The Girl from the Well

by Rin Chupeco

  The woman grips the teaching assistant’s arm. “Promise me you will protect my son. Promise me you will tell my husband that he must return to where it all began, to lift the curse. He will not believe you. He will not understand. But you must convince him.”

  “Return to where?”

  But something else distracts the woman. She rises from her chair, stepping toward the platform, and lifts an empress doll off its stand. Taking a tiny pearl comb from her dresser, she returns to her seat with the doll settled on her lap. Now she combs its hair, a doting mother.

  “Have you ever been to the Hina-matsuri?” Her voice is calm once more, placid. “It is a time-honored festival, celebrated throughout Japan. My father was a celebrated dollmaker, and my sister and I grew up surrounded by his creations. People would buy his dolls and bring them out for luck during the Hina-matsuri. But dolls are useful in other ways, as well. One can, for instance, use dolls as a sacrifice—a way to capture evil spirits and keep them trapped within their bodies for as long as it takes to exorcise their malice. Did you know what dolls like these are called in Japan? Ningyo. ‘One of human shape.’”

  She pauses, staring off into the distance, while her hand continues to stroke the empress’s hair.

  “But there also exist spirits so powerful that mere dolls cannot contain them. For this, another type of sacrifice must be used—a living human being, an innocent.

  “For many long years, Chiyo had endured as such a sacrifice. But then the spirits took over, transforming her into the revenant she is now. To overcome her ghost, I was forced to create a new sacrifice…

  “Was it wrong for a mother to sacrifice her son to protect the lives of others around me, those who looked to me for protection? I do not know. I was so sure of myself back then, so sure I could cleanse him from her taint eventually. But I could not.”

  She smiles then, sadly. “Tarquin must have told you how I have tried to kill him many times. I thought it was the only choice I had left. But there is one more thing I can do for him. After tonight, my son will no longer suffer from my mistakes. This will end, one way or another.” She places the empress on her bed, rises to select another doll, and begins the same painstaking process all over again. “But if I fail, he must return.”

  “Return to where?” The teacher’s assistant could easily dismiss the woman’s words as nothing more than ramblings. Even the White Shirt lounging by the door is no longer listening, now that the threat of violence has passed.

  But the young teacher has seen the woman in black. She has seen the woman in white and is now aware of how strange things may lurk, unseen to the eye. She has seen the Smiling Man’s corpse. She has seen her cousin’s face, as blank and as paper-white as all the dolls in this room, and her own blood curdling against the seals on his skin.

  The woman looks back at her, and for the first time, there is clarity in her gaze. “Yagen Valley,” she says. “They must return to the little dolls of Yagen Valley, to my sisters. To the fear, where it all began.”

  The young woman leaves several minutes later with more questions, rather than the answers she seeks. The woman is alone. She selects another doll, running the small comb through its glossy black hair. Once this is completed to her satisfaction, she lifts the doll to the light, gazing into its face. She must like what she sees, for she sets the doll down—not in its usual place on the stands, but on the floor next to her chair.

  She takes another doll and does the same thing, placing it down on the ground once she is done and reaching for yet another—until finally, eight dolls surround her in a circle, all facing inward. Their blank faces bore into the woman’s, awaiting her next move.

  It is foolish, this thing that she attempts.

  “It may be so,” she says to me, as I stand in the corner of the darkened room and watch her, “but it must be done.”

  There is a knock at the door. One of the White Shirts arrives with dinner and her medication. In exchange, the woman hands him a small letter and asks him to post it on her behalf as quickly as possible. When he leaves, she carefully spits the tablets back into her hand and hides them in a tiny space between the wall and the dresser where several other pills gather dust.

  From behind several dolls, she extracts four slim candles and a box of matches, taken when the White Shirts were distracted elsewhere. She lights one of the candles and tilts it to allow the tallow to drip onto the floor. She moves slowly, and when the flames flicker briefly against her fingers she gives no cry of pain, making little sound at all. She does not stop until a perfect circle of dried wax surrounds all eight dolls.

  She now lights the other candles in turn, setting them down in all four directions outside the circle. Lastly, she steps inside the ring with the empress doll, seating herself at its center. She closes her eyes and begins to chant softly, once again in that obscure, melodic language.

  Nothing happens. Not at first.

  There are no windows in the room, yet a breeze picks up. A noiseless wind begins to whip at the hair of the dolls on their shelves, wrapping around their faces and blindfolding their eyes with their own dark locks. The wooden stands splinter, seemingly on their own. The bed behind the woman, though bolted down, lifts up once, then crashes back down against the floor.

  This does not frighten the woman, who continues her chanting. Something takes umbrage at her impertinence. The shaking grows louder, more agitated. Dolls rain down as shelves dislodge themselves from the screws in the walls. The room itself seems gripped in the throes of an earthquake that grows fiercer with every minute that passes. Claw marks appear against grooves in the ceiling, long deep scratches raking down.

  And still the woman chants. The eight dolls remain upright despite this terrible haunting, and the candles sputter and wink out briefly, but just as quickly resume their light.

  The black fog appears just outside of the wax circle. Unlike during her previous appearances, the woman in black seems tangible, solid. Her face emerges from the writhing darkness, a ruin of skin and clot. More of the mask she wears has fallen, and now two staring sockets look out from a hideously disfigured face, flecked and mottled.

  The woman called Yoko lifts the empress. The doll stares serenely back at the black abomination with its blank, colorless eyes.

  “Begone!” the Japanese woman cries, and for the first time she is alive, more animated than I have ever seen her. “Leave us alone!” More sutras flow from her lips.

  The woman in black hovers in the air, motionless. Then she lifts a hand as if to ward off an invisible blow, but against her will, she is slowly pulled toward the empress doll. The other woman does not budge. She is unmoving, triumphant.

  The woman in black lifts her head again, and all the hate is in her eyes. Then the wind dies. The candle’s flame flickers out briefly, and when it returns, only the Japanese woman and I remain inside the room. The woman in black is gone.

  The Japanese woman waits for a few moments, panting heavily. When all is finally quiet, she lowers the doll and looks at its upturned face. Its eyes are now a solid, unending black.

  The woman begins to laugh—silently, then hysterically—relieved it is now over. With the empress doll still in hand, she takes a step outside of the wax circle, moving back toward the doll’s stand.

  Behind her, one of the dolls in the circle slowly leans over and topples forward to land face-first on the floor.

  The woman turns, shocked. As she watches, the other seven dolls follow, sinking to land on their faces, one after the other in the same manner as the first.

  She looks down at the empress doll in her hand.

  A mask stares back at her, and behind it that maimed, hideous face.

  The woman says a curious thing.

  “Oneesan,” she whimpers, beseeching, as ragged nails claw their way up her arms and shoulders, the woman in black extending to her full height. The empress doll fal
ls at the Japanese woman’s feet, its head torn off.

  The woman screams, but by then it is already too late.

  When it is done, the woman in black stares at me. From behind her mask, she smiles.

  The night passes quietly enough for the other inmates at Remney’s, but when one of the White Shirts comes to check on the woman, that peace is soon shattered. She bursts out of the room in such hysterics that it becomes difficult to distinguish her from her patients.

  Someone has cut off the heads of all one hundred and eight dolls, their faces charred by some unknown fire. The room is in disarray with the bed and chair overturned, and faint scorch marks encompass one side of the wall. The headless dolls are lined up in small rows beside the broken bed, which is now drenched in blood.

  And underneath this bed they find the one hundred and ninth head.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Understanding

  The air smells like a hundred years of memories. The teacher’s assistant reads through articles scrolling on a large computer screen. Piles of dusty newspapers lie strewn on the floor. There are few people in the local library today and fewer still in this small, musty section of the building that many have already forgotten. Old things still flourish here.

  The young woman sits hunched over a large table and scrolls through countless sheets of yellowed, preserved paper. In this small room, she logs on to the Internet and spends several minutes assuring her mother that all is right with the world, lying about her lack of injuries and the exaggeration of the media. Then she begins her research and, within an hour, finds a series of reported murders strangely similar to the one she has just lived through:

  Mutilated Body found in Houston, Texas

  Bloated Body Located in Florida Swamps

  Unidentified Body in Mexico

  Remains Found in Brazil

  Gruesome Discovery in Queensland, Australia

  Body Found Floating in River, Philippines

  The list goes on, and the young woman finds the details disturbing. Bodies discovered in the same way: faces bloated and distended as if held underwater indefinitely; the fear in their faces; their eyes rolled back until only the whites show. Of the fifty-eight articles she has found, only twenty-three of the victims have ever been identified. Most were drifters, meeting their deaths in lands far from the countries of their birth. Of the twenty-three identified, thirteen had been arrested on previous charges, many of them sexual offenses. Most have been suspects in other missing persons cases, all of which involved children and teenagers. Five have been posthumously convicted for these crimes.

  The young teacher leans back against her chair, thinking.

  She tries to look up everything known about Blake Mosses, but has little to show for her efforts. Except for the numerous articles written about his death, no other matches turn up for the dead man at the Holly Oaks apartment. The only telling clue was the police’s recent discovery of a hair fiber wedged within his floorboards, and the results will not be determined for many more months.

  She types in a different name next: Quintilian Saetern.

  Throughout news reports of the Smiling Man’s murder, she lay in seclusion, unfettered by the cameras and news reporters attempting to reach her hospital bed for an interview, only to be repulsed by nurses and policemen. The Smiling Man was less taciturn about hiding his name than Blake Mosses had been, and by the time she had healed enough to leave, the reporters had lost interest in her, having discovered the Smiling Man’s past through other more conventional means.

  She discovers that Quintilian Saetern’s real name was Quintilian Densmore, formerly of Massachusetts. A string of juvenile offenses followed him into adulthood, and at twenty years of age he was charged with the attempted rape of a ten-year-old girl and served five years. Two months after his release from jail, he inherited a substantial fortune from his father and began traveling extensively. The reported disappearances of more young women and children over the years bore the marks of his killing spree. His first conviction had taught him one thing: dead people tell no tales.

  The police have no suspects in his killing. They have interviewed the teacher’s assistant and the tattooed boy, hoping to find more leads, but have so far met with little success. The boy has no recollection of his time in the basement, and the young woman tells them nothing about me or the masked woman.

  Though with no further clues, the detectives are of the same opinion as most of the residents in Applegate—that the guilty party deserved neither an arrest nor a prison sentence, but a medal and a commendation from the governor himself, for killing Quintilian Densmore. Still, two murders in so short a time have caused an uneasy ripple in Applegate. Uncertainty has gripped the town, and people no longer feel as safe as they once did.

  It is an unfortunate side effect of my work, but one worth the consequences.

  Here in this moldy section of the public library, the girl starts again with the basics of what she already knows. For one, two, three, four hours, she scrolls through the microfilm. I lean over her shoulder to read what she has found.

  1970—Mutilated Body Found in Houston, Texas. Suspected murderer Gavin Hollencamp found dead at his apartment on September 14. Water found in his lungs, along with his heavily corroded face, suggested death by drowning. Advanced decomposition of his skin indicated at least five days spent underwater, though many witnesses claimed to have seen Hollencamp alive the day before his death. Revenge believed to be the motive for the killing, but as all known suspects have solid alibis, police are left with no leads. Suspected of murdering ten-year-old Lisa Brooks two years before, though eventually acquitted due to a court technicality. Still an open case.

  1995—Bloated Body Located in Florida Swamps. Body identified as a Mathelson Smith from Boise, Idaho. Lower half of corpse believed to have been eaten by alligators. Smith was wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of Lydia Small, aged ten, two months earlier after she was last seen in his company. Characteristics of the water found in his lungs suggested groundwater such as that found in artesian wells, indicating that the man had not drowned in the swamps as originally thought. Police suspect possible foul play but possess few leads.

  2004—Gruesome Discovery in Queensland, Australia. Fully clothed body found washed up on the beach in North Narrabeen, Sydney, and soon identified as a Patrick Neville, fifty-two, local car salesman. According to witnesses, Neville was on a yacht with business associates when he “looked down into the water and gave this bone-chilling scream shortly before falling overboard.” Others claim Neville was yanked into the water—but they could provide no description of what pulled him in. Sharks and other large fish are not known to inhabit this particular coast. The medical examiner could not explain the several days’ worth of decay on the deceased’s face, despite the accident taking place only hours earlier. Two years before his death, Neville was one of five suspects questioned regarding the disappearances of several children in the northern Sydney area. Police have no leads.

  The young woman feels hair brushing against the side of her head and sees from the corner of her eyes tendrils of black, stringy hair and a white face inches beside hers. She whirls around, clutching at the table with her hands for support, but the apparition is gone.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” she asks the darkness, still breathing hard.

  Her eyes fall on several small piles of newspapers and binders, dusty from disuse. Her eyes widen for a moment before her face settles into a bright, almost calculating, expression. She rises from her chair and begins to lug stacks of these newspapers over by her chair. I count them.

  One stack, two stacks.

  Finished, she returns to her chair, though there is now an air of urgency and nervous excitement about her.

  Five stacks, six stacks.

  She takes a deep breath and then holds it. Her hands are clenched, and she is bitin
g her lip.

  Eight stacks. Nine stacks.

  She waits.

  Nothing happens. Relief and disappointment fills her, and her hands lower.

  And just as suddenly, the ninth stack of newspapers begin to fold in on itself in front of her horrified eyes. Inch after inch it is crushed by unseen, powerful hands, until it is now a third of its previous size, the paper so heavily compacted that removing an individual sheaf becomes impossible.

  No

  nines.

  There is silence in the room, except for the sounds of the young teacher’s quiet, panicked breathing, fearful of retribution for her insolence.

  And then just outside in the hallway, something lands with a heavy thump.

  The young woman jumps, another scream leaving her mouth before she is able to stop herself. But the minutes tick by and nothing untoward happens and so, with shaking feet, she ventures to where the sound came from, out into the long hallway leading back into the library.

  There is no one else around. One of the books had fallen from the shelves, landing facedown on the floor.

  The girl picks it up, turning it over to see the page it was open to.

  The large volume is titled Popular Japanese Destinations, and the open page shows a picturesque view of a large, rocky wasteland dotted by majestic peaks and yellow hot springs.

  “If you’re an adventurous traveler with a taste for the strange and the macabre,” the caption begins, “Mount Osore (fondly known as Osorezan by the locals) on Aomori, Mutsu province, may be right up your alley. Known for its Bodai Temple and peaceful, if rather desolate surroundings. A small road leads into the mostly uninhabited Yagen Valley, where visitors can enjoy an unusual mixture of uncivilized nature and uncrowded hot springs.”

  The young woman looks around. She does not see me but speaks anyway.

  “Thank you,” Callie whispers.

  • • •

  The tattooed boy is hiding.

  It is night, and the lights have gone out in other houses. The only sources of illumination are the strange moon looking down at him from the window and the faint artificial glow of the lampposts on the streets below.