The Girl from the Well

But the young teacher has seen the woman in black. She has seen the woman in white and is now aware of how strange things may lurk, unseen to the eye. She has seen the Smiling Man’s corpse. She has seen her cousin’s face, as blank and as paper-white as all the dolls in this room, and her own blood curdling against the seals on his skin.

The woman looks back at her, and for the first time, there is clarity in her gaze. “Yagen Valley,” she says. “They must return to the little dolls of Yagen Valley, to my sisters. To the fear, where it all began.”

The young woman leaves several minutes later with more questions, rather than the answers she seeks. The woman is alone. She selects another doll, running the small comb through its glossy black hair. Once this is completed to her satisfaction, she lifts the doll to the light, gazing into its face. She must like what she sees, for she sets the doll down—not in its usual place on the stands, but on the floor next to her chair.

She takes another doll and does the same thing, placing it down on the ground once she is done and reaching for yet another—until finally, eight dolls surround her in a circle, all facing inward. Their blank faces bore into the woman’s, awaiting her next move.

It is foolish, this thing that she attempts.

“It may be so,” she says to me, as I stand in the corner of the darkened room and watch her, “but it must be done.”

There is a knock at the door. One of the White Shirts arrives with dinner and her medication. In exchange, the woman hands him a small letter and asks him to post it on her behalf as quickly as possible. When he leaves, she carefully spits the tablets back into her hand and hides them in a tiny space between the wall and the dresser where several other pills gather dust.

From behind several dolls, she extracts four slim candles and a box of matches, taken when the White Shirts were distracted elsewhere. She lights one of the candles and tilts it to allow the tallow to drip onto the floor. She moves slowly, and when the flames flicker briefly against her fingers she gives no cry of pain, making little sound at all. She does not stop until a perfect circle of dried wax surrounds all eight dolls.

She now lights the other candles in turn, setting them down in all four directions outside the circle. Lastly, she steps inside the ring with the empress doll, seating herself at its center. She closes her eyes and begins to chant softly, once again in that obscure, melodic language.

Nothing happens. Not at first.

There are no windows in the room, yet a breeze picks up. A noiseless wind begins to whip at the hair of the dolls on their shelves, wrapping around their faces and blindfolding their eyes with their own dark locks. The wooden stands splinter, seemingly on their own. The bed behind the woman, though bolted down, lifts up once, then crashes back down against the floor.

This does not frighten the woman, who continues her chanting. Something takes umbrage at her impertinence. The shaking grows louder, more agitated. Dolls rain down as shelves dislodge themselves from the screws in the walls. The room itself seems gripped in the throes of an earthquake that grows fiercer with every minute that passes. Claw marks appear against grooves in the ceiling, long deep scratches raking down.

And still the woman chants. The eight dolls remain upright despite this terrible haunting, and the candles sputter and wink out briefly, but just as quickly resume their light.

The black fog appears just outside of the wax circle. Unlike during her previous appearances, the woman in black seems tangible, solid. Her face emerges from the writhing darkness, a ruin of skin and clot. More of the mask she wears has fallen, and now two staring sockets look out from a hideously disfigured face, flecked and mottled.

The woman called Yoko lifts the empress. The doll stares serenely back at the black abomination with its blank, colorless eyes.