Well Down There

“Does Cindy have a future?” they’d ask, and she heard them, even if they do not think they are being heard. Her parents, all adults really, assumed she couldn’t perceive such worries. Which was a stupid thing to assume.

Cindy, like all kids her age, could as much feel as hear what went on around her. And always unrest sat on her like a cloud of sticking, cloying static. Like humidity that burned behind the eyes.

Cindy’s house was a place one would not want to visit for too long. Much less live inside. So, instead, she sat by the well, outside, with a box of jewelry, containing diamond rings and earrings and broaches that were not hers. Hard to keep track of such treasures in such a big house.

And, so, unseen, she’d cast them down into the well.

Her parents did not know she knew about the well. How funny how they assumed she did not know things. Assuming age meant wisdom.

Assuming innocence came with youth.

The cold and shine of the silver flowed in her hands, and she dangled the necklace over the little hole. The well that went down, and down, and further. A narrow lip, wider as it went. Slick and molding stones made a wall and full of thick murky water that would burble once on the hour, every hour, except lunchtime—Cindy had checked.

She dropped the necklace, and it plopped nice and solidly in the water, even if the water did not at all look like a real liquid. More like a shimmering cloth with some structure to hold it up. Cindy often wondered, if she dropped something big enough, if it would break that structure and reveal that the well existed down as a black hole forever.

The necklace disappeared—seen then unseen.

Out came another small trinket, and before she dropped it into the well, she clicked it open and saw the picture it contained. Nothing special about the image, though, just her second stepmother’s face. But, still, Cindy paused, and tilted her head in debate.

Mind made, down it fell, and her box grew emptier. But, they were still arguing in there, in the house. Some hushed words, some calm-sounding, but really a lie that all was: they wanted to yell more, louder, when they were silent like that. The quiet was the quiet of building up a good scream.

Cindy, with a blink, took the box and dumped all the rest at once into the well, her daddy’s well. So much did the jewelry shine.

But despite one beautiful thing happening in her world, arguing continued, until it did not continue. Until a rather loud, shrill sound and then not at all. Cindy raised her hand and counted on her fingers. Twenty seconds passed, and she peered down into the well—waiting. She’d looked at the clock earlier and wanted to see the burble.

With her head over the well, she watched as the surface turned translucent for a moment, though only showing a little way down, the vision of the greater depths blocked even still. Only plunging in might have given her the real sight.

“Hello,” Cindy whispered to them, understanding they could not hear her, that they would not respond. But she wanted them to, and so she always tried.

“Hello,” she repeated.

The mouths of the women were wide. Dark and cosmic and weightless in the watery void they were, and each without clothes, and their hair drifting in a pattern with little reason to it. Five, ten, twenty, all milky eyes and random shuddering motions.

The surface burbled, and they disappeared. Back to the clouded cloth. Cindy frowned, and moved away from the edge, ready to go back to her room, perhaps read another book. Her father would want her out of the way now, and would scold her if she was not in her room during this time of day.

After all, a child should not be seen or heard.

“You must always hear the clock chime from your room, you understand?” he’d say, and she’d gone along with it for the first few weeks of living in the house. But it was easy to lie to a man with much else on his mind.

And, even now, with her deception, when he repeated his rules, she’d say, “Yes, I understand father, I understand for sure.”

It was the kind of understanding that was loose, and open to interpretation, just like how his wives “understood” that there was a haunted well that must not be mentioned to anyone, especially Cindy.

Especially Cindy. Cindy with no future, too quiet, too shy. Not easy to marry off in preparation for her adulthood, or make into something useful. Cindy, so silent, reticent and had something in her eyes that no one could put a name to, but scared them all the same.