Stolen

a free (long) short story

Dear Lovely Subscribers,

Hello and thank you to new subscribers, and special thanks to paying subscribers!

This week I thought I’d share a barely-published story that I’m very fond of. I wrote “Stolen” about twenty years ago and wasn’t able to sell it; eventually I put it away, but it always remained my favorite short story that never found a home. About six years ago, the late great Joe Pulver asked me if I had a short story I’d be willing to contribute to an anthology that would be a fundraiser for Necronomicon, and I thought this might be a chance for “Stolen” to finally see the light of day. For reasons that I can’t recall at all (but not the fault of Joe), the anthology, A Walk on the Weird Side, sort of sank without much of a trace (and I never saw a copy), so “Stolen” remained virtually unread.

So I thought I’d give it new life here on Substack. I still love this story. I hope you enjoy it.

If you’d like to read (or listen to) more free fiction from me online, you can find more stories linked here. Most likely, any future fiction I publish here will be paywalled, but this one’s a freebie.

Without further ado, here is the story “Stolen.”

Lynda

In Fairyland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh

“A sense of wonder,” said Mrs. Casey.

We all waited, more or less politely. Some kids fidgeted. It was well into the school year, though, and we were accustomed to our English teacher opening class with enigmatic (she taught us that word) statements. She ran the drama club, too. I guess that's why she liked to jazz things up a little bit. Most of the other teachers would just write a lot of notes on the board and have us copy them in silence, or make us do exercises out of the book.

“This is what Yeats and his contemporaries sought,” she went on, “to pierce the veil between worlds, to glimpse the terror and majesty of those realms lost to myth.”

One thing about those other teachers, though. You usually understood what they were talking about. Most of the time—even though I liked her—Mrs. Casey just lost me, and looking around, I don't think I was the only one.

But I should start by telling you about the girls, not Mrs. Casey, who isn't really a part of the story.

No. I should start by telling you it's true what we read in the poem that day. We didn't know it at the time. We were high school sophomores, fifteen years old, and we thought the whole word was the one we'd made, of boyfriends and girlfriends, and cliques and spats and gossip in the cafeteria. It wasn't like we didn't know tragedy—there were kids whose parents were dead and kids whose parent beat them and kids who already had that haunted look about them, like they'd been wasted by life. One of our classmates had shot himself in the head the previous year, on purpose. And it was the 1980s, so sometimes our dreams were about mushrooms clouds and something called a nuclear winter that would turn the whole surface of the earth into something worse than the hell we heard about in church. But whatever was wrong around us, it wasn't our fault. The grown-ups were the ones who screwed things up. We believed we'd all run fast and far away from Bydell, Georgia, turn into different people from our parents. That we wouldn't repeat anybody else's mistakes.

We didn't know then—how we could we?—why the poem told us what it did: For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

§

Or maybe I ought to start with Missy. My little girl, Missy. She has fits. Doctor says there's nothing wrong with her physically, and looks at me like I'm the one causing them, or maybe even making up that she has them.

She's three years old. She has red hair that's not like anybody else in the family except maybe for my great-granny, who I never met. It hurts me to look at her. Nobody ever tells you that having kids will be like that, but it's true. Sometimes just the sight of them makes your insides go all knotted up in ways I can't explain.

She talked when she was just ten months old. Mama says, “Maybe she's some kind of genius,” and my cousin Angie's husband Chad says, “Lord, not that. Them geniuses is the next thing to fools. My granddaddy told me he knew this one man was a scientist, worked on some top-secret government project but couldn't hardly remember to tie his shoes.”

Angie says, “Chad, sometimes I think you're the thing to a fool,” and that shut him up real fast.

I went into Missy's room the other night while she was sleeping, and she didn't look like my baby in the moonlight falling across her face. She made me think of something real ancient, and wild, like the thousand-year-old trees me and Steve saw when we took our honeymoon out in California.

Ryan, my boy—he's sturdy and strong, and kind of a mystery to me, like all boys. Like his daddy. But I see myself in his chin and the shape of his head and his hazel eyes. I see his daddy in how he laughs and the way he runs. Missy, now. If I hadn't bore her out of my very own womb, I'd wonder who she belonged to.

She was gone when I got up this morning. I can't tell anybody. I kept Ryan inside and told his cousin Brandon he was sick and couldn't come out to play. I'm half out of my mind with worry. You have to remember that. So maybe nothing I'm writing here is true.

But this isn't where I meant to start the story either. It has to start with them. The goddesses. The Larkin girls.

§

They were crazy, all three of them—Sheila, Crystal, and Danielle. Beautiful, too, like girls out of a fairy tale. Dark-haired and rosy-cheeked, golden skin like the crust of good homemade bread. Lips that always looked smeared with berries, like they'd just tasted something sweet and fine. They looked pure. All that made it harder to believe the things people said about them, words like whore and slut and worse, nasty verbs like sucked and licked and fucked. They hung out on the square downtown on weekend nights jumping in and out of cars.

Trash, folks called them. But they were different, like they floated up somewhere high above the rest of us, where the things we said about them didn't hurt.

They moved to Bydell over the summer between seventh and eighth grade. Their daddy rented the big old Rice homeplace about a mile and a quarter down the road from us. The homeplace had been empty for longer than I'd been alive, and was just about falling in. There was something romantic about it, though. I lived in a boring new two-bedroom brick house with my parents, just a few doors down from where I live now. Most all of us out here are cousins, or related by marriage. As much as I like having family near me now that I got kids of my own, it can be kind of suffocating when you're growing up. Everybody knowing your business all the time. Makes you start to feel like nothing exciting or unpredictable can ever happen to you, and when you're a kid you live for unpredictable. Not like now.

When I heard a family had moved in at the Rice place, I tried to get my cousin Angie to go over there with me and meet them.

Her face twisted like she smelled something bad. “Anybody moving in that old dump ain't nothing but trash,” she said. “I bet it don't even have indoor plumbing. Nasty people.”

I said something mean back, but I'd gone hot all over, and I was embarrassed. Angie was a year younger than me, but that didn't stop her being the bossiest person I knew. I waited until she'd gone back inside to drag my bike out of the garage and set off.

I rode too fast in the July heat that day, pumping the pedals as fast as my short legs would go, because it kept me from thinking about the fact that I didn't know what I'd say to the new neighbors when I got there. I heard somebody yelling before I even saw the house. A man's voice. I couldn't tell what he was saying, just that he sounded mad. I thought about turning my bike around right then and there, but I was so hot I didn't think I could face the ride back without getting me a drink of water first. Anyway, Angie's daddy, my uncle Roger, he was always hollering about something or other and nobody paid him any attention. Since I only heard the one voice, I figured something similar was going on here.

I said the old Rice place was falling in, and that's the truth. In fact, seeing it that day, I couldn't believe it had been put up for rent. It used to be a grand place, a real showy mansion, but that was back in my grandparents' day. One window had been broken and was boarded up. It made me think of an eyepatch. A porch ran the length of the front, but it looked like the kind of thing my mother would make me get off before I fell through and needed a tetanus shot or something. Nobody had bothered to clean up the yard, and it was littered with crushed beer cans and bottles and fast food wrappers, the kind of garbage people throw out their car windows.

I dropped my bike and ran up on that porch, which was sturdier than it looked. I knocked hard on the door and waited.

It took so long for anybody to answer that I thought better of what I was doing and almost left. Then the door swung open. I didn't know it yet, but it was the middle one, Crystal. Fourteen years old, eyes dark but clear, a fading bruise along one jawline. That was how you saw them, sometimes. Sheila would be out a few days with the flu and then she'd come back with one eye ringed in fading shades of yellow and purpose. “I had a fever and I passed out on the way to the bathroom,” she'd say.

But that came later. You know that saying, It took my breath away? Mrs. Casey would have called it a cliché. But Mrs. Casey aside, that's what I felt the first time I saw Crystal, like I couldn't breathe. She was that beautiful. Only that word, took, it isn't enough. It was more like getting punched in the stomach. Having all the wind knocked out of you.

In the meantime she said, “Who are you?” Her voice didn't match the rest of her. It was flat and hard.

When I got my breath back, the first thing I did with it was swallow. Then I stuck my hand out to her and said, “Hi, my name's Jessie. I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood.” What a dumb thing to say. I couldn't think, though. Or rather, I could only think of one thing, and it was that I wanted to kiss her. Isn't that just the craziest thing? And I wanted to press my body up against hers. She'd feel cool and soft.

She just looked at me. She didn't take my hand, and finally she turned her head and hollered, “Mama! There's some girl here to see you!”

I didn't want to talk to anybody's mama. But it was too late. Mrs. Larkin, holding a dishtowel, planted herself in the doorway. She was little and washed-out looking, pasty colored skin and hair and eyes. She squinted at me, suspicious. Said, “You selling something?”

“I live over at Rock Branch,” I said. “I just wanted to welcome y'all to the neighborhood.” I had to hear how stupid I sounded all over again.

But then she got nice, or as nice as I ever saw her. She didn't smile, exactly, but she said, “Well, now, ain't that sweet of you. You look like you're about to have heatstroke, honey. You better come on in and get something cold to drink.”

I followed her across the threshold and that was when I saw how bare everything was, and dirty. Scrabby wood floors in need of sweeping. We went through a room that didn't have anything in it but a coffee table and a sprung-looking couch with the foam sticking out where the stitching had split. They didn't even have a TV.

She led me into the kitchen, which was hotter than outside and smelled like bacon. Sheila, the youngest—she was the same age as me—was at the sink washing dishes. Danielle, fifteen but she looked eighteen at least, sat at the table. She was drinking a cup of coffee. It made her seem grown up. They both looked at me when I came in. Their eyes weren't curious at all.

“Girls,” said Mrs. Larkin, “this is your new neighbor Jessie. Why don't ya'll show her around the place a little bit?”

§

They were sullen as I trailed behind them in the bleak hot yard. I knew I wasn't welcome, but I pretended like everything was going just fine. They stood around, arms crossed, saying things like, “What do you want to do?” and “I don't know, what do you want to do?”

At least, Crystal and Sheila did. Danielle couldn't be bothered; she just looked bored. Crystal said, “Danielle don't want to do anything, she's just boy-crazy.”

But Danielle got a look on her face. “Let's show her the toolshed.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Danielle said, and I thought about how my cousin Angie bossed her little sister Ruth around and how lucky I was to be an only child.

I followed them across the yard to the little shed, which was built out of scrap wood and topped with a metal roof. A combination lock fastened the door. Danielle undid it and we all stood around peering in, even though it was so dark you couldn't see anything inside. “ Go on in,” Sheila said, and I should've known then what was coming. She gave me a shove and I stumbled forward and the next thing I knew the door had slammed shut behind me. I could hear them laughing as they ran away.

§

It was hot in there, with that tin roof over my head, and when Sheila pushed me I'd fallen down and skinned both my knees. But sunlight leaked in through the gap where the roof didn't quite meet the walls, and as my eyes adjusted, I could see what was around me.

It was just a regular toolshed, except nobody had used it for a long time. A shelf was built high along one wall, and when I set my hand on it, I felt a few forgotten nails rolling around. I tugged on the door, and of course they'd locked it, just like I knew they had. I wasn't too worried. It was the kind of thing my cousins would do, although Crystal and Danielle seemed a little old for that kind of mischief. I figured they'd let me out soon. In the meantime, I was bored. I counted how many steps it took me to get from one end of the shed to the other—sixteen--and then I did it again, only this time I went toe-to-heel, and that was when I noticed something in the corner.

You know when you see something just on the edge of your sight, and then you turn your head to look at it and it's like nothing was ever there? Something bright flashed, but an instant later it was gone. I bent down to look closer. Someone had placed smooth stones in a circle about the diameter of a basketball.

When I leaned in toward them, I felt a low hum on the air, like the white noise from a fan, only it wasn't something you could hear, exactly. And then I was kneeling, forgetting about the pain in my skinned knees and hanging over the circle.

I was falling, the way you fall in dreams. I couldn't breathe, and the air was colder than anything I've ever felt in my life. I thought my lungs were frozen solid. The air hurt, rushing past. Then I realized that it was all dark because I had my eyes closed, and I opened them, and in the instant before I closed them again—because that hurt too, like the air was skinning my eyeballs—I saw stars. Think of the time in your life when you saw the heavens brighter than any other, and then magnify that by a thousand. That's what I saw.

When I opened them a second time, the stars were gone. I wasn't falling so fast, and the light around me was a milky grey. The landscape below me was like nothing I've ever seen, a huge rocky plain dotted with circles of boulders, and dark mountains in the distance. I knew then that the low hum was the land itself, chanting, but nothing there was alive.

And then I was nearer still, and I saw that what I thought were canyons were actually vast open mouths, and I started to scream but the rushing air tore the sound out of my throat.

I hit the ground, hard, and I was back in the shed. I hitched a breath, and it hurt my chest.

I scrambled back against the door and hammered at it until my hands were red and sore. Someone fumbled at the lock and the door opened and it was Mrs. Larkin, blinking at me.

“Thought I heard some commotion,” she said. “Them young 'uns lock you in here?”

“We were just playing.” I thought my voice would sound funny, broken, maybe, but it was normal and steady. I followed her out into the sun. The light hurt my eyes, and something was howling, only it wasn't outside—it was in my head. After that I don't know what happened because I guess I fainted.

When I came too, Mrs. Larkin was leaning over me, shouting about how I had heatstroke and she was going to kill those girls, so help her, she really was. She had dragged the hosepipe halfway across the yard and spraying me in the face with it, aiming for my mouth, I guess. The water tasted metallic and hot.

Mr. Larkin came lumbering across the yard, fat and sweaty and red, his belly stretching his white T-shirt and heaving out over his pants. He bent down and picked me up and carried me over to the bed of his rusty pickup. He asked me where I lived. I tried to tell him, but it was like my tongue was stuck to the roof my mouth.

“She's kin to that bunch over at Rock Branch,” Mrs. Larkin finally said.

The girls were nowhere to be seen.

Mr. Larkin threw my bike in after me. I was so embarrassed, I like to have died when they pulled up in my driveway in that nasty old truck, me laying in the back. Some of the kids playing on Angie and Ruth's swing set stopped what they were doing and came over to stare. I was glad my daddy wasn't there—he would've had some words with Mr. Larkin before he even bothered to figure out what was going on, and that would've been ugly. Things were bad enough as it was—when Mama first came out the door she thought they'd run me over. Just before they drove away, I heard Mr. Larkin say something about how we better not sue them on account of me falling out in their yard. I couldn't believe my ears. I wondered what kind of people they thought we were. Then I realized that him saying something like that, that told me what kind of a person he was.

After Mama calmed down I told her I didn't have heatstroke—I said I hadn't even fainted, just tripped and fell down in their yard, and she believed me, cause she said she smelled liquor on Mrs. Larkin's breath.

“I don't want you messing with those kinds of people,” she said. “Lucky thing your daddy's on the road right now.” She was always telling me that. He was a truck driver. Retired a few years back—forced into it, really, they said his health wasn't good enough to keep working—and then died six months later. I guess some people just weren't meant to lead an idle life. Mama always says his doctors were good as murderers. The world sure is full of weeping.

I went outside to play. I still felt funny, like I was hanging suspended someplace and when I took another step I'd be falling again. Most of the kids had wandered off, but Angie and Ruth were still out in their backyard.

“Saw your new friends,” Angie said. “Looked like trash to me.”

“Were not,” I said. “And they did so have indoor plumbing.”

“La-di-dah,” Angie said, “that's real fancy. Maybe they'll learn how to use it and take a bath next time. They looked dirty.”

I didn't answer her. My head hurt, and I was beginning to be a little bit afraid. I wondered if those girls were some kind of witches, even though my mama said that only Pentecostals and religious fanatics like Angie and Ruth's mama believed in things like that.

I wondered how I'd ever get to sleep again at night, with the image of those open mouths burned on my brain and that awful chanting in my ears and that helpless fall still stinging my flesh, like I'd never stop plummeting as long as I lived.

§

That might have been the end of it. School started, and I'd see Sheila there. She'd say hey to me, like locking me in the shed had never happened. She only ever mentioned it once, when I was working as a hall monitor during lunch. I was doing my math homework and I felt somebody standing over me.

“Back when you came to see us,” she said.

I put my pencil down and looked up at her.

“In the shed,” she said. “That was Danielle's idea. Me and Crystal, we didn't want to do it.”

I didn't say anything.

“Did something happen?” she said.

I said, in a voice as cold as I could manage, one I'd copied from Angie, “I got a bump on the side of my head from falling down in your backyard.”

Sheila stood there looking at me for another minute. I wanted to say something to her like Who do you think you are, looking at me like that? But you didn't dare talk to those girls that way.

She turned around and walked off without saying anything else.

We didn't have any classes together. I was in accelerated and she was just a general student. She was popular right at first. They all were. It was before the rest of the girls started turning on them, calling them whores and all. Even then, though, they were what my mama would've called real mature girls, disapproving, like a girl's loose morals were to blame if she had to wear a bra or got her period too young.

I tried not to think about them during the day. I couldn't help the dreams I had at night, falling into ancient landscapes of broken rock. Sometimes I woke myself up mumbling words I didn't know the meaning of.

It wasn't even Thanksgiving yet when people started whispering about them. Pretty soon you saw them walking down the halls alone instead of having a clutch of girls around them. Those three, they didn't act any different. They didn't seem like they cared about being outcasts.

And then Christmas came, with two weeks vacation, and I stopped thinking about them altogether. The night before we were suppose to go back to school, it snowed, big fluffy flakes. We don't see much snow around here and all of us kids about lost our minds. We had eight inches by the time I woke up the next morning and found out school was canceled. It was the biggest snowfall I'd ever seen. I was dressing to go out and play in it when somebody came hammering at the front door. Mama went to open it, muttering something about kids with no upbringing. I heard a raised voice, and Mama called my name.

Danielle was in our living room, talking on the phone. “It's one of them girls from the Rice place,” Mama said, like I wouldn't have recognized her. “Hysterical, and just about frostbit. Her mama's hurt and they ain't got a phone over there. She's calling for an ambulance now. Run and get Uncle Roger to drive her home.”

Uncle Roger was a truck driver, too, but he was always off on disability. Long hauls made his back act up. Angie and Ruth were in the front yard making snow angels and Angie sat up when I ran past them.

“Hey!” she hollered at me as I burst through their front door, “hey, that's my house and I say you can't just bust in there like that! Hey! You listening to me?”

§

Later on I found on Danielle had tried at two or three other houses before ours. She wasn't wearing a coat and her eyes were all wide and scared and still I imagined people saying, “It's one of them damn Larkin girls. Don't answer the door.” Everybody claimed they didn't hear any knocking. It makes you wonder about folks, it sure does.

When Roger brought his pickup truck around front I jumped into the cab next to Danielle, and she was so frantic nobody bothered to try and get me back out of there. Heading back to the Rice place we like to skidded in the ditch twice, and Danielle was still too upset to tell us what was wrong with her mama. I followed her and Roger into the house. The first thing we saw was Mr. Larkin standing in the middle of the room, the one that had the split sofa cushions and no television. He was wearing a shirt he hadn't bothered to button up, and he was crying.

Roger looked disgusted. “For God's sake,” he said, but Mr. Larkin didn't even hear him. “Where's your mama?” he said to Danielle.

We walked through the next doorway into the kitchen and Roger said, “Jessie, get back,” but it was too late. I'd already seen it: Mrs. Larkin, sprawled on the floor with her feet stuck out and her arms flung up over her head and her head all busted open. Sheila and Crystal were kneeling on either side of her, and like Mr. Larkin, they didn't seem to notice we were there.

I thought she was dead. I thought I could see a piece of her brain lying nearby. I couldn't, but that's how scared I was.

And then Crystal stood up and came over to me. “Come with me,” she said, and clutched at my arm. I looked over at Roger, but he was ignoring us, kneeling by Mrs. Larkin where Crystal had been. She pulled me across the kitchen—which still smelled like bacon, just like the first time I'd been there—and out the back door. We stood ankle-deep in the snow. Crystal leaned close to me and started to whisper.

“You have to promise me something,” she said. “I can't tell you what, but it’s something you don't care about now and won’t want when it comes to you.”

I said, “I promise.”

And then she told me unbelievable things.

§

They arrested Mr. Larkin. Later on, after Mrs. Larkin got out of the hospital, he was let go. They all went on living out there. Mama was always telling me to stay away from them, like I might forget. “You can't get mixed up in those kind of situations, Jessie,” she's say to me. “Folks like Mr. Larkin, they'll shoot you as soon as look at you. You don't run around with that Sheila at school, do you?”

I had to laugh. Sheila didn't have any friends left by then; none of them did. And everybody knew there was nothing worse than a bad girl. You couldn't fix a girl's reputation, for one thing. You'd feel sorry for that Mrs. Larkin, people said, if it wasn't for her being how she was. And they'd nod at one another when they said it, like some secret had passed between them.

I asked my mother what people meant by that.

“You know, baby. You've seen her.”

I wondered if they meant because Mrs. Larkin was a drunk. I just took to nodding seriously, too, when people said it to me.

§

Later on, after high school, when the Larkins were long gone and I was married to Steve, I stopped thinking about them. They were like a kind of old recurring dream, and most of the time I could only get at the edges of what had happened between us. Once or twice more of it would come back to me, and I tried to tell Steve about them.

“Mass hysteria,” he says to me.

“What?”

“When a lot of people get together, and some of them believe in something? It spreads like an infection, only it's all in their heads.”

“There wasn't no masses out at the Rice place, Steve, just me and those girls. You never listen to me.”

“Jessie,” he says, “you're so literal. Why are you like that?”

I said, “I don't know.”

“It doesn't have to be masses,” he told me. “It can just be two or three people.”

I didn't answer him. I think I know when I'm having hysteria and when I'm seeing something miraculous. I think I know the difference in what goes on inside and outside of my head.

Here's what I thought of saying to him, and didn't. “Mrs. Casey knew all about it, and she didn't think it was hysteria.” But it would have been a lie, even though she helped me in ways she never knew.

§

She's dead now, Mrs. Casey. Cancer, just before my Missy was born, actually. I went to her funeral. A lot of her old students did. She hadn't been that old; in fact, I'd been hoping she was one of the teachers my kids would have someday too. I was surprised to see her husband there—I never thought about her having one, despite her being a Mrs. and all. He looked like he didn't know where he was. I wondered if Steve would look like that if I died.

I had stayed after class one day to talk to her.

“Mrs. Casey,” I said, “remember that poem we read in here that time? About the stolen child? I think I know some.”

“Know some what, hon?”

I took a deep breath. “Stolen children.”

In the long silence after that, I wondered if Mrs. Casey was waiting for me to say something, like some kind of code word.

Then, “Jessie, honey, that's just a poem, based on Irish folklore. It's not real. There's no such things as fairies that steal children.”

“I know,” I said. I was thinking of pictures I'd seen in books, little pink fluttering things with wings. “They're not fairies. They're—I'm not sure what they are, but they were left in place of stolen human children, I guess, and they've been trying and trying to get back home again. Sometimes they find a doorway, and they mark it off with a circle of stones, but they can't so much as look beyond the doorway or they'll get stuck there, and who knows where they'll end up?”

I stopped when I saw the look on her face.

“Jessie...”

“It's just a dumb story,” I mumbled, “a story I was writing,” and I felt like I couldn't breathe, like I was falling again, as I grabbed my books and got out of there fast. After that Mrs. Casey gave me a lot of meaningful looks in class, like we had some kind of secret, and once she said, “Jessie, if you're ever looking for someone to read some of your writing—”

“I tore it up,” I said. “It was stupid. I don't like English, anyway.”

She looked so hurt. It was another lie; I loved her class. I told her at the funeral that I was sorry. I don't know if she heard me or not.

§

I remember those two and a half years of my life in pictures and feelings, not words, so it's hard to put down here the things I saw and heard. I followed the girls on long rambles through the woods where they spoke to one another in the language of birds. They knew how to make the earth bleed and the wind weep. They knew how to make my bones tremble.

I peered into doorways whenever they found that. My human blood let me cross boundaries and come back where they couldn't—at least, that's the way they explained it to me, and I never had any way to find out different. There were worlds inside of other worlds. Sometimes there was danger: one place was underwater, and I nearly drowned before they pulled me out; another was all burnt up air and molten ground, and tiny blisters erupted on my hands and arms before I could escape. For a week I had to wear long sleeves and keep my hands in my pockets around my mother.

There were colors and sounds that can't exist, smells that resembled nothing at all. You moved without using your limbs. You spoke without a tongue. You saw without eyes. You felt things in places underneath your skin and your blood sang out and your heart broke in two over and over again.

And finally, I found their home.

§

Even then, they couldn't leave right away. There were rituals and ceremonies. There were certain days and not so certain ones. There were moons to be observed and rites to be chanted.

I stayed away from them after that, in the year that followed. I felt like I was getting over a long illness. I had awful nightmares. My hair came out in handfuls. Sometimes I couldn't feel my arms or legs; sometimes at school everything would just go dark around me in the middle of class. My grades fell. I got so thin my mama started to worry about me, and fixed big Sunday dinners when it was just the two of us at home, trying to fill me out again.

Some teenaged boys disappeared that year, one from school, the others dropouts. Most people figured they were runaways. A few men, too; looked like they'd just up and left their wives and families. Nobody ever found out what happened to them. Sometimes, folks said, a man just takes it in his head to walk out that way. It's just in some men's nature.

By the start of my senior year of high school, Danielle and Crystal were both taking classes at the Bible college over in Hartwell. People thought that was real funny. One or two of the girls at school said they ought to get their daddies to call up the administration there and tell them about those girls, but it was all just talk.

Then Mr. Larkin died of what they said was a heart attack. Billy Clint at school, his brother was an EMT. “His face was all black and his tongue was stuck out like this,” Billy told us. They found him out in the woods, in back of the house. Sheila stopped coming to school after that. I heard something about Mrs. Larkin, and relatives in Spartanburg, but I never knew if she went there or the girls went there or what.

They used to laugh at the thought of how he'd die, flopping around like a fish, red-faced and gasping. “You think we're cruel,” Sheila said to me once. “Do you have any idea what it's like to go through this dead world and not feel anything at all except wanting to go home?”

I used to think they loved their mother, but they were only concerned about their own protection. He knew those girls weren't his, and she didn't. If anything happens to her, Sheila told me, he'll kill us.

I was worried about them then, but she reassured me. She said not to be afraid. She said, We'll kill him first.

Those girls, they didn't know right from wrong any more than a hungry bear would, or the rain, or a baby like Missy. Their consciences are quiet as the breeze cooling the night air just outside my window.

§

Missy was born on a bright May morning, pink and screaming like the dickens. Then those red curls started popping out all over her head and people teased Steve, saying, Lord, boy, you sure that ain't the milkman's daughter or something? She don't look a bit like you. Steve'd just laugh and say something like, don't you know there ain't been no milkman around here in thirty years?

When I first found out was pregnant with Missy, I didn't want another baby. And how could I have cared about her back when I made that promise to Crystal in the snow, back before I even knew she'd exist, someday? They trick you that way. They always do.

Not long after Missy's first birthday, me and Steve split up. It hurt worse than anything I could imagine, like he tore a piece out of me when he went out that door. I hated him and loved him all at the same time, you know?

I couldn't conceive then that an even worse loss was coming my way.

§

They left something in place of her. They pulled up the covers round it so at first it looked like she was still snug in bed sleeping. But it was nothing but a pine long, a piece of wood just like in the old fairy stories. Nothing magical about it. I cried when I saw the bark it had shed among the sheets where she'd slept. A single strand of her red hair against the pillow is all I have left, that and her smell lingering in her clothes.

I know the world is full of weeping. I know there's a hollow place inside of her chest or her stomach just waiting to be filled up with sorrow, sorrow she'll never know if I leave her there.

Ryan's been asleep for hours. It's late now. Close to midnight. Nobody's lived at the Rice place since the Larkins went away all those years ago. I still remember the lay of the land, if I close my eyes and pretend I'm dreaming. I can float like moonlight through the forest. By dawn we'll be back, me and her, cheek to cheek on her pillow long before Ryan wakes up.

I said I found their home; I didn't say what it was like there. I don't dare write about it here. Once I scribbled some notes about it but then I tore them into tiny pieces, and I burned some, and I drowned some, and I buried some, and I have some hidden but only bits, and I won't tell you where. I might whisper it back into the night as I go, where it will live in hollows of trees and swathes of grass and soft patches of dying leaves, swallowed by the earth and lost for good. At least, that's how it ought to be.