The Girl from the Well

“But that’s awful!” Callie is appalled. “Why didn’t you or Uncle Doug ever tell us about this?”


Tarquin snorts. “What, Dad telling you and Aunt Linda I was crazy, or me telling you both I was being haunted by an eyeless woman with a mask, or that I was responsible for my old school almost closing for failing to reach local sanitation standards? If you hadn’t told me you could see her, too, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“This isn’t something you should be going through alone, Tark. I won’t let you!”

Tarquin flashes her a swift, grateful smile. “You’re treating me like one of your fourth-graders again, Callie.”

“Half my fourth-graders think ghosts are people running around in a white sheet, and the other half think they’re some kind of Pokémon.”

“Well, she tried to come after me last night. Don’t worry,” he adds, spotting Callie’s stricken expression. “Okiku saved me.”

“Okiku?”

“The other ghost. The girl in white. We…she’s all right.” An odd note enters the boy’s voice. “I don’t know how much you’ve seen of her, but she’s… Sometimes she wanders around looking like she’d been floating in a river for days, but that night she was… She can actually look kind of pretty, you know? Don’t know why she doesn’t look like that all the time. Maybe it’s some unspoken rule about being dead that I’m not aware of.”

“Tark, I’m not sure you should be sympathizing with someone like her just because she saved your life,” Callie says, uneasy at the remembrance of my dead face, my broken neck. “She might have some other ulterior motive.”

“Like what?”

“You’ve heard about the murder at Holly Oaks, right? They say the victim’s face was bloated—exactly like that man who kidnapped you and nearly killed me! I’ve been doing a lot of research. I’ve read newspaper clippings dating back dozens of years about men who’d been killed in the same way, and how no one has ever found out who’s responsible. They’ve all been suspected of murdering children themselves, but many of them have never been arrested or convicted for a number of reasons. I think—I think it’s her, Tark. She’s been traveling all around the world, looking for people like them to kill.”

Tark merely shrugs at that, and Callie does not like the quick manner with which he dismisses her fears. “Then I’ll have to make sure not to go around molesting teenagers of both the handsome and tattooed persuasions, so she won’t want to murder me, too, right?”

“That doesn’t mean she still isn’t dangerous!”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like that at all. I mean, she saved my life. She saved yours, too! It feels like she genuinely wants to help. And with her around, maybe I can finally stop accidentally killing off people.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“There’s something else Dad and I neglected to tell you and Aunt Linda. Before we came to Applegate, there was this other boy…” The boy stares down at shoes dug deeply into the damp soil, the dirt obscuring the whites of his laces.

“I’ve never told this to anyone else before,” he says.

“I understand if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“No,” the boy says, making a decision. “You’ve seen her, too. I don’t like it, but you’re in this with me now. Besides, he was a bully. His name was Todd McKinley. But I still can’t say that he deserved it. I don’t think anyone deserved dying like that.”

The words pour out, painting the vivid images I see inside his head.

The bully is a stocky boy of marginal width and height, a menacing memory. Tarquin is younger, frightened. I watch as the bully pushes him against a bathroom door, lifting him high enough that his shoes kick out, barely reaching the floor. But when the bully pulls a fist back to punch Tarquin in the stomach again, the lights go out.