The Girl from the Well

The woman in black is laughing. Callie scrambles forward despite her injured leg in a desperate bid to protect the unresponsive Tarquin, but an unseen force repels her, pushing her backward. It feels like an electric jolt sizzling into her skin, and she cries out in pain, clutching at her arm as a small burn mark appears across it, shaped like a human hand.

The mask is gone. The woman in black stands before them, and the body that once belonged to the miko named Chiyo is a disfigured tragedy. Her bright, sunken eyes look out from the hollows of her face, and her lipless mouth is pulled back to reveal horrible brown teeth, sharp as a canine’s. Her hair is a mottled black, a symphony of disorder and disease. Clumps of it fall away from one side of her head to reveal gleaming, ivory bone.

“Tark!” Callie cries out.

The boy does not respond. He is twitching ever so slightly, but his mouth is slack and his eyes lackluster, caught up in the ancient malady, in the web of power the woman in black spins around him. But the creature does not bother to look down at the boy, at the sacrifice she has inhabited for most of his life. Instead, her eyes are on Callie. With painstaking slowness, she lifts a putrefied foot and steps out of the broken circle, to where the girl cowers.

Callie realizes why. The lone seal on Tarquin’s body still beats in a silent, horrible cacophony on his left wrist. To be completely free, the woman in black must finish what she started in the Smiling Man’s basement.

Holding her injured arm, Callie scrambles away, crying out when pain lances up her foot. She attempts to stand and fails, as the woman in black closes the distance with slow, measured steps, leaving scorched marks along the floor with every step. She stands between the girl and the sliding doors leading outside the shrine, and so Callie has little choice but to crawl over the salted doorway into the next room, desperate to find another way out.

But the woman in black is so very near that Callie can see the frozen expression of hate on what is left of the dead miko’s face. She can hear the chopped, ragged

moans

rattling in the corpse’s throat, so soft they can almost be mistaken for breathing. She can smell death in that towering form.

The next room has no exit. Crying, Callie presses her back against the wall as the masked woman approaches, cringing as the woman’s long decayed hands reach out for her face, nails long and sharpened.

It is then that I

drop

from the ceiling, between Callie and this dead miko.

The woman in black draws away, the hissing more apparent, while I stand and do nothing but look back at her with pupil-less eyes. The shadows around the woman rise, lashing at the air like an angry viper.

I do not back down. I do not move away.

She changes prey and lunges at me. I slide away, and she passes harmlessly through. She spins around as I reappear behind her and grab at the dead woman’s hair, tearing through the stringy mass with ferocious satisfaction. Her snarls grow louder, and she swipes at me with a clawed hand.

I have never been attacked by spirits of my own kind before, and so I do not know what to expect. The cut the black-robed miko administers is not physical in nature, yet it sends a sharp, biting agony through me all the same. I have lived hundreds of years longer, but the dead miko has housed numerous demons and spirits within her during her short lifetime, and their combined strength stems from thousands of years of enmity. They are like poison running through her body, fueling it and giving her decayed form existence.

And power.

I give ground, and the dead miko senses her advantage. She lunges again, the momentum sending us both hurtling into the wall, but I alter direction in mid-fall, so that we pass through the mirror instead.