Emma slept for barely three hours that night, and when she woke, the first thing she did was check her arm. The mark had not darkened further, at least a small mercy but it hadn't faded either, sitting stark and black against her skin like something patiently waiting for its due.
She met Cassidy and Father Callahan at the church library at nine in the morning, the green folklore volume open on the table between them, and got straight to work on the one lead they had: a name, decades old, with no address, no phone number, and no certainty the woman was even still alive.
"Agatha Voss," Cassidy said, already typing on her laptop. "Folklorist, state university, active in the seventies and eighties based on what Father Callahan said. Let's see what the internet actually knows."
It took surprisingly little time. A faculty retirement announcement from 1998, archived on the university's old alumni newsletter site, confirmed that Dr. Agatha Voss had spent thirty-one years in the folklore and anthropology department before stepping down and, more usefully, that she had donated her extensive personal research collection to the university's special collections library upon retirement, with a note that she intended to remain in the area to continue "independent research into regional oral traditions."
"She might still be local," Cassidy said, scrolling further. "Give me a second."
Ten more minutes of searching turned up a single, thin thread: a letter to the editor in a small regional newspaper, dated just three years earlier, signed A. Voss, Millbrook, arguing against a proposed development project on the grounds that the land in question had "documented historical significance that the town would be wise not to disturb."
"Millbrook's only forty minutes from here," Father Callahan said, already reaching for his coat. "If she's still there, and still as sharp as her letter suggests, I think we've found exactly who we're looking for."
The House at the Edge of Millbrook
Agatha Voss lived in a small, cluttered farmhouse at the edge of Millbrook, surrounded by an overgrown garden and a fence line hung with what looked, on closer inspection, like carefully arranged bundles of dried herbs and small iron charms. She answered the door herself a tall, sharp-eyed woman well into her eighties, silver hair cropped short, moving with a wiry vigor that belied her age entirely.
She looked at Father Callahan for a long moment before recognition dawned in her eyes.
"You're the priest," she said. "The one who used to send me those careful, terrified little letters back in the eighties, always dancing around whatever it was you'd actually seen." Her gaze slid past him to Emma, and something in her expression sharpened immediately, focusing with an intensity that made Emma feel suddenly, uncomfortably transparent. "And you've brought someone marked. Well. You'd better all come inside, then. This isn't a conversation for a doorstep."
The inside of the farmhouse was every bit as cluttered as the outside suggested shelves crowded with books in a dozen languages, drawers of carefully labeled specimens, walls hung with hand-drawn maps of towns Emma didn't recognize, each one marked with the same small, recurring symbol that sat burned into her own arm.
"Show me," Agatha said, once they were all seated around her kitchen table, and Emma rolled back her sleeve without hesitation.
Agatha studied the mark for a long moment, her expression unreadable, before finally sitting back with a slow, heavy exhale.
"Hollow Lane," she said. It wasn't a question. "The Ashgrove place. I always suspected it was still active, even after all these years. I simply never had the standing to go poking around a town that wasn't mine, chasing a lead built on nothing but one priest's careful, unspoken fear."
"You know about it," Emma said. "Specifically. Not just entities like it in general."
"I know a great deal about it specifically," Agatha said. "I spent the better part of the 1970s tracing the Ashgrove family history, back before your Father Callahan ever wrote to me. I never set foot inside the house myself I am cautious, not foolish but I interviewed no fewer than six people from three different decades who had. Including, if I'm not mistaken, someone from your own family."
Emma's breath caught. "Vivian. My great-aunt."
"She wrote to me," Agatha said, and rose to retrieve a thick folder from a nearby cabinet, setting it down on the table with the weight of decades. "In the fall of 1961, a frightened seventeen-year-old girl sent a letter to the university folklore department, addressed simply 'to anyone who might understand what is happening to me.' It landed on my desk, quite by chance, and I wrote back to her immediately. We corresponded for exactly six weeks before her letters simply stopped coming."
Emma's hands trembled as Agatha slid the folder across the table. Inside were photocopies of handwriting Emma now recognized instantly from the journal in Nana Ruth's attic box Vivian's careful, increasingly erratic script, describing precisely the same nursery, the same voice, the same slow, patient hunger that Emma herself had encountered five nights earlier.
"She was trying to find a way out," Emma said quietly. "Just like we are."
"She was," Agatha said. "And in her final letter, dated only days before her disappearance, she told me she believed she had found one. I never learned whether she attempted it. I only know she vanished before her next letter was due, and no further contact ever came." She met Emma's eyes steadily. "I believe you deserve to read exactly what she wrote, before you decide whether to attempt anything similar yourself."
Vivian's Plan
Agatha carefully extracted a single page from near the bottom of the folder, its edges soft and worn from being folded and unfolded many times over the decades, and set it before Emma.
Dr. Voss I think I finally understand what it actually wants, and it isn't what it pretends to want. It doesn't want a friend. It wants to stop being alone in the way it has been alone since 1911 trapped, I think, exactly as much as Thomas himself once was, except Thomas at least got to die properly, while whatever is wearing him now has never once been allowed to finish anything. I think if someone could simply look at it truly look, past the fear and past the sadness it performs and tell it plainly that it is allowed to stop now, that its watching and waiting has gone on long enough and nobody is asking it to keep doing this anymore, I think that might actually work. I think it has been waiting a hundred years for someone to say exactly that, and far too afraid of what happens after to ever ask for it directly. I am going to try, this Friday, on the anniversary. If you do not hear from me again, please, please make sure whoever comes after me knows what I attempted, and knows that I did not go in afraid. I went in because I finally understood.
Emma set the letter down with hands that would not quite stop shaking. "She tried it," she whispered. "And she still disappeared."
"She did," Agatha agreed gravely. "Which tells us one of two things, Emma, and I believe you deserve to understand both possibilities before you decide anything. Either her theory was entirely wrong, and the entity simply took her regardless of what she said or intended. Or"
"Or she was right," Cassidy finished slowly, "and something about how she tried it wasn't quite enough to finish the job."
Agatha nodded slowly. "In sixty years of research into entities of this nature, I have never once encountered a case where an anchor of this strength was severed by a single person acting entirely alone, however well-intentioned or well-informed they might have been. If Vivian's theory was correct and I believe, given everything else I have gathered over the decades, that it very likely was then I suspect her fatal error was not her understanding. It was her isolation. She went into that house exactly as alone as the thing living inside it, offering understanding from one lonely soul to another, and I do not believe loneliness answering loneliness was ever going to be enough to finally break the cycle."
Emma looked at Cassidy, at Father Callahan, and finally back down at her great-aunt's sixty-year-old letter, and felt something settle into place inside her chest not certainty, not yet, but the first real shape of a plan.
"Then I won't go in alone," she said quietly. "Not this time. Vivian tried to give it understanding by herself, and it wasn't enough. So we're going to give it more than that. We're going to give it people who actually understand, and who are willing to stand there together and say it out loud, so it can't convince itself we're only pretending."
Agatha studied her for a long, searching moment, and something that might have been the first flicker of genuine hope in decades crossed her sharp, weathered features.
"Then we have a great deal of preparation to do," she said, "and considerably less than a month to do it in. I suggest we begin today."