What Sleeps in Harrow Hollow: What The Sheriff Knows

The brass bell above the sheriff's office door had not rung in years, but Margot Renfield set it swinging anyway with a sharp pull. The sound came thin and corroded, a complaint from metal that had forgotten its purpose. Behind the counter, a deputy whose name she could not recall looked up from a crossword puzzle, startled, then looked down again when he recognized her face. He did not greet her. He did not need to. The whole of Harrow Hollow had learned to flinch from Renfields the way foxes flinch from lanterns.

She crossed the worn parquet in four strides, boot heels striking the floor in a rhythm that announced her before her shadow did. The air in the station carried the staleness of old radiators and weaker coffee, paper yellowed at the edges, a faint suggestion of something chemical from the back office. Behind a frosted glass door marked SHERIFF, a shape moved. A chair creaked. A drawer opened and closed with the reluctance of old wood.

Calvin Thatch appeared in the doorway. He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders, with hands that looked made for ploughing and indeed had been. A coffee stain darkened his tie. His eyes, pale blue beneath brows like hedgerows, settled on Margot without warmth and without hostility. He carried a file folder in one hand and a mug in the other. Steam still rose from the mug. The file he set on the counter behind him, out of her reach, before she could read its label.

"Miss Renfield." His voice was unhurried, shaped by the same dales that had shaped hers, though where hers ran quick and bright his ran slow and heavy. "I wondered when you'd come."

She did not soften. Softness was a luxury she had surrendered somewhere between the city newsroom and her aunt's empty kitchen, between Darrin Quill's last message on her answering machine and the silence that had swallowed him since. Her mouth set itself in a line that had cut through editors and politicians in a former life.

"Three days." She held up fingers, counted them off. "Friday night, Darrin Quill walked out of the Black Hound after closing. He told the barman he was heading to the lakeshore to get some air. He never arrived home. His wife hasn't heard from him. His dog is sitting on the porch waiting. And your deputy, when I called Friday at midnight, told me to wait until Monday."

Calvin Thatch took a slow drink from his mug. The pause was deliberate, a wall built one brick at a time.

"It's Sunday morning, Miss Renfield."

"Don't." The word came out harder than she intended. She let it stand. "Don't give me procedural courtesy. I've been on the other end of that tone before, and I know what it hides."

He lowered the mug. Something shifted in his expression, not quite concession, not quite amusement, the look of a man who had shepherded livestock through worse storms than a woman with a chip on her shoulder. He set the mug on the counter and came around to stand in front of her, at a distance that was neither intimate nor dismissive.

"I've known Darrin Quill since he was a boy," he said. "Stubborn as his da. Softer hearted, though. He'd not vanish without telling his Eileen. You have my word that I'm looking."

"Your word." Margot tasted the phrase and found it bitter. "Your word is what the council gave the Whitfield girl, isn't it? Before she walked into the trees and never came back. Your word is what they gave Tom Voss before he went missing from the boat launch. Your word is what they gave Elsie Marchant before she drowned in three inches of water."

The deputy at the crossword had stopped pretending to fill in squares. He held his pen motionless over a blank box, eyes fixed on some safe middle distance.

Calvin Thatch did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice. That was the thing about him, the quality that had earned him the office and the trust of a village that mistrusted everyone else. When the rest of the world shouted, Calvin spoke as though offering change at the market.

"Three people in fifteen years," he said. "Not a pattern. Not a crime. Folk wander. Folk get lost. Folk choose to leave and don't say goodbye."

"Folk choose to leave." Margot laughed, and the laugh had edges. "In Harrow Hollow? You cannot give a dog away without the postmistress knowing its favourite treat. People here do not vanish quietly. They vanish loudly, with paperwork, with casseroles, with rumours that travel faster than river water. And yet three people have walked out of their lives as cleanly as soap through a sieve, and the only explanation the constabulary offers is that they had a sudden urge to travel."

She stepped forward. He did not step back. The space between them held the shape of long acquaintance and longer grief.

"I want the files."

Calvin Thatch's eyes did not waver. He had the patience of stone walls, and Margot had the suspicion that he had been expecting this conversation for years, rehearsing his responses in the quiet hours between rounds.

"The files are council records. Sealed under the local governance act of 1947. I cannot hand them to a civilian on request, and you, Miss Renfield, are not yet a civilian in the parish register, are you? Your aunt's estate is still in probate. Technically you are a guest."

"Technically, you are obstructing a freelance archivist doing work sanctioned by the parish council itself." She had brought the paperwork. Of course she had. She produced a folded letter from her satchel, held it out like a card in a hand she had been building all week. "Father Anselm approved my request to catalogue the parish archives. That includes any records touching births, deaths, marriages, and disappearances in the catchment of the old church. Those files touch all four."

Calvin Thatch looked at the letter without taking it. His mouth twitched at one corner, the only signal that the chess move had landed. Father Anselm, the parish priest, had a soft heart for strays and a soft head for paperwork. Margot had found the cracks and slipped through.

"Father Anselm doesn't speak for the constabulary."

"No." Margot's voice dropped, became something private, something with teeth. "But he speaks for the dead. And the dead, Sheriff, are piling up in this valley at a rate that would alarm anyone with a calendar and a conscience."

The office had grown quieter. Even the radiator's tick seemed to pause, the building holding its breath. Margot could hear the deputy swallow.

Calvin Thatch reached for the file folder behind him. His hand rested on it, palm flat, the gesture of a man deciding which of two doors to open. He looked at her for a long moment, measuring her in the way farmers measure weather, by the colour of the sky and the feel of the wind.

"You look like your aunt when you get that look," he said, and there was something in his voice that Margot could not immediately name. It might have been sadness. It might have been warning. "Same jaw. Same way of standing like the world owes her an apology."

"Don't." Margot's voice came out a rasp. "Don't make this personal. Darrin Quill is missing. Three others before him. If you have information, I want it. If you don't, I want the silence to stop."

He lifted his hand from the file. Did not pick it up.

"I'll make you a deal, Miss Renfield." He spoke slowly, as if each word cost him something. "You sit down. You let me pour you a cup of tea from the pot Mrs. Trotter left on the sideboard, because it will go cold otherwise and she will never forgive me. You tell me what you actually know about Darrin Quill's last night, the parts you have not told anyone, the parts your sources whispered because they trust you more than they trust the uniform I wear."

He paused. The office waited.

"And I will tell you what I am allowed to tell you about the other three. Not the files. Not the sealed records. What I am allowed."

Margot stared at him. Her reflection in the window behind him looked tired, her hair escaping its pins, the skin beneath her eyes bruised with the kind of exhaustion that sleep could not touch. She had spent three days building this confrontation. She had rehearsed it in the car, in her aunt's kitchen, in the long hours of the night when Darrin Quill's empty chair at the Black Hound kept appearing behind her eyelids. She had not prepared for this. She had not prepared for the word deal.

"What I am allowed," she repeated. "Allowed by whom?"

Calvin Thatch picked up his mug. Took a slow drink. His eyes, above the rim, were steady.

"Sit down, Miss Renfield."

It was not a request.

The chair scraped against the plank floor when Margot pulled it out. She sat, though she did not touch the teapot. Her hands stayed flat on her knees, fingers splayed, as though she was bracing for a blow.

Calvin Thatch crossed to the sideboard. The enamel pot there was a faded rose pattern, chipped at the spout. He poured with the slow deliberation of a man who had learned that hurrying changed nothing. Steam curled up from the cup he set before her. The smell was strong, tannic, slightly burnt, the particular scent of Mrs. Trotter's kitchen blend that had survived her departure.

"Darrin Quill," Margot said. "He left the Black Hound at quarter to twelve. The bar staff remember. He said he was walking home along the lake road."

"Aye."

"He never arrived. His bed was not slept in. His coat still hangs by the back door."

"Aye."

She waited. Calvin Thatch did not continue. He stood with his broad hands loose at his sides, the mug warming his palms, and looked at her with the patient, unhurried gaze of a man accustomed to weather and beasts and the slow turning of seasons. Outside, a car passed on the high road. Its headlights swept briefly across the window and were gone.

"I have told you that," Margot said, careful, precise, each word placed like a stone in a wall. "What have I not told you?"

Calvin Thatch exhaled through his nose. He sat down across from her, the chair protesting beneath his weight, and set his mug on the desk with a faint click.

"Miss Renfield." His voice had dropped, lower than the rough rural baritone he usually carried, into something closer to the cadence of a man speaking in chapel. "Your aunt kept records. Particular records. I helped her carry boxes from the parish cellar in the autumn of two thousand and twelve, the winter the pipes burst and we lost half the baptismal index to the damp. I did not read what was in them. I am a farmer, not a scholar. But I knew where she kept them. I knew which boxes went up to her rooms at the inn, and which ones she said were not for anyone yet."

Margot's mouth thinned. She had not known this. She had assumed, when she had begun clearing her aunt's rooms three weeks ago, that the files left in the parish cellar were the only archive. She had catalogued them dutifully, page by page, finding births and burials and the quiet, unremarkable deaths of a hundred and fifty years. She had not thought to look further.

"Go on," she said.

"You will have come across her journals by now. Bound in the blue cloth. They are not in the cellar."

"They are not in her rooms."

"No."

He reached into the back of his desk drawer, past the ink and the foolscap, and produced a small key on a length of cord. Brass, green at the edges. He laid it on the desk between them.

"They are in the vestry safe. Father Anselm has the combination. I have the key to the vestry door itself. I have had it since your aunt asked me to look in on the boiler one Sunday when the rector was away." He pushed the key a half inch closer to Margot. "She asked me to look in on more than the boiler, as it turned out."

Margot looked at the key. She did not touch it.

"Calvin," she said. His name, unadorned. "I asked what I have not told you."

"You have not told me," he said, and now his voice was almost a whisper, the roughness in it catching like a hand on a thorn, "that you found the sketch in the back of the ledger for nineteen fifty-two. The one in the blue cloth. You have not told me that you recognised what it was, or what it was of, because you have been guarding it like a dog with a bone ever since you arrived, and you have been asking questions in the village as though you did not know what you were looking for."

The office was very quiet. The clock ticked. Margot heard her own breath.

"How do you know about that sketch?"

"Because I sat with your aunt the night she drew it." Calvin Thatch's eyes were steady. "I sat with her, and I held her hand, and I did not leave her alone, because she asked me not to, and I am a man who honours the asks made of him. That was in the autumn of nineteen fifty-two. I was nine years old. She was twelve."

Margot said nothing. The key lay between them, brass going dark with tarnish.

"Darrin Quill," Calvin Thatch said, "is the fourth since I have been the man I am now. There was a woman in seventy-nine. A lad in eighty-nine. A girl in two thousand and four. Each time, the same pattern. Each time, the village closed around it like water over a stone. Each time, Father Anselm and I, and your aunt before she went, did what we could. Each time, it was not enough."

"You said there were others. Before you were the man you are now."

He nodded. The motion was small, almost imperceptible. "My brother. Nathan. He was older. He walked into the woods the summer I turned eight. He came back at the end of the week. He was quieter. He was thinner. He did not laugh the same way. He took to the lake road most evenings. He would stand at the water's edge and look out across it, as though he could see something on the far shore. In August of that year, nineteen fifty-eight, he walked down to the lake in the evening and he did not come back. They dragged the water. They did not find him. My mother never stopped setting a place for him at supper, not until the day she died."

His voice had not changed. It remained low, rough, slow. But something in the grain of it had shifted, the way a field changes in the last light before dark.

"Nathan," Margot said, careful.

"Nathan Thatch. He would have been seventy-eight this autumn. He would have been a grandfather. There are no photographs of him in the house. My mother could not bear to look at them, and after she was gone, neither could I."

Margot thought of the parish records she had been cataloguing. The baptismal index for the late summer of nineteen fifty-eight. The burial index for the same year, complete and unremarkable. The gap between them, where a life had simply stopped.

"The pattern," she said. "Walk into the woods alone. Return changed. Go willingly to the lake."

"Aye."

"Who else has seen it?"

"Your aunt saw it. Father Anselm has seen it. I have seen it." He paused. "Father Anselm's predecessor saw it. His predecessor's predecessor saw it. It is the office of the rector of Harrow Hollow to know what lives in the water, and to keep the village from walking into it."

Margot's hands had gone cold. She curled them into fists beneath the edge of the desk, where he could not see.

"Why did he come back the first time? Your brother."

Calvin Thatch was silent for a long moment. Outside, the wind had picked up. She could hear it in the eaves of the building, a low, almost singing sound, as though the architecture of the place was trying to speak.

"I do not know," he said at last. "Some do. Some do not. Of the four since I have been the man I am now, three came back. They walked back into the village in the small hours. They went to their homes. They answered when their families spoke to them. But something had gone out of them, or something had come in. They did not eat. They did not sleep. They sat for hours at a time, looking at nothing, or looking at the water. Within a week, sometimes two, they would go down to the lake in the evening, and they would walk into it, and they would not come back."

"And the fourth? The one who did not come back?"

"Mary Voss. Nineteen seventy-nine. She walked into the woods one afternoon in June. She did not return. Three days later, they found her shoes in the shallows. Her coat was folded on the bank. There was no note. There was no body. There has been no body since for any of them. The lake gives nothing back."

Margot thought of the file on the desk between them. She thought of Darrin Quill's empty chair. She thought of the sketch in the blue cloth, the one she had not shown to anyone, the one she had been carrying in the lining of her coat since the day she found it.

"You said your brother came back. Changed."

"Aye."

"How?"

He looked at her then with an expression she could not quite read, something between grief and an older, more patient sorrow.

"He did not know us," he said. "Not as we knew him. He knew our names. He knew the house. He knew where the kettle was, and which field the cows were in. But when I spoke to him, he did not answer in the way he used to. When my mother wept, he did not seem to see her weeping. He would sit for hours looking out of the window towards the lake. If you asked him what he was looking at, he would say, in a voice that was not quite his own, that he was waiting for someone. He would not say who."

The clock ticked. The teapot had stopped steaming. The smell of it lingered, tannic and slightly burnt, underlaid by the older smell of the office, which was the smell of paper and ink and the slow accumulation of decades.

"Who was he waiting for?"

Calvin Thatch shook his head, slowly, once. "I never asked him. I have regretted that silence every day of my life since."

Margot reached out and picked up the key. The brass was warm from the desk lamp. She closed her fist around it and felt the cord twist between her fingers.

"The vestry safe," she said. "What is the combination?"

"Father Anselm will give it to you. I will take you to him in the morning, if you will come."

"I will come."

He nodded. He picked up his mug, found it empty, and looked at it with the faint surprise of a man who had forgotten he was drinking.

"There is one more thing," he said.

Margot waited.

"Darrin Quill walked out of the Black Hound at quarter to twelve. That is what the staff remember. That is what the papers will say. What the papers will not say is that he was seen after that. By me. At half past twelve. On the lake road, half a mile from the water, walking away from the village, towards the trees."

Margot's breath stopped in her throat.

"You saw him."

"I saw him. He did not see me. I called to him. He did not turn. He was walking the way a man walks in his sleep. I followed him to the edge of the trees. I did not go in. I have never gone in. I went back to the village. I woke Father Anselm. We went down to the lake. We did not find him."

Margot stared at him. "Why have you not told the police this?"

"Because the police would go into the trees." His voice had dropped again, almost to a murmur. "Because the police do not know what is in there. Because what is in there is not a thing the police are equipped to meet."

He stood. The chair scraped back. He carried his empty cup to the sideboard and set it beside the teapot with a careful, deliberate motion.

"Go home tonight, Miss Renfield. Lock your doors. Do not walk by the lake. Do not go into the woods. I will come for you at seven in the morning, and we will go together to Father Anselm, and we will see what is in the vestry safe, and we will see whether there is anything left to be done for Darrin Quill."

"Is there?"

He turned back to her. The office lamp threw his shadow long and dark against the wall behind him. For a moment, in the angle of the light, he looked older than she had ever seen him, older than his years, older than grief, the face of a man who had been waiting a long time for a question he did not want to be asked.

"I do not know," he said. "I have never known. I have only ever known that the pattern holds, and that something in the water is patient, and that when it calls, they answer."

He opened the door for her. The corridor beyond was dark. The wind sounded in the eaves of the building, low and singing, and somewhere outside, far away, she thought she could hear the surface of the lake, though the building stood a full mile from the water.

She stepped out into the dark. The key was cold in her fist.

The wind off the moor hit her before she had crossed the threshold, a cold slap that tasted of iron and wet peat and something faintly sweet beneath, like rotten apples in a closed room. Margot Renfield pulled her coat tighter and walked the short distance to her aunt's cottage without looking back. The key the sheriff had pressed into her palm was already warm from her grip, or perhaps it had warmed itself. She did not want to think about which.

The cottage sat at the edge of the village proper, beyond the pub and the post office, where the lane curved down toward the reed beds and the lake beyond. Her aunt had left it to her, along with the rest of the estate, along with all the unanswered questions. Margot had been in Harrow Hollow nine days now. In that time she had catalogued four filing cabinet drawers, three boxes of uncatalogued parish photographs, and one thing she had not yet told anyone about, because she did not yet know how.

She let herself in. Locked the door behind her, as instructed. Stood in the dark hallway with her hand still on the key and listened to the house settle around her. The radiators ticked. The kitchen tap dripped its slow metronome. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked, the same floorboard that had creaked every night since she arrived, in the same place, at the same hour.

She climbed the stairs. She did not look into the spare bedroom where she had stacked the cartons from the parish archive. She did not open the wardrobe where her aunt's winter coat still hung, sleeves empty, collar still faintly holding the scent of lavender water. She went into her own room, the room at the front of the house that looked out over the lane, and she sat on the edge of the bed in her coat and her shoes and she did not undress, because she had told herself, earlier that evening, before any of this, that she would not be the sort of woman who took a sheriff at his word.

And now she was that woman. And she was angry at herself for it. And she was more afraid than angry, and she knew it.

She slept, in the end, in fits, with the lamp on and the key on the nightstand and the window cracked an inch against the smell of the wind.

She was awake before seven.

---

Calvin Thatch's truck was idling at the gate when she came down the path. He leaned across and opened the passenger door without getting out. His face in the dawn light was the color of old burlap, and his hands on the wheel were steady, but there was a stillness to him she had not seen before, the stillness of a man conserving what he had.

"Coffee," he said, and nodded toward the cup in the holder. "From Mrs. Bell. She's a good woman."

Margot got in. Took the cup. It was lukewarm and very sweet, in the way of Yorkshire tea that had been brewed strong and then left to cool under a knitted cosy. She wrapped both hands around it and said nothing. The lane unwound beneath them, pale and rutted, the hedges black and dripping.

They did not speak for the first mile. The moor opened out to their left, a long sweep of brown and silver, and somewhere in it a bird was calling, one note repeated endlessly, as if practicing a phrase it had forgotten the meaning of.

"He is a difficult man," Calvin Thatch said at last, without preamble. "Father Anselm. Difficult in the way of men who have carried a thing too long alone."

"I gathered that last night."

"Aye. You would." He took a breath. "What I did not say, because it was not mine to say in that room, is that he did not always believe. When he came to us, twenty-three years ago, he was a young man with new ideas. He thought the old stories were stories. He thought the lake was a lake."

"What changed him?"

"Darrin Quill was thirteen years old, and he walked into the water one November night and came back out, and he was not the same boy who went in. Not broken. Not mad. Worse. He came back knowing things. Knowing names. Knowing what the thing in the Blackvein was called in a language that has no letters in our alphabet. He would wake in the night and speak it, and his mother would hear him through the wall, and she would weep, because her son had come home and something else had come home inside him."

Margot set her cup in the holder. Her hands, she noticed, were steady. That surprised her.

"And the priest came?"

"Aye. The priest came, because the priest was the one person in the parish who had any learning at all, and the boy's mother begged him, and he came, and he saw the boy, and he believed. Not in God, perhaps. Not in the way he had been taught to believe. But in the thing. In the fact of it. In the fact that something in the water had a name, and that the name had weight."

The lane curved down toward the church. The building came into view through a gap in the trees, low and grey, the spire leaning slightly eastward as if listening to something to the west.

"And the photographs?"

Calvin Thatch did not answer for a long moment. The truck rolled to a stop in the churchyard lane. He turned off the engine. In the sudden absence of the diesel rattle, the silence was enormous, pressing in against the windows like a soft, attentive weight.

"Photographs," he said, "are the priest's territory. I will let him show you what he has. I have seen some of them, and they are not things I care to see twice."

He got out. She got out. The grass was silver with dew. The church door stood ajar, just as it had the night before, and inside, in the nave, a single lamp burned on the altar, and another, smaller, at the door of the vestry, as if a hand had been waiting there to guide them in.

Father Anselm was in the vestry. He was standing at the safe with a ring of keys in his hand. He did not look up when they came in.

"Close the door," he said. "Both of you."

Calvin Thatch closed it. The vestry was very small. It smelled of old paper and candle wax and something faintly metallic beneath, like the inside of a tin that has held fish. The safe was a squat iron thing set into the wall behind the altar cloths, and the priest was working the dial with the slow concentration of a man disarming something.

He opened it. He reached in. He took out a single envelope, brown and stiff with age, and he set it on the vestry table and he stood with his hand flat upon it, and his shoulders rose and fell twice before he spoke.

"I am going to show you a thing," he said. "I am going to show it to you because you came back last night, Miss Renfield, when most people would have stayed in their beds, and because Calvin vouches for you, and because I have carried this thing alone for twenty-three years and I am tired in a way that has no name. I am going to show it to you, and then I am going to tell you what I know, and then you are going to decide what to do with what you have been told. That is the arrangement. I will not be party to a lie. I will not be party to a panic. I will be party to the truth, because the truth is the only thing in this parish that still has any weight at all."

He lifted his hand. He opened the envelope. He took out a single photograph, sepia-toned, slightly foxed at the corners, mounted on card. He laid it on the table, face up, and stepped back.

Margot leaned in.

The photograph showed a woman standing at the edge of a body of water. She was young, or the photograph made her look young, with dark hair pulled back from her face and a long pale dress that hung to her ankles. Her feet were bare. Her toes were at the water's edge, where the small ripples came in and broke. She was looking, not at the camera, but at something just past the camera's left shoulder, something the photographer had not chosen to include, or had been unable to include, or had been warned away from including.

Her mouth was open.

Her mouth was open, and it was full of teeth that should not have existed in any mouth, in any photograph, in any record of the visible world. They were not the teeth of an animal, though they were not the teeth of a woman either. They were long and curved and dark, and they grew in rows, and they were wet, and where the wet caught the light they threw it back green. The woman was smiling, and the smile went all the way back into her throat, and the throat went back into a darkness that the photograph did not resolve.

Margot recognized the dress. She recognized the stance. She recognized the angle of the head and the way the dark hair fell across the collarbone. She had spent nine days staring at the wooden idol in her aunt's spare bedroom, turning it in her hands in the lamplight, trying to make it yield the name of its maker. The dress in the photograph was the dress carved into the wood. The stance was the stance carved into the wood. The face, the throat, the impossible mouth, were the face and throat and mouth carved into the wood, with a fidelity that no hand could have achieved without a model, without a witness, without a thing seen and remembered and translated into grain.

"1923," Father Anselm said, from behind her. His voice was flat and careful. "The parish photographer was a man named Edmund Hold. He took this photograph at the edge of the lake, in the month of October, in the year 1923. He gave it to the parish office two days later, with a note that said only that the subject had asked him to take it, and that he had done so, and that he wished he had not. He was dead within the year. His son, who developed the plate, was dead within two. The plate itself, as far as I have been able to determine, was destroyed. This print is the only one. I have had it in this envelope for twenty-three years."

Margot did not lift her eyes from the photograph. The woman at the water's edge seemed, in the grain of the paper, to be breathing, very slowly, the way things breathe under deep water.

"Who was she," Margot said, and her voice was steady and did not sound like her own.

"We do not know," Father Anselm said. "We know what she was called, in the records that predate the parish, in the records that the church at Harrow Hollow was built to supersede. She was called Lissaveth. She was called, in the older tongue, the mouth of the Blackvein. She was the hand of the thing in the water, sent up to the shore in certain years to call the living down. The photograph is a record of one of those years."

"1923," Calvin Thatch said, from the doorway. He had not moved from where he stood. He had not looked at the photograph.

"And 2023," Father Anselm said. "And the year before that, and the year before that. Every hundred years, since the parish was founded, since the church was built on the older stones. The pattern holds."

The lamp in the vestry flickered once. The smell of fish rose faintly in the close air. Margot Renfield stood with her hands flat on the table and her eyes on the sepia face of a thing that had called from the water a hundred years before she was born, and that was calling now, from the reeds and the dark, with patience that had no end, and she understood, in the way that one understands things that cannot be un-understood, that she had not come to Harrow Hollow to settle her aunt's estate, or to catalogue the parish records, or to write any article that any paper would print.

She had come because the thing in the Blackvein had called her, and because the call was very old, and because she had answered, the way they all answered, in the end.

She lifted her hand from the photograph. The sepia face did not move. The impossible teeth did not shift. The dark water at the woman's bare toes kept its ancient, patient lap.

Outside, the wind off the moor rose, and the lake, a mile away and a mile deep, began, very softly, to sing.