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Upon their return from the forest, Griswold Road is a flurry of activity. The sheriff department’s cruisers’ red and blue lights flash in timed intervals, casting an eerie glow over the grim gathering of townsfolk who litter the lawns of both houses. As dusk swells into existence, the heat never relinquishing the power it holds over the world, a distressed Mrs. Crenshaw and Jenny Cleary stand together in the shade of a tree, two lonesome figures amidst the chaos.
Rachel’s heart drops to her stomach at the commotion and then does a flip when Mrs. Crenshaw spots them near the forest’s ACCESS PROHIBITED sign. The old woman’s concern turns to rage in an instant—a frail lady changing into a warrior queen. Gone are the ailments of age, gone is the amicable façade.
“We’re in so much trouble,” Rachel says as they cautiously approach the road together.
Mrs. Crenshaw takes several footsteps away from Rachel’s mother, who wears a blank expression and stares past her toward the forest. Those who are present turn their gazes toward them, relief rather than annoyance filling the air. It’s strange, though, oh so very strange that a crowd had gathered outside their houses—possible search parties, if Rachel’s reading this scene correctly—in a matter of hours, whilst those poor missing children were never afforded the same luxury. Rachel doesn’t mention it to Dougal, doesn’t have the courage to utter a single word with Mrs. Crenshaw marching their way, but it’s unnerving to imagine her life meaning more than innocent kids’ lives.
Why?
“You two better have a damn good explana—” Mrs. Crenshaw almost shouts. She cuts herself off as she draws closer, her nose wrinkling as a pesky breeze blows past them. “What is that smell?” She looks them up and down, now clearly upset by losing her momentum, and runs her hand through her white, loosely braided hair, which isn’t her style of choice. “Go get yourselves cleaned up immediately. We’ll talk about this excursion of yours when you don’t smell like sewage.”
“Nan—”
“Don’t give me lip, boy. Move.”
Rachel watches as Dougal hurries toward the house. He dodges the curious onlookers by cutting across the lawn and slipping around the side of the Frasers’ property. She makes her way to the house across the street, gripping the umbrella handle tightly in her fist, defiantly marching through the whispering crowd to reach the front door.
“You and I are going to have a good long talk about responsibility, young lady,” her mother says when Rachel passes.
Rachel’s response is no more than an indignant snort. The hypocrisy of her mother’s words, the very tone she uses, doesn’t deserve more than belligerence. Responsibility. Ha! She makes her way up the porch steps, sets down the damp umbrella, and kicks off her ruined shoes. She escapes into the house without a word.
If Jenny wants to talk, if she suddenly feels like it’s time to act like a parent again, Rachel decides it’s only fair that her mother listens to the long list of complaints she’s compiled over the past few months. Period.
Her wet hair hangs over her shoulders and down her back, now several shades darker and infinitely curlier, thanks to the long shower she needed to get rid of the persistent smell. Water drips onto the black, white, and purple geometric carpet, protecting the hardwood beneath. Rachel sits cross-legged on her bedroom floor in the yellow artificial light that shines down from the ceiling, dressed in her favorite pajamas and robe, and scrolls through her emails and Instagram timeline. From the look of things, she hasn’t missed much; a few holiday photos, some passive aggressive status updates on Twitter, a handful of spam emails, and a few texts from a number she doesn’t recognize—first asking where she is and then whether she’s all right.
A knock on the door startles her out of her thoughts, followed by her mother’s irate words. “You’re grounded for two weeks.”
“For what exactly?” Rachel calls back.
“Insubordination.”
Rachel rolls her eyes, tosses the phone over her shoulder, which lands on her pillow with a dull thud, and stands from the floor. She crosses her bedroom and opens the door, searching for her mother in the hallway. It’s only natural for her to want to contest the unfair punishment, considering she and Dougal hadn’t even technically left their families’ properties, but her mother isn’t there. Deliberating, it seems, is out of the question. The public remark her mother made earlier, about them having a “good long talk about responsibility” won’t come to fruition.
She slams her door shut, hard enough to rattle the window, and makes her way to her desk. A few of her father’s journals are scattered across the surface, open at seemingly random pages. Her own notebook, which she’s been using solely to find a pattern to locate the missing children, sits atop her closed laptop. Rachel takes a seat in her swivel chair, opens the notebook, and looks at the progress she’s made. It makes for depressing reading, especially since she hasn’t found a single lead to get to the bottom of this frustrating mystery whatsoever, apart from the Black Annis running about town.
She picks up her pen and adds Astraea Hayward’s name to the growing list, her age and the information surrounding her disappearance—Vanished into thin air on Main Road, in front of witnesses.
She glances at her father’s journal, where the Black Annis is doodled in the margin, and sets her notebook aside.
There’s more to the sketch than meets the eye, but what? She flips to the first page of the journal and reads through her father’s notes, which mainly revolve around the Eerie Creek Sawmill. There isn’t anything salacious about the research her father had done. The journal delves into the history of the lumber company that agreed to enter into the partnership with Shadow Grove’s leaders. There’s a brief overview of the possible malpractices the lumber company was allegedly involved in—child labor, unsafe working environments, fraudulent behavior. Otherwise, it’s maddeningly tedious.
Rachel stands and walks over to her bed, lies on her side, and continues reading. There are a lot of facts to sift through, boring facts. In this particular journal, her dad doesn’t touch on the subject of the tragedies that had befallen the sawmill’s owners or workers, but the entry on the last page does hold promise.
The apathy shown regarding the missing child laborers, some as young as ten years old, during this turbulent time in Shadow Grove’s history, is perhaps the most appalling part of the Eerie Creek Sawmill Saga. For two years prior to the fire that would ultimately end the partnership between the town and the lumber company, at least fifteen children disappeared. Is this the work of a serial killer? We may never know.
“Oh.” Rachel sits upright on the bed. She rereads the last part of the journal, eagerly searching for more, but the tantalizing tease begins and ends with the paragraph in question. “This has happened before,” she whispers her revelation out loud, heart racing as she rushes back to her desk and finds her own notebook.
She copies her father’s entry word for word, adds the citation for future reference at the bottom of the copied paragraph, and places the journal to one side of her desk. Rachel picks up the next random journal and repeats the process, hoping to find something else that could help her in the search for those missing kids.
Long hours pass as she wades through useless information about farming methods used in Shadow Grove and how they’ve changed throughout the town’s history. The dull read weighs down her already leaden eyelids, exhaustion after a day of bizarre adventures promises a deep, dreamless sleep. Rachel absentmindedly strokes the soft bedding as her ever-narrowing eyes move across the page, while the pillow supporting her neck gently caresses her cheek. Comfortable, inviting, her resolve to continue reading ebbs until it finally dissolves. Sleep drags her out of the waking world and into blissful nothingness.
Sometime during the night, the temperature plummets. The wind howls as it rushes from the forest and enters the town. Leaves whisper as the wind picks up, the air becomes heavier, clouds gather over Shadow Grove as a storm rolls in. A long, low rumble rouses Rachel from her slumber. Her eyes snap open at the sound, and an incandescent light fills her bedroom for a few milliseconds.
One Mississippi ... Two Mississippi ... Th—
Peals of thunder interrupt her counting. She sits upright, mind muddled with sleep, and wonders if her mother had been the one to turn off the lights or if the storm had blown a fuse. She looks around her dark, undisturbed bedroom, still in the darkness. Aside from the gossamer curtains waving violently as the wind penetrates her room, nothing is out of order. Rachel doesn’t recall opening the window since the previous day, when it’d felt like someone—something—was watching her.
Lightning cleaves the night sky in half; a clap of thunder rattles the heavens.
She pushes the journal off the bed as she gets up, and it lands face-down on the floor. Her robe’s belt drags behind her as she saunters to the window. Yawning, she rubs the sleep from her eyes with the back of her hand. A persistent scratching and a click, click, clicking noise—not so loud as to truly hinder a heavy sleeper but loud enough to bother someone who wants to reach their dreamscape again—sounds just outside the window. Rachel pushes the curtains out of her way, battling the swathes of fabric which billow wildly as another gust of wind makes its way through, and comes face-to-face with the stuff of nightmares.
The creature’s most noticeable feature is her blue-hued skin tone, and although her rusty nail-like teeth are without a doubt a menacing sight, it’s those eyes. With a single glare of those midnight-colored eyes, even Death would surrender his scythe to the Black Annis outside Rachel’s window.
Metallic fingernails glint regardless of the absent moonlight—and tap against the glass pane, once, twice, before dragging downward to create a shrill screeching noise that reverberates in the very roots of Rachel’s molars. The Black Annis pushes away from the wall and comes into full view. Hanging there, suspended in midair, a satisfied smile spreads across her inhuman features. Then the black cloak, which is not at all filthy as Rachel had assumed the previous night, wraps around the Black Annis’ emaciated form, protecting her from the downpour. Rachel suspects the cloak to be sentient as it curls closer to its mistress on its own. Tighter and tighter, restricting like a python.
Whispers ride on the wind. Distant childlike voices, gleeful, as if they’re on a playground, swirl into existence around the crone. The soft voices become louder until it sounds like the children are playing right beneath Rachel’s bedroom window. The Black Annis’ cloak suddenly shoots open and spreads out farther. Impossibly, it somehow fills Rachel’s entire line of vision, revealing a collection of ghostlike faces stacked one upon the other and side by side. Chubby-cheeked cherubs avert their hollow gazes to stare at the Black Annis, forced smiles twisting their features horrendously.
The cloak continues unfurling to the sides and the tally keeps climbing as new faces appear. Even if Rachel wanted to study each collected child, in search of the missing children of Shadow Grove, there are simply too many to count.
“What are you?” Rachel’s words slip out of her mouth of their own accord, her voice awestruck instead of fearful. Her hands tremble and she feels unsteady on her legs, but curiosity overrides every other sane option.
The question seems to intrigue the Black Annis rather than anger her. Good thing, too, because she drifts closer to the window again, midnight eyes never straying far from Rachel’s position.
“The Night Weaver,” the Black Annis says without moving her lips. The cloak curls inward again, slowly retracting until it looks like a regular piece of clothing.
“Are y—you from Orthega?” Rachel stutters.
The Night Weaver’s face changes to indicate scornful derision.
“Yes.” The word is no more than a fleeting thought, a whisper on the wind.
Feeling brave, Rachel asks, “Did you take the children?”
Lightning flashes in the background. A horrible smile crosses the Night Weaver’s face, which seems younger now, almost vibrant. Apparently, her expression is answer enough, because the disembodied voice doesn’t reply.
Rachel narrows her eyes, anger substituting curiosity and fear. “Give them back,” she hisses, her hands balling into fists, even though there’s little to nothing she can physically do to retrieve the kids from this otherworldly creature.
The Night Weaver’s smile widens. What can only be described as excitement glimmers in those midnight eyes. She floats backward, away from the window, her retreating figure becoming smaller and less visible as the night swallows her whole.
Rachel rushes closer to the window, screaming into the night, “Give them back! Give them back!”
“Come get them.”
The final, distant whisper reaches Rachel just as the storm breaks properly and the rain turns to hail. She grabs the windows’ handles and pulls them inward, locking them quickly. The hailstones ricochet off the glass pane, pinging as they hit.
Enraged, Rachel spins around and finds her mother standing in the doorway, wide blue eyes set in an ashen face. There’s no telling how long her mom’s been lurking in the door or how much she’s heard. Rachel wants to ask, but whatever courage she’s had during her meeting with the Night Weaver has left her. Standing up to some make-believe monster is cake in comparison to confronting Jenny Cleary.
Her mother blinks, as if coming out of a trance, and looks away from the window to meet Rachel’s gaze. For a seemingly endless minute, the two of them stare at each other. This rift between them, which seems to have become infinitely wider and deeper since her dad’s death, is amplified by the inability to speak openly. These days, the awkward silence is a constant feature in their relationship, and it keeps Rachel from moving closer.
A sudden shift in the atmosphere throws Rachel off guard. The tight, forced smile spreads across her mother’s face, blankness glazes over her eyes. There’s nothing maternal about the expression, nothing soothing or familiar in the unusual response.
“It’s late, sweetheart. Better get to bed,” her mother says, her tone sounding far too robotic to pacify Rachel’s late-night fears.
Before Rachel can react, Jenny Cleary turns on her heels and slips back into the dark hallway, heading toward her bedroom on the other side of the house. Whether either of them will sleep again tonight, Rachel can’t say for sure, but she has no misgivings over how this episode will be dealt with in the future.
