The Girl from the Well

The boy’s yellow-haired cousin enters the cafeteria. She looks up, sensing by some obscure instinct that something is about to happen, and glances toward where the boy sits.

“Why not?” insists the brunette, who is not accustomed to being rejected. She reaches out and tugs playfully at the boy’s hand, a show of coyness. “My name’s Andrea. Come on, I don’t bite.”

“I said no.” The boy tries to shake her hand off, but it is too late. The dark-haired girl’s fingers snag against his shirtsleeve and the material rides up, revealing the strange tattoos that undulate and curl on their own like they are coming alive on his skin, staring up at them both like malignant eyes. The air grows dark and stifling, and the mist begins again, rising expectantly around the two teenagers.

The brunette stumbles back, eyes staring out of her lovely head, uncertain of what she has just seen.

“No!” the boy shouts, and his voice carries across the room. The rest of the cafeteria falls silent, heads turning. The boy yanks his sleeves back down, so hard the fabric nearly tears from the strength of his misery. And yet the fog doesn’t lift. It rolls over and around him so that, to his cousin’s eyes, the denseness of the shadow obscures him, the form behind him rising once more to mimic the shape of that brooding mask, that lady in black.

Neither the teaching assistant nor the rest of the students see this woman. Not even the tattooed boy seems to realize her closeness. His face is washed of all color, and he is clinging to the table before him, hunched over in pain.

Several things happen.

Flocks of birds crash through the window.

They are missing their heads.

They hit the walls hard: thud, thud, thud. They crash into plates and trays, into water fountains and people. Several smash into the lighting fixtures overhead before dropping down, suddenly motionless, and nearly missing a group of girls huddled in a corner.

The students begin to scream. The boy’s cousin claps a hand over her mouth, stunned by what she has just witnessed.

Without another word, the tattooed boy takes off—past the cafeteria doors and down the corridors, bursting out of the school’s main doors and barreling down the street, with the woman’s shadow fluttering after him.

“Tarquin!” His cousin follows him. She is quick enough to catch sight of him, with the strange darkness surrounding his head like a crown, before he disappears around the corner. “I’m going after him!” she calls out to other teachers who poke their heads out of their rooms, curious. She gestures back inside, where the screaming continues to drift out, where the dead birds still litter the floor.

“Take care of them, Jen!” she tells her friend who has come running up, eyes wide.

“What are you going to do?”

The young woman does not answer her. Already, she is running.

But boys are light of feet and quick of temper, and he is soon lost in the busy afternoon of cars and people. The teacher’s assistant pauses, looking this way and that, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. But the crowd flows past her, unyielding and unrepentant.

It is then that she sees the woman in white.

I am standing at the corner of a busy intersection, my face hidden under a ruined cobweb of hair. The girl sees me like a man might see an oasis in a dried desert—disbelieving, certain that her senses play with her mind, convinced this is nothing more than a mistake, a puzzle of flesh.

I lift my hand and point at something in the far distance. The young woman takes a step forward, her own arm extending, reaching for this strange creature. She is convinced that she will be reassured if she touches this apparition and feels the sensation of skin and bones underneath her own. But in the space between moments I move, and she finds herself standing alone, with only people swarming past.