THE NAG BRIDE

A. C. WISE

“Now its your turn to tell one.” Sophie swipes a piece of candy from Andrew’s pile.

He has more peanut butter cups, and they’re her favorite. When he doesn’t stop her, she takes a second one, giving him a mini Snickers in return.

Andrew thinks for a minute, and then glances around as if afraid of being overheard. They’re alone at the edge of the small plot of corn, planted equidistant between his grandparents’ house and their barn, where their annual Halloween party spills music and laughter into the night.

“Have you ever heard of the Nag Bride?” Andrew licks his lips.

Something in the way he asks it draws a shiver up Sophie’s spine. Just the name is evocative, and she wonders—has she heard the story before? No, she would remember something like that. She shakes her head.

“It happened right here,” Andrew says, “a long time ago.”

He holds the flashlight under his chin. Shadows cut angles into his cheekbones and make the freckles spread across his nose look darker. His hair sticks up every which way like a scarecrow. Sophie grabs the flashlight from him, shining it into his eyes like a police interrogation.

“Just tell the story.”

Andrew squints and they tussle for a moment until he has the flashlight again. Sophie pulls her knees up, wrapping herself more tightly in her blanket. The corn rustles in a faint breeze; from this angle, sitting on the ground and looking up, the tops of the stalks scrape at the stars.

There’s an unzipped sleeping bag spread beneath them, and a thermos of hot chocolate to share. Everything feels perfect and for the moment, Sophie can pretend that she’s never been anywhere else. Andrew and his grandparents are her real family; she never has to cross back through the trees that divide their properties to the house that’s supposed to be her home.

“Everything around here was farmland back then.” Andrew gestures, taking in the house and the barn.

Despite herself, Sophie turns all the way around, and her gaze snags on the trees lining the border of the property. Even through their screening branches, the shape of her house is visible. It’s completely dark, her father likely slumped in front of a silent TV, her mother at a local bar.

She turns her attention deliberately back to Andrew—her best friend, her brother, even though they don’t technically share blood. Who cares what her parents are doing? After ghost stories, they can watch movies in Andrew’s grandparents’ living room, and if they get tired, Sophie can snug down in one of his grandparents’ many guest rooms. His grandmother has told Sophie she’s always welcome here, she’s always safe in their home.

“Okay,” Andrew says again. “So a farmer is working in his field and he sees a horse outside the fence. It’s a beautiful horse, and he thinks surely it must belong to someone, so he chases it. The horse goes into the woods, and he loses sight of it. The farmer is about to give up when he sees a beautiful woman sitting on the ground. Her hair is black and she has very dark eyes. Her feet are bare, and she’s rubbing at them like they hurt. He forgets all about the horse and takes the woman back to his home.

“The woman doesn’t tell the farmer her name. She barely says anything at all, but the farmer doesn’t care. By the time they’re back at his house, he’s already in love with her.”

A flicker of shadow between the cornstalks catches Sophie’s attention, the light breaking weirdly. Her pulse jumps, and for a moment she’s certain there’s a tall woman watching them. When she looks again, the woman is gone. Maybe someone wandering away from the party.

“That night, the farmer hears someone moving around in his barn.”

“It’s not the same barn,” Sophie says automatically.

“I didn’t say it was.” Andrew’s tone is defensive and Sophie is weirdly relieved that he seems nervous too. There’s a delicious thrill to the thought that he’s scaring himself with his own story. It makes it feel more real. Like the Nag Bride has always been here, and he’s just telling something that’s true.

“There was another barn here before anyway, and stop interrupting.”

Sophie takes another piece of candy, even though her teeth are starting to ache and she’s full. Next month, she’ll turn twelve, and so will Andrew. This might be the last Halloween before they’re too old for piles of candy and ghost stories.

“The farmer takes his shotgun and goes to look in the barn. It’s dark, but he sees someone moving around so he fires his gun to scare them off. He doesn’t mean to hit the person, but as soon as he fires, he hears a woman scream. He runs to get a lantern and when it’s lit, he sees the black-haired woman on the ground. She’s bleeding and her legs are bent the wrong way. Instead of feet, she has hooves.”

The back of Sophie’s neck prickles, and despite herself, she turns to look at the corn again. A woman stands between the stalks, and as much as she wants to tell herself it’s just a guest, deep down, Sophie knows the woman didn’t wander away from the party. She’s always been right where she is, and Andrew and Sophie are the ones intruding.

She opens her mouth to tell Andrew, but the woman puts a finger to her lips. Sophie’s heart flies into her throat. Blood drips from the woman’s hand, but even so, she smiles.

“The man ties the woman up and leaves her in the barn. The next morning, he comes back with a set of horseshoes and tells the woman he’s going to marry her.”

Sophie is still listening to Andrew’s story, but she can’t look away from the corn. She can’t look away from the woman, who shifts without moving, who suddenly seems closer and, at the same time, farther away.

“Then the farmer holds the woman down and nails the horseshoes right through her hands and feet.”

Dark, coarse hair blows across the woman’s face. Only it doesn’t look like hair at all. It looks like a horse’s mane. There’s something wrong with her face—it’s too long, her eyes too far apart. The woman points through the trees, toward Sophie’s house.

Her father is in the house, all alone. The woman’s dark eyes are a question, and Sophie should shake her head—no, no, no. But she doesn’t move.

“Soph? Are you even listening?” Andrew pokes her arm.

She jumps.

“I saw—” Panic scrabbles at her.

The space between the cornstalks is empty, but something moves too fast between the trees.

“What?” Andrew’s eyes widen.

Sophie clenches her jaw so hard it aches. The Nag Bride isn’t real.

But a tiny part of Sophie, shoved deep down inside, wishes she were. A ghost to haunt them is exactly what her mother and father deserve.

“Never mind. I thought I saw something, but I was wrong.”

The lie tastes sugar-sharp, sour underneath, like the Sour Patch candies in the dwindling piles between them. Her stomach swoops, hollow and full, and for a moment, Sophie thinks she might be sick.

It’s not too late. She can still run and find Andrew’s grandparents and tell them what she saw.

And that same, small buried-deep part of her makes itself known again. Her parents don’t deserve her help. More nights than not, an endless stream of people rotate in and out of Sophie’s house, her parents’ supposed friends, coming and going with bright eyes and mouths open in laughter. No one is ever turned away, no matter what time of day or night they show up, because her parents always have time for everyone, except her. They don’t even know or care where she is right now, wouldn’t know or care if something happened to her. Sophie clenches her jaw even harder, her molars grinding together.

“Are you sure?” Doubt edges Andrew’s voice.

“Really.” Sophie rises, and deliberately turns her back on the trees, determined not to see. “It’s getting cold. Let’s go inside.”

A man in his late forties or early fifties and a woman anywhere from her early twenties to her mid-forties stand side by side on their wedding day. A barn stands behind them, a horseshoe nailed to its wall, visible just behind the groom’s shoulder. The man wears a dark suit, the woman a simple white shift dress. Her feet are bare. She holds a bouquet of marigolds. The woman’s hair is long and black. She wears a white veil. At the moment the photograph was taken, a gust of wind conspired to pick up both hair and veil and blow them across the woman’s face, hiding the lower half, obscuring her jaw.

Beneath the photo, the text reads: Mr. and Mrs. Everett Moseley, married September 5, 1969, in a private ceremony at Mr. Moseley’s home on Greenwood Avenue, the historic property originally occupied by Simpson Horse Farm.

—Napierville Gazette, “About Town,” September 7, 1969

“Are we really going to do this?” Sophie asks. “We don’t know anything about flipping houses.”

What she means is: How can we do this? How can we take the place we grew up in, strip it of everything we love, and sell it to strangers?

But she doesn’t say any of that aloud. This is as hard on Andrew as it is on her; he’s hurting too.

The house looks the same—white-painted boards and a covered porch stretched across the front, a peaked roof and gabled windows. It’s been just over a year since Sophie last visited, but without Andrew’s grandmother and grandfather here to welcome them home, it feels wrong.

“We’ll figure it out.” Andrew slings an arm around Sophie’s shoulder. “Between us, we’ve probably watched a thousand hours of HGTV shows. How hard can it be?”

“Sure.” She tries to match her tone to his, smiling for his sake. “A new coat of paint, plant these beds with some new flowers, and it’ll sell in no time.”

Marigolds—she pictures them—the beds awash with petals as bright as flame. And I hate this, she thinks. I don’t want the house sold. I don’t want things to change.

When Andrew’s grandparents bought their condo in Florida, the intention was always to split their time between here and there. But Andrew’s grandmother had gotten sick, and they’d decided the warmer climate and one-floor living with no yard to keep up would be easier on both of them. The cancer had moved so, so fast, though, and then Andrew’s grandfather had passed scarcely a month after her. They’d been high school sweethearts, married at seventeen; he simply couldn’t live without her.

Now the house belongs to Andrew and Sophie knows he doesn’t want it. He’d rather have his grandparents back, and Sophie agrees.

Rationally, she knows Andrew can’t keep the house. They’re only living here for a while—just long enough to fix the place up and sell it. A last good-bye.

Sophie’s landlord upped her rent and her firm’s biggest graphic design client dropped their account. Andrew was laid off a month ago from the financial software company he’d been working for, a victim of across-the-board downsizing. So it makes sense—they’ll live in the house rent free while they clean it out and fix it up. Sophie will still work for the smaller clients in her portfolio from home, while Andrew continues job searching.

And then they’ll move on. Sophie will find a new apartment, and Andrew will reclaim the apartment he’s currently subletting to a grad student doing a three-month internship. At least that’s what Sophie assumes. She knows Andrew isn’t limiting his job search; he could end up moving across the country, but she’d rather not think about that. They’ve never lived more than a few miles apart. Even when they went to separate colleges, they were still only a short drive away from each other.

Ever since Andrew’s parents died and he came to live with his grandparents at three years old, they’ve been best friends, inseparable, together so often that by the time they got to high school people assumed they must be dating. But it had never been like that between them. They’d always been siblings by choice, and now, with Andrew’s grandparents gone, he is truly the only family Sophie has left in the world.

By old habit, she glances at the trees along the property line. Her parents’ house was razed about the same time Andrew’s grandparents moved away. There’s a new house there now, but Sophie feels the old one, like a tooth pulled, a rotten hole left behind.

“Come on.” Sophie pulls her gaze away deliberately. “I’m hungry. Let’s go make dinner.”

All her ghosts were buried under the rubble, scraped down to the bone. Not even the foundation of the old house remains. Looking at the new house sitting there—a lovely two-story, four-bedroom home painted light blue—you’d never know an ugly brown fieldstone bungalow with a leaking roof used to sit there.

But Sophie knows.

They’re barely out of summer, September only just begun, but even so a breeze carrying the first glimpse of October blows across them as Andrew climbs the porch and unlocks the door. Behind him, Sophie can’t help but pause. Can’t help but look back one last time toward the trees, where, for just an instant, a dark shape moves between the trunks, crossing from one property to the next with no one to stop her.

No one knows how the Nag Bride is born. But they know how she dies. Always with iron. Nails through her hands and feet, shod to weigh her down. To slow her when she would run. To break her and tame her and take her power away.

Her skin is made for bruising. Her form invites violence. Too strange. Inhuman.

She is wed. She is killed. She is born again.

The Nag Bride digs her way up out of the ground. Earth beneath her nails and between her teeth, grave flowers in her hands.

She is:

An ancient spirit, bent on protecting her land.

A haunting, doomed to repeat a violent end.

A temptress, drawing out the essential, evil nature of men.

Alone, afraid, in pain.

A curse.

A blessing.

Sophie wakes, certain she is eleven years old again. Moonlight falls through the window, so bright it looks like there’s a second, elongated window on the floor. Peeling the covers back, she moves to the window, expecting to see again what she saw on Halloween night all those years ago. What she thought she saw.

The sky pearl gray, just before dawn, frost tipping the grass, and a figure running across the yard. At first, she’d been certain it was the woman from the corn, the ghost from Andrew’s story. The Nag Bride. But the figure had stopped, turned, and looked up, as if feeling Sophie there. Her father.

She’d dropped straight down, ducking out of sight, and when she’d peeked again, he was gone. The lawn was empty and she could pretend she’d only imagined seeing him. She could pretend that the shadows around the barn door hadn’t shifted, that the door didn’t stand open when she knew Andrew’s grandfather would have shut it tight after the last partygoer left.

Sophie presses her hand to the glass now. Her father has been dead for almost five years. She will not see him running across the lawn, but nonetheless, her breath snags as she scans the dark. The barn door is open.

Her breath clouds the glass.

That night, almost sixteen years ago, she’d crept downstairs, just meaning to step onto the porch and check. She’d tried to go back to sleep first, and failed. What if her father really was out there? What if he stole something?

But when she’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Andrew’s grandmother sat at the kitchen table, and Sophie froze, as if she’d been the one caught stealing. But she waved Sophie over, pouring her a mug of coffee—more than half milk—to match her own. Sophie’s tongue had curled around her confession. Maybe she hadn’t seen her father. Maybe there was no reason for concern.

And if she had, what if Andrew’s grandmother blamed Sophie? What if she finally realized that Sophie came from bad seed, planted in bad soil, and figured the apple couldn’t fall far from the tree?

She’d lied, and told Andrew’s grandmother she’d had a bad dream.

“See those?” Andrew’s grandmother had patted Sophie’s hand, pointing to the space above the kitchen door, then through the hallway to the front door. Horseshoes had been nailed above each.

Sophie must have seen them a thousand times, but she’d never really noticed them and a faint static-electricity feeling, like a storm coming on, ran from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine.

“They’re protection,” Andrew’s grandmother had told her. “Most people think they’re for luck, but they’re old, old magic. As long as they’re there, nothing bad can get in, and you’ll always be safe in this house.”

Sophie remembers Andrew’s grandmother smiling. She remembers her glancing, consciously or not, in the direction of Sophie’s home.

She feels the pang of Andrew’s grandparents’ loss anew, leaning her forehead against the glass. They’d never spoken of it directly, but Sophie had had her own toothbrush here, spare clothes. Sometimes she’d gone weeks at a time without crossing back through the trees planted along the property line, and never once had Andrew’s grandparents complained, or suggested she’d overstayed her welcome. She could stay as long as she wanted; she’d always had a place here.

Sophie glances at the barn again, trying to make the shadows resolve in a way to prove that memory playing tricks with her is the only reason it looked like the door stood open. Should she go outside and check? Before she can decide, a terrible cry splits the night. It’s the worst sound she’s ever heard.

Animal, human, visceral, bypassing her brain and jack-rabbiting her pulse. She’s down the stairs and to the front door before she’s aware of what she’s doing, running barefoot out the door.

She stops on the porch, the boards chilling her feet, grit meeting her soles. The cornfield is dark, half fallen to ruin. The wind shakes the leaves, and the light plays tricks, making shadows reach toward her.

The sound comes again, distant now, and less human. Only a fox, or a night bird. A normal sound. Nothing to fear. Her heart slows to a canter, to a trot. She waits a moment longer, and then stiff-legged, Sophie retreats, easing closed the front door.

“What’s wrong?” Andrew peers down from the top of the stairs, bleary-eyed with sleep.

“Didn’t you hear—” It was a fox or a cat. It was nothing. There are no ghosts here.

“Never mind. I didn’t mean to wake you.” She’s eleven years old again, telling Andrew’s grandmother she only had a bad dream. “Go back to sleep.” Sophie makes herself climb the steps, shooing Andrew toward his room—his grandparents’ old room.

He looks doubtful, and Sophie forces a smile, though something brittle in her chest cracks, a jagged fragment pressing against her heart. She isn’t being a coward. There’s nothing of value in the barn, no reason to check until morning. She only imagined the door being open.

As she climbs back into bed, she tells herself it’s too late to unwind the aftermath of that Halloween night. Too late to undo what is done. She couldn’t have stopped it, and it’s not her fault. And she tries very hard to make herself believe it.

Mrs. Everett Moseley disappeared without a trace in 1971, but even before she vanished, it seems there was something strange about her. In the wedding announcement printed in the Napierville Gazette, she is referred to only as Mrs. Moseley, never by her own name. No one I talked to about the story knew what it was either.

After they were married, hardly anyone even saw Mrs. Moseley, even though Everett Moseley was a familiar face around town. He was a member of the Napierville Volunteer Fire Company, he regularly ate and drank at the local pub, and he belonged to the Moose Lodge.

According to the stories, one day Everett Moseley walked into the hardware store to buy a shovel and cheerfully told the clerk that he was going to kill his wife and use the shovel to bury her. The clerk assumed it was a joke, but informed the police anyway. Walt Standish, who was the sheriff at the time, went to look personally.

He found no evidence of murder, but he didn’t find any sign of Mrs. Moseley either. When questioned, Everett Moseley claimed she’d run away. The sheriff did find a large amount of earth dug out of Everett Moseley’s lawn, however, about the size and shape of a grave. Moseley claimed it was for a new septic system, though the border had been planted with marigolds.

No official charges were made, Everett Moseley declined to file a missing person report, and Mrs. Everett Moseley was never seen again.

Various ghost stories grew up following the case. Supposedly, the grave, or the hole, or whatever it was remained on Everett Moseley’s property until he moved away. Some stories say he tried to fill it in, but it wouldn’t stay filled. Others say it filled in just fine, but it would mysteriously reappear on the anniversary of the day Mrs. Moseley vanished.

I had several accounts from locals who used to drive out to the Moseley place when they were kids. The story went that if you parked in the driveway facing away from the house, and turned off all the lights in the car, you would see Mrs. Everett Moseley standing at the side of her grave in your rearview mirror. Some people claimed to have been chased by the ghost, and one person swore up and down that Mrs. Moseley had gotten close enough to touch his car. When he and his friends got home, there was a dent in the trunk, just about the size and shape of a woman’s hand.

—Spooks, Specters, Superstitions, and True-Crime Tales of the Saratoga Region

The smell of coffee greets Sophie as she enters the kitchen. Gauzy yellow curtains, made by Andrew’s grandmother, frame the window above the kitchen sink, pulled wide to let in a flood of sunlight. The house is quiet. Andrew must have gotten up early and gone for a run.

She pours herself a cup from the pot, and a flare of color catches her eye. There’s a bowl of marigolds sitting on the kitchen table.

It’s so unexpected, so out of place, all she can do is stare. Until the front door opens, startling her, and Sophie jumps, hot coffee splashing her knuckles.

“Hey.” Andrew’s arms are laden with groceries. “That’s barely drinkable.” He gestures with his chin at Sophie’s mug. “I got desperate this morning and made a pot from an old container in the back of the pantry. I have the good stuff here.”

He produces a package smelling of freshly ground beans.

“Did you buy flowers?”

“What?” Andrew plucks Sophie’s mug from her hand and dumps the contents into the sink as he starts a fresh pot.

“Marigolds.” A chill seeps along her spine, a sense that someone—not Andrew—was in the room just before she entered.

Andrew turns, frowning. “You didn’t pick those?”

“They were here when I came down this morning.”

“Nobody else has been in here, Soph. I locked the door when I left and unlocked it just now. They weren’t here last night?”

She shakes her head. She’s certain she would have remembered seeing them, especially since she’d just been thinking about planting marigolds.

“Kitchen door?” Even as Sophie glances at it, it’s clear the bolt is in place. She would have heard someone breaking in.

“The caretaker your grandparents hired doesn’t still have a key?”

“I don’t think so.” Andrew frowns.

Sophie rounds the counter to the table, fighting the instinct at the back of her mind that screams danger and makes herself touch one of the petals. It’s velvety beneath the pad of her finger.

“They’re fresh.”

“That is fucking weird. But nothing is missing, right?”

“I don’t think so?” Everything seems to be in place, but there’s a nagging sensation of something she’s overlooked, something more than the flowers screaming their wrongness with their bright oranges and yellows.

“Okay, well, I was going to set up home security cameras anyway, but I’ll make it a priority. It’ll be a selling point when we put the place on the market.”

Sophie looks back to the kitchen door, and the answer clicks into place. There are holes in the paint and the plaster where nails should be.

“The horseshoes. Your grandmother used to keep them above all the doors. You don’t remember?”

“Maybe they took them down when they moved? Took them with them to Florida?”

The condo in Florida is not the house that needed protecting, Sophie thinks, but she doesn’t say it aloud.

“I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. So, coffee first, and then we can get started cleaning.” Andrew pours for both of them, and Sophie wants to shake him.

Why isn’t he freaked out?

But why would he be? She’s the one who heard something scream last night, who imagined the barn door was open. The memory, the uncertainty, chills her all over again.

“I can start on the barn.”

“Sure, we could—” Andrew starts, but Sophie hurries on, her words running over his.

“You should start with the attic. There’s a lot of stuff from your grandparents up there. You should be the one to go through it. If I find anything besides junk, I’ll set it aside for you.”

“Your funeral.” Andrew shrugs.

Sophie listens for doubt in his voice. She’s acting suspicious, so why doesn’t he suspect her? And why doesn’t she just come right out and say that she saw someone or something creeping around the barn? Because she didn’t see anything; she just heard a weird sound, and once she double-checks, she can tell him with her mind at ease.

Once upon a time, all a body had to do to own a parcel of land hereabouts was to stake a claim to it, and refuse to move if anyone tried to take it from them. A man who wanted to build a farm set out to do just that.

Every day he worked from sunup to sundown, but it wasn’t long before he began to feel like someone was watching him. He would wake to strange sounds—footsteps and someone rapping on the door of the little cabin he’d built himself. This went on for several nights, with the man finding nothing, until one day when he felt someone watching him and he turned around to see a woman standing between two trees. Her feet were bare, and they were very long. Her hair was very long as well, and just looking at her, he knew she wasn’t human.

He crossed himself and told her to leave. The woman answered him in a grating voice, like it pained her and she was unused to human speech.

“As a child, my grandmother buried me here. She put earth in my mouth, and left me for three days, and when I woke, the land knew me, and I knew it. But you do not belong here.”

The man was afraid, so he threw the iron nails at her that he’d been using to fix his cabin.

She took the nails and drove them through her own feet and into the earth, saying, “I stake my claim, and I will not be moved.”

Terrified, the man fled to one of his neighbors and told him what had happened. Together they gathered more men and when they returned, they found the woman exactly where the farmer had left her. Try as they might, they could not pry the nails from her feet. They threw stones, bruising her flesh and drawing her blood, but she did not move.

They said prayers, and tried all they knew, and at last, exhausted, they laid down to sleep. As soon as they did, the woman began to shriek, ungodly sounds that kept the men from their slumber.

For three days and three nights they endured her wails, and then they woke to terrible silence and found that she had died. Her corpse, however, remained nailed exactly where she had stood and still they could not move her.

Then one of the man’s neighbors suggested a terrible thing.

“Marry her, and as her widower, the land will belong to you.”

The farmer was sickened by the idea, but at last, he allowed himself to be convinced. The men brought a priest, and the groom went to stand by his bride. As the priest began to speak, a wind rose and moaned through the bride’s open mouth. The farmer felt such a deep terror that the moment the ceremony was done, he took up a blade and struck off his bride’s head. When he did, her body finally fell from where it stood.

He buried her, but did not mark her grave.

In time, the man replaced his little cabin with a farmhouse. With more time, he met a woman he asked to be his wife. Nine months after that, their son was born. And a year after that, a daughter. Eventually, the farmer forgot how he had won the land. And it was then, when the farmer had forgotten, when his first two children had begun to walk, and his wife’s belly had begun to swell again, that the farmer’s first bride returned.

Sophie pulls her hair into a rough ponytail, listening to the ceiling creak as Andrew moves around the attic. Her stomach butterflies—a strange combination of guilt and unease. She should tell Andrew about the barn, but deep down, she’s afraid. The scream, the open door, they feel like part of a story that’s been going on for a long time. Her story.

When she could have spoken, she chose silence. She chose to blinker herself to what she did not want to see. The woman in the corn. Her father, freezing partway across the lawn and looking up at her standing at the window.

Until it was too late.

When she finally had crossed back through the trees after that Halloween night, Sophie had found her mother on their battered couch, chain-smoking. She’d told Sophie matter-of-factly that her father had run off. There’d been a bruised quality to her mother’s eyes, more wrinkles gathered at their corners than her age warranted. Sophie remembers watching her mother’s bony shoulders as she reached for a fresh cigarette. Above the scooped neck of her tank top, Sophie had been able to count the first few bones of her mother’s spine.

Life had worn her thin, but with her father gone, Sophie had briefly hoped things might get better. But it had only been a different flavor of neglect, another kind of uncaring. More often than not, the house sat empty, her mother gone for long hours at a time with no explanation, and Sophie would creep through the trees and find herself on Andrew’s grandparents’ porch or in their kitchen, holding onto her hurt and never speaking aloud all the things that were wrong.

On her way to the barn, Sophie gathers garbage bags and heavy work gloves. She’s relieved to find the padlock in place, the chain still wound around the doors, but the relief doesn’t last long. The hooked bar isn’t pushed in; only rust holds it shut. A gentle tug and the lock opens. Sophie unwinds the chain and lets it slither to the ground.

There’s a spot beside the barn door where the wood is darker, unfaded by the sun—the distinct shape of a horseshoe. Sophie rests her hand against it, fingers splayed, touching the nail holes left behind.

Then the farmer holds the woman down and nails the horseshoes right through her hands . . .

Sophie jerks back, shaking her hand out, pushing open the barn door all at once like ripping off a bandage.

Slats of light coming through imperfect gaps in the wood slice through the gloom. It smells like soil. Like time and waiting. Piles loom in every corner—garden implements, boxes, old farm equipment. Andrew’s grandfather was forever buying things at flea markets and antique fairs, claiming he would fix them up one day, but he never did. There are old horse stalls in the barn, holdovers from a previous owner. Old bicycles and bits of wood and broken furniture fill them now.

Sophie turns in a slow circle, breathing in the dust. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for—would she even be able to tell if anything was missing? Or is she looking for something that doesn’t belong?

Sophie steps deeper into the barn and her gaze lands on a spot where the packed dirt floor has been disturbed. Her pulse trips. There are garden tools jumbled in a box nearby. She takes a trowel, digging, clearing the rest with her hands. The work gloves remain tucked, forgotten, into her back pocket. Black earth rinds her nails.

Sophie rocks back on her heels, looking at a flat wooden box uncovered by her efforts. There’s no lock. And why would there be? She flips it open.

In the same way she expected to see her father running across the lawn last night, the almost overwhelming sensation that she will find her father’s cigarette lighter, silver and etched with a stylized horse, overwhelms her. She’d stolen the lighter from her father shortly before he disappeared—a small, stupid act of rebellion. It was the nicest thing he owned, too nice, and he didn’t deserve it. More than that, it was tainted somehow, and she wanted to take it away from him. As though stealing it could fix everything that was wrong.

The first time she’d seen him with it, she’d just climbed off the school bus and her father had been standing on their front lawn, fidgeting with something that glinted silver in the sunlight. Sophie had tried to edge past him without saying anything at all, but he’d startled, a violent, involuntary motion, and he’d dropped the thing he’d been holding.

It landed at Sophie’s feet and she’d picked it up automatically. She’d barely gotten a look when her father had seized her wrist, hard, wrenching it as he snatched the object back from her.

“Don’t touch that. It’s a gift from a friend.”

His eyes had been wild—red at the edges, whether from drinking, or because he was on the verge of crying, she couldn’t tell. Sophie had stepped back, rubbing at her wrist. Her father hadn’t even apologized. He’d gone right back to staring at the trees, like he’d already forgotten she was there. Waiting on something or someone.

She hadn’t even been looking for it the day she’d found it in her father’s bedside dresser. She hadn’t even thought about it as she slipped it into her pocket. She’d gone back to her room and hidden it deep in her sock drawer. The next day, the lighter was gone. She’d expected her father to confront her, to yell, to call her a fucking little thief and a sneak and trash, but he didn’t. She’d watched him searching for it, frantically, strung-out-looking and afraid as he’d looked standing on the lawn and turning it over in his hands as he watched the trees. Sophie hadn’t said a word, and she’d never seen the lighter again.

There’s no rational reason why she should expect to see it now, but the feeling is so strong that for a moment Sophie can’t make sense of the box’s actual contents. The dull glint of metal forms a puzzle she can’t sort out until she blinks her vision clear and sees—four horseshoes, all of them broken, three inexpertly repaired.

Weld marks cross the iron like ragged scars, and beneath the horseshoes there’s a folded piece of paper. Dirt sifts loose, trapped in its creases, as Sophie draws it out and unfolds it.

Detailed drawings of hands and feet cover the page. Her father trained as an artist—he’d met her mother at art school, where she was studying to be a sculptor. He’d even worked in medical illustration for a while, but together, Sophie’s parents fed into each other’s self-destructive habits, their talent squandered, uninterested in pursuing their art anymore and doing just enough work to pay for the next round of drinks, the next fix of their current chosen drug.

But even unused, Sophie’s father had retained his skill and Sophie has no doubt these drawings are his. Long-fingered hands and long-toed feet, a woman’s face, the skin flayed on one side to show the delicate bones of a horse’s skull. A woman’s hand splayed, the tips of each finger anchored with nails to a horseshoe.

At the very bottom of the page there are words: This is how the Nag Bride is wed.

The horseshoes had been in place the night she’d thought she’d seen him running across the lawn. Andrew’s grandmother had pointed them out to her. But maybe when she’d seen him he had been intending to steal them, while the Halloween party was going on, but misjudged the time—gotten distracted, gotten drunk—and arrived too late. Or had he come for something else? Come looking for the Nag Bride, and seeing Sophie at the window had scared him away?

Maybe he’d returned later, stolen the shoes, and buried them here. Or maybe someone else had. There’s so much Sophie doesn’t know.

What Sophie does know is that Halloween night was the last time she had ever seen her father. At least alive. And she’s spent years telling herself she didn’t really see him, that she didn’t know anything strange was going on. That it isn’t her fault.

During Sophie’s final year of college, her father had finally come home. He’d killed her mother, and then he’d killed himself. He’d used a nail gun.

Andrew’s grandmother had been the one to call Sophie and tell her, and Sophie and Andrew had driven all through the night, back to his grandparents’ house, back home. Her father had been gone for eleven years. She’d almost convinced herself she would never see or hear from him again. Then she’d had to identify his body and her mother’s in the morgue.

The nails had been removed, but the puncture wounds remained. Sophie couldn’t help imagining how it had been. Her mother never bothered to change the locks; her father would have been able to walk right in. He would have been able to sit down in the dark and pour himself a drink and wait for her. Bang, bang, bang.

Sophie pictured her mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, struggling to breathe. She’d imagined her mother reaching toward her father, maybe to beg for mercy, or maybe in a last futile attempt to hurt him.

He’d put just enough nails into her to make sure her death would be slow. Sophie imagined her father pouring himself a second drink—with her mother’s hand still reaching for him, always caught in that moment, but never touching him—finishing that one, then putting the nail gun to his own head. Bang.

It’s all part of the same story. Her story. And the moments she hasn’t been living it, those are the unreal moments. In the morgue, Sophie had realized that even after her father left, part of her had always been waiting for him to return. She’d felt him hanging over their lives, a ghost haunting them, because the circle hadn’t been closed. There’d been too much left undone.

Sophie buries her face in her hands, not caring about the dirt. Then she pulls her hands away, smearing her skin, and wraps the horseshoes and the paper into one of the black plastic garbage bags, and tucks the whole bundle under her shirt. She runs across the lawn, and creeps back inside, listening for Andrew, holding her breath, and hoping the boards don’t creak.

The horseshoes press against her skin. Sweat gathers against the crinkling plastic, slick and uncomfortable. Sophie’s heart beats in the roof of her mouth as she buries the horseshoes and the paper at the bottom of her suitcase, and shoves the suitcase all the way under the bed.

Will they still be there in the morning? Or like her father’s silver lighter, will they disappear?

A gift from a friend.

A courting gift.

The Nag Bride needs a groom.

Did the Nag Bride take the lighter back from Sophie’s room?

Will she take the horseshoes as well?

She’s already been here.

She left marigolds behind.

A courting gift.

She needs a groom.

The cycle, the story, never ended. It’s begun again.

Image 1: A postcard showing two horses behind a split-rail fence. A gentleman in a suit stands on the other side of the fence, one arm leaning on the top rail. A legend across the bottom of the cardstock reads “Simpson Horse Farm.”

Image 2: A man in a dark suit stands next to a woman in a wedding dress with an empire waist. Behind them, the wooden wall of a barn, nailed with a horseshoe, is visible. The man’s hair is neatly parted and he sports a moustache. The woman’s hair is dark and long. The woman appears to have moved partway through the image’s exposure; her face is a long, oval blur. In faded ink along the bottom of the photograph is written “Mr. and Mrs. Edward Simpson, September 1932.”

Image 3 & 4: A survey map dated 1929 showing the plot of land occupied by Simpson Horse Farm. Thirty acres, surrounded on three sides by trees, and bordered on the fourth by the township road. A survey map dated 1989 showing the same land. A 6-acre plot where the original farmhouse and barn stood, surrounded by a suburban neighborhood made up of several single-family homes.

Image 5: The farmhouse at Simpson Horse Farm, surrounded by trees. A flaw in processing the image resulted in a smudge appearing between two of the trees. It vaguely resembles the figure of a woman, and has been used as evidence by those who claim the property is haunted.

—Napierville Historical Society Archives,

Gift of Everett Moseley 1968.10.29.1-5

“Find anything good?” Sophie asks.

She’s sore from moving piles, and despite scrubbing her hands and face, she still feels dusty.

“Take a look.” Andrew points to a stack of photo albums on the kitchen table. “I only skimmed the first one.”

Sophie opens the album to a picture of Andrew’s grandparents when they were young, standing on the house’s front porch.

“They look so young!” Sophie exclaims, and Andrew comes to peer over her shoulder.

“That must be right after they bought the house. Sometime in the mid-seventies?”

“I’d say so.” Sophie points at the wide collar on Andrew’s grandfather’s shirt, grinning.

There’s no real chronology to the album, the recent and distant past jumbled together. She finds Andrew’s father and aunt as children. Andrew as a baby. Various family gatherings. She pauses on a picture of her and Andrew the year they went as robots for Halloween in costumes made from cardboard boxes covered in tinfoil.

“We were such dorks.”

She hears Andrew open and then close the fridge door behind her. For a moment, everything feels normal. She can almost believe Andrew’s grandmother is just in the other room, sitting in her favorite chair, watching one of her nature programs. Andrew’s grandfather will walk through the front door at any moment, eager to show off his latest treasure.

“Geez, we were never that young, were we?” Andrew carries plates with chips and sandwiches to the table. He reaches back to the counter, and hands Sophie a beer, before sipping from a sweating bottle of his own.

Sophie freezes, her own bottle partway to her lips before her brain catches up.

“Andrew.” She points to his bottle.

Realization spreads across his face, confusion replaced by alarm, as he sets the bottle down on the counter and backs a step away.

“Oh shit. I just opened the fridge, they were there, and I grabbed one without even realizing.”

Just over two years ago, Andrew had called Sophie in the middle of the night, his voice shaking across the distance between them. He’d been crying. He hadn’t been able to tell her what was wrong, only that he needed her. She hadn’t hesitated, taking two subways and walking the remaining damp chilly blocks to his apartment. She’d found him in the bathroom, his entire body curled inward, the arch of his spine pressed to the wall between the toilet and the tub.

“I can’t . . . I don’t remember. Soph. I don’t remember.”

One eye had been bruised, a cut healing on his brow. She’d knelt beside him, wrapped her arms around him, and let him sob. They’d stayed like that on the bathroom floor the rest of the night, Andrew alternately shaking and crying, and in fits and starts, when he could stop his teeth chattering, he’d told her how bad it had gotten. Blackouts. Lost time. Skipping meals to drink on an empty stomach so the alcohol would affect him faster.

Sophie had noticed him losing weight, but told herself it was all the running he did. She’d noticed the sallow complexion of his skin, the bruised quality around his eyes, so much like her mother’s, and told herself he simply wasn’t getting enough sleep. They talked, but not every day, saw each other regularly, but not as often as they used to.

Sophie gave these things to herself as excuses—why she hadn’t seen it earlier, why she hadn’t insisted Andrew get help. She’d told herself she couldn’t help Andrew until he was ready to help himself. She told herself Andrew was an adult, he could make his own choices, and if he needed her, he’d let her know. She’d looked the other way, like she had with her parents, and she’d almost lost him.

“You didn’t buy them?” The words are out before Sophie can stop them.

Andrew’s face crumples, going from frightened to hurt. She knows he didn’t buy the beer, of course he didn’t. Since that night, he’s been sober, worked hard, and made the choice every day not to touch alcohol. Until now.

A courting gift.

Cold ticks its way up her spine.

Sophie gathers both their bottles and empties them in the sink. She opens the fridge, repeats the action with the remaining four bottles, flattens the cardboard carrier, and shoves it deep in the recycling bin.

“It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” She’s aware of speaking too rapidly, panic fluttering as she tries to push it down.

Andrew’s expression remains hurt, and a new fear strikes Sophie.

“I didn’t—” she says.

“I’m going out for a run.” Andrew pushes his chair back from the table.

She can’t tell if he believes her. Struck, unable to make her voice work, Sophie watches him retreat up the stairs. He must know she wouldn’t. She would never do anything to hurt him. And besides that, selfishly, she’s been avoiding going into town, even to the grocery store. Because she knows it’s only a matter of time before someone recognizes her, the whispers buzzing as they do in small towns—there she goes, Carl and Tina’s kid, daughter of a murder-suicide, so tragic, I wonder how far the apple falls from the tree . . .

She hears Andrew come back down the stairs.

“Need any company?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s wearing his earbuds, looking at his phone, and she tells herself that’s why he doesn’t respond. Sophie listens to the front door open and close.

Her body goes slack, not quite slumping, but letting the counter take her weight. If she’d told Andrew about the horseshoes, if she’d mentioned the Nag Bride, could she have stopped this from happening? Sophie rubs a hand over her face, still feeling imaginary grit on her skin from the barn.

After a moment, she returns to the kitchen table. She’s lost her appetite, but she’s still curious, and she picks up the next album from the stack Andrew brought down from the attic.

Instead of more jumbled family photos, there’s a newspaper clipping—a wedding announcement, but she doesn’t recognize the names—Mr. and Mrs. Everett Moseley, married in 1969.

Sophie recognizes the barn behind the couple, though. It’s Andrew’s grandparents’ barn, only newer. Just behind the groom’s head, there’s a horseshoe nailed to the wall.

She flips to the next page. There are images copied from the archives of the Napierville Historical Society. When Sophie lifts the book for a closer look, loose pages tumble to the kitchen floor. She finds photocopied pages from a book of ghost stories and legends, mixed in with handwritten pages. She recognizes Andrew’s grandfather’s hand.

The Nag Bride, over and over again, even if she isn’t named as such. Women murdered by their husbands. Women with nails driven through their hands. Women buried and digging their way out of the ground.

. . . said that every night she transformed into a black mare, stole men from their beds, and galloped them all over the countryside until their hearts stopped with fear.

. . . cursed the land with her dying breath.

The horse spoke with the voice of a woman and said . . .

. . . screamed, but it wasn’t a human sound . . .

. . . drove a spike of iron through her tongue . . .

Sophie’s hands shake, the pages rattling. She’s about to shove them back into the album, bury the album at the bottom of the pile, when a name on one of the pages arrests her. Carl. Her father’s name.

The page is lined loose-leaf, torn from a notebook, torn again at the bottom so only half the writing remains. Sophie recognizes Andrew’s grandfather’s hand again, but sloppy, as if the words were written in haste, or in a panic.

Carl—

Nettie would kill me if she knew I’d taken these down, but you need them more than we do. Put them over all your doors. I don’t know how much you know, how much you think you know from what you’ve pieced together, but it’s important. Do it for Sophie and Tina. Do it for yourself. It’s not too late to—

Sophie stares at the ragged edge where the words end, breath rough in her throat, a stinging heat behind her eyes. Andrew’s grandfather had taken the horseshoes down. He’d tried to give them to her father, to protect him. To protect Sophie and her mother. It’s not too late, he’d written, but it had been.

There’s a note from Andrew resting up against a white paper bag from the local bakery waiting for her in the kitchen. Sorry about yesterday. I just needed to get out of my head a bit. I know you didn’t buy that beer. I’m starting to think the house is haunted. He’d drawn a smiley face there, and then added a postscript at the bottom of the page. Meeting Craig for breakfast and a run. Consider this a peace offering.

Sophie unfolds the bag and finds a chocolate croissant wrapped in bakery paper. Tension she didn’t realize she’d been holding slides from her shoulders, defenseless in the face of buttery pastry. She’d waited for Andrew to come home from his run for almost two hours before she couldn’t stand being in the house alone. She’d gone for a drive, and briefly considered driving all the way back to the city.

Don’t look. Pretend everything is fine. Never look back and maybe all the bad things will go away on their own.

His bedroom door had been closed when she’d returned, and she’d retreated to her own room, slinking down to the kitchen after a while to make herself a sandwich, and eventually going to bed with her stomach in knots.

The smiley face in his note, joking about ghosts, and the fact that he’s meeting Craig, his sponsor, eases at least some of Sophie’s worries. Maybe not everything is okay. Maybe nothing is okay, but she and Andrew, at least, are okay.

After breakfast, Sophie loses herself in work, shifting piles until her muscles ache, dust and dirt grinding themselves deep into her skin. She leaves her phone inside, plugged in on the bedside table in the guestroom, deliberately not keeping track of time. Even so, she’s surprised when she glances through the open barn door and sees the sun on the verge of setting. Only then does she realize it’s also gotten cold.

“Hey.” Andrew looks up from the stove as she enters. He’s stirring garlic and onions in a pan, and Sophie’s stomach rumbles. “You really seemed to be in the zone and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“That smells amazing. Your grandfather’s recipe?”

“Absolutely. He ruined me for the store-bought stuff.”

Andrew’s posture is relaxed, his smile easy. Sophie allows herself to sink into one of the kitchen chairs and watch him work. She should take a shower, but the thought of climbing the stairs is too much.

She notes the stack of albums has been moved, and she’s about the ask Andrew about the one with all the clippings, when something catches her eye. A single petal, plastered to the side of the dark blue ceramic bowl in the middle of the table. A marigold petal—orange gold and shading to deep red at the center, the color of heart-blood. All the flowers she found on their first morning in the house were orange and yellow.

“Let me show you what I did while I let this simmer.” Andrew’s voice jolts her and Sophie turns to face him. “You weren’t the only one who was busy today.”

He gestures, and Sophie rises automatically, following him into the front room. His laptop is set up on the coffee table, its screen mirrored on the TV—a large flatscreen Andrew’s grandparents purchased before they’d moved.

“I got all the cameras set up.”

Andrew drops onto the couch and Sophie watches as he cycles through views, front yard, back, an interior camera looking down the stairs at the front door. There’s even one set up to look out over the barn. He backs the feed up, and Sophie watches herself leave the barn and walk to the front door.

The trees sway in the background, at the edges of the screen, and something pings at the back of Sophie’s mind. It was cold when she came back inside, but she doesn’t remember any wind. There’s a smudge between two of the trees, a space where the shadows jitter.

“Now we can see everything that goes on around here.”

“Can you go back a sec?”

She doesn’t look at him, eyes fixed on the screen as she backs it up and she watches herself walk backward into the barn, steps jerky and awkward, as if her legs are bent the wrong way.

“Everything okay?”

Sophie ignores him, leaning forward, squinting at the trees on the screen. They’re still; there’s nothing between them. Sophie shakes her head.

“Must be dust in my eyes from the barn.” She smiles, keeping her voice light.

Why doesn’t she just tell Andrew what she saw?

How long did his grandfather wait before taking the horseshoes down, trying to give them to her father?

How long is too long?

“So, hey, I got a call about a potential job today,” Andrew says.

His words jolt her again, careening them back to the normal and the mundane, and it’s a moment before Sophie catches her footing.

“That’s great!” Her voice sounds brittle, almost falsely chipper, and she’s sharply aware of the lag between her response and his words.

For a moment, Sophie thinks she sees a flicker of disappointment in Andrew’s eyes. But then he looks down, and she tenses reflexively, braced against his words, though she doesn’t know why.

“It’s in L.A. It sounds like a really great opportunity. They want to fly me out there, which, that’s got to be a good sign, right?”

The world tilts further, and Sophie fights to wipe the disappointment off her face before Andrew looks up again. He’d told her he wasn’t limiting his job search to local opportunities. She’d known this was a possibility, but now that he actually has an interview scheduled all the way across the country makes that possibility too real. What happens if he gets the job, if he moves away? Daughter of a murder-suicide; a bad seed planted in bad soil—what will she do without the only family she has left in the world?

“The job wouldn’t start for a few months, so it wouldn’t change anything with the house. I’ll fly out and back and I’ll only be gone a couple of days . . .”

He lets the sentence trail. Sophie makes herself breathe, hating the look in his eyes that seeks her approval, hating the selfish thoughts running roughshod through her head while he’s sharing good news.

“No. That’s great. I’ll keep working here and you’ll go there and you’ll be amazed at how much progress I make while you’re gone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Sure. Definitely. We should celebrate.” Sophie pushes herself up from the couch, too fast, walking on stiff legs to the kitchen.

Her chest constricts, and she blinks rapidly. What the hell is wrong with her? This is a good thing for Andrew—a fresh start, a new job, a new city.

“Soph?” Andrew touches her shoulder, voice soft and questioning.

She turns, lowering her hand from where she’s been subconsciously worrying at the cuticle of her thumb with her teeth. Too fast and the skin tears. Blood wells along the nailbed and drips from her hand and Sophie hisses in a sharp breath.

“Shit.” She reaches automatically for the drawer beside the sink, Andrew’s grandmother’s all-purpose junk repository, searching for a bandage.

“Are you okay? Let me see.”

“I’m fine.” The words are too sharp, and Sophie jerks away when Andrew reaches again.

She listens to him moving around the kitchen. When she turns, when she finally gets her hitching breath and prickling eyes under control, he’s holding a sweating beer bottle in one hand. Sophie gapes at him, stunned for a moment, until fear and anger and adrenaline bubble up and bubble over.

“What the fuck?” She jabs an accusing finger at him and Andrew blinks in confusion, lifting his hand and looking at the bottle as if he genuinely wasn’t aware of holding it until she pointed it out to him.

“What the fuck?” Again, her pulse galloping, and Sophie shoves him, hands landing in the center of Andrew’s chest, leaving drops of blood behind.

Pushing him feels good. She thinks of her parents. The bruises on her mother’s skin, the cigarette burns on her father’s arms. The way she tried so desperately to pretend she didn’t see them hurting each other, didn’t hear them shouting.

They were always the couple everyone wanted to party with, and they never let the fact that they turned into parents along the way stop them. The house was always full of men and women laughing too loud. Empty pizza boxes littering the floor. A constant fug of smoke clinging to the ceiling and walls like a lowering storm.

Once—she couldn’t have been more than eight years old—she remembers a hand drifting down her back to the waistband of her shorts and dipping inside, and the laughter getting louder and even more raucous as her face turned burning hot and bright, spilling with tears as she fled through the trees and across the yard to Andrew’s grandparents’ door.

But in the lapses between parties, her parents were different people. It was like without the laughter and other voices filling up the rooms there was too much space, too much silence in which to realize they hated each other. And Sophie alone wasn’t enough to stand between them.

“Hey, calm down, it’s okay.” Andrew’s tone is placating, he holds a hand out, palm up, like he’s calming a skittish horse. Sophie realizes that somewhere along the way she picked up the knife he’d been using to chop vegetables. She’s clutching it now, tip pointed at him.

Instead of looking alarmed, Andrew looks amused, one corner of his mouth lifted, a strange light in his eyes.

“It’s just one beer, Soph. You’re the one who said we should celebrate.”

He lifts the bottle, takes a deliberately long pull, gaze fixed on hers as if daring her to do something about it. She wants to hit him again. She wants to hurt him. She poured all the beer in the fridge down the drain and she knows neither of them bought new bottles and yet they’re here, like the marigolds. Like her father’s lighter, which he’d claimed to have received from a friend. A token of affection from a bride to her potential groom. And now again, the Nag Bride, trying to tear them apart, tempting them to violence.

But knowing all this doesn’t help, or make it so she can let go of her anger. If anything, it makes things worse. She grips the knife tighter. She’s shaking. She reaches for the bottle, and Andrew holds it out of her reach.

“Relax. It’ll be fine.” Light slides through his eyes.

He’s not Andrew. He’s a complete stranger. Like her father standing on the lawn, looking at the trees, playing with the lighter. Waiting for his “friend,” ready to leave his old family behind. Like Everett Moseley walking into the hardware store to buy a shovel to bury his wife. The center of Sophie’s chest feels bruised, as though kicked.

“I thought you talked to Craig today.”

“I did. He said the occasional drink is fine.” That quirk to Andrew’s mouth again, shaped like a lie, shaped like he’s testing her.

What are you going to do, Soph? Are you going to stop me? Or are you going to look the other way?

“Andrew.” She reaches for the beer again.

“Seriously, Sophie. Chill.” Andrew’s expression shifts, hard now.

The house creaks, a distinctive sound like someone stepping on a floorboard. Heavy. Not a regular footfall. A hoof.

Sophie’s head jerks up, tracking the sound across the ceiling. Her knuckles ache on the knife’s handle, jaw clenched hard.

Andrew moves, a sudden, darting motion, a feint as if to swat the knife from her hand. But his fingers miss deliberately by a mile, toying with her, laughing at her. She takes a step, her spine bumping against the sink behind her.

“Don’t.” Her voice shakes.

She lifts the knife’s point, but doesn’t move as his fingers encircle her wrist. He tightens his grip, wrenching, painful. Her father snatching the lighter from her hand. It was a gift from a friend.

The crack overhead is distinct this time, impossible to miss. Andrew’s head jerks up at the same time as hers, and they fall back from each other, mouths open, breathing like they’ve just run a mile.

“The fuck?” Andrew says. “The fuck is happening?”

Sophie can’t make herself speak, can’t find her voice, like an iron spike has been nailed through her tongue.

“I’m going to check.” Andrew is already moving toward the hall.

Sophie lets the knife clatter into the sink. She catches up to him at the foot of the stairs.

“Don’t.” She touches his arm. He shakes it off, but not violent this time, like a horse shrugging off a stinging fly.

She listens to him climb the stairs, the creak of each step, and can’t make herself follow. She can only crane her neck to peer after him, one hand gripping the newel post and her heart in her mouth. She listens to Andrew move down the hall, strains for the sound of a hoofstep.

Her wrist blushes in reverse from red to pale and bloodless, the mark from Andrew’s fingers already fading. After what seems far too long, Andrew comes back down.

“Must have been the wind.” His eyes are glazed as he says it, pupils widened and cheeks slightly flushed.

He’s lying.

She can’t stop herself from thinking it.

She stares at him, her best friend, her almost-brother. She wants to tell him everything, and she can’t make herself say anything at all.

Sophie steps onto the front porch. The house feels vast and empty, a weight at her back. She’d offered to drive Andrew to the airport, but he’d declined, ordering a car instead. Sophie had at least walked him out and wished him luck, but even that had felt strained.

She wraps her arms around herself, watching the trees stir. She searched the entire house after Andrew left, but she can’t shake the sense of someone—something—watching, waiting for her to let her guard down.

Despite herself, Sophie turns her head in the other direction, looking through the trees to the lights of the house that replaced hers—warm and glowing. The bones of the old house—her house—are still there, calling to her. It doesn’t matter that the house was razed to the foundation, torn out by its roots; it remains—a ghost beneath the skin.

A shadow-smear of darkness blocks and breaks the light, there and just as quickly gone. She wants to tell herself it’s only a branch, swaying despite the lack of wind, and steps back inside, locking the door.

As she pours herself a glass of wine, guilt needles her, even though Andrew is out of town. She switches on the TV and uses her phone to put the feed from the security cameras on the big screen.

Better to know what’s coming for her. Better, if she’s being watched, to be able to watch in turn.

She switches to the camera looking down the long drive. Empty for now, but she knows it’s only a matter of time. The Nag Bride has marked them, like she marked Sophie’s father. She already knows their weaknesses—the loss of Andrew’s grandparents, the loss of his job, points of stress and alcohol offered as a balm. And she knows Sophie’s weakness, knows from experience that Sophie will turn her head, look away, deny and deny and deny until it’s too late.

Sophie leaves the TV on, leaves her glass of wine on the coffee table, and climbs the stairs. She drags her suitcase out from under the bed, digging out the plastic bag wrapped around the horseshoes. She glances out the window and her pulse catches, stutters, and it’s a moment before it consents to start again.

The woman standing in the cornfield looks up.

Sophie drops the bundle on the bed and pushes the window up, leaning as far out as she can. There is no mistaking the woman; she is nothing human. Her hair is coarse, like a horse’s mane, and even though there’s no wind, it blows across her face. It hides her mouth, but Sophie feels her smile nonetheless, a visceral, terrible thing that needs no witness to be true. The Nag Bride’s smile, like the Nag Bride herself, is rooted in the primal spaces of the world—ancient, recurrent, myth made flesh. She does not require Sophie’s belief or consent, she simply is—her teeth flat and wide and too big for her mouth, distending her jaw.

Sophie pushes away from the window, grabbing the horseshoes and pounding down the stairs. Iron stops the Nag Bride. It’s in all the stories crammed into the back of Andrew’s grandfather’s album. It’s in Andrew’s grandmother’s promise to Sophie all those years ago.

At the bottom of the stairs, Sophie nearly trips as her phone’s ringtone pierces the silence. The horseshoes slip from her arms, landing with a heavy clang, just missing her toes. She snatches her phone from the coffee table, the screen lighting with Andrew’s name.

“Sophie.” His voice slurs.

Instead of a response, Sophie’s voice catches in her throat, and all that emerges is a strained hiss.

Andrew sounds wrong. She’s certain he can’t even have landed yet, let alone have reached the hotel and started drinking.

“I’ve been checking in on the cameras.”

Sophie pulls the phone away from her ear, looks at the number again. It is Andrew’s number. It’s his voice, but it doesn’t sound like him at all.

“I saw you outside, and I saw her in the trees. Is that why you wanted me to leave? So you could marry the Nag Bride and have her all to yourself?”

“No.” Sophie finds her voice, but it’s small, the denial thick and clumsy on her tongue.

She doesn’t want to marry the Nag Bride; she doesn’t want anything from her.

But.

But if Sophie doesn’t marry the Nag Bride, what if she turns to Andrew instead? She’s already divided them, separating them so she can claim one of them.

This is how the Nag Bride is wed.

Andrew’s voice comes again, but now it sounds farther away, cut through with a cold wind. He sounds more like himself, but he also sounds afraid, the slurring to his voice not from drink, but from tears.

“Soph, you have to stop it. You have to . . . I can’t—” His voice breaks up, an electronic wash of noise crackling down the line, and inside it, a rhythmic sound, like hooves clopping.

Sophie drops the phone, startled.

By the time she picks it up again, Andrew is gone.

“Shit.”

She dials his number, phone pressed hard to her ear. It rings and rings. No answer, not even voicemail.

“Shit!” Louder this time, and Sophie throws her phone against the couch so it bounces off the cushions and ends up back on the floor.

Her breath comes ragged and hard. The house creaks again. Not the walls. The porch this time, as though someone—something—just outside the front door is shifting their weight from foot to foot.

From hoof to hoof.

The weight, the way the boards creak, whatever stands there holds more mass than a single human woman.

A thud, heavy enough to shake the house. Sophie steps back automatically, her heart thundering in response.

The sound comes again, the front door shuddering under a blow, like a horse kicking its stall. She waits for the door to splinter and fly apart. Silence, so terrible and vast that it leaves room for a panicked rush of Sophie’s breath. Then, all at once, the restless prance of hooves. The Nag Bride pacing back and forth.

Sophie’s chest squeezes, painful and tight. She tries to count, but she can’t tell how many hooves there are—two or four. There’s a hammer and nails in the kitchen junk drawer, but she can’t make herself move.

Thunk, scrape. Thunk, scrape. The door shivers, a horse pawing a question. The doorknob doesn’t move. The Nag Bride can’t turn it with hooves, but Sophie has seen her long-fingered, bleeding hands. Hysteria tries to crowd the remaining air from Sophie’s lungs, and she chokes back terrified laughter. Thunk, scrape, and at last the sound unfreezes her. She bolts for the kitchen, the junk drawer, the nails.

Back into the hall. There’s a chair by the door, one Andrew’s grand-father used to sit in to put on his boots. Sophie drags it in front of the door.

She grabs one of the horseshoes, inexpertly repaired. Who tried to fix them after they were broken? Her father? Did he repent at the end and try to protect himself, her mother, Sophie, but he was already too late?

Because Sophie turned away. Because she let the Nag Bride cross through the trees and did nothing to stop her?

The chair wobbles as Sophie climbs. Lining up the nail while holding the horseshoe flush is almost impossible. She’ll drop the shoe, the hammer, or the nails. She’ll accidentally pierce her own hand.

She fumbles the first nail and it falls to the floor. The sound of it striking the wood is the loudest thing in the world. The steady pace of hooves stops. Listening?

Sophie lines up another nail and drives the hammer home.

On the other side of the door, the Nag Bride screams.

It’s the sound she heard their first night in the house. The sound of a woman, the sound of an animal, both in unspeakable pain. The sound of a nail driven not through wood, but through flesh and bone.

The hammer slips, and Sophie smashes her thumb. The chair tilts, and she drops the hammer, catching herself before she falls. Pain throbs and she shakes out her hand, the nailbed already turning purple. The horseshoe hangs crookedly, but it stays in place. Sophie scrubs tears from her eyes, climbs down, and goes to the back door to do it all over again.

Her arms shake by the time she’s done. Every part of her feels wobbly. The Nag Bride no longer paces across the boards, but Sophie doubts she’s gone. The Nag Bride requires a groom. That’s the way it’s always been. The Nag Bride must be wed.

Sophie returns to the front room where the TV still shows the feed from the security cameras. The Nag Bride stands in plain sight on the drive, and Sophie’s body jerks, a panicked, startled reaction. As if knowing the moment she is seen, the Nag Bride moves, walking slowly up the drive. Her head is bowed, dark hair covering her face, but even so, Sophie feels the too-long shape of her jaw.

But the Bride’s gait is painful, and for a wild moment, Sophie feels a surge of pity.

She thinks of nails driven through the woman’s feet, iron weighing her down. There’s a stuttering, halting quality to her steps. Like she isn’t meant to walk on two legs, like the legs she walks upon are bent the wrong way.

The Nag Bride’s skin invites bruises; her hands and feet beg for nails. She is made to be wed, to be killed, to unbury herself in a terrible cycle. But is she to blame? If she draws violence to the surface of men’s skin, doesn’t that mean the violence was already there?

If Sophie hadn’t turned away, hadn’t let the Nag Bride pass through the trees, would anything have changed?

Her father’s choices, they were his own. The Nag Bride didn’t make him do anything he didn’t already want to do.

Sophie drops onto the couch, leaning toward the TV. A shift, the Nag Bride moving a fraction out of focus, and now a horse walks toward the camera, steps slow and plodding. A beast of burden carrying the weight of humanity’s cruelty, the weight of the world. Sophie watches until the horse, the woman, passes out of the camera’s view. She watches a moment longer, the shadows on the long drive shifting, drawing together and pulling away. She strains, trying to see whether the footprints left behind are shaped like a woman’s bare heel, or the rounded moon of an iron horseshoe.

Sophie’s legs tremble as she stands, but she makes them carry her into the hall. Thud, thud, thud. Hooves scrape the boards again.

Sophie glances at the horseshoe hung crookedly above the door. As long as it remains in place, she’ll be safe. This house is safe. But safe for who?

She thinks of her mother, tortured to death. She thinks of Mrs. Everett Moseley, denied her own name, her husband cheerfully informing the store clerk he intended to bury her. And what about Edward Simpson’s wife? What about the women in all those stories Andrew’s grandfather wrote out? The Nag Bride killed and buried, again and again.

And she thinks of Andrew’s grandfather, his kind smile, his excitement at showing them his latest flea market find. She thinks of Andrew, her best friend, her brother, the two of them making Halloween costumes and telling stories and always having each other’s back. Andrew’s grandmother pouring Sophie coffee and drying her tears when she’d come running through the trees, making sure she felt loved. All of them, together, Sophie’s family when she couldn’t rely on her own, making this a safe place for her.

The Nag Bride with her moon-pale skin, easily bruised, with her long-fingered hands, waiting for the iron nails, is a mirror reflecting the worst and most terrible impulses humanity has to offer. But humanity has more to offer than pain. Sophie has seen for herself that this is true.

Sophie presses her forehead against the door. Hard. Harder, until it hurts. She clenches her teeth.

Behind her closed eyes, she sees the farmer standing over a woman in his barn, driving nails through her hands. She sees her father, driving nails into her mother’s skin.

Maybe the Nag Bride doesn’t need to be wed or killed. And if she isn’t either—unmarried, unburied—then maybe the cycle needn’t begin again.

Sophie draws in a ragged breath. She pulls the chair back in front of the door, grabs the hammer. Her thumb still aches, but she ignores the pain as she climbs onto the chair and gouges at the nail, prying the horseshoe free.

Sophie half jumps, half falls, kicking the chair out of the way. She wrenches open the door.

The Nag Bride blinks dark, liquid eyes.

She is the most beautiful thing Sophie has ever seen, and the most terrible.

Her face is long. Not a horse’s face, and not a human’s either. The lines of her skull are visible through her skin. She turns her head to one side, nostrils flared, and looks at Sophie from one of her wide-set eyes. A prey animal’s eyes, rolling and afraid.

Then she turns her head again and she’s fully human. A predator again. Except when she smiles, it is pained, her flat teeth never meant to fit a human jaw.

Lashes shadow the Bride’s pale cheeks as she looks to the horseshoe in Sophie’s hand. When her gaze comes up again, it’s a question. Will the Nag Bride be wed?

The woman, the horse, both and neither, reaches out a hand. It’s already bleeding, rusted punctures where nails have been driven in over and over again. She turns it palm up, waiting for Sophie to place the iron shoe there. Sophie moves closer, until she is on the porch with the Bride and they are face-to-face.

Breath warms Sophie’s skin; it smells sweet, like hay, and it smells old, like earth and flowers—marigolds—on the edge of rot. Sophie places the horseshoe in the Bride’s hand.

“I’m not giving it to you,” she says, her voice trembling. “It’s yours already.”

Fear pools in Sophie’s belly. It trickles along her spine. She is not marrying the Bride, and she will not drive nails through her skin. And she can only hope in choosing not to do so, she is setting her free.

The Nag Bride’s jaw shifts, teeth grinding, as if she would speak, but her tongue isn’t made for human sound.

“I don’t want . . .” Sophie closes her eyes, takes a shuddering breath.

“I don’t want to marry you.”

She opens her eyes.

“No one here does. This house belonged to a good man and a good woman, and it will again. I—”

A thought takes her, and Sophie releases a shuddering breath, gathering herself before she speaks again.

“This house is safe, I swear it. No one here will hurt you as long as . . . As long as I’m around. I promise.”

Sophie has no idea how she will keep the promise, but she means it, down to her core. She may be making the biggest mistake of her life. If the Nag Bride refuses her proposal, will she pass through the trees, will she go to hunt the family living in the house where Sophie’s own house used to stand? Will she continue on until she finds someone else, someone weaker, someone like Sophie’s father?

The Nag Bride’s hand remains extended, the iron shoe between them. There’s nothing protecting Sophie now. The Nag Bride could step over the threshold, whuffing the air. She could kick Sophie in the chest with powerful hooves, cracking Sophie’s ribs open with one blow.

The Nag Bride takes a step back. Her mane-like hair stirs, hiding the strange shape of her jaw, then blowing away again to reveal her unnatural smile. Her eyes shine, and they do not look away from Sophie as she continues to walk backward, the iron horseshoe still held out on her palm.

A promise made, and a promise accepted?

Sophie still doesn’t know. Has she only delayed the inevitable?

The Nag Bride must always have her groom.

Or will things be different this time?

She leaves the front door open, retrieves her phone from the floor. She dials Andrew’s number. He answers on the third ring, sounding out of breath, but like himself.

“Hey. I just landed, and I’m trying to find the shuttle to the hotel.” She pictures the crowded airport, Andrew dragging his suitcase behind him. “Is everything okay?”

“I want to buy the house.” The words leave her in a rush, given breath, made real.

“What? Soph—What are you—”

“I want to buy the house. Don’t sell it. I don’t know . . . I’ll figure something out.”

Sophie carries her phone back into the hall, out the front door, and onto the porch. Ruined cornstalks sway, even though there is no breeze. Footprints trail in the driveway’s dust. Hoof-shaped, shaped like a woman’s bare heel. A promise in return. The Nag Bride is patient and if Sophie fails, she will be there, waiting.

“We can talk about it when you get home.” Sophie hears the weariness in her voice, the strain.

She knows how all of this must sound to Andrew, and she doesn’t care. She has a promise to keep.

“Hey, don’t even worry about it. Focus on the interview. I know you’re going to kill it.” Sophie feels herself smile, despite everything.

“Are you sure you’re all right? You sound—”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just . . .”

Sophie looks to the trees, swaying as though something just passed through them. For a moment, it isn’t the new house built where her house used to be that she sees. It’s her house, low and narrow, and her father is in there, sleeping, and her mother is gone, and there’s no one else to protect it except Sophie.

“I need to do this,” Sophie says. “I need to stay here. This is the only place that’s ever felt like home.”

The trees sway and the wind doesn’t blow and somewhere in the darkness a horse wickers. And even though Sophie can’t see it, she feels it—the Nag Bride smiles.