The Bedrock of Salt Creek

My half-sister, Cora, is twelve years younger than me, and we share only our mother’s blood. Her father’s clan came from the red rock country of the Southwest, and she always carried that desert dust in her bones. I grew up in our mother’s neat Ohio suburb, while Cora spent summers with her father’s people, learning things I could never understand.

Our mother died when Cora was nineteen, and I, being the eldest, became her reluctant guardian. She’d already been in and out of treatment centers, and her diagnosis of bipolar disorder came with a laundry list of other ailments, many self-inflicted. But the thing that always unsettled me wasn’t her illness—it was her certainty about the unseen.

When Cora was three, she introduced me to her imaginary friend, a large Black woman she called Jim Mercy. I asked her to describe her, and Cora would say, ‘She’s tall, Mama Mercy, with skin like the night and hands that hold the moon.’ I’d find Cora whispering to the corner of her room, and when I asked who she was talking to, she’d say, ‘Mama Mercy says you’re afraid of the dark, but you shouldn’t be. She’ll watch over you.’ I’d shiver and leave the light on.

One night, when Cora was six and I was home from college for the summer, she came to my room at 2 a.m., her small face pale in the moonlight. ‘Can Mama Mercy sleep with us tonight?’ she asked, her voice trembling. ‘She’s scared of the storm.’ I said no, I was scared of her, and Cora replied, ‘She’s just lying next to you right now, on the floor.’ I looked down and saw a shallow indentation on the carpet as if something heavy had been there. I slept on the couch that night, and in the morning, I found Cora asleep on the living room floor, her hair spread out like a halo on the rug.

Years passed, and Cora’s stories grew stranger. She would call me at 3 a.m., rambling about spirits in the walls, about the dead who owed her debts. I chalked it up to her episodes and the long shadow of her drug use. ‘You don’t believe me,’ she’d say, her voice cracking. ‘But it’s real, Lena. The Veil is thin here.’ I’d sigh and tell her to take her medication.

Last year, Cora moved to a small, crumbling apartment in the industrial district of our town, near the old salt flats. She claimed the spirits there were ‘the loudest.’ I visited once, and the air was thick with the smell of brine and something else—something like old blood. Cora had covered the walls in drawings, charcoal scribbles of faceless figures, and one central image: a large, shadowy woman with eyes like white stones. ‘That’s Mama Mercy,’ Cora said, pointing. ‘She’s been following me. She says she has a message for you.’

I should have left then, but I stayed. I needed to see if she was truly losing it or if there was something else. Cora sat on the floor, cross-legged, and began to speak in a voice that wasn’t quite hers. ‘The salt remembers,’ she said, ‘and the wind carries voices. You must listen.’ I asked her what she meant, and she looked at me with eyes that seemed too clear. ‘There’s a well under this building. A deep one. They threw bodies in it, a hundred years ago. Mama Mercy was one of them.’

I felt a chill snake up my spine. I knew the history of the salt flats—there’d been a scandal about a mass grave discovered in the 1980s, but the town hushed it up. I told Cora she was being dramatic, that she should rest. As I turned to leave, she grabbed my wrist, her grip surprisingly strong. ‘She wants you to come down there with me tonight,’ she said. ‘She says you owe her a debt, from when you were a child.’

I pulled away and fled, but that night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing Cora’s face, the desperation. Around 2 a.m., I got a call from Cora. I expected her to be hysterical, but her voice was eerily calm. ‘I’m at the well,’ she said. ‘Mama Mercy is here. She’s telling me to jump.’ My blood ran cold. I drove to her apartment as fast as I could, my mind racing.

The building was dark, the hallway lights flickering. I found Cora in the basement, kneeling before a ragged hole in the concrete floor, a black pit that seemed to breathe cold air. She was chanting something in a language I didn’t know. ‘Cora, stop!’ I shouted. But she turned to me, and for a moment, I saw something else in her eyes—something ancient and hungry.

She pointed to the hole. ‘She’s down there, Lena. All this time, she was down there. She was your imaginary friend too, remember? She used to sleep by your bed, but you sent her away.’ And then, a voice rose from the pit, low and resonant, like the rumble of the earth. It said, ‘The sister knows. The sister always knew.’

I stumbled back, my heart pounding. The voice was real, not Cora’s. It seemed to fill the room, to seep into my bones. Cora smiled, a genuine smile that reached her eyes, and said, ‘I have to go now. She’s been waiting for me.’ And before I could stop her, she dove headfirst into the hole.

I screamed, but there was no thud of impact, only silence. I crawled to the edge and looked down, but saw only darkness, and a faint smell of salt and roses. I called the police, but when they arrived, the hole was gone, the floor smooth and solid. They found Cora’s body in the apartment, in her bed, as if she’d died in her sleep. The coroner said it was an overdose, but I knew better.

I still have dreams of that pit, and sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear a voice that sounds like Cora’s, but not Cora’s. It whispers, ‘Mama Mercy is waiting for you, Lena. She’s been waiting since you were six.’ I look at my own reflection now and wonder if Cora was ever truly mad, or if she was the only one who could see the truth. I’ve started sleeping with the lights on again, and I never go near the salt flats. But every time I close my eyes, I see the dark well and the wide, white eyes of Jim Mercy, and I know that she is patient.

Sometimes, I think I felt her lying next to me, just like Cora said, and I press my face into my pillow and whisper, ‘Not me, not me,’ but the emptiness in the room only grows. I haven’t told anyone about the call, about the voice, or about what I saw. They’d say I’m as crazy as she was. But I know the truth now: there is a bedrock of salt beneath our town, and it holds more than just history. It holds something that waits. And my sister, wherever she is, is not alone.