear her. I was too scared to sleep, so I listened.

The scratching skittered its way up, until it started coming from my ceiling. It went from a frantic jangle of sounds to long, low scrapes moving across my ceiling. It was like when I carry around a big heavy quilt like a cape on my shoulders.

I'm not sure where the scraping went, but it got quieter and quieter until I suddenly heard a large crash down the hall. I thought I heard someone scream, but it was too mixed in with the sound of heavy things falling to be sure. It didn't last very long, but I was so scared I started to shake.

Then Maman opened my door! She was just like I imagined her! She had long brown hair, and it was curly like mine! She had a big smile and she was wearing a long white dress like angels do! She told me to close my eyes and take her hand, so I did. When I opened them again, I was outside on the road. Maman told me to follow the road until I saw lights, just like in the story she told me. She said she'd be right behind me, to make sure Papa Wolf wouldn't find us. So, I did and now I'm waiting for Maman at a place with police officers. She told me to wait for her here. I can't wait to see her again! I wanna give her a hug!"

Gustave flipped through the remainder of the spiral notebook, finding the remaining pages blank. He had never gotten to write in his childhood journal again. It had been taken for evidence. Now that he had aged out of foster care, it had been returned to him.

With a sigh, Gustave held the notebook to his chest and looked at the field of wildflowers where his childhood home had once been. It sat in a mountain valley, an out-of-the-way place where neighbors could be miles apart. He stood on the path he had walked down that cool autumn night, not stopping until he saw the lights of the town a dozen miles downhill. The immature ramblings written in crayon in the journal were haunting, when Gustave considered the story that he'd later been told:

The cottage that had once stood in that field had been purchased – perhaps even built – by his parents, Christine and Raoul de Chagny. His father was French, apparently, but his mother was a local – she'd been born only a few cities over. When six-year-old Gustave had wandered into the police station, the officers found no records of his birth anywhere in the system. They assumed Erik had found the family shortly before he was born.

When troops were sent up to the house Gustave claimed he'd come from, they found a ghastly sight. The ladder to the attic was lowered, but a few feet away was a gaping hole in the ceiling. From said opening, swung the body of a wanted man: a mentally disturbed man, a physically deformed man, a man by the name of Erik. From what Gustave had been told, when he was old enough for his social worker to explain, that Erik had fallen between the attic beams and had gotten his neck tangled in the electric wiring. At his feet was a burlap potato sack. The fall had slit it open, revealing the mummified remains of Christine de Chagny. The coroner had apparently ruled her death was by natural causes. "Uterine rupture and internal hemorrhage" was what the death certificate said.

Later that day, a plastic storage bin was found dumped about a mile into the nearby forest. Inside was found the remains of Raoul de Chagny, identified through dental records. He had been deceased longer than his wife, by about two months. His death had been a violent one. Ligature marks and broken vertebrae in his neck would have indicated suicide, were it not for the disembowelment. Drywall found on the lid indicated the container had been inside the structure of the house at some point, and the half-patched hole in the wall told them where it had been.

Gustave walked to where the foundation of the cottage had been, still holding his journal to his chest.

The police suspected Gustave had found some kind of evidence of his parents' fate and had shown it to Erik, who had been raising him as his own for six years. This, they suspected, caused Erik to remove the bodies in a panic – leading to a fatal misstep. Investigators suspected Christine's body had been left to rot in the attic, but further investigation revealed a pocket of the walls had been hollowed out and was accessible through the attic floor. Erik had hidden her body where she could still be close to her son…just inches away from him every night.

Gustave adjusted his glasses and watched the wildflowers sway in the cool autumn breeze.

The only motive they could discern was Erik's obsession with his mother – indicated by a restraining order filed in France a year before Raoul's death. He had followed them there, across an entire sea, to ruin the life they had only just built.

Gustave looked at the bracelet on his wrist. A portion of his parents' ashes had been preserved in resin, each one forming half of a heart. He had since seen pictures of his parents, and it was eerie how well his childish brain had matched her description. Perhaps on some level he just assumed she looked like him? But what of the town? He had never been outside the cottage, and no one had an explanation as to how he had known to walk all the way there.

There were too many things that would simply never be known about that night. The adults around him had simply stopped asking for an explanation – tired of the same answer of "My maman told me to come here."

Gustave knelt and dug his hands into the cold earth, raking at the topsoil until there was a large enough pit. He laid the tattered notebook to rest on the haunted ground it came from, and patted the dirt back over it. He walked back down the trail, leaving the memory of Papa Wolf behind in that field. Far, far away from the village.