The Girl from the Well

(Four girls, five, six.)

They are blondes and redheads and brunettes. They are blue-eyed and dark-eyed and brown-eyed and green-eyed. They are pale and freckled, and dark and brown. They are six years old and eight years old and twelve years old and fifteen years old.

(Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.)

Some of these children have been tied to him for almost twenty years, others only since the month before.

(Twelve. One boy, two boys, three, four, five.)

He smiles now, this smiling man. It is how he sets his bait, how he entices. And his smile this time is for the boy with the tattoos.

I could take him

take take him take him

now. I could take his smiling, putrid little head and crush it

crush it crush

in my mouth. I could make him suffer. I could make him scream

scream scream scream SCREAM SCREAM

for me. Daylight holds no power over spirits such as me.

But I prefer the thrill of night. I prefer the same enclosed spaces in which these people do their work, where they feel themselves at their most powerful. It is a greater pleasure to kill in darker pastures, that much I know. It is not much of a vanity, but that is all that remains with me.

The Smiling Man

take him crush him

starts his car. The dead children watch me as I watch him drive away, and I know I will see him again. I quell the hungers, the quiet places, and they retreat, for now.

The boy, too, intrigues me—for the first time in as long as I can remember—and that is a long, long time. His strange tattoos intrigue me. What lies moving underneath them intrigues me. There is something inside the boy that calls and repulses. There is something strange and malevolent hiding inside him, though I know not what, or why.

There is something inside him that reminds me of home.

I want to know the language of his strange tattoos. And time is one of the few things I have left to spend.

And when the Smiling Man

take him

makes his move—as I know he will—I will be there. Waiting for him.

Until then, I can keep my own vigil.

For in this new house, there also is an attic.





CHAPTER THREE


    Light Shatters


Few things of note pass during the nights at this new house, despite what finds residence in the empty room upstairs.

The lethargy finds me again, and by the time I become aware, several days in the tattooed boy’s lifetime must have passed. The furniture has been unwrapped and assembled, and the rooms no longer look abandoned. The man inspects the attic only once but quickly leaves again, unsure why he is repelled by its strange emptiness.

It is morning. The tattooed boy is sitting at a table, and his father is cooking, steam lifting from various metal pots and pans. The boy does not look happy. He is wearing dark pants and a long-sleeved shirt he keeps pulling down over his arms. The tattoos that so fascinate me only seem to anger him. He does his best to cover them up so no one else sees, though there is nobody present but his father, who has seen them many times.

“School blows,” he says by way of greeting. I count the plates in the kitchen. Eleven.

The father sighs like he has heard this all before. “I know it’s going to take some time for you to get used to a new city and a new school, Tark, but you have got to meet me halfway on this one. Applegate has a lot of friendly people. Even my boss is nice, which is about as rare a thing as you can imagine.” He is attempting to be funny, but nobody laughs.

“Not really.” The boy bites into his bread with admirable ferocity, tearing a good chunk of it out with his teeth. I count glasses. Six.