Jack & Jill

The nursery rhyme is supposed to be a children's lesson. In Oakhaven, it is a ledger.

Municipal archivist Jill Mercer is used to filing away small-town eccentricities. But when a velvet-mounted set of children's teeth and a rusted sand pail are discovered deep within the municipal collections-and a fresh tooth arrives directly on Jill's doorstep-what begins as a bureaucratic puzzle rapidly transforms into a dark, moral excavation.

Through unearthing old home videos, tracking a doctored access log, and listening to a brittle cassette tape that teaches the childhood rhyme like a mandatory task, Jill exposes a chilling social practice hidden in plain sight. It is a secret ritual performed under the guise of keeping the town safe, a system that has over generations morphed into a terrifying web of promises, unpayable debts, and quiet compliance.

As the unsettling "Middle Hours" of Jill's nights begin to lengthen, and fragments of unfamiliar memories surface where there should be none, she finds herself violently forced into the absolute center of the very ledger she once catalogued from the safety of the outside. While Detective Mara Voss relentlessly pursues hidden confessions and hard evidence, a rogue collection of neighbors are finally driven to speak the names they once desperately hid.

The hill watches. The town recalculates. And Jill must face a devastating reality: naming the debt could break the ritual-or it could completely break her.

Jack and Jill is a slow-burn, intimate psychological horror about memory, communal complicity, and the seemingly innocent objects by which a town pays for the fragile illusion of safety.

Content & Reader Advisories

• Series Position: Sinister Nursery Rhymes - Book Three
• Content Warnings: Disturbing themes, ritual acts, implied child victimization, psychological terror, non-graphic violence, and body/forensic imagery. Reader discretion is advised.