The Dry Well of Appleton

The house on Hemlock Lane had never felt like ours, not truly. We’d moved in when I was nine, the summer the previous owners fled without explanation, leaving behind a half-packed moving truck and a baby’s crib in the attic. Mom said it was a bargain, but I remembered the way the realtor’s smile didn’t reach her eyes, and how the keys were cold in my hand.

In the first week, I found the well. It was hidden in the back garden, a circle of cracked concrete barely visible beneath the overgrown honeysuckle. My father, ever the pragmatist, said it was just an old dry well, probably for rainwater. But when I dropped a pebble, I never heard it hit the bottom.

We should have left then. But we stayed, and the house began its slow work of wearing us down. The first signs were small: the grandfather clock in the hall would chime thirteen times at midnight, always thirteen, and the pendulum would sway even when I held it still with my hand. My mother’s roses, which she tended with obsessive care, began to bloom only in black and white, their petals like paper ash.

I was nineteen when I first saw Her. Not in the garden, but in the mirror of the upstairs bathroom. Her reflection was there, a thin woman in a grey dress, her hair a tangle of weeds. She stood behind me, her lips moving in a silent, desperate rhyme. I spun around, but the room was empty. When I looked back, the mirror was cracked, a spider’s web of fractures spreading from a single point where her forehead would have been.

That’s when the objects began to move with a new violence. It wasn’t just books or perfume bottles anymore. It was the kitchen knives, which would fly from the wooden block and embed themselves in the walls, forming patterns that spelled out words in a language I didn’t know. It was the heavy oak dining table, which would tip over at dinner, sending plates shattering onto the floor. My father said it was just drafts, foundations shifting. But I could feel a presence in every room, a pressure like the air before a storm, and She was always at the edge of my vision.

One night, I woke to the sound of scratching. It came from behind the wardrobe in my room, a space that should have been sealed solid against the wall. I moved the wardrobe with a strength I didn’t know I had, and there was a door, hidden and painted over. I pried it open, revealing a narrow spiral staircase leading down into darkness. The steps were cold and slimy, each one a layer of dead moss and old bones. I should have turned back, but my feet carried me down.

The staircase ended in a cavern, beneath the well, I realized. The walls were lined with shelves, hundreds of them, and on each shelf was a jar. Inside the jars were eyes. Human eyes, all different colors, all still wet, all turned toward me. In the center was a stone basin, and she stood there, her back to me, her hand guiding a black liquid from a carved vessel into the basin. When she turned, I saw that her face was not a face but a smooth porcelain mask, and around her neck she wore a string of finger bones that clicked as she moved.

She spoke, and her voice was a chorus of whispers, not from her mask but from the walls, the ceiling, the jars. She told me that the house had been hers for two hundred years, and that the well was her portal, her only way to drink from the cold earth. She said that everyone who lived here belonged to her, that we were all just jars waiting to be filled. And she smiled, a crack appearing across the mask, and I saw my own eye floating in a jar beside her.

I ran. I don’t remember climbing the stairs, only bursting into the cold night air, my breath ragged. The house loomed behind me, its windows black, but I could feel her gaze following me. I drove to the county library that very night, and in the local history section, I found a record from 1847. The property on Hemlock Lane had once belonged to a midwife named Elspeth Morn, who was hanged for witchcraft. The official record said she was guilty of ‘ensouling the unborn’, but the townsfolk had a simpler name for her: the Eye Thief. She would steal the eyes of newborn babies, they said, to see into the future. They sealed her in the well with a lid of blessed iron, but they never found all her jars.

I know now that we are not the first to have lived here, and we will not be the last. The house is a living thing, and She is its heart. I write this in the attic, surrounded by her jars, which multiply with each night of my life. My eyes are the clearest she has ever harvested, she says, and she will use them to watch the children I will have, the children I will bring here, to be her new vessels. I try to scream, but my mouth is sealed with moss and stone. I am a jar now, and she has filled me with the darkness of the well.

The last thing I remember is her mask peeling back, not to reveal a face, but a deep, empty void from which a single, wet eye blinked out at me. And then the lid of the well closed over me, and I heard the sound of roots growing, and I knew that I was home, at last, in the only home I would ever have.