Lena did not flinch under his gaze, her small hands resting quietly over the sleeping infant as the shadows lengthened across the wooden floorboards. She didn’t call her Mama anymore, Ethan noticed with a sudden, cold terror, because the woman in Mill Haven had never been her mother at all. Mill Haven was just a ghost town, a desolate grid of abandoned shacks where no one had lived for a decade, a place where no one could check her story or ask inconvenient questions about where a ten-year-old girl had acquired an infant. Ethan took a slow step backward, his hand finally gripping the cellar latch for support as the horrifying truth began to assemble itself in his mind.
Clara had not been delirious when she spoke those names on her deathbed; she had been issuing a warning about an event she knew would happen long after she was gone. But Clara had died three years ago, and an infant who was eight months old today could not possibly have been named by a woman who perished before the child was even conceived. Unless Clara had not been talking about the future at all, but about a cycle that had already played out more times than Ethan wanted to admit to himself. The silence in the ranch house grew oppressive, broken only by the steady, rhythmic ticking of the clock and the soft, shallow breathing of the baby on the cot.
You didn’t walk sixty miles from Mill Haven, Ethan whispered, the realization tasting like ash on his tongue. You didn’t walk from anywhere near there, because nobody lives in that direction for a hundred miles. Lena tilted her head, a strange, knowing smile touching the corners of her cracked lips, erasing the last vestiges of the frightened, starving orphan. Mama always said you were slow to catch on, Cole, Lena said, her voice dropping an octave, losing the strained rasp of a child and taking on a cadence that sent ice water straight through Ethan’s veins.
Ethan’s breath hitched in his throat as he stared at the face of the girl before him, seeing past the dirt, past the torn dress, past the clever illusion of youth. It wasn’t the face of a ten-year-old child enduring a miracle of survival, but the terrifyingly familiar visage of someone who had never aged a single day since the afternoon Clara was buried. My name isn’t Lena, the girl said smoothly, swinging her bandaged legs over the edge of the mattress with an unnatural, fluid grace that ignored the terrible wounds on her heels. And Mara isn’t my sister, she added, looking down at the infant who had suddenly stopped breathing altogether, her chest lying perfectly still beneath the wool blanket.
Ethan could not move, his boots seemingly glued to the floorboards as a horrific hypothesis bloomed in his terrified consciousness. Clara hadn’t died of a fever three years ago, not really, or at least not the kind that doctors could diagnose or medicine could cure. Clara had simply grown old too fast, her body withering away in a matter of weeks while the thing that called itself Lena watched from the doorway, waiting for the transition to complete itself. Every ten years, the cycle repeated, a fresh vessel arriving at the isolated ranch with a bleeding pair of feet and a fabricated tale of woe, offering labor in exchange for sanctuary from a nonexistent world.
The dying woman passes the torch to the new arrival, and the husband is left alone in the silence, believing he is mourning a wife while actually serving as the caretaker for something that feeds on his isolation. Ethan looked at the baby on the bed, noticing now that the infant’s skin was not pale from sickness, but from the complete absence of blood, smooth and flawless like carved porcelain. The baby wasn’t eight months old; it was the next iteration, the seed waiting to sprout into the next Lena when this one grew too tall for the faded blue dress. She’s ready to grow now, the girl said, standing up on her bandaged feet without a single wince of pain, the red stains on the linen bandages completely dry and odorless.
You let us in, just like Clara told you to on her last night, and according to the rules of the house, you can never ask us to leave. Ethan backed up another step until his spine hit the kitchen wall, his chest heaving as he stared into eyes that held centuries of patient, predatory intent. The door behind him was unlocked, the Wyoming prairie stretched out endlessly in the fading twilight, and he knew with absolute certainty that even if he ran until his heart burst, he would only ever find himself walking back toward this exact porch. The girl picked up the small ceramic cup from the table, the very same yellow cup that had belonged to Clara, and took a slow, deliberate sip of the goat’s milk.
Welcome home, Ethan, she whispered, her voice echoing in the silent house as the front door clicked shut by itself and locked from the inside.