The Girl from the Well

There is one remaining seal on the boy’s body, throbbing frantically against his flesh like a heartbeat. It is the seal on Tarquin’s left wrist, the same seal bearing Callie’s blood. Callie, the only victim to survive the woman’s curse.

“What has happened?” The obaasan is shocked, trying to rise to her feet.

“The seal is still here!” Saya sounds panicked.

“That is impossible! It should have disappeared along with the others unless…unless…”

The obaasan’s hard gaze now swivels toward Callie’s stunned face.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Callie does not need to understand the woman’s Japanese to glean its meaning from the fury of her lips, the anger in her eyes. “It was your blood on this seal!”

“I…I don’t…”

“You should have told us, Callie-chan!” Kagura wails. “You should have told us it was your blood, your seal! Everything that bears witness to the ritual must be pure and untainted. You should have been forbidden to watch!”

“I’m sorry! I…I didn’t know…”

There is a loud gasp, and the obaasan suddenly stumbles, her face deathly pale. She is clutching at her stomach, where the hilt of a stone knife protrudes. She tries to speak, but blood flows instead from her mouth, and she falls onto the wooden floor.

“Machika-obaasan!” Forgetting their duties, the other mikos rush to the old woman’s side, unmindful of the pool of blood that is spreading from her in spirals, growing larger and larger until it first brushes and then soon immerses itself in Tarquin’s hair. The boy’s mouth falls open, and a harsh, choking sound comes from his throat.

It is Amaya who is first made aware of the danger. “No!” she howls, attempting to lift Tarquin and bring him away, but by then it is too late. Blood drips onto the boy’s back, onto the final untouched seal that reappears on his skin without warning, before just as suddenly dissolving back into nothingness.

The darkness steals into the room, blocking out the daylight outside, and with it comes cold, mocking laughter.

The ritual has failed. The woman in black

is

free.





CHAPTER TWENTY–ONE


    Sacrifice


First come the

screams.

In the darkness they come from everywhere and nowhere, all at once.

And then come the terrible sounds of

bodies,

the crunch of bone against wood and stone.

And then there comes the

silence.

When the shadows lift, she stands within the ring of dolls, beside Tarquin’s prostrate form. The dolls that once surrounded the circle have been thrown with such force that one embeds itself in a wooden wall and another is flung outside and into a tree.

The mikos resemble broken dolls themselves. Saya has been tossed several yards into the next room, and only her feet peek out from underneath a shattered wooden screen. Amaya has been driven into the doll glass display. She lies unmoving on the floor, red bleeding out from her head, and many of the dolls have tumbled out, burying her silent form.

Kagura lies in a crumpled heap off to one side, her arms and hands cut and torn from flying glass that has sliced into her skin. She is groaning softly, the only one of the mikos to offer proof of life. Parts of the roof have caved in, wood and heavy debris burying the back rooms.

Even Callie, huddled in her corner, the farthest away from the woman’s fury, is not without casualty. A heavy wooden plank has fallen from the ceiling, crushing her ankle.

But it is the old woman, the obaasan, who suffers worst. She is stretched out on the floor on her stomach, her eyes staring into the wood as the blood seeps from her wounds, pooling around her. In her hand she clutches the ichimatsu doll that should have been the woman in black’s new prison, though the doll itself is burned nearly beyond recognition, its head lying some distance away.