I pulled down chunk after chunk of straw, but still the blood flowed, creeping down the hay to be sucked into the dry ground.
Where was it? Surely I couldn’t have struck so deep, not even in my wildest fury. And why was it so unnaturally quiet? The wounded creature—animal or human—hadn’t uttered a sound. Not when struck. Not now in what must be an agonizing death. Why wasn’t it crying out in pain or shock? Shouldn’t it have shown itself?
Behind me the lantern flickered, casting long, wavering shadows across the birthing stall, as if the flame was being pushed about by an unfelt draft. I turned just in time to see the wick blow out, plunging me into darkness.
“Oh,” I whispered, finding my voice once more.
I reached into the pockets of Papa’s coat, fumbled about with sticky fingers before finding the little box of matches he kept there. Blindly I opened the lantern’s door, struck a match, and fed it the oiled wick.
The lantern sparked to life, lighting the room once more. I moved the lantern out of the draft and turned to the gruesome task at hand.
But the stall was clean.
The hay bale was still in ruined shreds—piles of discarded straw littered the ground—but there was no blood.
Anywhere.
Not seeped into the dirt. Not oozing from the stacks. Not even on me.
I pawed at Papa’s coat, checking deep into its folds and creases. It had been horribly stained just moments before but was now clean. The pitchfork looked pristine. There was nothing to suggest I’d ever stabbed anything.
“I don’t…” I wiped my fingers over my face, certain I would blink once and the massacre would return. “I don’t understand….”
Twice this morning I’d seen things one moment that were gone the next. I wanted to believe—I had to believe—the sleepless nights were to blame. Once the cakes were made, I wouldn’t have to worry over the sugar any longer and things could return to normal.
“Please, God, let them return to normal,” I whispered, clutching my fingers together so tightly, the tips turned white and tingly.
An unwelcome memory stirred in the back of my mind, like a thin cotton curtain caught in the draft of an open window. Just a wisp of a remembrance, truly. It wasn’t even my story to remember, only something I’d heard Papa speak of once, when he hadn’t known that Samuel and I were in the adjacent room, listening in.
A few harvests ago, Levi Barton—one of our neighbors to the south—had become convinced there was gold to be found in the caves along the Greenswold. He wandered off to search, leaving his wife, the farm, and the harvest. Days turned into weeks. The wife was beside herself, certain he’d fallen into a crevice. Search parties were sent out, but no one knew exactly where to look. After a week of scouring the caves, the people of the Falls gave up and declared him dead.
But then, one morning, Levi sat down for breakfast as though he’d only been gone for hours. His wife told other ladies in town that there was something peculiarly off about him. He was always muttering to himself, responding to questions no one had asked, staring into empty corners and nodding as if listening to someone who wasn’t there. Her friends told her not to worry—the caves must have been stressful, full of echoes and dark shadows. An overworked, overstimulated mind was apt to imagine all sorts of unusual things. Once rested, he’d be fine, they promised.
A week later her friends came visiting for tea and found the wife at the dining room table, a pickaxe lodged deep in her skull. Levi had slaughtered all their animals too, quick slits across the neck, and had left their bodies in stalls and out in the fields, festering with flies. Before the farmer had taken his own life, he’d left a message scrawled across the side of his barn, written in blood.
“THEY HAVE WATCHED AND I HAVE SEEN AND NOW I WILL SEE NO MORE.”
That phrase had haunted me, eliciting chilled shivers on even the hottest summer nights when it had inevitably popped into my head, always as I was on the cusp of sleep.
What had he seen?
Had Levi seen blood too?
The rustling noise came once more, snapping me from my thoughts. It sounded as if someone was crossing the loft above, stealthily on tiptoe. I grabbed the lantern and raced into the open area, keeping the light as high as I could.
It caught a dark form slipping between the posts, keeping to the shadows.
I hesitated for only a moment before climbing the ladder to the loft. If it was a hallucination, I had nothing to fear, and if someone was truly in our barn, they needed to be caught.
“Show yourself,” I called out, searching for movement. “I have a gun,” I lied. “Come out now and I won’t shoot.”
“Ellerie, don’t!” The voice came from behind a stack of old wooden crates not far from me. Though it was distorted and too highly pitched, I’d have recognized it anywhere.
“Sam?” I hissed. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on the supply run. You—” I stopped, coughing against the horrible, raw odor filling the loft. It smelled like the Kinnards’ pig farm on slaughtering day, coppery and biting and so terribly, terribly wet. Covering my mouth and nose did nothing to help mask it. “What is that?”
All I could make of Samuel were his eyes, reflecting the lantern’s glow and shining brightly even in the midst of the barn’s shadows. They looked too large for his head, panicked and stretched open wide. “They’re dead,” he whispered, and my heart plummeted into my gut.
I wanted to move, wanted to step forward and take Samuel’s hands in mine, but I was frozen with fear. It was Mama, I was sure of it. Though the idea was utterly preposterous—Sam couldn’t have made it all the way to the city and back in just a week’s time—in that moment, I was certain my mother was dead. “Who is?”
“All of them.”
Tears pricked at my eyes, blurring my vision. I’d never felt so impossibly small. “Papa too?”
“What? No!”
“I thought you meant…What did you mean? Who’s dead?”
“I—I’ll come out now and explain everything, but…please don’t scream, Ellerie. Just…please.”
I squinted around the glow of the lantern, trying to make sense of what I saw, trying to find my brother within the monstrous shape that crept forward.
“Oh, Sam,” I whispered, fighting the urge to flee.
The smell, that blackened, foul odor, was coming from him. From the viscera coating his clothing, his arms and chest. He was covered in it.
My eyes flickered over the streaks of red that had trickled down his face and dried there, unnoticed and unwiped. It couldn’t be his, not all of it. There was no way he’d be standing before me if he’d lost so much…