The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco Read Free Book Online

sometimes.”
    The young woman feels a decided chill. “How do you know all these things, Sandra?”
    â€œI don’t know,” the girl says, puzzled herself. “I just see them, and then I do.”
    â€œWhy doesn’t she like the number nine?”
    â€œShe had ten things a long time ago, but then she lost one of them so now she only has nine, and she got hurt because of it. She doesn’t like being reminded.”
    â€œWhy does she like standing on the ceiling?”
    â€œSometimes she stands the right way like us, but she got used to ceilings, too. Someone hurt her really, really badly, and they put her down someplace that was dark and smelly, like a big hole. Her head went in the hole first before her feet and she died like that, so she got used to seeing everything upside down.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    The girl swivels in her swing seat. She grasps the sides of the swing with both hands and tips herself over backward so that her hair grazes the ground and she is looking over at the teaching assistant from the wrong way up.
    â€œLike this,” she says. “She died looking at everything like this.”
    â€¢ • •
    The father and the boy finally leave, and the therapist returns to the solitude of her office, back to the one hundred and sixty-three volumes on her bookcase. She picks up the small device she uses to record conversations with patients and presses a few buttons.
    â€œMy mother.” The boy’s voice comes from it, low and tinny. “I remember that she used to sing to me before I went to sleep.”
    â€œWas it a lullaby?” she hears her own voice ask.
    â€œI don’t know the song’s name.” The boy begins to hum.
    Within the tape, something else begins humming in light counterpoint.
    The therapist gasps and shuts the recorder quickly. She hesitates, steeling herself, and switches it on again. The boy’s humming continues, but this time there is no other accompaniment.
    Melinda Creswell, psychotherapist, looks around the empty room with growing unease, but by then I am long gone.

CHAPTER FIVE
Madwoman
    The boy and his father enter a different building next, this one a dollhouse of white decay. The walls and floors are white. The doors are painted white and the ceiling is painted white and the windows are painted white, and whenever there are curtains, they are also white.
    There are two kinds of dolls here. The first kind wears white shirts and pants. They hurry down corridors pushing white carts and carrying white towels, stacks of white paper, and white trays. They carry about themselves an air of forced joviality, though they know very well there are few things to smile about in these halls.
    And then there are the broken dolls. They are pushed around in wheelchairs and fed, drooling, from plastic cups. Sometimes they are dragged, fighting and screaming, by the White Shirts into white beds inside white rooms. Needles are jabbed into their arms to keep them calm, but they are never truly cured. The broken dolls cry and laugh and shout and sing, and often they sound much more alive than the White Shirts.
    The boy and his father follow one of the White Shirts down a long corridor where many broken dolls live. One doll is banging her head repeatedly against the wall, over and over, until another White Shirt comes to take her away. Another has soiled himself, a stream running down his leg even as he meows and swipes at his own head with a curled arm, oblivious.
    Still another steps out of her room and sees them. “I curse thee!” she shrieks, lifting a spindly finger to point at a spot behind the boy. “I curse thee, foul abomination! In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I abjure thee! Begone, foul spirit, begone, begone, begone!”
    A Shirt takes her arm but she shakes him off, still spewing curses at nothing. More arrive, seven in all, to subdue the little woman, and she