Unspeakable Things

Unspeakable Things Plot Summary

Introduction

The summer of 1983 in Lilydale, Minnesota should have been about bike rides and birthday parties for thirteen-year-old Cassie McDowell. Instead, it became a season of terror when boys started disappearing from their small farming community. One by one, children vanished near the creek, only to return traumatized and changed—if they returned at all. While adults whispered about predators and the police arrested the wrong suspects, Cassie noticed what no one else would see: every victim rode the same school bus. Living under her own family's dark secrets, with an alcoholic father whose midnight footsteps on the stairs filled her nights with dread, Cassie learned early that children's voices go unheard. But when Gabriel Wellstone, the boy she secretly loved, disappears without a trace, she realizes that some truths are too dangerous to leave buried. Armed only with her courage and a desperate need to save those she cares about, Cassie must venture into places where monsters hide—basements that smell of dirt and despair, where the innocent become prey and silence becomes complicity.

Chapter 1: The Shadow of Small-Town Secrets

Cassie McDowell had spent most of her thirteen years learning to be invisible. In their rambling farmhouse four miles outside Lilydale, invisibility meant survival when her father Donny came home drunk, his green eyes flashing with unpredictable rage. Her mother Peg, an English teacher trying to hold their fractured family together, had perfected the art of looking away. Her older sister Sephie had recently discovered that teenage boys offered escape from their father's uncomfortable attention. The McDowell property sprawled across thirteen acres of metal sculptures and hidden pathways, where Donny's artistic vision created beauty from steel and shadow. To visitors at his legendary parties, their home seemed bohemian and free. But Cassie knew better. She'd spent too many nights sleeping in her closet or under her bed, listening for the clip-clip-clip of fingernails being trimmed—the sound that meant her father might finally climb those creaking stairs to her room. When school ended for the summer, Cassie clung to the normalcy of her seventh-grade achievements and her secret crush on Gabriel Wellstone, a kind boy who wore a gold paper airplane necklace and dreamed of being a pilot. Gabriel represented everything good about her world, everything worth protecting. But even Gabriel couldn't shield her from the darkness gathering around their small farming community, where children played in cornfields and adults kept secrets that festered like infected wounds. The first sign of trouble came from Betty, the school secretary, who pulled Cassie's mother aside to whisper about a boy being attacked. The details were vague, frightening, spoken in the hushed tones adults used when they thought children weren't listening. But Cassie was always listening, always watching, always trying to piece together the puzzle of the adult world that seemed determined to consume her.

Chapter 2: Monsters Among Us: The Missing Boys

Mark Clamchik was the first to return changed. Everyone called him Clam, and he lived in the Hollow—the rough neighborhood on the wrong side of the railroad tracks where poverty and neglect bred different kinds of monsters. Cassie had known Clam since kindergarten, a quiet boy with wiry strength who kept to himself on their long bus rides to school. But the Clam who returned from his ordeal was something else entirely, his eyes holding a wildness that made Cassie's skin crawl. The attack had happened on a Sunday night, or so the whispers claimed. Clam had been found wandering naked, traumatized, requiring hospitalization and diapers. The official story spoke of masked attackers and unspeakable violence, but the details shifted with each telling. Some blamed gangs from Minneapolis. Others whispered about aliens and supernatural forces. The adults seemed more interested in creating theories than finding truth. Cassie first encountered the new Clam in the school's instrument storage room, where she'd been indulging in her shameful habit of examining other students' belongings. The boy who cornered her there bore little resemblance to the harmless kid she'd grown up with. His words carried menace, his touch burned with wrongness, and when he spoke about her sister Sephie in crude terms that made Cassie's stomach turn, she realized something fundamental had been broken inside him. The pattern became clear when more boys fell victim to whatever stalked their community. Teddy Milchman, a soft-haired fourth-grader with puppy-dog eyes. Wayne Johnson, who had a crush on Sephie and lived in the same Hollow neighborhood as Clam. Ricky Tink, a nervous boy covered in Band-Aids to hide his warts, who spoke of clicking sounds and fumbling hands in the darkness. Each boy carried the same haunted look, the same fundamental alteration that marked them as survivors of something unspeakable.

Chapter 3: Closets and Basements: Finding Safety in Dark Places

While boys disappeared into nightmare, Cassie perfected the art of hiding. Her bedroom closet became a sanctuary, its walls lined with quilts and the comforting sound of hangers chiming like wind bells. Under her bed offered another refuge, where she could press her back against the box springs and feel protected by the darkness above. These weren't games or childhood fantasies—they were survival strategies learned through years of navigating her father's unpredictable moods and inappropriate attention. The McDowell house held its own geography of fear. The basement remained strictly off-limits, its dirt floor and damp walls hiding whatever secrets her father chose to bury there. The smell that rose from below carried hints of marijuana and something darker, something that made Cassie's throat close with dread. When she finally worked up the courage to peek down those wooden steps, the absolute blackness seemed to swallow light itself, promising horrors worse than anything her imagination could conjure. Her father's midnight rituals had become more frequent since her mother started working late at the high school, grading papers and organizing yearbook activities. Donny would begin each hunting expedition with the deliberate clipping of his fingernails, the sharp snick-snick sound echoing through the house like a countdown to disaster. Then came the footsteps on the stairs, each creaking board announcing his approach to the second floor where his daughters slept. Cassie discovered that writing possessed a strange power during these dark hours. With pencil flying across journal pages, she could craft stories that seemed to hold her father at bay, spinning words into barriers that kept him from reaching the top of the stairs. Whether through magic or coincidence, her midnight narratives had so far protected her from whatever her father planned to do when he finally completed his ascent to her bedroom door.

Chapter 4: Paper Airplane Dreams: When Gabriel Disappears

Gabriel Wellstone moved through Cassie's world like sunlight, warming everything he touched with simple kindness. The son of Lilydale's dentist, he possessed that rare combination of popularity and genuine decency that made him beloved by teachers and students alike. His paper airplane necklace caught the light as he walked, a gold charm that symbolized dreams of flight and escape from the gravity of small-town life. Cassie's crush on Gabriel had crystallized during a December bus ride when he'd offered her warm gloves with such thoughtful grace that she'd fallen instantly, hopelessly in love. She spent months crafting elaborate fantasies about their future together, imagining how the necklace would look around her own throat, covering the ropy scar that marked her as different. Gabriel would remove a link to make it fit perfectly, she dreamed, and in that magical moment her disfigurement would disappear, replaced by the beauty of being chosen. When school ended for the summer, Cassie had managed to get Gabriel to sign her yearbook, his message promising that he would see her around. Those simple words became a talisman she carried through increasingly dark days, proof that someone good existed in her world of monsters and shadows. She planned to tell him she loved him, to finally bridge the gap between her dreams and reality. The news of Gabriel's disappearance struck like lightning, shattering Cassie's carefully constructed hope. Unlike the other boys who'd been attacked and released, Gabriel simply vanished on the evening of June first, leaving no trace except the terrible certainty that something irreversible had occurred. The police arrested Robert Connelly, the beloved band teacher, but Cassie knew they had the wrong man. Connelly was kind, musical, devoted to his students—nothing like the monster that stalked their community.

Chapter 5: Investigating the Impossible: The Bus Route Connection

While adults stumbled through false leads and misguided theories, Cassie began connecting dots that others couldn't see. Every boy who'd been attacked rode bus twenty-four, the same route that carried her and Sephie through the agricultural communities surrounding Lilydale. The connection seemed obvious once she noticed it, but the police showed no interest in listening to a thirteen-year-old girl, especially one who'd been caught stealing lip gloss from a classmate's instrument case. Sergeant Aramis Bauer, the local police officer who'd grown up in Lilydale and now patrolled its streets, dismissed her concerns with the casual cruelty of an adult who'd forgotten what it meant to be powerless. Bauer had been a regular at her father's parties, and Cassie had witnessed him in compromising situations that made her skin crawl. When she tried to share her theory about the bus route, he reminded her that thieves weren't credible witnesses, silencing her with the shame of her own desperation. The pattern extended beyond simple geography. The attacks occurred near the swimming hole at Crow River, where generations of Lilydale children had learned to swim and played in the summer heat. Cars of every color had been spotted in the area, but no clear suspect emerged from the chaos of conflicting witness reports. The boys themselves could remember little beyond masks and terror, their trauma too deep for clear recollection. Cassie's new friend Frank Gomez, whose family had recently moved from Rochester to escape similar troubles, became her partner in amateur investigation. Together they sold popcorn door-to-door, using the fundraising as cover for gathering information and mapping the connections between victims. Frank possessed the outsider's clarity to see what locals had missed, plus the courage to ask questions that might have seemed innocent coming from children.

Chapter 6: Recognizing the Sound of Evil

The breakthrough came from Ricky Tink, the nervous boy whose fingers were perpetually covered in Band-Aids to hide his warts. During a tense evening when Cassie was left alone with unwanted visitors, Ricky finally found the courage to describe his attack in detail that chilled her blood. The predator had worn a mask, just like the others claimed, but he'd brought something else—a distinctive clicking sound that accompanied his violence. Click. Click. Click. The rhythm haunted Ricky's nightmares, he explained, as distinctive as a fingerprint and twice as terrifying. Other victims had mentioned the same sound—Clam and Teddy Milchman both spoke of clicking that seemed to come from their attacker's body, a mechanical rhythm that punctuated their trauma with metronomic precision. At first, this detail seemed to point toward Mr. Connelly, whose music room contained metronomes and whose gentle manner had been twisted by fear into something sinister. But Cassie had heard that clicking before, in contexts that had nothing to do with music education. At her father's adult parties, she'd witnessed Sergeant Bauer engaged in activities that left him breathless and sweating, his police-issued dog tags creating that same metallic rhythm against his chest as he moved. The sound that terrorized young boys was the same sound that marked Bauer's moments of excitement, a detail that connected him directly to the crimes he was supposed to be solving. The realization struck Cassie like physical blow, reorganizing everything she thought she knew about safety and authority. The man charged with protecting Lilydale's children was the same man who stalked them in darkness, using his position to select victims and cover his tracks. His knowledge of police procedures, his access to information about the investigation, his ability to deflect suspicion—all of it served to shield him from consequences while children suffered.

Chapter 7: Descent into Darkness: Confronting the Goblin

As Cassie's investigation deepened, another figure emerged from the shadows of rural Minnesota—Gary Godlin, known to local children as "the Goblin" for his mysterious nature and unsettling appearance. Living in a farmhouse identical to the McDowell family's, Godlin had become a local legend, the kind of strange neighbor that rural communities tolerate but never embrace. His green Impala prowled the country roads at odd hours, and his rare appearances in town sent children scrambling for safety. Cassie's direct encounters with Godlin revealed a man eaten hollow by decades of trauma and rage. She learned that his stepfather had brutally abused him throughout childhood, creating cycles of violence that continued to ripple through the community like stones thrown in dark water. The clicking sound that terrorized attack victims wasn't dog tags after all—it was the distinctive throat noise that Godlin made when stressed, a nervous tic that had marked him since youth. On her thirteenth birthday, while celebrating at Lake Corona with her mother and a single friend, news broke that the police had arrested Arnold Fierro, a traveling salesman caught peeping in windows. The adult world sighed with relief, believing they'd finally captured their monster. But Cassie's instincts screamed that something was wrong. Gabriel remained missing, and the real predator was still free to hunt. That same evening, she discovered Gabriel's paper airplane necklace discarded in the wild strawberry patch near Godlin's house, the gold chain glinting in moonlight like a desperate message from beyond. The charm confirmed her worst fears—Gabriel hadn't escaped like the other boys. He'd been taken completely, disappearing into whatever darkness consumed those who ventured too close to Godlin's territory.

Chapter 8: Unexpected Rescue and Painful Revelations

Armed with only a flashlight and desperate courage, Cassie broke into Godlin's house while he was away, following the smell of decay down wooden steps into a dirt basement that reeked of death and despair. What she found there would haunt her forever—Gabriel's body buried in the packed earth, marked only by a single pale finger jutting from his makeshift grave like an accusation against the adult world that had failed to protect him. Godlin returned before she could escape, trapping her in the basement where so many children had suffered and died. His hands closed around her throat with practiced cruelty, and Cassie felt her vision narrow as oxygen fled her lungs. She was dying in that cellar of horrors, joining Gabriel in whatever peaceful darkness lay beyond pain and fear. Her childhood would end in that basement, along with any chance of justice for the boys who'd been sacrificed to one man's twisted appetites. Salvation came from the most unexpected source. Donny McDowell, following his daughter's trail through pure parental instinct, arrived in time to tear Godlin away from Cassie's throat. For all his flaws and failures, all his drinking and inappropriate behavior, Donny proved capable of heroism when it mattered most. He saved his daughter's life by nearly taking Godlin's, demonstrating that even damaged adults could sometimes protect the innocent. The aftermath brought both justice and heartbreak. Godlin was arrested and charged with Gabriel's murder, plus the attacks on numerous other boys. But the victory felt hollow to Cassie, who understood that monsters weren't anomalies—they were created by cycles of abuse that stretched back generations. Gabriel was gone forever, his dreams of flight extinguished in a basement that smelled of dirt and despair, and no amount of justice could bring him back to the mother who wept over his paper airplane necklace.

Summary

Cassie McDowell's thirteenth summer taught her that childhood ends not with celebration but with the terrible knowledge that adults cannot always be trusted to keep children safe. The boys of Lilydale learned the same lesson in darkness and trauma, their innocence sacrificed to one man's consuming appetite for power and pain. Gabriel Wellstone paid the ultimate price for living in a world where kindness made him vulnerable, where his very goodness marked him as prey for monsters who fed on light and hope. In the end, justice came not from official channels but from personal courage and the fierce love of a father who, despite his own demons, refused to let his daughter join the roll call of the lost. Cassie survived because she learned to recognize evil in all its forms, from the obvious predator in the basement to the subtler poison of adults who chose comfort over truth. She emerged from her ordeal scarred but unbroken, carrying Gabriel's necklace as both memorial and talisman—proof that some dreams of flight transcend even death, and that sometimes the greatest courage comes from children who refuse to be silent in the face of impossible darkness.

About Author

Loading

Jess Lourey

Lourey interrogates the complex layers of secrecy and human psychology within her diverse literary works. Her upbringing in a secret-laden household fuels her fascination with what people conceal and reveal, creating a consistent thematic undercurrent across her crime fiction, young adult, and nonfiction books. This focus on the hidden aspects of human nature invites readers to explore dark themes and real-world settings, making her narratives deeply engaging. Lourey's transition from academia to full-time writing was marked by the unexpected success of her domestic thriller, "Unspeakable Things", which sold over 300,000 copies despite modest initial expectations. This success allowed her to dedicate herself fully to her writing career.\n\nReaders benefit from Lourey's skillful blending of suspense and psychological depth, drawing them into stories that are both thrilling and thought-provoking. Her work reaches a wide audience, evident in her accolades, which include being a two-time Edgar Award nominee and an Anthony Award winner. Lourey's commitment to storytelling is further highlighted in her "Murder by Month Romcom Mystery" series and the Steinbeck and Reed novels, where she crafts intricate plots that captivate and challenge readers. Beyond her books, she maintains a connection with her audience through workshops and her online reader group, enhancing the literary community's engagement with her work.\n\nLourey's contributions extend beyond her role as an author; she is a mentor and an inspiration for aspiring writers. Her dedication to teaching creative writing internationally, along with her recognition as a recipient of The Loft's Excellence in Teaching fellowship, underscores her commitment to nurturing literary talent. This short bio of Lourey emphasizes her impact on both readers and the broader literary landscape, as she continues to explore and unveil the secrets that bind us all.

Read more