The Girl from the Well

The woman sees her son, and then she begins to scream.

It is a howling symphony of loss and fear and madness. She leaps toward him, her eyes blazing and her hands clawed, transforming that pale, pretty face into that of a creature of malevolence.

“You!” she howls. “I will not let you escape! You will not have him! I will not let you have him! I’ll kill him first! I’ll kill him!”

At the same time, I see that aimless shadow drift up from behind the boy’s stricken form, the same darkness I saw in the classroom that day, though there is more to its shape. Something is rising out of the boy’s back—something with terrible, burning eyes, yet not quite eyes at all, preserved behind a bloodless, decaying mask that hides its face from the world.

Our gazes

meet.

The woman is still screaming, hurling vile curses into her stunned son’s face. She fights off her husband’s attempts to restrain her. “Get away from him! I will never let you out! I’ll kill him first! I’ll kill him I’ll kill him I’ll kill him!—” She stops only to reel off sutras and chant at breakneck speed in a language that should be familiar to me but is not, a language that crackles in the air, which now grows uncomfortably hot from the heat of her words.

The door flies open and several more White Shirts run in. With efficient precision, they surround the woman, cutting off her chants. She lashes out with her legs and her fingernails, dislodging dolls from their shelves in the process, but the Shirts are successful at incapacitating her, holding her long enough to jab a large needle into her arm. In time her struggles grow weaker until she finally sinks, exhausted, against a White Shirt’s chest, her head nodding as she spirals into sleep.

“I’m sorry,” a White Shirt tells the man and his son. “She’d been responding well to the lorazepam. I’m not sure what triggered this outburst.”

“That’s okay,” the father replies. The boy says nothing, though his face is as white as those of the dolls that surround him. The dark fog has disappeared.

“I’m so sorry you both had to see this. But I think it would be best if we cut this visit short and give her more time to rest.” The man nods and gently ushers his son out of the room.

With one final effort, the woman’s eyes fly open. She lifts her head over the sea of White Shirts attending to her and stares directly at me. In her eyes there is desperation but also a sudden realization of my purpose here in this room of one hundred and eight dolls.

“I am so sorry,” she whispers, imploring. “Please. Please protect him. Please…” The words trail off. Her head lolls to one side and her eyes fall shut. Within seconds, the drugs have taken their toll, and she is fast asleep.

The boy is frightened. He keeps glancing back at his unconscious mother, who is now being lifted by one of the bigger White Shirts onto her small bed.

“What did she mean?” he asks. His father looks at him. “Was she talking about me? Who was she talking to?”

“Your mother isn’t well, Tark,” the man tells him. “You shouldn’t take to heart anything she says while she’s in this condition. We just came at a bad time.”

“We always come at a bad time!” the boy responds with violence in his voice. “What is it about me that she hates so much, that she can’t even stand the sight of me?”

“Tark…I…”

“Forget it. Just forget it. I’m getting out of here.” The boy brushes past his father and tears down the hall. Several of the patients jeer and cheer him on as he runs by, but the boy does not pay attention.

“Tarquin!” His father takes off after him. A woman reading a newspaper on a nearby bench lowers it to stare at the retreating visitors and then at me.

“Mad people,” she observes sagely. “They’re all mad.”

Then she grins to show off rotting teeth, and she winks at me. “Not like us, dearie,” she coos. “Never like us.”





CHAPTER SIX


    The Murder