The Girl from the Well

Despite the wet, the boy sits in some tall grass several feet away, looking quizzically at her. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”


“Tark!” she bursts out, unable to respond to his question. “I…I don’t know. There was—I thought there was a—something was scratching at the—I think I’m going crazy.”

“Welcome to my world.” The boy does not sound surprised. He points at the empty spot to his left and indicates that she should join him there. His right wrist is heavily bandaged. “I’m not going back inside, anyway. Too stuffy.”

Still trembling, the girl sits.

“You sure you’re okay?” he asks.

“I…yes. I should be the one asking you that question. What happened to your wrist?”

“Accident. Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Oh, I’m peachy,” the boy says, a bitter smile on his lips.

“I’m so sorry, Tark.”

“Don’t be. You’re in this mess because of me. I should be the one apologizing. If not for you, it could have been my funeral everyone’d be attending now.”

“That wasn’t your fault, either, and you know it.”

“I know. She did it.” The teenager said it so softly that she almost missed the words.

“The…the masked woman?”

“Yeah, the…” The boy blinks back at her, surprised. “How did you know?”

“I’ve seen her, too. There is a woman in black I’ve seen around you before, back at the…” She pauses, decides it would not be prudent to bring up the unpleasantries of the past, and attempts a different approach. “And there is another woman in white.”

The boy nods his agreement, still looking surprised. “Thought I was the only one who could see them both. I was half convinced I was going insane, like Mom.”

“Aunt Yoko…I know it sounds odd to say after everything that’s happened, but I think she really did love you, despite everything.”

“I know that. I just wished she loved me the way a normal mother would have. Like making me cookies or grounding me. Not giving me these.”

The teenager stares down at his arms. As before, his long sleeves obstruct the tattoos curling into his skin. In a spontaneous display of trust, he tugs one up to let her see them briefly. The seal no longer moves and twists, and the ink here seems lighter now, half faded into flesh.

“I’ve been seeing that masked woman since I was a little kid. And I’ve had these for as long as I can remember. Everyone says Mom did it, but I don’t really remember how I got them. It’s like all my childhood memories before I was five years old had been completely erased.

“I hated these tattoos. I was always picked on by the other kids, and their parents thought I was a freak. Kids would either bully or ignore me, and on the rare instance someone would try to make friends with me…well, weird shit happened. You remember all those dead birds crashing into the cafeteria? That’s happened before, in Maine.

“There were other things, too, like decaying smells that come out of nowhere, strong enough that the school had to be evacuated a couple of times. I found a hundred dissected frogs, some still hopping, in fifth-period math once. And there were small earthquakes that only extended out a couple of meters, and nobody could explain that, either. Once at my old school, a piece of plaster crumbled and a host of dead rats came tumbling out, all with their heads cut off.

“And every time, I black out. Every time I come to, I’m somewhere else from where I recall being. It’s happened frequently enough whenever I’m around that people started connecting me to all these weird incidents and staying away. Dad doesn’t believe that, naturally, being dear, old logical Dad. And word soon got around school that I had a mom in a mental institution, a mom who attacks me before I can even get in a ‘hello.’ Not exactly the best way to climb up the social ladder.”