Gifts for Catherine

Content warning: This story includes physical violence, graphic suicide, and stillbirth

Mama never cried in front of me, but in the dead of night I could hear her muffled sobs through the wall we shared. She was yet to hold me since day we lost her, and though she’d never say it I knew she blamed me. In truth I too blamed myself, Catherine was especially prone to being careless, though that fact hadn’t crossed my mind the day we ventured to the old well just down the road from the house.

Catherine was our lovely songbird, blessed with a syrup smooth voice, and in her absence the house became haunted with an unbearable quiet. How I missed the echo of her sweet melodies about the house.

She died in my care and I was condemned to forever relive the moment. That wretched sound, it resembled something of old melon splitting on stone, and it crawled up the brick walls of the well, reaching my ears to forever lurk in my mind.

In spite of my mother’s strict orders to never return to the well I had done so many times. I knew Catherine’s soul had long departed the withering husk that sat in the belly of the well, but there was always the smallest part of me that feared she was still trapped down there.

I began to think my fear wasn’t entirely unfounded, as one night I was awoken by what I thought was sweet singing. It came from somewhere down the road, there were no towns nor neighbors for miles in either direction of our house, so this was awfully peculiar. I thought it was her, but it was so faint I couldn’t be certain.

I was unsure if that night was merely a fantasy I’d conjured in sleep, so the next morning while Mama scrubbed the dishes I asked if she’d heard it too.

“Heard what?” she asked.

“The singing, Mama.”

“Who’s singing?”

I hesitated, “Catherine’s.”

Her head snapped up from the dishes to meet my gaze with eyes that threatened to pop from their sockets, then her face contorted into an awful scowl, her jaw clenched, viciously, and her eyebrows knit together. I hadn’t a moment to flinch before she delivered a swift strike to the side of my jaw.

“That is not amusing.” Mama said, sharply, trembling as she did so. “While you make a mockery of her, she rots. You you should be ashamed of yourself.”

She went back to the dishes. I missed Catherine more than ever in that moment, had she been there she would have undoubtedly offered her sympathy. Instead I could only hold my stinging cheek and swallow the lump in my throat. I hadn’t the nerve to tell Mama I was being sincere, nor the desire to provoke her any further as stress would be a detriment to the baby.

Mama’s words, deep as they cut, made me pity Catherine. It felt wrong to leave her body down there without so much as a parting gift. Since her passing there was never a time her blue handkerchief left my person. It became my most cherished item upon the loss of my most cherished friend, though seeing as it was her prized handkerchief I reasoned that it was only fair it joined her in death and so I dropped it down the well.

I returned home and that night I was awoken once again by the sound of distant, lovely singing down the road, only this time it was louder and most certainly Catherine. Upon this realization I sprung from my bed and hurriedly made my way down the road, following her sweet echoes. Eventually I found myself over the mouth of that terrible well, looking into the uncanny, black opaque as her voice sang from below. She looked back, I felt it so deeply with every fiber of my being of my being, though I could not see her.

I woke inexplicably in my bed the next morning. I wasn’t sure if I’d merely dreamed the night at the well, but I wasted no time. I went to the well with a rope, I tossed the rope into the darkness and for a brief moment there was nothing. Suddenly, I felt a great, unholy force tug at the other end of the rope, it was so strong I teetered over the brick wall, nearly treated to a fate much similar to my sister’s. I summoned all my strength but the rope tore through the flesh of my palms and became lost to the pitch black maw of the well.

I went home, my heart heavy with perceived failure, but to my delight I heard her melody once again that night— louder. In the next few days that followed I continued to drop offerings down the well— my dinner, stuffed dolls, locks of my hair, and even my loveliest dress. And what followed each night was the the utterance of honeyed notes ascending ever closer to the mouth of the well.

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if any of it was even real. I’d never stopped to consider the fact that this was all merely an obsession born out of a refusal to let go, and now perhaps it was making its way into my dreams, planting false hope.

As my spirits began to lift, it seemed Mama’s did too, likely due to the fast approaching birth of her new hope. She’s been so merry in fact, I noticed she even began to behold my face with the tender gaze of a mother, the way she used to before the incident. I couldn’t help but feel her sudden glee was because she too felt Catherine’s spirit returning to us, whether she was conscious of it or not. Perhaps my surge of newfound hope was unfounded, though if that were the case I did not care to know. False hope was hope nonetheless.

One morning Mama and I were greeted with the grim sight of a fallen dove on the steps of our front porch. Upon this discovery, Mama became very agitated.

“This is not right.” She said, shaking her head, vigorously. “It’s a bad omen, something unholy is to come.”

Mama rubbed at her belly, he was due any day now. I knew Mama had her reservations about the dove but I felt this could not have been a greater fortune— a grand offering of a life had been dropped into our laps and in turn I would drop it into the well. Perhaps this was my grave mistake. It was indeed Catherine singing in that well, at least for a time, but offering the dead dove created something sinister. Such was the perspective I find most favorable, as I am unwilling to entertain the alternative— that it never was her.

On the day little Charles was born the reign of somber quiet upon the house was to be broken by the shrill cries of a new beginning, but after long, agonizing, labor Mama held Charles in her arms, small, bloody, and silent.

“I can hear him.” Mama choked out with desperate eyes and wet cheeks, “I can hear him, Helen, can’t you?”

Mama poured her anguish into my arms, wailing in Charles’s place. For a time, each suffered howl rang out long and painful, but they eventually crumbled into a pitiful, whispering sadness as her voice grew horse and tender. She rocked Charles in her arms as we sat in a quiet that had taken on an uglier form— one of stomped out hope.

That night, as I sat sleepless in my bed listening to the raspy weeping of my mother, I felt an awful surge of panic and helplessness. I felt I was in the midst of an especially chilling night terror, one with no conceivable beginning or end. I missed Catherine so desperately in that moment. I desired nothing more than to see her again, to return to some sense of normal with her, and it was that desire I let eat away at me, consume me body and soul.

When Mama’s cries fell silent, I crept in her room in the dead of night and carefully took Charles from her arms while she slept. It was an awful thing to do, a truly selfish act, and had I known the ruin it’d cause I would have never done it, but I was naive and mad with grief.

I stood over the well with Charles in my arms. I couldn’t summon the courage to look him in the face, instead, I stared absently at the other end of the well and let my arms give out.

As I returned home I felt an awful dread in the pit of my stomach. I pictured the next morning— Mama’s panicked shrieks, and the daunting task of looking her in the face and telling her what I’d done. Just as I’d feared, I was awoken by a yowl and terrible crash. I braced myself, ready for her to burst through my door in a mad rage, but to my surprise nothing but silence followed. Evening approached and Mama was yet to emerge from her room. I hadn’t so much as knocked on her door as I had no intention of disturbing her much needed solitude, but I grew worried.

Nine o’clock rolled around and as the sky became drowned in a pitch black ink, my worry and curiosity grew unbearable. I tentatively opened the door and there Mama sat, propped up against the far wall with her head hung low on her shoulders, her wrists and the floor that surrounded her were consumed by black blood. A broken vase sat next to her and her fingers curled around one of its shards.

It pains me to say I did not cry for her, I wouldn’t allow myself to sit with my isolation for even a moment. I held Mama under her arms and dragged her down the stairs, wincing each time her bare ankles smacked against the hard wood.

I dragged her limp body down the road,and propped her up on the well so she faced me, and in my mind’s eye a gentle smile was plastered over her frozen, slack jawed expression. I held her close, and planted one last kiss on her forehead, before letting her fall backward and become nothing more than a gift to the depths below. Then I returned to an empty home.

That same night I awoken not by the voice of Catherine, but that of many. The chorus of hundreds of heavenly, incoherent voices rang out into the empty night, beautiful as they were, they instilled within me a primal fear. Something beckoned me toward the well, I knew it was not Catherine. No, something new awaited my arrival.

Despite my every instinct telling me otherwise, I made my way down the road one last time with a rope in hand. As I grew closer to the well, the heavenly chorus erupted into a tormented cacophony of shrieks. I stood over the well as their collective suffering rang in my head, so unbearable it threatened to shatter my skull. I tossed the rope into the abyss and almost immediately I felt a weight at the other end of it. As I pulled the rope, the weight ascended up the well and the shrieks one by one grew quieter. They all melted into a singular shrill wail as a fussy Charles emerged from the darkness.