Chapter 4 - THE GIRL WHO DROWNED

“That’s impossible,” Caleb said.

Mara could not answer.

The photograph was dated 1996.

Lena would have been four years old.

But the Vale family had never met Ezra Halverson.

Mara flipped the photograph over.

In faded ink:

THE FIRST ONE CAME OUT OF THE RIVER.

Her hands went cold.

Lena had drowned in that same river eighteen years later.

Caleb watched her carefully.

“You never told me exactly what happened.”

“We were camping with our parents. Lena heard someone calling from across the water.”

“Who?”

“She said it was our mother.”

“But your mother was with you.”

“Yes.”

Lena walked into the river at night.

Mara had followed and tried to pull her back.

The current took Lena first.

Mara survived by grabbing a root along the bank.

For years she remembered Lena screaming.

Now another memory surfaced.

Something she had forced herself to forget.

Before the current carried Lena away, her sister had turned and smiled.

Not like a frightened child.

Like someone listening to a beautiful song.

Caleb touched the photograph.

“What if Lena heard the same thing Ruth heard?”

A thump sounded under the table.

Then another.

The cellar.

Mara ignored it.

She searched the notebook for references to the river.

Near the back she found one.

NOVEMBER 12:

The old miners called them Echoes.

They believed the stone below Blackpine was alive.

Not alive like animals.

Alive like hunger.

It cannot speak until it hears us.

It cannot remember until it enters us.

It needs the ear because hearing is how it learns a person.

Caleb rubbed his right ear.

Mara noticed.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You keep touching it.”

“I said nothing.”

She stared at him.

“Caleb.”

His jaw tightened.

Then his eyes moved toward the cellar.

A woman’s voice whispered below.

“Caleb, honey.”

He went white.

Mara had never heard that voice.

But Caleb had.

“My mother,” he said.

His mother had died six months earlier.

The voice came again.

“Baby, come downstairs.”

Caleb stepped toward the table.

Mara grabbed him.

“No.”

He looked at her with tears in his eyes.

“You don’t understand.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

Then the voice changed.

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Now it was Lena.

“Mara,” it whispered. “He already has another one inside him.”