Mae crouched low to examine me with her enormous, brimming eyes. My baby, she said, reaching one scrawny arm to my face. My baby. Miabella.

But when the back of her hand brushed my cheek, the horror of her dusty, dead breath broke the spell and my screams split the supernatural quiet that had descended over the mountainside. I howled until my cries went hoarse, and the women withdrew. Mae left me last, turning with a slow, miserable sob and vanishing into the crowded trees. The last thing I saw before I shrieked myself unconscious was her retreating back, slashed and stained with long, dark streaks that could have been nothing but blood.

III

It should come as no surprise that I ended up a regular patron of the school counselor’s office. Mr. Schumann was short and wide, with red hair that grew shorter every year. His ears protruded north past the narrowing fringe, straining to listen even when his round blue eyes appeared impassive. He always watched me with squinty concentration, like the face a cat makes while trying to figure out a bathroom faucet.

“Why don’t you tell me about some of these pictures you’ve made?” he began our last session together. “Mrs. Patterson thinks they’re very good, but she wants to know what they’re about.”

I stared at my shoes. “I already told her. They’re about the sisters.”

“Yes, the women who died. You said someone killed them.”

“Uh-huh.”

His brown office chair squealed as he shifted his weight. He leaned forward and pressed his palms together. “That’s a scary story to tell someone, don’t you think?”

“It’s for real. It’s a for-real story. I didn’t make it up.”

“Where did you hear it? Did you see it on TV or in a movie?”

I shook my head, aggravated because I couldn’t make him understand. “I didn’t hear it anywhere. I just know it. It’s in my head.”

“But stories like that have to get into your head from somewhere. Where did you pick them up?”

“Nowhere. I came that way. I was born with the story. It happened to me before I was born.”

He tapped the tips of his index fingers against each other, then reached for a pad of paper and a pen. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you tell me the whole thing, then—from start to finish.”

“I don’t know the whole thing,” I sulked. He still didn’t believe me.

“Then tell me the parts you do know. I’d like to hear them.”

I closed my eyes and saw flashes, frames of action disconnected and surreal. A house like the one I’d sketched for Mrs. Patterson, surrounded by swirling green-black water. The slick jerking motion of an alligator sliding off a bank into a fetid pool of stagnant backwater.

One.

Two.