The Marble in the Ash

The first time I saw the girl, I was picking wild blueberries along the ridge above the quarry. It was late August, and the berries hung heavy and dark as old bruises. I remember the heat buzzing with cicadas, and the smell of crushed pine needles. When I looked up, she was standing on a flat granite slab, maybe thirty yards away. She wore a faded yellow dress that looked like it had been washed a thousand times, and her hair was the color of straw. She didn’t wave. She just stood there, perfectly still, like a photograph. Then she turned and walked into the thicket of pines that bordered the cliff. I didn’t follow. I thought she was one of the summer kids from the lake cabins, but something about the way she moved made my stomach clench. I told my grandmother about it that night, and she went very quiet. She set down her teacup and looked at me with those pale, milky eyes. ‘What did you see her wearing?’ she asked. I told her. ‘Yellow, with a torn hem,’ I said. ‘And she was barefoot.’ My grandmother nodded slowly. ‘It’s her,’ she whispered. ‘She’s come for you too.’

Her name was Coral, but we never called her that out loud. My great-grandmother wrote about her in a leather journal I found in the attic after the funeral. The pages were brittle and smelled of mothballs, but the handwriting was still sharp. According to that journal, my great-grandmother saw Coral when she was eight, in 1916. She was swinging on a rope over the creek behind her farmhouse, and she saw a little girl in a yellow dress sitting on the bank, her feet dangling in the water. The girl didn’t move, even when the current pulled at her dress. Great-grandmother thought it was the neighbor’s child, but when she waved, the girl vanished. That night, she woke to the sound of wet footsteps in the hallway, and she saw a small, dark shape at the foot of her bed. She screamed, and her mother came running, but there was nothing there. The next morning, they found the creek swollen and muddy, even though it hadn’t rained in weeks.

My great-grandmother’s journal was filled with these incidents. She described how Coral would appear at the edge of the cornfield, or standing in the hayloft, or once, looking through the kitchen window with her palms pressed flat against the glass. She said the girl never spoke, but she smiled sometimes, and that smile made her skin crawl. The last entry, dated 1919, said: ‘I have seen her for the last time, I hope. She was standing on the far side of the mill pond, and I knew she wanted me to cross. But I would not. I will not follow the drowned.’ After that, the journal stopped.

My grandmother saw her too. She told me about it once, when she was very old and her mind wandered. She thought I was her sister, Ruth. She said, ‘Ruth, I remember the girl by the quarry. She was waiting for you on the day you fell, but I saw her first. She had your face, Ruth. Your face, but younger, and wrong.’ I didn’t know what she meant then. I didn’t know that Ruth was her twin who died at nine, drowned in the quarry. But my grandmother never swam there. She was terrified of the water. She said it was because of a dream she had as a child, where she saw a girl in a yellow dress floating face down in the middle of the quarry, her hair spread out like a dark stain. The girl turned over, and it was her own face, pale and still, with water dripping from her lashes. She woke up screaming. She never went near the quarry again.

My mother saw her too, a few years before I was born. She was walking home along the same dirt road that ran past the quarry, and it was dusk. She saw a little girl skipping ahead of her, humming a tune she didn’t recognize. My mother called out, but the girl kept going, and then she veered off the road and vanished into the old apple orchard. My mother felt a cold hand close around her ankle, and she fell. When she looked up, the girl was standing over her, and there was nothing in her eyes but empty white. My mother had a miscarriage after that. She never told anyone until I was older, but I saw the way she flinched whenever anyone mentioned the orchard.

And then there was my brother. He was the last one before me. He was twelve, and we were playing hide-and-seek near the old well at the edge of our property. I was ‘it’, and I counted to fifty with my face against the bark of an elm tree. When I turned around, he was gone. I searched for hours. The police came with dogs, and they found him at the bottom of the well, but the thing was, the well was dry. It had been sealed for decades, and no one could figure out how he got in. He was conscious, but he wouldn’t speak. He just pointed at the water in the bottom of the well, which was only a few inches deep. There was a marble down there, a blue one, and a yellow hair ribbon caught on the stones. He never spoke again after that. He lived to be an adult, but he spent his life in a silent world, staring at nothing. Sometimes, I would catch him watching me with a look that was not his own, and I knew then that she had taken a piece of him.

I thought I had escaped. I moved away from the quarry, from the town with its whispered stories. I changed my name, got a job as a librarian in a city that had no wells, no orchards, no cracked granite slab. For ten years, I saw nothing. I even convinced myself that the girl was a family legend, a shared delusion born of grief. But last spring, I was dusting the shelves in the basement archive, and I found a box of old photographs that had been donated by a local historian. They were from a turn-of-the-century county fair, and there was a tintype of a group of children playing a game. In the background, standing half-hidden behind a tent, was a girl in a yellow dress. Her face was blurred, but I knew her. I could see the outline of her small, bare feet on the grass. I dropped the photograph, and when I picked it up, there was a marble on the floor, a blue one, rolling away from me.

Now I am back. I returned to the town, to the house that has been in my family for generations, and I am sitting on the front porch, watching the sun set over the quarry. I know she is coming. I feel it in the way the air thickens, in the way the birds have stopped singing. I have a plan. I have brought a rope, and I have tied one end to the porch railing. The other end is around my waist. I am going to go down to the quarry, and I am going to walk to the edge, and I am going to look into the water. I will not run. I will not scream. I will face her, just as my great-grandmother refused to do. Perhaps I can end this. Perhaps I can break the chain. But as I stand up, I feel a small, cold hand slip into mine. I look down, and there is a girl with straw-colored hair, wearing a yellow dress, and her eyes are the color of the quarry water. She smiles, and her teeth are sharp. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she says, and I realize that the rope has gone slack, and the porch has vanished, and I am standing on the edge of the abyss with her, and I have no choice but to step forward.