The big house was then sold to a wealthy Indiana family named Clemson, who used it for a summer getaway, and the cottage was rented to various people for various reasons. None of them stayed longer than a few years. Some were gone within a couple of months. The turnover was exceedingly high. In the 1950s, a family named Raskin moved into the cottage and stayed for some time longer than any of the previous inhabitants. They were a mother, a father, two sons, and one daughter. The daughter, Sybil, was the youngest and the only family member named in the archives. The father had died, according to a newspaper clipping where he was referred to as “Mr. Hill,” of a flu.
Two sons. Chloe looked up from the ledger of names and dates. Mr. Craft was busy elsewhere in the library. She remembered the dream she had had from the night before. Two boys fighting. One, the healthier-looking of the two, seemed to have a significant advantage, but the other, the skinnier and sickly looking one, was winning out of pure viciousness. The skinny one had beaten the other until the healthier boy was nearly unconscious and was being dragged down to No Hope Creek. The skinny boy was laughing. Giggling. The boy being dragged moaned and whimpered.
Then they were in the creek and the hurt boy was being held under. He was alert now and thrashing, but the other held him hard. Then a wiry-haired woman—their mother, it seemed—raced down the hill to the creek. She pulled the sickly boy off the other, screaming and shrieking.
Chloe shivered and brought in her shoulders, as if there were wings attached to them that might shield her from cold or harm.
At last, she came to it. The death of the crazy boy. She didn’t know which one of the boys it had been, and it seemed, neither did the town. He was just a child, after all, and children were never as interesting as adults. His death was listed as a suicide, yet from what Mr. Craft had told her, no one had even seen the boy or his body after he was tied up in the barn. No one knew for certain he was dead. But it made a good story.
Jeff had spent a lot of time in that barn. He was most likely in that barn or working on the well this moment. Jeff and Death.
After the boy’s suicide, there was no more mention of the Raskin family. They just disappeared. Not one word of their whereabouts. The big house emptied soon after and wasn’t inhabited again until Lana Pruitt bought it in the early 1980s. The cottage was then renovated for Rebecca’s playhouse, but no one actually lived there again until she and Jeff purchased it. They were already listed in the archives. They were the present and the past.
The only other odd happening on Bad Luck Hill was the tragic death of Rebecca and the disappearance of her father. The latter might not even be included on that list of the strange. For all anyone knew, Michael had left Lana and was as guilty of the child’s death as Chloe was beginning to suspect.
Chloe leaned back in her chair. Seven suspicious disappearances. An entire family of five and two of another. And everything within her vicinity.
She closed her eyes, remembering the dream. The skinny boy shook violently as his mother had rebuked him and she headed back to the cottage with his brother. He stood for a moment, staring at the stream in front of him. There would be a thrashing to come. He picked up the large-brimmed hat that had been knocked off during play, and then he turned and looked directly at the dreamer. He stared right at Chloe. And he grinned, eyes as big and bulging as two hard-boiled eggs. She had awoken with a catch of her breath.
Having discovered everything she could from the archives, Chloe approached the librarian, who was now back at the front desk. “I was noticing,” she said, “that the little girl is the only Raskin named in any of the papers. Is there a reason for that?”
“Sure there is,” Mr. Craft said, looking up at her with eyes urging gossip. “She was the only one any of the townsfolk knew by name. She was the only one who would answer when asked for it. At first. But that soon changed. It didn’t take long before she was as hush as the rest of them. That’s what I’m told. Yes. That’s just what the others tell me.”
***
Jeff tied the yellow rope around the strongest of the trees close to the barn. The barn itself, he decided, did not look as trustworthy as he first thought it was. He pulled on his thick working gloves to reduce rope burn and flipped on his cave helmet’s light. Using the rope and his climbing gear—a pick and his crampons—he would slowly crawdaddy down the well.
With a hop, he entered the mouth of the well. It was just narrow enough for him to safely and comfortably stretch out an arm and touch the opposite side. The shift in the air was immediate, a clinging, cold dampness. Every sound and scrape he made was amplified by the cavern below him. He imagined when it rained, before the well was covered by the slab and the stone, it had held a good deal of water. Now only the stones that it was constructed of showed any signs of wetness. Pebbles and the loose detritus that fell as he descended down the sides of the well did not hit water. Rather, they hit something solid.
A nausea and vertigo hit him, and he had to close his eyes to still himself. The truth was, he felt like a dog. As mangy and sick as one anyway. He scratched like he had fleas. His body was red with the marks. The unpleasantness was like that of a tarantula bite, only turned up. And he felt like something more was gnawing at him, like it had gotten inside and was now making a wreck of his guts and his head.
And then there was Chloe’s crack about not liking—no, the word was
hating
—where they were at. What did that mean? She was the one who had chosen the place, after all. But then,
he
was the one falling in love with it. It figured she would want to leave.
He lowered himself farther. Faint glints shone from well debris at the bottom. He was still too far up to see what lay in the gut of the well. Into the dark. Into the dark.
He was so ill. So fucking sick, tired, and ready to retch. He knew he had slept plenty the night before, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had woken up well-rested. He threw up acidic spittle, and it left a metallic taste in his mouth. He heard it smack the debris below.
Earth dwellers. Spiders and worms wriggled and crawled past him. Occasionally a spider would dart across his hand as he placed it on the wall for support. A scant and fleeting notion of paranoia swept over him, of spiders everywhere, watching him. Waiting for him to slip and become their meal.
He looked up. The light was slipping away, becoming a tiny sphere overhead. What if he fell? What if he didn’t have the strength to pull himself back up? Could he even be heard all the way down there?
He was sweating profusely. It stung his eyes and tasted dirty on his lips. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to be in the well.
What if he fell?
What if he screamed and screamed and Chloe never heard him? Or worse: what if she did but chose not to answer?
Death. Last night he’d had a dream about death. Ethan was trying to kill him by No Hope Creek. Ethan, the epitome of gentility, a fratricidal maniac.
Jeff was near the bottom now. His light caught a glint of something shiny. There wasn’t as much refuse as he had thought there would be. No great treasure that he could see at any rate. That was a bit disappointing. The air was thicker down there, and there was a stench, the primeval smell of earth.
He reached for the object that welcomed the helmet light, the first beam of brightness it had most likely seen in some time. It looked to be a little pony, crystal or blown glass. As Jeff touched it, the light exposed something else as well—a hand, badly decomposed. Jeff jerked away, nearly losing his traction on the wall. He adjusted the beam’s focus. Lying there at the bottom of the well, a crumpled and broken heap, was the body of a man. His face was a distorted nightmare, with a jaw that stretched as if in the midst of a scream. It watched in the direction of the glass pony, and also, it seemed, watched Jeff as well.
***
From the telescope on the widow’s walk, Lana had been watching Jeff stare down the well’s mouth for days. Perhaps he was gathering the courage to go into the dark. Though a deficiency of courage seemed highly unlikely given his choice of career. It seemed more plausible that he was daring whatever lay in the well’s depths not to match his own gilded imaginings.
When at last he did journey inward, burrowing into Bad Luck Hill, Lana watched with mounting anxiety. She did not know from where this sudden anxiousness came, but it rested around her as sure as the embrace of her own arms on her shoulders. Tighter and tighter. She held her breath to shallow rhythms until Jeff reappeared. He held nothing, but upon emerging, he sat on the edge of the well’s mouth and peered into the cavern, his headgear still bright and shining down. He did not move for some time, as still as the broken cherub in the garden.
It was getting later in the day. Lana found herself moving slowly down the stairs to the porch. Her teeth chattered and she clenched her jaw to stop them. She hurriedly searched the library for the small pair of silver binoculars given to her as a gift from a former director, the image of Jeff sitting on the well mouth held frozen in her mind. When she reached the porch, however, he was gone again. She sat down on a rocker, her back straight, her body alert, and kept watch.
What was it? Why was she so interested in what he was doing? Something was different about today. Something was coming. Her teeth chattered on and her flesh crawled. It was in the air. It was all around her.
Jeff hadn’t gone down the well again as Lana had thought. He came out of the house with what looked like a stiff sleeping bag. A stretcher. Again, something most likely familiar to him from his choice of career. The sight of it made Lana gasp aloud. She covered her mouth as if someone might hear her. What else would a stretcher be used for, she thought, but a body.
Lana was fascinated as she peered through the binoculars, making her way from the rocker to the edge of the porch, as Jeff fastened ropes to the strange white cot and lowered it down the well. He tied the rope to a different tree than the one he himself was secured to, and then slowly and carefully, he disappeared once more.
By this time, Lana was off the porch, treading through the uncut grass and onto the gravel road she had seen Chloe use so many times now. It was a good distance from the big house to the cottage for her, and steep. Somehow, the road felt colder and stranger than Lana had known it in her life. An ill wind rushed at her up the gradient. Soon she was as far away from her own home as she had been in twenty years. The sky was darkening and the waters were placid, a day ripe with frowns.
She stopped in the middle of the road in front of the cottage just as Jeff’s helmet light began piercing up and out of the well. A solitary beam of light coming from the core of the hill as focused as true intent. If the very mouth of Hell had opened up, Lana was certain this was what it would look like.
Jeff climbed out of the well with a violent cough, unaware of Lana standing just a few feet away, and he began to haul the cot up after him. It seemed a difficult task as he grunted and growled. The rectangular cot was dragging against the sides of the circular well, but at last it rose from the dark. Jeff carefully placed the cot on the ground in front of the well and folded back the covering that had kept its contents in place.
The corpse’s face, not completely gone of emotion, was enough to make Lana stumble. The shirt—a shocking blue button-up that Michael would never have bought for himself—rushed back to her in Christmas Day memories some thirty years past. And then she saw the little glass pony in his grasp…
Jeff had still not seen Lana. He crouched, studying the figure with his head lantern. The light added shades and definitions of horror. It was not until Chloe came out the back door that he finally noticed anything more about his surroundings.
“What did you find?” Chloe said. Then seeing Lana, she stopped short in surprise.
Jeff quickly stood and watched the actress as she struggled near the corpse of her husband, Michael. Jeff’s helmet light cast its spotlight on her.
Chloe neared slowly as well. “What’s wrong?”
And then she too saw the body and its condition, and she turned away with a shriek.
“He was in the well,” Jeff said in a near whisper. He wiped his forehead of sweat.
Lana bent and touched her husband’s tormented face gently. Then she took the pony from his grip. “You mean, you never left me?” she said, her voice a pitiful echo of a wind. “You were here the whole time?”
***
The actress stood with her rifle at her side as her husband was interred beside Rebecca in the garden. Chloe thought that the maimed cherub that guarded the little girl’s grave seemed balanced at last. Jeff and Chloe attended without being specifically asked. After all, someone needed to. A body so long lost with none of the respect due it, no fresh dirt to help send it back to the whole, needed some kind of special attention.
“We’ll plant him by Rebecca,” Lana had said with a voice of grief that was foreign to what Chloe had grown accustomed to hearing from the actress. Lana now spoke with a certain pride in her loss, a tangible amount of relief that Michael had not, as she had imagined for many years, left her. In seeing that, Chloe felt shame that she ever thought the woman could have had a hand in her husband’s death. She had thought just what the town of Wicker had wanted her to think. They’d needed her to feed them. To feed their fascination with the woman and the hill.