There have been three particularly severe summers in Bowers during my lifetime, the entirety of which I have lived in this small town, and while I shall write to some extent of all three, it is the first that concerns these papers most. I was a child at the time, of that age where I was impatient to be considered otherwise, but Bowers has never been a town for rushing things, and my adolescence was no exception. We have always been a town where time runs a little slower than most other places. For example, it would be another five years after the summer I’m about to describe before I saw my first motorcar, though I had heard talk of them my whole young life. We’ve grown as a town since then, but not much, and as many people seem to move away as arrive. My mother left while I was too young to remember her, bored by the seclusion and simple living, and I was raised by a father who, though sometimes stern, raised me with love. When he passed away late last year, during the second of the three harsh summers, I inherited the store and its accounts (and its debts) along with a number of personal affects, among which were included the papers retrieved so many years previously from the home of Mrs. Winifred Dolores.
Mrs. Dolores, or Winnie as she had been less formally known to those who knew her better, had been one of our regular customers, and in that she was little different to most people, for our store was one of only two in town and of the two we had the fairest prices, if not the greatest range of goods. Mrs. Dolores lived on the outskirts of Bowers where the land begins to slope into a narrow wooded valley, a beautiful if isolated spot where she and her husband had raised goats for a number of years, but despite our willingness to deliver her groceries, she always came to the store to personally collect whatever it was she needed, as her husband had always done before her. She said it helped her feel connected to the community, and prevented her from becoming a recluse, the temptation of which grew stronger for each year that passed after her husband left. She was always very frank about his leaving, though rarely about the reasons why, seeming to accept her circumstances with admirable grace and fortitude. Of course, there was plenty of gossip to counter her reticence, and even as a child I heard some of this, for I was easily overlooked when the adults chose to talk and trade stories amongst themselves. As an adult myself now, I have very little interest in sharing the idle speculations the people of this town seem to enjoy and it is with some reluctance I tell this particular story now, except that it concerns events to which I was a witness, events that seem to have some influence on my life even now, so many years later, as I shuffle towards old age. Events that have had me dreading since boyhood a summer as hot as the one of which I write, and as hot as the one, now, in which I write of it.
My involvement in the affair begins at the end of that hot summer when Mrs. Dolores failed to come in for her usual provisions and I was sent to check on her welfare. Prior to this, my father made some rather discreet enquiries as to whether Mrs. Dolores was being supplied by our rivals in town (rivals being a term I use very loosely, and with some humor, for we had always been friendly with the McIntyres) and upon learning that she had not bought so much as a grain of salt from McIntyres Trading, and realizing that nearly two weeks had passed since her last visit to town, I was sent to her farm with instructions to both check upon her health (with polite subtlety) and to reiterate our willingness to deliver whatever goods she might need that we could provide. The most general of these I took with me, as if to prove the ease with which it could be done.
Her property was not a large one, and as such was easily maintained by husband and wife, if not quite by a wife alone. The house, I saw, did bear some minor signs of neglect, but these were easily addressed, and the opportunist in me made a mental list of the chores a young lad such as myself could help with, such as repainting the doors and sills or realigning fences that had fallen askew. I was, that summer, trying to save enough money for a handsome saddle I had seen displayed at Pearson & Haverston’s, and never mind that I didn’t yet have the horse for it. Thinking of this saddle, I noted there was some weeding that could be done in the small garden of the Dolores property, and closer to the house I noticed that perhaps the windows needed some attention as well for they were all of them open. As I have mentioned, it had been a particularly hot summer and so I could have understood a desire to air the whole house through perhaps a week or so ago, but the weather had turned since the worst of it and though we were yet to know rain again, the temperature had dropped enough that a woman of Mrs. Dolores’s advancing years might feel the chill of it. With her age in mind, I wondered if perhaps the wood of the window sashes had warped to such a degree that closing them had become difficult. It would be no bother at all for me to do that for her, while I was here, free of charge!
I knocked on the front door and waited.
I knocked again, and called, “Mrs. Dolores?” and waited a few moments more.
My enquiries received no answer.
I went behind the house with the intention of repeating the procedure at the back door, but upon the first knock I discovered it to be open. Not wide open, like all of the windows, but as if it had been pushed to and failed to catch upon the latch.
“Mrs. Dolores?”
I opened the door with my foot so that I could enter with my arms full of groceries, an immediate visual explanation for my intrusion should Mrs. Dolores choose that moment to appear, but still she did not answer. I set the box down on the kitchen table.
“Mrs. Dolores? It’s Pip, from the store. I’ve brought you some things.”
There was no answer to my call, nor had I expected there to be. You’re probably as familiar with the feeling as I am, knowing a house to be empty even before you’ve checked any of the rooms. There’s a silence that settles on an empty place that’s different from the silence of an occupied one, and I was certain the house in which I stood was empty.
There were some papers on the kitchen table which I shall come to. I did not read them at that time, as they seemed at a glance to be of a personal nature, but I looked up from where they had been written and saw directly into the yard at the back of the building, noticing then something I had not when coming around the house to knock.
The yard at the Dolores property was a wide area trodden down to dirt that separated the main building from the fenced pen where they once kept their goats. At the center of the yard was a well. All of this I had seen already. What I noticed now, however, standing at the kitchen table and looking into the yard through the open window, was a length of rope on the ground near the well, one end of which was tied to a toppled bucket. At a glance, it would have appeared that the bucket had been discarded after water had been drawn from the well, and that whatever slack that had gathered in the rope was coiled beside it, so perhaps I had noticed it and disregarded it as unimportant, but what I was in fact looking at, still tied to the bucket handle, was a short section of cut rope. The rest of it I could see hanging taut to the fullness of its remaining length, disappearing into the circle of stonework, down into the well.
I knew without looking why the rope hung taut, much as you have likely guessed the cause, but I had to look to be sure of it, and on my way across the yard made another discovery. A kitchen knife had been discarded next to the bucket. I gave it little thought at the time, presuming its purpose had been to cut the bucket from the rest of the rope, though I would amend my thinking of that before too long.
Foolishly, at the edge of the well, I called as I had at the door, “Mrs. Dolores?” though I’m sure I have no idea how I might have reacted to a reply. Finally, steeling myself against the certainty of what I would find, I peered into the dark of the well and confirmed what I already knew and feared, namely that Mrs. Winifred Dolores, Winnie to her friends, had hanged herself.
It was a shock to see, and when I went to fetch my father, I did it running, though there was nothing that could be done to warrant such urgency.
My father received the news solemnly. He asked me several times if I was all right, worried at the haste with which I tried to tell of what I’d found, and he put his hand to my forehead several times as if I might have caught a fever, though it seemed he was not satisfied by his own findings, because when he went for Dr. Crombley to tell him of poor Mrs. Dolores, he took me with him for the man to examine. Dr. Crombley was so certain of my health that when I volunteered to go back with them to the farm, he vouched that my returning might actually be mentally beneficial in processing the initial shock of my discovery, and though he would later come to regret the decision, my father was persuaded to agree.
Dr. Crombley had a cart which had served him more than once in the transportation of someone passed, and this we took with us to the farm. We no doubt inspired more than a little gossip, and several of those who saw us followed the cart a short distance so as their speculations in our absence might be better supported by our direction of travel.
“Half the town will know of her death before we even retrieve her body,” Dr. Crombley said.
“And the other half by the time we return with it,” my father agreed. After a moment, he added, “There’ll be talk again of Gorman,” meaning Mr. Gorman Dolores. “Rumors always return upon news of a death.”
The doctor nodded. “Gorman, the goats, the whole mess of it.”
We were a few hours yet from evening, but the afternoon sky had darkened somewhat with the promise of rain. A great deal of the heat of recent weeks had passed, but the humidity left in its wake was yet to break and we were still to know the relief of rain, so the clouds were very much welcomed.
“All her windows are open,” I said as we neared the property. It was a detail I had forgotten previously, and unnecessary now when both men could see for themselves, but it was important to me upon seeing them again that we close the windows to prevent any rain from ruining the indoors, though of course, upon arrival, our priority was Mrs. Dolores.
She was in a sorry state of injury and decomposition, and I shall remember the horrors of it for the rest of my days. Or perhaps, as I should more accurately write, I shall remember it for the rest of my nights, for that is when I see her again most often. I never had the good fortune to marry, though I had been close to the occasion once, and at my age I don’t dare hope it could still happen, but whenever I suffer those summertime nightmares I am glad to have no wife. Bad enough that I am tormented by remembered terrors without startling a wife awake with them, and embarrassing enough that I alone have to clean the sheets when fear regresses me to bedwetting. I record it here only inasmuch to provide as full and honest an account as I am able. There are nights when Mrs. Dolores speaks to me in dreams, and what she has to say scares me more than anything I have read in her papers, but these are the frightened fancies of an old man, and they have no place in this document.
We drew Mrs. Dolores from the dark of the well like we were drawing water, though she did not come up with the same ease. Death lends a greater heaviness to any weight and Mrs. Dolores was no exception, my father and the doctor heaving at the well handle and rope between them. My father told me to look away as the top of her head came towards us, but I have not always been an obedient child and he was too busy at his task to notice my morbid curiosity. Not until I gasped at the sight of her swollen face did he tell me again, sharp with reprimand this time, but by then I had seen her bulging eyes, wide as if with the horror of her demise. I had seen how her tongue protruded from a mouth made slack from gravity. I saw, as well, how her throat had bloated over the rope that wrapped it, as if to deny it was tied there. My attention was drawn to worse, though, when Dr. Crombley exclaimed a profanity so loaded with blasphemy I thought he’d have to confess it at church every following Sunday.
“What has she done?” he asked afterwards, though it seemed to me a rhetorical question, for the evidence plain before us. A better question would have been to ask why she had done it, and to this day I have no satisfactory answer.
Closer to the lip of the well, where the light could reach more of her body, Mrs. Dolores was revealed to be without so much as a nightgown and wore only the grotesqueries of her death, namely a horrid wound that split her across the middle, just below the stomach. It sagged open like a spewing mouth, and she hung suspended in a state of partial disembowelment.
“Look away, son.”
This time I did as I was told.
“Her neck’s not broken,” Dr. Crombley said, and I tried not to imagine his fingers feeling at the fullness of that bulging throat, “but with a wound like that, the drop would have sent her guts slopping out—”
“Doctor, please.”
I was sprawled on the ground a short distance from the well, leaning aside in the expectation of being sick, but I knew the look that would have come with my father’s words, and I could see enough of Dr. Crombley to know that when he said, “My apologies,” he was giving the words to me. My father received the same by way of a nod.
“She either suffocated her way to death, or bled to it,” the doctor said, and as he was a learned man of medicine it was no difficult task for us to take his reasoning as our own when he declared, “Self-murder, albeit of a most grisly kind.”
Both my father and I have since decided otherwise, or at least considered the possibility of an alternative conclusion.
Between the two of them, my father and the doctor managed to bring the poor woman out of the well shaft and lay her to the ground. I no longer wanted to see anything of her, but a sharp intake of breath from my father and another profanity from the doctor drew my attention to how the wound beneath her stomach gaped so widely, either from the force of her fall or the state of her decomposition, that she was very nearly split in two and I wondered that they were able to retrieve more than just her upper body. What looked to be tangles of bloody rope around her waist were in fact loops of what she’d once held inside, and at the sight of them I was finally (and violently) sick, my lunch heaving from me with all the burning unpleasantness you have no doubt been unfortunate enough to experience for yourself, although I hope it was with less gruesome a cause. The noise of it had me imagining the splattering sound Mrs. Dolores would have made as the rope yanked her opened body to a stop and I heaved again until all of me was empty.
I felt my father’s hand, cool on the back of my neck. When I was done, he helped me to my feet.
I was grateful to Dr. Crombley, too, who had stripped to his shirt sleeves to drape his fine coat over Mrs. Dolores, concealing the worst. We had sheets in the cart with which to wrap her, but she was such a ghastly sight that he’d felt it necessary to cover her even for the short time it would take to fetch them.
“You’ll never see a sight like it again, lad,” he told me, “perhaps you can take some solace in that, at least.” He offered me a sympathetic look to which I replied with a nod.
“Shut those windows,” my father told me. “The doctor and I will prepare Mrs. Dolores for her trip back to town.”
I was glad of the distraction and left the men to their grim task.
To my surprise, the windows were shut very easily, so Mrs. Dolores must have kept them open for reasons of her own or had passed during the worst of the heat. Her house was situated where the land begins to rise into the valley, and it may be that such a location trapped a great deal of heat, in which case our recent summer spell must have been insufferable. Insufferable enough that one might end their own life to be free of it, though? I did not know, and I tried to put the thought of it from my mind.
To that purpose, there was plenty in the house to remind me more of her life than her death, and as I went from room to room I took some grief-tinged relief in seeing framed pictures of Mrs. Dolores and her husband, and other personal effects such as a hairbrush and comb set on a dressing table before a mirror, a nightdress cast across the bed, a glass half full of water in the kitchen. Things that spoke of living. What I mean to say is that it was easy to believe that Mrs. Dolores might return to her house momentarily, and that in closing her windows I was merely carrying out a favor for the woman in her absence.
I was in the kitchen, closing the last of the windows, when my father and Dr. Crombley entered the house. Dr. Crombley spent some time leaning against a countertop and staring out of the window at the well. My father returned the knife from the yard to its appropriate drawer. Presuming, now, that it had been used not only to cut rope but to make that awful mortal wound, I thought the return of the knife a somewhat macabre decision and wondered who might use it again on some future day without knowing the part it played in a woman’s end.
At the kitchen table, my father took up a handful of the papers I’d left alone as something private. He read the first page, and then the second, but the third and fourth he read so quickly I thought he could have only skimmed the content, at which point he gathered up the rest and folded them into a pocket. He meant to do this discreetly, and I turned away before he could see me looking, but not before I saw how pale he had become. His face could have been carved from wax, such was its pallor, and the hand with which he tucked the papers away trembled so that he couldn’t pocket them with his first attempt.
He took the papers for the sake of Mrs. Dolores’ reputation, to protect her from any further scandal. He told me this twice, once directly while drunk on whiskey, and again a second time (which he probably thought the first) in an indirect fashion via the reading of his will. As I have mentioned, I inherited the papers along with the store, though why he did not destroy them shall remain a minor mystery to me. Perhaps they didn’t feel enough like his to do so. I will summarize them here as I move towards concluding my story, though I’m not sure how much they might explain.
The papers begin like a letter written to her husband, Gorman Dolores, though before long she only writes to him in an abstract fashion, as if he is merely a useful means by which to discuss her personal concerns, and so the papers take the tone more suited to a diary, and it was with the same shameful sense of voyeurism one might feel reading another’s private records that I first read them. I feel that way again now, reading them a final time so as to accurately record their details here in papers of my own.
As I say, Mrs. Dolores begins with My dearest Gorman, and what follows is a saddening account of the loneliness she has felt in the years of his absence. So deep is her sense of loss without him, that were I to have abandoned my reading after the first page, I would have presumed the letter a final farewell of the type often left behind by those who choose to end their own life. Come the end of the second page, however, and from the third onwards to the last, Mrs. Dolores addresses her absent husband only as one might a confidant when confessing a distressing tale. It seems in these pages that her mind takes a terrible turn towards madness, though I am no longer as certain of that as I once was. My father, too, had a change of mind in that regard.
After detailing the extent of her loneliness and expressing her wish that her husband were with her still, she writes of a mysterious figure who she claims visits the farm at night. She has seen it creeping about the yard, she says, sometimes bent at the back like someone keen to remain unseen, other times crawling on all fours as if tracking a scent across the muddy ground.
I must confess that my earliest reading of this was affected by the sadness I felt for how her mind had so badly turned, though even in presuming thus, I must also confess to the shiver of fear I felt in imagining such a visitor, and I did so while safely embedded in the heart of town. It must have been a thousandfold worse for a woman alone at that isolated farm.
It seems Mrs. Dolores coped initially, and rather desperately, by longing for this figure to be her husband, come back to her after all these years. Be him alive or a great deal more ghostly, she shares her hopes that the figure she sees by the light of the moon is her lost love, and declares how she can love him, still, however unsubstantial a form he might be forced to take, so long as he chooses to remain with her. Even when her strange visitor behaves like an animal, sly and snuffling, this good woman is still willing to believe it may be her husband and reminds him in her writing that were he now of unsound mind, she accepted him in sickness and in health. Alas, the figure is not her husband, as she realizes very quickly, is in fact something altogether very different to Mr. Dolores or indeed any other man, for she notes how it proved beyond a doubt that it was not of heaven or of this earth, but elsewhere, though how it proved this to her she does not reveal. Instead, and with a shaking hand, she writes I fear not so much for my life as for my soul, for why else should such a thing appear if not to strike me damned?
Content, at first, to limit its visit to exploring only the yard, there is yet an instance in which it looks at the house with some awful intention that troubles Mrs. Dolores, even as it seems to excite her. She writes that she has seen the figure several times but offers very little by way of specific detail, combining all but one of her sightings in a single line of writing, and it is in this line she notes of its new interest in the house. I have seen it skulking in shadows, hunched in hiding, she writes, seen it creeping in circles, snorting at the ground like a beast with a scent, and once, to my awful wonder, it stood boldly by moonlight, staring at the house with some awful intention, the anticipation of which seems to please it. She adds, I wait for its return to see what such intentions, and my role in them, might be.
I understand now, at least to some extent, the strange thrill she must have felt then, though she waited for its return in a braver state than I could ever manage. I, who writes this with my doors locked and a bar across my shuttered windows, though in this heat I’d like to throw them wide for any coolness of air they might offer, despite the consequences.
There is a moment in Mrs. Dolores’s papers when she blames this skulking, creeping figure that visits for luring her husband away. In a brief interlude she remembers with some regret her accusations that he had been continuing some torrid affair with someone from town, though she never puts a name to this woman, and while it may seem an error on my part to presume it truth and not simply the creation of a jealous, abandoned wife, let me note here that I have learnt in subsequent years that Gorman Dolores was indeed rumored to be a man of questionable moral rectitude regarding his marriage vows. With that recorded, I should also note that it appears the affairs he allowed himself were few, and brief, and for the most part without consequence beyond the slow and silent breaking of poor Mrs. Dolores’s heart over a period of years. I say for the most part because there was one incident that may be of some relevance regarding the events I write of now, and Mrs. Dolores herself alludes to it briefly.
As I have mentioned, Mr. and Mrs. Dolores used to keep a number of goats, selling the milk and cheese and sometimes the meat, until one year, over a short period of time—I believe it was no longer than a week—they were all slaughtered, down to the last. This was not an intended butchering for market, as they might carry out themselves, but a violent attack, or rather a sequence of attacks, that saw every animal gutted and crudely displayed. Do I need to write that the week had been a particularly hot one? That the animals had been slaughtered at the height of a terrible heatwave?
Upon the first awful occurrence, Mrs. Dolores and her husband suspected it to be the work of some savage predator, perhaps driven into ferocious frenzy by the severe heat, but with subsequent attacks Mrs. Dolores’s thoughts went to her husband’s suspected adulterous affairs, and she considered the possibility of someone who might bear them grievance, such as a scorned woman or a jealous partner, though it seems in her writing of it that she never put a voice to such suspicions. In each instance, they saved what they could of the meat, though none of it made the market price they could have normally expected and they were never able to replace any of the animals.
There were those in town (and are, still) who supposed it was this loss of livestock and livelihood that drove Mr. Gorman Dolores to abandon his wife, perhaps to seek work, perhaps because he saw the slaughtering of the goats as a threat to his own person, whereas others were (and are) of the opinion that he merely saw it as an opportunity to leave a woman he no longer loved, despite having sworn quite the opposite in till death do us part. Whatever his reasons, Mr. Dolores was soon gone, and Mrs. Dolores remained alone, resigned to never knowing why.
That said, and as I have mentioned already, there is a moment where she blames the figure in her yard for luring her husband away, admitting that even a married man might find himself lonely and seeming to forgive her husband for any previous indiscretions before turning her attention to one who might encourage them. It makes for distressing reading, the sudden shift in tone to a voice so angry and resentful that her handwriting becomes jaggedly erratic on the page, and it is at this point that she imagines a different reader for a short while, no longer addressing her husband or recording events in a diary-like fashion but rather speaking directly to the figure she claims to see in her yard. You took him from me, she writes. You drew him to you with the coolness of one who has no want for what might come so easily, though you crept in the night with the manner of one intent on stealing. While there is evidence of control in her word choices and syntax, nevertheless there is a vehemence to her script that nearly presses her pen through the paper.
She is far less aggressive when accusing the nocturnal visitor of driving Gorman Dolores away in fear. Indeed, she writes of this possibility with such calmness and clarity that it seems she harbors no regret at all that this was so and may even be relieved by such a prospect. I would go so far to suggest there is even some joy in how she writes of her realization that her strange visitor was in fact mostly male, an observation that allows her to sleep at last, despite the maddening heat that keeps me fidgeting. What she means by mostly is never disclosed, nor do I have the imagination for it.
The final pages of her account are filled with such woeful accounts of loneliness and rejection (and, as I understand it now, frustration) that reading them without pity is an impossible undertaking, all the more so because of how much her mind seems to have deteriorated by this time. How long must the poor woman have suffered so privately? There were more than a few people in town who could have offered companionship, had they only known.
It was a thought that troubled my father a great deal in the last years of his life, which was when he turned more frequently to the comfort of drink. Could it be that Mrs. Dolores came personally to the store not only to collect her groceries but to see my father, similarly abandoned by one he once loved? McIntyres Trading were, after all, better stocked. And had he, also, looked forward to her visits? I know, with certainty, that I did. She had no children herself but she had a motherly nature I appreciated, and I had always been fond of her; perhaps my father had been, as well. I remember finding him more than once, in his chair by the fire, quite melancholy with the thought that for each day that Winnie (as he still fondly called her) came into town to fetch her food and other supplies, she spent six more in isolation at her farm without so much as even a single goat for company, at which point, depending on his temperament, he might launch into a violent deconstruction of her husband’s character. Come the morning he would always apologize for his recollections of Mrs. Dolores (or for his diatribe regarding her husband) as he knew the memory of her upset me, but the truth of the matter is I welcomed such drunken monologues, for they reminded me more of the woman herself than the state in which we found her, and I took some comfort in witnessing a more emotional side of my otherwise stoic father, for it helped me understand that my own occasional lapses into an unhappy mood were not unusual.
He was troubled, too, by another detail.
“How was the knife so clean?”
Though he talked of this less frequently when troubled, the knife he meant was the one found in the yard. The knife Mrs. Dolores likely used to cut the bucket from the rope for which she had a darker purpose. The knife which I’d presumed she’d used to commit awful violence upon herself so as to be certain of her death at the end of that rope. It was the knife my father had returned to the kitchen, because as he said, and as I remembered again at his prompting, it had been clean.
“Long knife like that, and such a wound, and no blood upon the blade? Not a single drop?” my father would ask. “There had been no rain for days. Not for days.”
I have mentioned the lack of rain already, though it came the very night we brought Mrs. Dolores back to town. Prior to that, the week had been uncomfortably warm, the summer heat settling upon us like a hot, stifling blanket. Just as it does again now, as the curling of these sweat-damp pages upon which I write this evening testify. And so it is I am almost brought to the end of this tale.
For Mrs. Dolores, the tale ends at the end of a rope, the horrid details of which I have already provided, but her papers end with a few paragraphs more detailed and distressing than the others, which I reproduce here in full. It concerns the final sighting not included in the compression of one line like the previous visits, and Mrs. Dolores gives it an entire page of her writing.
Yesterday, I witnessed for the first time its arrival and later its departure. I had always supposed that it appeared as if by magic, prowling out from the dark like it was made of the same shadows or riding down on a moonbeam or some other such fanciful method, and no doubt you would blame the fiction I enjoy, Gorman, for having put such ideas in my mind, but having seen the truth of the matter I wish that there had been more substance to such imaginings. Instead, what I saw as I watched my visitor’s arrival was how it climbed out from the very well from which I daily fetched my water. A graceless thing, it grasped at first with long-taloned hands the edge of the well wall and then hooked more with the thin crook of its elbow to pull itself out of the dark. There followed, then, a scant thigh and bony knee, and then a shin like a goat’s rear cannon, before it fell into the yard. From there it crawled, low to the ground, not on its forearms and knees but upon its palms and feet. A bent-backed thing as thin as a reed, it shuffled as much sideways as forwards, its rump on proud display until the moon appeared and bathed its sickly skin with silver, at which point it stood without shame or modesty despite its obvious nudity, and I fully saw how wicked it was. Though in its eventual departure it returned to the well, yet was I glad to see it go, for the sight of it that moonlit night was almost too much for my mind to bear. Better that it should fold itself over that wall and descend, headfirst into the well, crawling spider-like down out of view, than remain a moment longer in the yard with every detail of its form exposed. And in that form, I had some idea of its intentions, and, oh, how foul a feeling that aroused in me.
Before it went—and this is the worst of it, dear Gorman—before it went, it said something I’d been keen to hear for many years. Its voice was like water, slow and trickling, and though in writing this I can no longer remember a single word it spoke to me, I understood its want and find I must give it what I can, and all I can, just as I understand, now, that I want too.
There is a declaration of love, a plea for forgiveness, and a signature, but those details aside, such is how the story of Mrs. Winifred Dolores comes to its end. With a hitherto unseen grammatical error that provides some ambiguity as to the meaning of her final sentiment.
My own end will come soon enough, and I fear that applies to more than my writing, for I, too, have seen this thing from the well these last few nights. Perhaps it comes to me from the old Dolores farm, but if it does then I wonder that there might be more than one, for the individual that visits me is far from mostly male. Indeed, were I inclined to provide a detailed description (which I am not) I would note there are prominent if ill-proportioned female attributes. It is yet to speak, and I am glad of that for now, though the silence in my house is beginning to feel like an empty one despite my occupation of it and I am concerned that I will soon long to hear whatever this visitor might choose to say. That I shall succumb to it as I have that maddening heat that had me, at last, opening all the windows.
I shall watch for it and write what more I can in the time that remains to me. There are some details yet to tell.
First, to conclude the mystery as to the whereabouts of Mr. Dolores, they found his body in the very same well, which is to say, they found bones enough to suggest a human skeleton, albeit with some minor deformities. The well was filled shortly after, though considering my own nocturnal visitor I find myself wondering how thoroughly.
I should, as well, offer some more detail regarding my father’s passing. He suffered a fatal heart attack one night, collapsing in the store yard where he was discovered the next morning by one of our traders. The most likely explanation is that he had been investigating the possibility of an intruder (and perhaps had found one and been more startled than they upon the discovery) as he had confided with several customers, as well as myself, that he suspected someone was loitering in the yard in recent nights. Do I need to add that this was during the second of those bad Bowers summers? Perhaps the heat was why he had stripped himself down to only the most minimal of clothing when his heart so abruptly stopped.
Upon inheriting the store, I moved back into the rooms above the business and it is from the open window of one of these that I have the view of that same yard where my father died. I don’t pretend that it is he who comes again now, while the nights are hottest, to crawl in the moonlight down there or to beckon me to follow, and I do not think I imagine the rank, stagnant smell of brackish water, though I do suppose that should I be visited again, and should the visitor speak, that smell will become at once cool, and welcoming, and impossible to resist on a night as stifling hot as this.
I have no one, and leave these papers to you, whoever shall find them. Please do not judge me too unkindly and know that though I am (and have been for some time) very lonely, I go to my new friend sound of mind.
I can see her now, shimmering in that maddening heat, and her voice, when she speaks, will be as welcome as the rain.
Originally published in Nightmare Abbey, Summer 2023.
