No one will die, but three horses will be lost.
Your wife will receive a letter from her sister on Saturday.
It will contain news of a death.
You will drop your pocket watch on Monday morning.
The glass will crack, but the mechanism will still work.
And you? She looked up at him, her blue eyes steady.
You will leave here tomorrow and never speak of what you have seen.
The doctor laughed, though the sound was hollow, preposterous.
But Thursday came and the barn caught fire.
Three horses died.
Saturday brought a letter to the doctor’s wife.
Her sister’s husband had passed suddenly.
Monday morning, the doctor’s pocket watch slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor.
The mechanism continued to tick.
He packed his bags that afternoon.
Martha found his notes later, half burned in the fireplace of his room.
Only one page remained partially intact.
The last line written in a shaking hand read, “She knows what I have done.
God help me.
She knows.
” The master forbade anyone to speak her name.
After that, Anelise became the child or that girl or nothing at all.
But the house could not silence her.
Clock stopped when she entered a room.
Paintings would crack, their canvases splitting down the middle, mirrors fogged over, candles guttered and died.
No matter how still the air, children in the big house began to have nightmares, waking in the night, screaming about a girl with blue eyes calling to them from the bottom of the well.
The slaves feared her, but they also protected her.
She was one of them after all, even if she was something more.
They kept her hidden, kept her fed, kept her alive.
And in return, she began to do things, small things.
She would whisper to Ruth where her lost earring was hidden.
She would tell Esther which herbs would cure her aching joints.
She would warn Martha when Crenaw was coming, giving them time to hide whatever needed hiding.
But as she grew older, the fear grew, too.
By the time she was eight, people crossed themselves when they saw her.
They avoided her gaze.
They spoke in hushed voices when she was near.
The air around her seemed to shimmer sometimes, as if reality itself was uncertain in her presence.
Objects would move when she was angry.
Small things at first, a cup sliding across a table, a door swinging shut, but then larger things.
A chair that flew across a room, a window that exploded outward, sending glass into the yard.
Martha knew it was only a matter of time before something terrible happened.
The child’s power was growing, expanding beyond her ability to control it.
Or perhaps, Martha thought, Anelise was learning to control it all too well.
Either way, the plantation was a powder keg, and the girl was the spark.
One night, Martha sat with Anelise outside the cabin.
The girl was quiet, her eyes fixed on the stars.
“Do you know what you are?” Martha asked softly.
Anelise was silent for a long moment.
Then she said, “I am what happens when something wrong tries to become something right.
I am the question that has no answer.
I am what they made me.
And what’s that?” The girl turned to look at her and in the moonlight her eyes seemed to glow.
Inevitable.
The next morning, Anelise was gone.
Martha woke before dawn, as she always did, her body trained by decades of labor to rise with the first pale light.
The air was cool, heavy with dew, and the world was silent except for the distant crowing of a rooster.
She moved through the dim cabin, stirring the embers in the hearth, preparing for another day.
It was only when she turned to wake Anelise that she realized the girl’s pallet was empty.
The blanket was folded neatly, as if she had never slept there at all.
Martha’s heart clenched.
She stepped outside, calling the girl’s name softly, then louder, her voice edged with panic.
Other slaves emerged from their cabins, rubbing sleep from their eyes, their faces tight with worry.
They searched the quarters, the barn, the fields.
They looked in the smokehouse, the root cellar, the places children like to hide, but there was no sign of her.
It was Ruth who found the footprints.
Small bare feet pressed into the soft earth near the riverbank, leading down to the water’s edge.
But these were not ordinary footprints.
They glowed faintly in the morning mist, a pale luminescence that made Ruth’s breath catch in her throat.
She called the others, and they came running, their faces pale.
The footprints led to the river, then stopped.
Beyond them, the water was dark and still, giving nothing away.
Some said she had drowned, others said she had run.
But no one truly believed either.
Anelise was not the kind of child who drowned by accident, and she was not the kind who ran without purpose.
She had simply vanished, as if the earth itself had swallowed her whole.
The slaves searched for days, combing the riverbanks, the forests, the swamps.
They found nothing, no body, no trace, only those glowing footprints which faded slowly over the following days like dying embers, the master was told, of course.
He nodded, his face impassive, and ordered the search to continue, but there was something in his eyes, a flicker of relief, as if a burden had been lifted.
He did not mourn.
He did not grieve.
He simply returned to his study, to his ledgers, and his whiskey, and tried to forget.
But forgetting was not so easy.
The house felt different after Anelise was gone.
The air was lighter, yes, but also emptier, as if something essential had been removed.
The clocks began to work again.
The paintings stayed whole.
The candles burned steadily.
And yet the servants found themselves looking over their shoulders, half expecting to see her standing in the doorway, her blue eyes watching.
Martha could not shake the feeling that the girl was still there, not physically perhaps, but present in some other way.
She would catch glimpses of movement in her peripheral vision, only to turn and find nothing.
She would hear soft footsteps at night, the sound of a child walking through the quarters.
But when she investigated, the paths were empty, and sometimes in the quiet hours before dawn, she would hear humming.
A child’s voice, wordless and haunting, drifting through the air like smoke.
A week passed, then another.
Life on the plantation settled back into its familiar rhythm of labor and pain.
The slaves worked the fields, bent under the sun, their hands bleeding from cotton bowls.
The master drank his whiskey and counted his profits.
The world turned as it always had, indifferent and cruel.
And then one morning, Garrett Ashford was found dead.
It was his valet, a man named Benjamin, who discovered him.
The master had not come down for breakfast, which was unusual, but not unheard of.
Benjamin climbed the stairs to the study, knocked softly, and receiving no answer, pushed the door open.
Garrett Ashford sat at his desk, his body slumped forward, his hands resting on the polished wood.
His eyes were open, staring at nothing, wide, unblinking, and blue.
Not the gray green they had been in life, but the same impossible crystalline blue as Anaise’s.
Benjamin stumbled back, his hand over his mouth, and ran for help.
The doctor was summoned along with the sheriff, a portly man named Horus Dill, who had known Ashford for 20 years.
They examined the body, searching for signs of violence, poison, or disease.
There were none.
The master’s heart had simply stopped, they concluded.
a natural death, if a sudden one, but neither the doctor nor the sheriff could explain the eyes, that strange, unnatural blue that lingered even in death, as if something had been left behind.
The funeral was held 3 days later.
It rained, a cold, relentless downpour that turned the churchyard into a sea of mud.
The slaves stood at a distance, their heads bowed, their faces unreadable.
The master’s family, distant cousins and an aging uncle, spoke in hush tones about the estate, about debts and inheritances, about what would happen next.
No one mentioned the girl.
No one dared.
But that night, as the rain continued to fall, Ruth woke to the sound of singing.
It was faint, barely more than a whisper, but it was unmistakable, a child’s voice, high and clear, singing a hymn in a language Ruth did not recognize.
She sat up, her heart pounding, and listened.
The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, carried on the wind, woven into the rain.
She was not the only one who heard it.
Others in the quarters woke too, their faces pale, their hands trembling.
They gathered outside, standing in the mud, listening to the song that seemed to emanate from the very air.
It went on for hours, rising and falling, a melody both beautiful and terrible.
And when it finally stopped, just before dawn, the rain ceased as well, leaving the world silent and dripping.
Martha stood in the doorway of her cabin, her arms wrapped around herself, and whispered, “She’s still here.
” The others did not ask what she meant.
They knew.
Anelise had not drowned.
She had not run.
She had become something else.
Leave a Comment