The Girl from the Well

“You are not going to die. I will protect you every way I can. I promise you that much.”


Tarquin smiles up at her, though it is clear he does not believe Callie. “Whatever you say, cuz.”

“Do you think Okiku can beat her?” he asks again, much later. The light evening sky has deepened into twilight, and the only source of light in this darkness are the few candles the mikos have left for them, bobbing up and down and sending shadows across one wall.

“Beat the woman in black?”

“Kagura-san says the longer someone exists as a spirit, the more powerful they can be. Okiku’s ghost has been here for hundreds of years, but the other ghost hasn’t. Doesn’t that technically make her the one to root for?”

“I think Okiku would have defeated her long before we came here if that was the case. Kagura told me about it. You know that sometimes some gods have more power over some things? Like river gods can only control water, and earth gods can only control earth?”

“If you believe in gods, sure. I guess there’s a certain kind of logic to that.”

“Well, she thinks that maybe Okiku only has power over abused children, or children in danger, or people who died in the same way she did. Or power over people who murder kids. But not over anything else.”

“I guess that kind of makes sense, too. About as much sense as you can get hypothesizing about comparative natural laws that ghosts might follow.”

“Like lightbulbs,” Callie says with sudden understanding. “And newspaper stacks.”

“Lightbulbs?”

“It’s nothing important. Something just occurred to me.” Callie glances out at the sky. “Maybe it’s time to turn in for the night. It’s getting pretty late.”

“Callie? I was lying. I’m a little scared. But tell anyone else, and I’m gonna deny it and laugh all masculine-like.”

“So am I.” Callie squeezes his cold hand. Something tells her to look up.

I stand on the ceiling, watching them. Tarquin, too, sees me, but neither show any fear. Oddly enough, he smiles at me and the smile lights up his whole face. “Right, Okiku?”

Tentatively, I smile back.

Callie is less welcoming. Her eyes follow my movements as I drift across the room, disappearing out the window and into the night.





CHAPTER TWENTY


    Purification


Strange dreams keep her company for most of the night.

Callie first imagines she is back in Applegate, teaching a class of students. She can see Tarquin hunched over his desk, drawing, and Sandra, who keeps turning her head to smile at something at the back of the class. There are nine lightbulbs hanging over her head, and as she continues her lecture, they silently explode one after the other. She knows without knowing why that when the last bulb goes out, something will come to take her away.

And then the lightbulbs are inexplicably transformed into long, hanging stalks of hair. She looks up and realizes they are attached to nine women in white, hanging upside down from the ceiling and staring at her with

pale faces

and

bright black eyes.

The dream shifts. Now she finds herself strapped to the gurney inside the Smiling Man’s basement, as the murderer methodically cuts off her fingers one by one. And yet she feels no pain and watches placidly as the Smiling Man is enveloped in a mass of hair that tears him into pieces.

Then she is standing before a ring of mirrors. In some, she can see herself looking out. In others, it is Tarquin, his face solemn and grim, or the woman in black, bits of mask still clinging stubbornly to her horrifically disfigured face. In some, I look out at her as a vengeful creature, and in others as a young girl in a servant’s garb.