My mom still had her hand over her mouth, taking short, gasping breaths, staring at the boy as if his features might rearrange themselves if she looked long enough.
But no. The more she looked at him, the more my dad appeared in him: the shape of his nose, the slightly drooping eyelid on his left eye, that serious expression that looked wrong on a child, like it was borrowed.
Alice reacted first. She knelt in front of him and held his face with both hands.
“I told you not to talk about her,” she whispered.
The boy didn’t move. He kept his backpack clutched tightly against his chest. “She found us,” he answered.
The way he said it made me look toward the backyard without meaning to. The curtain was drawn, but even so, I felt like there was someone out there, on the other side of the glass, watching the kitchen with infinite patience.
My mom took a step back. “What does he mean by ‘other mommy’?” she asked, and her voice sounded old, older than ever. “Alice… what did you do?”
Alice stood up so fast that the chair behind her fell to the floor. “I didn’t do anything. I tried to get out.”
“Get out of where?” I asked.
Her gaze went to the backyard window again. Then to the ceiling. Then to the kitchen door. As if she were calculating how much time we had left before something decided to come inside.
“I can’t tell you everything up here,” she said. “First, the well.”
My mom started shaking her head, over and over, faster and faster. “No. No, no, no. Your dad sealed it for a reason. We already opened it once that night and it didn’t do any good. We already prayed, we already called the priest, we already poured quicklime, we already—”
“Because she wasn’t alone,” Alice interrupted her.
Those four words shut the house down. Even the ceiling fan seemed to slow down. I felt a sharp punch to my stomach.
“Who wasn’t alone?”
Alice looked at me like I had arrived late to a very long conversation. “I wasn’t.”
A faint noise came from the backyard. Not a knock. A scrape. Like wet fingers sliding across concrete.
My mom let out a whimper and crossed herself. “Don’t open the curtain,” she said.
I hadn’t planned to, but my body wasn’t fully obeying me anymore. I took a step, then another, and barely pulled the fabric aside with two fingers.
I didn’t see anything. Just the dark backyard, the motionless clothesline, and, in the back, the gray circle where the well was, under the cracked concrete slab.
But something else was reflected in the glass. A silhouette standing behind me. A woman.
I thought it was Alice until I realized Alice was over by the table. The figure in the reflection was taller, her hair was plastered to her body as if she had just come out of the water, and she was holding something in her hand. Something small. Like a doll.
I spun around. There was no one there. Behind me was only the half-dark living room, my mom trembling, Alice holding her breath, and the boy, motionless, as if that presence didn’t surprise him at all.
“She’s here,” he said.
Alice closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she showed a desperation I had never seen in her, not even when we were kids. “I need a sledgehammer. Or a shovel. Whatever you have.”
“To break the concrete?” I asked. “Yes.”
My mom let out a tiny, broken laugh. “And then what? What do you want to take out? Your bones? A new lie? Because that’s what you brought, isn’t it? Seven years and you come back with a kid and stories.”
Alice froze. She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes flashed in a strange way, almost with anger, but there was something else underneath. Guilt. Exhaustion. Fear.
“Mom, when I left I was nineteen,” she said slowly. “I’m not saying you have to believe me. I’m telling you that if we don’t open that well today, tomorrow she won’t recognize me or him.”
The boy looked up. “Or you.”
No one answered.
I went to the shed for the gardening shovel and the sledgehammer my dad used to break bricks. While I was taking them out, I realized the tools were damp. Not just a little. Soaking wet. As if someone had submerged them in water a few minutes ago.
I brought them to the kitchen without saying a word.
Alice took the sledgehammer. Her hands were shaking so much I thought she was going to drop it. “You’re not coming,” she told the boy. “Yes I am.” “No.”
He looked at her with an unbearable, adult coldness. “If you leave me alone, she’ll talk to me again.”
My mom let out a sort of sob and leaned against the table so she wouldn’t fall. I didn’t understand which part scared me more: the darkness of the backyard, the things Alice was saying, or the casualness with which the boy said them too.
All four of us went.
I opened the back door and the night air rushed in smelling like wet earth, even though it hadn’t rained. The backyard was freezing. Much colder than normal for Detroit at that time of year. I felt the cold rise from the soles of my feet, pierce through the bottoms of my sneakers, and creep up my legs.
The well was where it always was. Round, under that poorly leveled concrete cover my dad had poured years ago. Pale weeds grew around it, almost white, as if the sun never touched them.
Alice didn’t approach it right away. She looked all around: the fences, the roof, the door, the kitchen window.
“Don’t listen to her if she speaks to you,” she said. “Who?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She wedged the shovel into a crack in the concrete and tried to pry it up. She couldn’t. I helped her. Between the two of us, we barely managed to lift one corner.
There was no dirt underneath. There was another layer. Wood. A black board, swollen from the moisture.
“Who put that there?” I whispered.
My mom answered from behind us, her voice trembling. “Your dad.”
I turned around. “Dad went down there?”
My mom didn’t answer immediately. The boy, however, did. “He went down twice.”
The silence was so complete that I could hear the buzzing of a streetlight far away.
Alice wrapped her fingers around the sledgehammer and struck the wood. Once. Twice. On the third time, something knocked back from underneath.
Not like an echo. Like an answer.
My mom screamed and covered her mouth. I jumped backward. The boy didn’t move.
“Keep going,” he said. His voice didn’t sound like a plea. It sounded like an order.
Alice raised the sledgehammer again and the board finally splintered. The smell escaped instantly. It wasn’t just dampness. It was a smell that had been trapped for years: stagnant water, mildew, rotting flowers, and something else—something sweet that stuck to the roof of your mouth like you were tasting it.
Beneath the wood appeared the mouth of the well. Open. Black. Too black.
I remembered that well as something narrow, old, a semi-ornamental thing they used before the plumbing was installed. But what was in front of me looked bigger than what should fit in that backyard. The edge was lined with ancient stone, and on one of the stones I saw long, parallel marks, like fingernail scratches.
Alice knelt by the edge and spoke down into it: “I came for him.”
There was no answer. Just the damp echo of her voice descending.
My mom grabbed my arm with unexpected force. “We shouldn’t have opened it,” she whispered. “Look at the walls.”
I followed her gaze. On the back brick wall, right above the well, water was starting to run. A dark, thin trickle, flowing down between the brick joints. Then another. Then another.
As if on the other side of the wall there was a swimming pool overflowing.
The boy set his backpack on the ground. “We have to take the bag out first.”
I looked at him. “What bag?”
He pointed inside the well. And then I saw it.
Snagged a few feet down, swollen, trapped between two stone protrusions. A black plastic bag. Big. The kind used for construction debris. The water was barely rocking it.
I felt nauseous. “No,” I said immediately. “I am not touching that.”
Alice turned to me. For the first time since she arrived, her voice sounded like it used to. Like my sister. “Please.”
That made it worse.
We grabbed a rope from the tool shed. We tied it to a long hook and, between Alice and me, we tried to pull the bag up to the edge. It weighed much more than it looked. Several times I thought it would rip. The plastic was slimy, covered in a gray film that glistened under the backyard light.
When we finally hoisted it onto the concrete, my mom collapsed into a lawn chair and started praying under her breath.
I didn’t want to open it. No one did. But the boy had already crouched down in front of the knot.
“No,” Alice said. “Don’t even think about it.”
He looked at her with a strange sadness. “It’s always my turn.”
He dug his fingers into the plastic and pulled. The bag opened.
There wasn’t a body inside. There were clothes.
Women’s clothing, soaked and stuck together: a pair of jeans, a floral blouse, a bra, socks, a beige sweater. All of it old. All of it covered in dark stains. Tangled in the clothes there was also a hairbrush, a rusted keychain, and a silver chain with a small heart-shaped locket.
My mom stopped praying. She stood up, took two steps, and fell to her knees in front of the bag. She picked up the chain with trembling hands.
“It’s mine.”
No one moved. She looked up very slowly. Her face had emptied.
“I lost it the night we went looking for you,” she told Alice.
Alice watched her without blinking. “No.”
My mom squeezed the locket so hard I thought she was going to cut her hand. “Yes.”
The air grew colder. A murmur began to rise from the well. Not one clear voice. Several. Wet whispers brushing against each other.
I backed away. “Mom, what are you saying?”
My mother closed her eyes. And when she spoke, she did so as if each word was tearing itself out.
“Your dad didn’t want us to call the police. He said it would be a scandal. He said you’d probably run off with someone and that you’d come back when you stopped being mad. But I knew better. I knew you wouldn’t leave without your sweater. Without the Virgin Mary in your backpack. Without saying goodbye to your sister.”
Alice didn’t seem to be breathing.
“That night,” my mom continued, “I heard you in the backyard.”
An unbearable pressure filled my ears. I didn’t want to know anymore. But I couldn’t stop listening.
“I came out with the flashlight,” she said, “and I saw you here. Sitting on the edge. Crying. I thought you had finally come back. I ran to hug you… but when I turned you around… it wasn’t you.”
The boy pressed his lips together. As if he already knew that part.
“It had your face,” my mom went on, “but it wasn’t you. You smelled like the well. Like stagnant water. And you said ‘don’t leave me down there anymore.’ I screamed. Your dad came out. He grabbed her by the arms… and then you… you appeared behind him.”
The sledgehammer slipped from Alice’s hands and fell to the ground. I felt like my legs were going to buckle.
“No,” I whispered.
My mom began to cry soundlessly. “There were two. Both identical. Both wet. Both crying. Your dad said it was the devil. That one of you was dead and the other wanted to take the living one. And when we tried to get close… one bit me.”
She brought her hand to her forearm, as if she could still feel it.
“I fell. I lost the chain. Your dad grabbed a rock, then another. It all happened so fast. I heard screams, but I didn’t know which of the two they were coming from. Afterward… afterward, there was only one left.”
The boy said something so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. “And they chose wrong.”
No one contradicted him. A woman’s laugh rose from the well. Long. Drowning.
My whole body broke out in goosebumps.
Alice was white. Whiter than when she arrived. She looked at my mom as if finally seeing a stranger.
“So you did know,” she said.
My mother cried harder. “I didn’t know which one was you.” “But you locked her in here.” “Your dad said he was going to come back in the morning with the priest, with people, with ropes… but during the night someone started knocking on the kitchen door, saying in your voice to let her in. And he… he went crazy. He sealed the well. He made me swear we would never talk about it.”
Alice started to laugh. Not out of joy. It was a thin, broken laugh, growing louder and louder, until it turned into a sob that seemed to scrape her throat.
“Seven years,” she said. “Seven years listening to her imitate me. Learning me. Stealing my face.”
The boy picked up his backpack from the ground. “She’s out.”
I turned to the well. The water, black as oil, had risen until it almost touched the rim. And something could be seen beneath the surface.
Hair. So much hair floating slowly. Then a forehead. Two open eyes. And a smile.
It was Alice. Not the Alice standing next to me, trembling. The other one. Soaking wet. With swollen, pale skin, clinging to the bones.
She rose without using her hands, as if the water itself were pushing her up. First the head, then the shoulders, then the torso covered in a white dress I had never seen her wear. Her feet couldn’t be seen. They were still inside the well, as if she were still standing on something down there.
My mom let out a shriek. The thing turned its face toward her. “Now you recognize me,” it said with the exact voice of Alice at nineteen.
The other Alice took a step back, bumping into me. I didn’t know which one to look at. They were identical. Not identical like “they look alike.” Identical like a cursed reflection.
There was only one difference: the one that came out of the well didn’t blink.
The boy walked until he positioned himself between us and the one who just emerged. He opened the backpack. Inside there were no notebooks or clothes. There were rocks. Dozens of wet, round, small rocks, each one marked with a date written in black marker.
The boy picked one up. He held it high. “Don’t ever call me ‘son’ again,” he told the woman from the well.
She smiled wider. “But you’re the one who let me out.”
Then I understood. He wasn’t just a boy. He was a door. Or a vessel. Or something they had used to get the other one out from down there.
Alice understood it at the same time, too, because she yelled his name for the first time since she arrived: “Matthew, don’t listen to her.”
Too late. The woman from the well raised a hand. Matthew took a step toward her. Then another.
I grabbed his sweater, but he turned to me with an empty, sleeping expression. “My other mommy says there’s still one missing,” he murmured.
The water began to spill out of the well, spreading across the backyard like a dark tongue. Wherever it touched the ground, the concrete cracked.
My mom fell back into a sitting position, praying through her teeth. The other Alice looked directly at me. Not at my mom. Not at the boy. At me.
And in her eyes I saw something worse than resentment. Recognition. As if she had been waiting for me from the very beginning.
“You were the one left to be opened,” she said.
The house creaked behind us. A window shattered on its own in the kitchen. And beneath the sound of the water, beneath the prayers, beneath Alice’s crying, I heard something else coming out of the well.
Not a person. Many hands. Scratching the stone from below, waiting for their turn to climb up.
Part 3:
Maybe it was Alice, who was trembling beside me. Maybe it was my mom, sitting in the backyard with her hands clasped, praying so fast she couldn’t even be understood. Or maybe it was me, although at that moment I felt fear leave me mute, as if my mouth had been filled with well water.
The hands kept coming up. They weren’t shadows or reflections. They were real hands. Pale, waterlogged, some small, others huge, all of them banging and scratching the damp stone from below, reaching for the edge as if they had spent years waiting for someone to finally break the right cover.
The black water was already reaching our shoes.
Matthew was still standing in front of the other Alice with the wet rock in his hand, looking at her with that sick obedience with which some children look at the wrong person. The woman from the well, identical to my sister and, at the same time, completely alien, smiled without blinking. Her hair was plastered to her face, her white dress barely floating in the current that kept gushing from below, and that smile stretched so wide it looked like it hurt.
“You were the one left to be opened,” she repeated to me.
I tried to back away, but the water hindered my steps. Alice grabbed my arm. “Don’t answer her.” “What is she?” I blurted out, almost voiceless. She shook her head, taking jagged breaths. “I don’t know what to call her. But she learned. Down there she learned to speak like us.”
The other Alice tilted her head, amused. “I didn’t just learn to speak.”
Then she moved her hand. Matthew walked toward her. My mom screamed his name and tried to run to pull him back, but she slipped in the flooded backyard and fell to her knees. I lunged forward before thinking. I grabbed the boy by his backpack and pulled with all my might. Matthew barely stopped, as if he were being pulled by a rope from two different sides. He turned to me and for a second I saw his eyes were completely black. Not empty. Full of water.
“Let go of me,” he said with a voice that didn’t sound like a child’s. “My mommy is calling me.” “Your mom is right here,” I yelled at him, pointing to Alice, the living one, the trembling one.
But the other one laughed. Not loud. Softly. Like someone mocking a childish mistake. “Moms make mistakes too,” she said.
And behind her, in the well, something struck with such force that the edge stone cracked. One of the hands managed to come out completely: thin, dark, with extremely long, busted nails full of slime. It gripped the well’s rim and began to pull the rest of the body up.
My mom let out a shriek that pierced my stomach.
Alice finally reacted. She threw herself at Matthew, snatched the date-marked rock from him, and smashed it against the ground with all her might. The rock split in two.
The boy fell as if his strings had been cut. He didn’t faint; rather, he came back. He blinked rapidly, disoriented, and started crying in a normal, human way, the way he should have cried from the beginning.
The smile of the woman from the well vanished.
It was barely an inch, a minimal drop of her lips. But it was enough for the air in the backyard to change. The water stopped advancing for a second. The hands below went still. The other Alice locked her eyes on the broken rock and for the first time seemed annoyed.
“I told you not to bring that,” she whispered to Matthew.
He clung to Alice, genuinely scared now. “I didn’t want to open you up anymore,” he stammered.
My sister hugged him without taking her eyes off her double. “What are the rocks?” I asked. Alice swallowed hard. “Dates.” “Dates of what?” She didn’t answer immediately. My mom did.
“Of the days I heard her,” she said, crying. “Of the days that thing called from the backyard with your sister’s voice. First it was at night. Then at dawn. Then it started talking to the boy ever since he was born.”
My stomach turned. “What boy?” No one said anything. But I already knew. I turned to look at Matthew. Then at Alice. Then at the other thing, soaking wet and smiling, standing halfway out of the well as if she had never fully belonged to this side.
I suddenly understood why my sister had returned after seven years. I understood why the boy seemed so tired for his age. I understood why my mom had looked at him strangely as soon as he arrived, searching for features that didn’t fit. Matthew wasn’t weird because he heard voices. He was weird because the voice had raised him.
“No,” I said, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. “Don’t tell me that…”
Alice closed her eyes for just a moment. “I was pregnant when I left.” My mom let out a broken sob. “I didn’t know what you were carrying with you,” she whispered.
“Neither did I,” Alice spat, with a rage that made her lip tremble. “I thought he was mine. I thought that if I went far enough away, she wouldn’t find me anymore. But since he was born, he called me the same thing she did. He called me ‘the other mommy’ even before he knew how to talk. He would stand asleep in front of closed doors. He pointed at cisterns, storm drains, puddles. And every year, on the exact same night, a rock would disappear from the backpack.”
The other Alice smiled again. “Because they belong to me,” she said. “Every date opened me up a little bit.”
Behind her body, the hands in the well started moving again. Faster. More desperate. A face began to emerge from the water. Then another. Not complete; just foreheads, mouths, waterlogged cheeks, as if several people were trapped under wet glass looking for the same hole to breathe.
“We have to close it,” I said. My mom laughed. A horrifying, empty laugh. “With what? With prayers? With another concrete slab? We left her down there once before and it did no good.”
“Because you left the wrong one,” said the woman from the well, and this time she looked at us, one by one, enjoying it. “And because I was never alone down there.”
The entire backyard creaked. The cracks in the concrete spread to the wall. The water running down the bricks didn’t look like a leak anymore; it looked like the house was sweating. From the kitchen, we heard something glass fall and break. Then a voice.
My voice.
“Mom…” it said from inside the house.
I froze completely. It wasn’t me talking. It came from the kitchen, crystal clear, trembling, exactly like me.
My mom brought both hands to her face. “It’s started,” she whispered.
The other Alice smiled with tenderness, almost maternal. “You learn quickly down there.” And she called me again, now with my dad’s voice: “Baby girl.”
I hadn’t heard that nickname since he died. My knees buckled. It was a second of weakness, just one, and it was enough for the thing to notice. Her eyes sparkled, satisfied. She had hit on something.
“No,” Alice said, shaking my shoulder. “Don’t give her anything of yours.” “What do you mean, anything of mine?” “No memories. No names. Don’t answer when she uses Dad.”
But it was too late. I had already heard it. And something inside the well had heard it with me. The hands thrashed with more violence. One managed to come out up to the elbow. Another dug into the edge next to the other Alice’s dress. The water rose a few inches all at once.
Matthew started to hyperventilate. “She’s angry,” he said. “Who?” I asked, even though I was sick of asking stupid questions.
The boy turned to the inside of the well with terrifying lucidity. “The one furthest down.”
And then something pushed from the bottom. Not like a person coming up. Like a floodgate opening. The black water swelled upward, and for an instant, we saw an impossible depth beneath it. The well was no longer a well. It was a wide, bottomless tube, lined with old stone that went on and on beyond what a house in Detroit, Michigan, could contain. On the walls there were marks, niches, rusted hooks, stuck rags, ribbons, clumps of hair. And on every ledge, faces. Human faces. Stuck to the stone as if the dampness had absorbed them.
The other Alice took a step back from the edge. For the first time, I saw fear in her. “No,” she whispered, and that single word hurt me more than everything else. “Not yet.”
Something half-obeyed her. She wasn’t the master of that place. She was just the first thing that had learned how to climb up.
Matthew started to tremble so hard I thought he was going to have a seizure. He grabbed onto my sweater. “She says it’s my grandma’s turn now.” My mom let out a muffled scream. “No, no, no…”
The voice returned from the kitchen. Now it wasn’t mine or my dad’s. It was my grandmother Connie’s, dead for eleven years. “Girls,” she called out, sweet, just like when she served coffee. “Come here, it’s getting cold.”
My mom started walking toward the house. Just like that. With teary, empty eyes, taking short little steps over the freezing water as if nothing we had in front of us mattered anymore. I pulled her by the arm before she reached the door. “Mom!”
She blinked and looked at me, lost, as if she hadn’t recognized me for a second. “It was your grandma,” she said. “I heard her clear as day.” “It wasn’t her.”
The other Alice took a step toward us. “Leave her. She’s been calling her for years too.”
Alice stepped in between. I don’t know where she found the courage, but she did. She planted herself between her double and us, with Matthew behind her, as if her fear had broken inside and now only pure rage remained. “You’re not taking anyone else.”
The other one smiled tiredly. “Do you still think you decide anything?” And then she raised her hand toward Matthew.
The boy screamed. Not in pain. As if something were coming out of his mouth. He fell to his knees and started vomiting water. Black, thick water, with chunks of slime and rotting leaves. My mom shrieked. I bent down to hold him and felt something solid hitting the floor amidst the liquid. A rock. Then another. And another. Wet, round rocks, each with a date written in marker. The backpack wasn’t empty. The backpack was inside him.
Alice dropped down next to her son and began scooping the water out of his mouth with her hands, crying, calling him by his name over and over again. The other Alice watched the scene with a horrible serenity, like someone waiting for a familiar countdown. “When he spits out the last one,” she said, “you won’t be able to hold him ever again.”
I felt such a brutal hatred that I grabbed the sledgehammer from the ground without thinking. “Do it right,” Alice told me, without looking at me, focused on Matthew. “If you hit it, don’t hit the head.” I didn’t know if she was talking about the thing or the well. But I understood.
I ran. The other Alice barely turned her face when I swung the blow. Not at her. At the stone edge, right where she was leaning. The sledgehammer hit with a dull crash. The stone cracked. The rim gave way on one side and the woman’s body teetered. Her smile disappeared entirely.
“Stupid,” she said, now with an old, hollow voice, full of water. She raised her arms to grab hold, but at that very moment the hands from below found her. One on the ankle. Another on the wrist. Another on the dress. They pulled her.
She screamed. And she didn’t sound like Alice anymore. She sounded like many women at once. “Don’t send me back!” she howled.
The faces in the well rose a little higher, hungry, glued to the edge. One of them opened its eyes and I saw they were completely white. Another had its mouth sewn shut with black thread. Another was smiling at me with my own face, just for a second, enough to freeze me.
The thing struggled with monstrous force, digging its nails into the stone. One of its hands reached Matthew’s ankle. He shrieked. Alice pulled him toward her. I raised the sledgehammer again and hit it right on the fingers. The bones crunched. The hand opened. The ones below took advantage and pulled with everything they had.
The other Alice fell backward into the well. Not all at once. First the legs. Then the waist. Then the torso. Her face was the last thing left outside, looking at us with an ancient, immense hatred. “You’ve woken her now,” she said. And she disappeared.
Everything exploded at the same time. The water rose in a black wave and slammed against our legs. The hands grew desperate, clawing at the air. The back wall cracked from the floor to the roof. A horrifying crunch came from the kitchen, as if something heavy had fallen on the tiles. Matthew expelled the last rock and passed out in Alice’s arms.
And from the well, for the first time, a voice rose up that wasn’t imitating anyone. It wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t a man. It wasn’t old or young. It was a deep, wet voice, as if speaking from inside the earth. “The first one is missing.”
My mom stopped praying. She turned toward the well, her mouth half-open. “The first what?” she whispered. The voice answered using mine. “The firstborn daughter.”
No one needed to explain who it was referring to. Me. The water suddenly began to recede, but not downward: toward the house. As if the well had changed direction and was now draining the entire backyard through the kitchen. Mud, rocks, and those finger marks were left everywhere on the ground.
Alice stood up with Matthew in her arms, swaying. “We have to leave.” “And then what?” I asked. “Leave this open?” My mom kept staring at the well. She wasn’t moving. “Mom,” I told her, louder.
She barely reacted. Very slowly, she raised her hand and pointed to something on the other side of the rim. In the mud, half-buried next to the broken stone, was another chain. Not hers. A rusty, childish little chain, with a tiny teddy bear charm.
My breath caught in my throat. I had one just like it. I lost it when I was six years old. The night I fell into the neighbor’s well playing hide-and-seek. The night everyone swore my dad pulled me out in time. The night I didn’t remember anything about.
The voice from the well spoke again. Now with the exact voice of the little girl I used to be. “You took a long time to come back.” And behind that voice, climbing from further down than all the others, a wet little head began to appear, two small hands gripping the stone, and eyes that were identical to mine.
