The thing at the bottom of the well was asleep.
It had been asleep for quite some time. The thing itself didn’t know how long, because it no longer measured time at all. Light slipped into darkness, warmth dissolved into cold, and the thing remained where it was, drowsing, occasionally staring out at the soggy shadows through the slit of one gray eye.
The well was ancient, dug and used centuries ago. The thing at its bottom was older still. Its great gray body stretched through the tunnels that branched from the well’s shaft, filling the courses where deeper water used to run. Its claws sank in the black dirt.
People brought it offerings now and then, but the thing at the bottom of the well rarely took them. It was so vast and so old that it rarely felt hunger. It rarely felt anything at all.
But once in a great while, between stretches of sleep, something small and new would catch its eye.
Late one summer afternoon, a family came walking through the woods: a mother, a father, and a five-year-old boy. They’d had a picnic in a clearing, and now they were rambling along the overgrown paths. It was the little boy who spotted the well—the crumbling and mossy wooden roof, the circle of stacked gray stones. His mother gave him a coin. The boy tossed it into the well. In half a heartbeat, it had slipped out of reach of daylight and vanished into the deep, deep dark.
The woods rustled. The little boy’s parents steered him away.
Far below, at the bottom of the well, the coin landed with a delicate tink. It struck a mound of other coins that had piled up above the shallow water, most of them eaten away by rust and mud and time. It lay there, glimmering against the darkness.
The world is full of wishes like this one.
Secret wishes, birthday wishes, wishes scribbled in diaries, wishes mumbled to no one. Most wishes are merely words. I wish I didn’t have school tomorrow. I wish I was rich. I wish I could just disappear. But some wishes—the ones made on birthday candles and broken wishbones, the ones hung on falling stars or thrown down certain deep, dark wells—are more than that.
Some wishes, with help, can come true.
The thing at the bottom of the well opened its eyes. With one huge, clawed hand, it reached for the wish glinting on the pile of coins. It scooped the wish into its toothy mouth . . . and swallowed.
Mist, thick and silvery, filled the air, rising up through the well like smoke from a chimney.
And in the forest above, a unicorn leaped from the underbrush.
It galloped past the path where the family was walking, its silver mane and tail gleaming, its hooves so swift and soft that the little boy was the only one to notice it at all.
He raced off the path after it.
His parents turned a moment too late. They shouted for the little boy. They chased after him, screaming now, trampling through the bracken. Before long there were other sounds: motors and sirens, dogs snuffling through the brush, booted feet moving in lines. By the time the little boy was found, cold and scared but safe at the bottom of a ravine, nearly two days had passed. He kept insisting, while his crying parents hugged him and the EMTs checked him over, that he had wished for a unicorn, and his wish had come true.
The thing at the bottom of the well heard all of this.
It listened distantly, indifferently, the way it watched the weak shafts of sunlight that ventured down to its tunnel before being consumed by darkness.
The thing had caused far worse trouble than this.
Digging its claws deeper into the earth, it settled back to sleep.