Tales to Keep You Up at Night

Amelia in the Attic

Amelia discovered the old book lying in a dark corner of her grandmother’s otherwise empty attic. Its paper jacket was missing—the cloth cover a faded red, almost pink. Embossed in silver on its side was a long title that appeared blurry in the dim light. Amelia was struck, however, by the bright white sticker at the bottom of the spine. Someone had typed numbers on it and adhered clear tape to keep it from falling off. She recognized the numbers. Dewey decimals. When Amelia flipped open the cover, she found a paper pocket glued inside, a blue card sticking crookedly out of it. Each line on the card had been marked with purple stamps—days, months, years—going back decades.

What was a random old library book doing up here?

Her grandmother had not resided in this house for a long time, and Amelia missed her with all her heart. If the last due date stamped on the card was correct, Grandmother would owe the library a hefty sum, unless library fines disappeared when you disappeared.

Amelia held the book up to the bulb at the top of the steep steps. The title on the spine glinted again in the light—clearer now. Amelia looked closer.

Tales to Keep You Up at Night.

The title was familiar somehow.

A shiver passed through her.

Grandmother had been interested in science and history and memoirs of writers and artists. Scary stories? Not so much. Amelia wondered if Grandmother had left this book up here on purpose.

When she turned to the steps, there was a skinny silhouette staring up from below. Amelia flinched, then blushed. It was Winter—her little brother. She hadn’t recognized him at first because yesterday, Mom had shaved his head after he’d wiggled during a haircut and her scissors slipped.

Amelia had come up to the attic in the first place partly because Win had been pestering her. Recently, he had lost both of his front teeth and had somehow taught himself a shrieking type of whistle that he alone thought was hilarious.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“None of your business,” she answered, brushing past him, keeping the book hidden at her hip.

“Want to play a game?”

“I want to be alone.”

“But I’m boo-oored,” Win whined.

“You could help Mom and Mama with Grandmother’s things.”

“Never mind!” he yelled, and took off running down the hallway.

In the ancient house, his every footfall felt like an earthquake. She shut her eyes and let out a long breath. Winter had only been a piece of the reason she’d sought out the attic. The night before, Amelia had dreamed she met with Grandmother up there. She couldn’t remember much of what happened in the dream. Only bits and slices. But she did remember the dream feeling intense enough that it made her wish to come up and explore.

Was that why the book felt familiar? Had she seen it in the dream?

Downstairs in the foyer, cardboard boxes lined the walls. Amelia’s mom was placing paper-wrapped parcels into one of them, and her mama was in the kitchen, pulling dishes off the shelves and lining them up on the countertop.

“What have you got there?” Mom asked.

“An old library book.” An idea struck Amelia. A way to escape her brother for the afternoon. Keeping her voice low so Win couldn’t hear, she added, “I’m going to go return it.”

“Good idea, sweetheart,” Mom answered distractedly. Amelia’s family had been at Grandmother’s old house all weekend, preparing for its sale. Her mothers were both running on fumes. “The library is just down the street.”

“I know where.”

“Take Win . . .”

Amelia opened the front door and slipped outside, pretending to not hear. A brisk breeze mussed her long hair. She zipped up her green canvas jacket, clasping the faded hardcover to her chest.

“Look both ways!” Mama called out from down the hall.

“I will!” Amelia promised.

The door swung shut as Win peeked from the top of the stairs.

***

Down the sidewalk.

Around the corner.

Amelia skipped over the cracks in the concrete, concerned slightly about that old rhyme and her mothers’ backs. You know the one. Then she paused and considered what might happen if she decided to not be so careful.

Amelia was hiding a secret anger, something she hadn’t even shared with her best friends, Scotty and Georgia. She hated that Mom and Mama were clearing out Grandmother’s house, that they were going to sell it. What if Grandmother came back a year after she’d disappeared to find the place empty, her memories discarded? Wouldn’t that only make the time she’d been away from everyone who loved her even harder? Amelia wouldn’t share her frustration with her mothers. Whenever they came to a decision, they stuck with it, no matter what anyone else said, especially she and Winter.

The question of Grandmother’s whereabouts had haunted the family since she’d gone missing. One year earlier, Grandmother was supposed to have arrived for lunch at Amelia’s family’s home, a few towns over, but she’d never shown up. When her mothers went looking for Grandmother, they found her car in the driveway and her house in perfect condition. But there was no sign of her and no clues to where she had gone. The police visited over and over, asking a bunch of questions that the mothers kept from the kids. Amelia begged to know what they’d thought was going on.

Mama and Mom had told Amelia and Winter that Grandmother might have been secretly struggling with a health issue. Dementia, they called it. They’d explained that as certain people grew older, sometimes they became confused. Their brains got sick. Betrayed them. Their memories failed. Sometimes they couldn’t recognize loved ones. If they weren’t under proper care, sometimes they wandered off.

Mama and Mom were certain dementia was the answer. But Amelia wasn’t so sure. Shouldn’t there have been some kind of a clue that Grandmother had been ill? Grandmother had known who Amelia was during a visit the week before the disappearance, and her memory had been perfect. She could recall events from her childhood as if they’d occurred only yesterday. As far as Amelia knew, Grandmother hadn’t once gotten lost walking, shopping, hiking, or driving to pick up her grandkids for an overnight.

The scary thing, they said, was that in Grandmother’s town, there was a creek whose banks rose high during storms. Sometimes, the muddy water rushed ferociously, carrying away fallen branches and bug-eaten tree trunks. Things that sometimes never turned up again.

The search had been extensive. There’d been MISSING posters attached to telephone poles and hung in store windows. Grandmother’s photograph even appeared on the local news. The photo they used was one in which Amelia had also appeared. In it, the two were hugging, their wide smiles crinkling the corners of their eyes. When they showed it on TV, they’d cropped Amelia out, which hurt.

It made her feel like they’d cut off a piece of her body.

Amelia’s anger had sparked a couple months ago, when she’d overheard her mothers speaking late one night after lights out. Mama had been crying in the living room, and Mom was trying to comfort her. They’d said things like, I’m tired of this . . . Want it to be over . . . Just like my father . . . Time to move on . . . Not coming back . . . That night they’d made the decision to sell Grandmother’s house. Having strained to listen until the mothers fell asleep, Amelia lay in bed, trying to control her ragged breath, staring at the ceiling until the sun came up.

***

Part of wanting to take the book back to the library had been to escape the slow packing up of Grandmother’s life.

Head held high, she walked by the grocery store and the lunch place and the hardware store and the Victorian inn that reminded her of the house in that movie about the family of witches who’d been cursed by an ancient ancestor. The one where the women would leap off the roof every Halloween and float gently to the ground. In the town where Grandmother had lived, many of the buildings were partially covered in creeping ivy, and at this time of year, their leaves always turned a vibrant red and flickered gently in the wind as if to say Watch out. Amelia thought she heard Winter whistling. She winced and turned to look for him. When the sound came again, she realized it was only a bird.

***

One strange thing no one ever wished to discuss was that Grandfather had gone missing a decade prior, in a similar manner. Just one day, gone. Amelia had been a baby, so she didn’t remember. Back then, no one had wanted to admit that Grandfather had just run off. They’d said he was not that type of man. What type was that? Amelia often wondered.

Just like my father, Mama had said. Had she been talking about the raging creek waters? Dementia? Both? Or maybe she’d meant something completely different . . .

Something she was keeping secret . . .

Amelia comforted herself by thinking that maybe Grandmother had gone looking for Grandfather.

Maybe they were together now. Safe and sound.

Not dead. Neither of them.

Amelia refused to believe that.

***

A sign for the library stood beside the road. A lush green lawn rolled out before a stark white building. From here, the library looked like a small cottage. A path of stones led across the yard from the sidewalk, each one sunk deep into the grass, as if the earth were trying to devour them. Amelia hopped from stone to stone imagining that the grass was lava and if she were to trip, the earth would devour her too. She caught herself and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Don’t, she scolded. How would she ever join the yearbook crew next year if the kids at school mocked her for doing nonsense like this?

Grow up, Amelia . . .

Opening the library’s skinny door, she realized that the building appeared to be bigger on the inside than had been noticeable from the street. Beyond the front desk, several doorways opened onto rooms filled with endless shelves stuffed with books, a long straight corridor leading to a room at the back, and two sets of stairs, one of which went up to a second floor while the other descended into shadow. Amelia felt an urge to wander, to pluck a book from a shelf, to sit and read for a good long while—long enough to forget about what Mom and Mama were doing up at the house. Was it a good idea? Her mothers would be busy for another few hours at least, and the longer Amelia kept her distance, the less likely she’d be to snap at Winter for some dumb thing or another.

At the desk, a thin woman with thick round glasses glanced up. Her black hair was streaked with gray and pulled into a short ponytail. She wore a gauzy brown dress that looked like it had been constructed from the faded floral wallpaper in Grandmother’s powder room off the kitchen. A plastic card hung from a black lanyard around her neck. It read: Mrs. Bowen, Librarian. The woman’s age seemed slippery. She might have been thirty. She might have been fifty.

Amelia approached, holding out the library book. “Excuse me,” she said. The librarian’s suspicious eyes were enormous behind those lenses. “I found this in my grandmother’s attic.” Amelia laid it on the desk. “It was due a long time ago.”

The librarian picked up the book and looked at the spine. She opened the cover and saw the card in the paper pocket. “A long time ago indeed,” she said, puzzled. Glancing at Amelia, she asked,
“And who is your grandmother?”

“Susannah Turner.” Speaking the name aloud, even at a whisper, made Amelia all tingly, as if it were a spell that might bring her back. She made a mental note to do it more often.

The librarian sighed. “I’m so sorry for your loss, honey. Oh, how we miss her here.”

Amelia flinched. What loss? she wanted to say. “That’s okay,” she replied instead. “She’s been gone for over a year now.” The worried look on the librarian’s face made her wish she’d kept that to herself, and yet, there was something satisfying about making an adult uncomfortable. “My moms are packing up the old house. Time to sell, I guess. I wish we could move in. Keep it for her in case she . . .” The librarian’s eyes widened. This was the wrong direction to take, Amelia realized. She backtracked, “It’s just, the house is so big. So much to explore.”

The librarian smiled. There. Better. Grown-ups loved hearing about the curiosity of kids. “I remember. Your grandmother invited me to quite a few dinner parties. Such a lovely lady,” the woman finished, as if Amelia hadn’t said a word about what may or may not have been her grandmother’s tragic ending. Amelia chewed at her lip. This was a hard part—the listening as other people made judgments and drew their own conclusions.

Sudden sadness brushed softly against the inside of Amelia’s skull. She focused on the book again in case some of that emotion tried to find its way out. “I don’t have any money to pay a fine. I just wanted you to have it back.”

The librarian shook her head. “Well, that’s very nice, dear, but your grandmother’s book isn’t from our library.”

Amelia was confused. “Are you sure?” As soon as she said it, she felt her face flush.

The woman ran her finger along the embossed title. “Tales to Keep You Up at Night. I read this when I was your age.” She shuddered, looking suddenly much older than Amelia had first thought, maybe even as old as Grandmother. “If we ever had a copy, I’d remember.” Wearing a wistful squint, she handed the book back to Amelia. “Gosh, I wish I could read it again for the first time. Maybe your grandmother wanted you to have it.”

A flash of the dream from the previous night. Grandmother in the attic, stepping from the shadows, holding the book out. Opening the cover. Showing Amelia something written on the first page . . . But what had it said? In her memory of the dream, the words blurred, the letters shifted, transformed, shifted back.

Amelia stared at the silver title on the spine again, imagining what was concealed between the bindings. Tales . . . She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She’d never ventured into these kinds of stories before. Lately, she’d been obsessed with biographies. Shirley Chisholm. Eleanor Roosevelt. The female pharaoh, Hatshepsut. Joan of Arc. And her namesake, Amelia Earhart. But if Grandmother had wanted her to read it—and Amelia did feel like her dream had been a visit from Grandmother, wherever she was—shouldn’t she try? “Are the tales very creepy?” Amelia asked.

“Kept me up at night.”

Amelia felt nervous but also curious. Did she want to be kept up at night? Wondering where Grandmother had gone had kept Amelia up more nights during the past year than she cared to count. She thought of how the two of them would make tea in the afternoons, steeped strongly, with lots of honey and milk. Of the walks they’d take on mornings when Amelia was lucky enough to wake up at the old house after nights filled with card games and dominoes. Of Grandmother’s clothes that had been semi-stylish maybe twenty years prior, pastel cardigans and thin turtleneck sweaters and polyester pants with creases so sharp they could cut paper, her hair high and tightly curled, done at the hairdresser weekly. She thought of the house up the hill where her parents were working so diligently, and how it would soon be empty.

Amelia rubbed at her eyes. Was it possible that Grandmother had read this book? If Amelia read it too, might they be connected again? Could it be that stories stretched across the distance that separated them, however far that was?

“Is there somewhere I can sit for a while?” Amelia asked.

“Feel free to take a look.”

“Thanks.” Amelia hugged the book to her chest again, then strolled past the circulation desk. Without turning, the librarian lifted a hand, gave a wave, and went back to her work.

Down the corridor, Amelia found a small room with two wooden desks and a view out the rear of the library. Orange and yellow leaves turned the afternoon’s sunlight into a dim, stained-glass glow that spilled onto the wide floorboards. Beside the desks, a couple of comfy-looking leather chairs sat, a coffee table between them. Amelia plopped into one of them, opened the book she’d found in Grandmother’s attic, and with a deep, shaky breath, turned to the first story.


Moll’s Well


There are many ways a story can echo through time.
For Moll Bowen, tales of her own family resonated in her mind long into her elder years, mostly as a result of a book she’d carried from the old country—a stiff, leather-bound thing whose yellowed pages would crinkle whenever she opened it. Inside were names and dates and histories going back generations. More importantly, some might argue, there were recipes for remedies and tinctures and poems (the earliest Bowens had called them spells, but Moll never spoke of such things).

Believe it or not, there once were days, years, decades, and centuries when physicians were scarce, and so folk came to depend on women and men like Moll and her family. In secret, villagers would visit the old woman’s home up on Zion Hill and ask for help with love, money, and health (and sometimes, even, revenge). Moll was always happy to oblige, but for a price, of course. Though the bits of coin, slaughtered hares, pheasants, and bunches of turnips, greens, and beans were welcome, more important to Moll were words of appreciation—acknowledgment from her patrons that her skills were indispensable and unparalleled; she wanted to know that she had truly helped them, for that was what she cared most about. In this way, Moll came across as prideful, but so effective were her services, the people were more than pleased to pay her small sums and offer those slight phrases of gratitude.

The Bowens had long been known as practitioners (of a sort), and Moll had forever looked forward to passing her knowledge (her tales, remedies, and poetry) to her offspring, and to her offspring’s offspring.

Little did she know, however, how drastically the circumstances in the nearby village would change before she’d have her chance . . .

***

There are many ways that stories can echo through a community.

Wives whisper to husbands. Children share at school. Preachers bellow to congregations. Writers publish in papers. Some folk even believe that stories can travel through dreams.

Whatever the manner, tales of the Bowens twined the area swiftly, taking hold of suspicious minds. Locals spoke of the strange family with such frequency that lore sprang up around them and their house and the nearby woods, like the water from her well that old Moll would use for her tinctures and broths. To cure a cough. To steady vision. To unbreak a heart. Moll’s Well, as it came to be known, was filled with the sweetest, purest water one might wish to sip. No other natural spring in the area came close to the taste of the groundwater under Moll’s property, which only added further to the legends of her cures.

Sometimes, from the window of her cottage, Moll watched the sons of prominent locals sneak to the stone structure that her own sons had dug out and constructed decades earlier. Daring one another, the young trespassers would lower her bucket and steal huge gulps, hoping the liquid would bring them extra luck. Moll never minded; she believed that if one were lucky enough to be blessed with such a gift as sweet water, one must share it. What Moll didn’t expect was that the boys would bring home stories about Moll’s intense stare from behind the darkened glass of her home—a look they believed was a scowl.

The people began to call her the witch of the woods. They said she had powers acquired from living close to several mysterious boulders, inventing tales that these massive alabaster rocks were remnants, crumbled from the walls of paradise, which had been blasted apart far and wide after a trickster serpent had caused the fall of Humanity. Moll felt it was a preposterous notion (to anyone with a lick of logic), but its roots dug deeper the more the story’s seeds were watered. So, even though preposterous notions made up the bulk of Moll’s daily bread, their roots began to choke away her steady stream of customers until the people who visited were few and far between.

Rumors echoed. Over time, the echoes clamored. Lore spread that the Bowens visited you in dreams and made you see things that were not there, that Moll communed with inhuman spirits of the forest, working with them to exact the magic she needed for her garden, her recipes, her words. People came to believe that even the well was magicked, either by the alabaster boulders out in the wood or by Moll’s own will.

When the echo of these rumors reached Moll’s own ears, she wrote to her children and grandchildren, who lived miles across the rolling hills. In her letters, she confessed fears that a change was coming, something big, and she asked if her family would venture home to help. So worried was she that she planned, on their return, to hand off her family’s book of shadows—the one containing tales of the Bowen legacy, with its tincture recipes and stories and poems and family tree trunks, branches, and stems.

Her children were due to arrive on Moll’s ninetieth birthday. October was her daughter. November and December were her sons. Each of them were solid of body, if not mind, but what all of them shared most strongly was a love for the woman who had raised them.

Moll spent those last few days of peace listening from behind the shuttered windows for the squeaking turns of wooden wheels and the huffing breath of horses. She went so far as to arrange a type of alarm—jingle bells attached to string tied to low saplings around her property so she’d know if anyone was approaching.

You see, earlier that week, a man had come to the village—a man who’d heard those same echoes of rumor and who was determined to do something about them.

About Moll.

The man’s name was Turner, and he was known far and wide as the Judge, as the law had given him authority to mete out justice to those whom he determined deserved it.

And so, on her birthday, when Moll finally heard those wooden wheels and huffs of horses’ breath, the visitors were not the ones for which she had hoped.

Bells rang out. Jingle-jangle. Jingle-jangle. Moll hobbled to the window.

The faces in the yard were mostly familiar to Moll except for the tall, pale man wearing the black suit and wide-brimmed hat. His eyes were piercing and dark, and at first glance, they sent waves of fright through Moll’s frail frame.

This man was the change she’d warned her children about, she knew now.

Turner called her name, his voice booming through the woods, rustling crows from the branches, scattering them frantically into the wind cawing together like an alarm. Moll stepped out onto her stoop, taking in the crowd. The folk who used to come to her for help were now wearing darker expressions. She was tempted to acknowledge each of them by name, the Spencers, the Fullers, the Carvers, the Brewsters, the Martins, the Winslows, and the Hathornes, to let this imposing new man know of their bonds, but she worried that this would only put these people, whom she believed to be good--hearted (if only deep down) into danger.

The Judge nodded to some of the men. They seized old Moll. Then he motioned to others who pushed past her into the cottage. One emerged moments later with Moll’s book in hand, raised high overhead. “Here it is!” this man shouted. “Proof of her pact with darkness!” The crowd erupted in cheers and jeers, spewing words of hate and spite and hypocrisy.

The Judge glanced through the pages, then squinted up at Moll. “Does this belong to you?” he asked.

Moll’s mouth was so dry, she could barely spit out an answer. She gave a nod. “The book has long been the property of my family.” She coughed, then begged the men to release her so she could drink of her well, its stones protruding from the earth, half hidden by the shadows beside her home.

The Judge shook his head. “I think not.” He approached the structure that was holding her attention, and with nary a consideration, tossed Moll’s book into the deep hole.

Her heart dropped a moment later as a resounding splash echoed forth from the well’s mouth.

The Bowen family’s history. Their knowledge. Gone. In the wink of an eye.

“Take her,” said the Judge.

As the men (whom she had once considered good neighbors) dragged the old woman down the path toward town, Moll managed to look back at the small cottage where she’d been lucky enough to raise her family.

If only they had arrived in time.

This was the last moment Moll would ever see her home.

Her true home.

***

The trial was swift, Turner’s judgment brutal.

Moll was to hang that very evening, from a hastily built gallows in the village square.

You may have heard of fates similar to poor Moll’s. At this point in our tale, you must understand why. Stories echo through time. Sometimes stories become distorted, but sometimes they are as fresh as when they first were spoken. Since the beginning, there have been countless people in Moll’s circumstances—accused, convicted, jailed, hanged, burned, forgotten—people who have been transformed into villains because, more often than not, the people who tell the stories are the ones who did the accusing, the convicting, the hanging, and the burning. The ones who lived. If these stories don’t favor the accusers, then the accusers are the ones who force the forgetting.

But echoes linger in darkness. In whispers late at night from corners of bedrooms. In dusty, out-of-print volumes. In handwritten journals with cracked, yellow pages.

Later, Judge Turner may have wished that his conviction of Moll Bowen had been one of the tales that died on the wind.

As the men of the village led the old woman up the wooden steps, as torch fire made harsh light lick across her terrorized countenance, something occurred that gave rise to an enduring legend. From out of the shadows surrounding the square, a dozen or so figures stepped, holding rifles and blades that glinted in the flame. As Moll noticed her family, a grin spread her cracked lips and made them bleed. She gave the pain nary a thought; she knew she was saved.

Judge Turner tried to warn off October, November, December, as well as their spouses and their children, but the Bowens would not listen, not until the noose was removed from around the matriarch’s throat and Moll was safely encircled by them.

“You dare touch our mother,” a thin man with a black beard called out from the new group. He was Moll’s son November. “And on the ninetieth anniversary of her birth?”

“What a party you all have thrown,” said a solid gent, whose smile gleamed white, even as his eyes showed death. This was Moll’s other son, December.

“There is no escaping judgment!” Turner bellowed as the villagers backed away from the gallows and the family perched above them, watching, as if collecting faces, collecting names. When Turner saw the villagers’ fear, he changed tack and quieted. “Leave her be,” he reasoned with the Bowens, “and I shall consider leniency when your own time comes to stand before me.”

“You will not find her,” said a tall woman in the group. Moll’s daughter, October. “You will not find us.”

Judge Turner spun on the villagers. “We must stop them!”

But the people of the village would no longer listen. Moll’s children standing up for her had shamed the villagers, forced them to recognize their cruelty and remember the help she had offered their families over the course of her extraordinarily long life.

The Bowens edged away from the rope and to the shadows, but a moment before they would have disappeared into darkness, Moll stopped them. She faced the Judge and called out in a harsh whisper, her voice like the crunching of footsteps through brush, “May your thirst be quenched.” She looked to the crowd. “May all your thirst be quenched.”

As a gust of wind came whipping down the hill, the torch fires flickered nearly out, and when the light was restored, the people saw that the family was gone.

***

Because of the deep and sweet well, old Moll’s property on Zion Hill became desired by most everyone in the area. The man who came to own the place, however, happened to be the same who had driven her from it.

Turner tore down the poor stone cottage and replaced it with a grand mansion, which he called the Manse. He moved there with his wife and children. What pleased him most was the acquisition of Moll’s Well and the pure water contained in its depths.

Moll’s final wish for him seemed to have come true. May your thirst be quenched. He never wanted for a drink another day in his life. What seems like a blessing, however, sometimes ends up a curse, especially when uttered by someone who’s been wronged. Shortly after the last shingle was laid on the Manse’s roof, Turner’s wife found the Judge, bloated and blue, at the bottom of Moll’s Well, his stomach and lungs filled to bursting with that once--sweet water.

No one knew what had happened. Had he slipped? Or had someone pushed him?

Over time, stories about the Judge’s death continued to echo like voices calling from the bottom of the well. Children in the village spoke of strange happenings on the famed hill, especially after the Turners lost their fortune and abandoned the Manse, leaving it to rot and tumble down, as nature returned to Zion in the stead of old Moll, who had never been allowed. These tales did not stop the children from visiting, especially in the dead of night, when moons peaked in the sky overhead.

Years after the death of Judge Turner, a brother and sister decided to climb the hill and locate the well. They’d heard tell of curses and death, and as children are wont, they desired to see about it for themselves.

They left home when their parents were asleep. The village was more populous than before. Roads were wider so wagons could travel more efficiently. Though the brother and sister had no wagon, nor horse, under the light of the moon they made their way toward the old Bowen-Turner property. Listening to the night’s cricket song and the percussive crunching of larger, furred hunters through the dry forest scrub, they paused every now and again, uncertain if something out there was listening to them too.

Finally, they found what they’d come for. The Manse’s roof was bowed now, and some of the slate had slid away, showing dark holes that gaped up at the sky, as if in awe. Though the grass of the yard was tall, wavering in a weak breeze, no trees grew around the old house, as if they did not wish to spread roots through cursed soil.

The boy pointed toward the circular pile of stones a couple dozen yards from the building’s foundation. The ruins of Moll’s Well still stood. The tale he had heard from an uncle, who was prone to sharing things with the children he probably should not have, was that anyone who chanced glancing into the well on a bright night like this would gaze upon a reflection that was not their own.

The girl took her brother’s hand, and together, they tromped through the grass, breaking stalks and leaving deep boot prints, daring the ghosts of the old place to scold them. She was the first to reach the piled stones. The edge came up to her hips. She placed her hands on the lip, but instead of peering down, she looked to her brother, who was hesitating to join her there. “Are you a fraidy-cat?” she asked.

Younger by a year, the boy was determined not to show the fear that seized him. “Shush,” he whispered, mirroring his sister’s stance—hands on the stones, hunched over, ready to test the veracity of Uncle’s tale. The boy looked into his sister’s eyes. Her wide gaze gave away her own terror.

Why did we come here? he suddenly wondered. Who would tell their story if neither of them made it home again? Right then, he wanted more than anything to make it home again. He’d heard that the Bowens had never left the town, that they’d only moved deeper into the forest . . . that they were the ones who’d pushed Judge Turner over the edge of these very stones.

What must it have felt like tumbling into darkness? Hitting limbs and scalp and skin on the walls as you went down, down, down? He’d heard that the Bowens were evil, but then he remembered what the villagers, what the Judge had done to the family, and he wondered who were the evil ones.

Were the Bowens really capable of magic? Could they visit your dreams? Build doorways from their house to yours simply by scribbling some arcane symbols and writing their names on the walls? Command creatures that come from other, darker realms? Attempt to live on eternally? Or were these stories made up by guilty people who wanted to control what future generations thought of the scorned family?

Were these stories merely echoes, distorted by time . . . and the tellers?

If the Bowens still lived . . . what would they feel when those echoes reached their own ears? Would they ignore them? Or might they embrace the tales, make them true somehow, as if they were capable of a new kind of revenge upon those who would corrupt their legacy?

Something splashed.

Something in the water below.

Don’t look, said a voice in the boy’s mind.

But then his sister began to count. “One . . . two . . .” And he knew it was too late. They were here. They had to go through with it, no matter the consequences. “Three!”

Together, they peered into the well.

At first, the boy saw nothing. But then, the far ripples quieted, and the moon, which was just overhead, solidified in the reflection. A great, glowing orb. Soon, he could see his own face, and the face of his sister staring up. It was not so different from the looking glass at his mother’s bedroom vanity.

His uncle had been incorrect. There was no curse. For all the boy knew, there had been nothing to the story of old Moll and Judge Turner and this property and this well. Just because someone tells you a tale and says it’s true doesn’t make it so. He wondered: Is there a word for when you feel both disappointment and relief at the same time?

The boy was about to back away, when his sister stifled a gasp and then pressed her hand on top of his own. It was then that he saw it.

Down at the bottom of the well.

Reflected in the still water.

The dark figure rising up behind them, faceless, as it blocked out the light of the moon.

The boy tried to turn. To see. But cold fingers clutched his shoulders, ragged nails scraped his skin. There was a shove and a shift of weight, and before he could stop it, he felt himself falling forward, into the mouth of stones. He dangled there for a moment, the waist of his pants catching on a rough piece of mortar, and he waved his hands, helplessly, as he watched what was happening in the reflection below.

The figure grew taller behind him, blacker than the night sky. In one brief glint, it seemed that a smile appeared where a smile might have been. He was sure then he would learn what it was to tumble down, down, down.

But then his pants cinched. His sister yanked him back. And together they settled into the tall grass, arms wrapped around each other, as they heaved breath. Then, looking quickly around the clearing, they saw that they were alone. No dark figure was near. None that they could see anyway. If anyone had smiled at them, the boy knew now, it had been down in the depths of that hole. The Judge, he was certain, had punished them for disrespecting the place where he’d perished.

Later, after they had rushed down the hill into the village, and stumbled almost blindly back into their own yard, the boy realized that his sister had her own version of what had happened. “The witch,” she whispered quietly so their parents would not wake. “She almost got us.”

“It wasn’t the witch,” the boy argued. “There never was a witch. The person who pushed me was the Judge.”

“No way it was the Judge. Why would a good man turn bad after he died?”

“Because he was never a good man?”

The siblings realized then that the argument would have no resolution. To continue on would only lead to their parents discovering them standing in the moonlight. But the question remained even as they slipped into bed: Whose face had reflected up from that dark water? The Judge? Or the witch? And which of them had tried to shove the boy down, down, down?

As they grew older, each of the siblings repeated the story of what happened that night to any child willing to listen. Their stories echoed through generations, changing with each new teller, so that when it reached the current time, the one in which you live, neither of the tales could be said to be true anymore . . . as if they ever were.

As time and space can distort both echoes and stories, what is important to note is that both must begin with a voice.

Sometimes that voice sings a song, whispers a secret, chants a rhyme.

Sometimes the voice shrieks in pain. Or fear. Or joy.

Sometimes the voice accuses. Condemns. Apologizes.

Sometimes the voice (the echo) changes, and thus, the story with it.

When that voice belongs to you, be warned. For once you tell a tale, you cannot take it back. And you might be surprised by what a story, set loose in the world, can do.