The Damp Child

Chapter 1: The Jar

The wax was black and old and it crumbled under her thumbnail like ash from a fire that had burned out before anyone living could remember lighting it.

Laura Pate knelt in four inches of cellar water with her jeans soaked to mid-thigh and her headlamp throwing a cone of yellow light against the foundation stones. The cellar smelled the way it had smelled since she'd arrived three days ago—wet wood, mouse nests, something mineral and deep, like the inside of a well. She had been down here with a sump pump and a shop vac for most of the afternoon, fighting water that seemed to rise as fast as she could pull it out, and she'd found the collapsed stone shelf by accident, barking her shin against it hard enough to make her eyes water.

Behind the shelf, mortared directly into the foundation wall as though someone had wanted it to become part of the house itself, sat a clay jar about the size of a large coffee can. The mortar around it was different from the rest—newer by maybe a century, though still old, mixed with horsehair and something that looked like ground bone.

She should have left it alone.

She knew that even then, in the way you know a stove burner is hot before you touch it and touch it anyway because some part of your brain has already committed to the pain.

The jar came free with a sound like a tooth being pulled from wet earth.

Laura sat back on her heels and held it under the headlamp. The clay was unglazed, reddish-brown, with no markings except a thumb-print pressed into the base. The wax seal around the lid was thick and layered, as though it had been resealed multiple times, each layer darker than the last. The outermost layer was nearly black.

She thought about calling someone. Dean, maybe. Then she remembered that Dean was in Burlington with a twenty-eight-year-old named Kenzie who worked at his law firm and who had, according to Dean's careful, therapeutic phrasing during their last conversation, "helped him understand what he'd been missing."

What he'd been missing. As if Laura were a vitamin deficiency.

She dug her thumbnail into the wax.

It took several minutes. The seal was stubborn, and her fingers were cold and pruned from the cellar water. But the wax gave way in flakes and chunks, and then the lid turned with a gritty scrape, and inside—

Not gold. Not bones. Not the dramatic horror-movie discovery she'd half-expected.

A leather-bound journal, about six inches by four, wrapped in oilcloth that had gone stiff and brown with age. The leather was cracked but intact. When she opened it, the pages were dense with handwriting in faded iron gall ink, the letters small and precise and slanted hard to the right.

The first page read:

*This account of Abigail Rill, midwife, set down in the year of our Lord 1799, in Denton Falls, Vermont, that what I have witnessed and what I have done may not be lost when I am gone from this place, which will be soon, for I have asked for the rope and they have granted it.*

Laura read the passage twice.

Then she closed the journal, put it back in the jar, climbed the cellar stairs, and locked the door behind her.

She made it as far as the kitchen before she went back for it.

---

Rill House sat at the eastern edge of Denton Falls, Vermont, where the road gave up pretending to go anywhere useful and dissolved into a two-track that ended at the base of the falls themselves. The house was a late-1780s saltbox—two stories in front, one in back, with a long sloping roof that made it look like it was perpetually leaning away from something. The clapboards had been white once. Now they were the color of old teeth.

Laura had inherited it six weeks ago from a great-aunt named Agnes Pate, a woman Laura had never met, never spoken to, and never heard mentioned by anyone in her family until the lawyer's letter arrived.

The letter had been brief and strange. Agnes Pate had died without other heirs. The house was Laura's. There was no money attached to it, no conditions, and no explanation for why a woman Laura didn't know had left her the only thing she owned.

Laura's mother, when pressed, had offered only a tight-lipped acknowledgment that yes, there had been an Agnes. "Your father's side," she'd said, as though that explained both the existence and the silence. "Country people. We didn't keep up."

Laura had driven up from Montpelier to look at the house three days after the letter arrived, meaning to assess it, list it, and never think about it again. She was eleven weeks pregnant. She was living in a furnished sublet that smelled like someone else's cooking. She was not sleeping well.

The house had been empty for two years—since Agnes's death—and it showed. The porch sagged. The kitchen faucet ran brown for ten minutes before clearing. Mice had colonized the pantry with the confidence of homesteaders. The cellar was flooded. The whole place smelled of damp wood and old things shut away before they were finished with.

But the bones were good. The framing was hand-hewn chestnut, and the foundation stones were massive, fitted together with the kind of care that suggested the builder had expected the house to outlast him by centuries. The fireplaces drew. The roof, improbably, did not leak.

And the falls.

Laura could hear them from every room. A constant low roar, like blood in the ears, like the sound the world makes when you press your face into a pillow and listen to your own pulse. At night, lying in the bedroom Agnes had died in—Laura tried not to think about that—the sound was almost soothing. Almost.

She moved in on a Wednesday.

Temporary, she told herself.

Just until she figured out what came next.

---

Denton Falls was the kind of town that had been dying for so long it had gotten polite about it.

One general store, run by a man named Burl Hodgkins who looked like he'd been carved from the same wood as his shelves. One church—Congregational—with a steeple that tilted two degrees east and a congregation that could fit comfortably in a minivan. One historical society, housed in a room above the post office, staffed by volunteers. One school, K through 8, with enrollment numbers that dropped every year like a countdown.

And the falls.

The Rill River—Laura noted the name with a small, cold feeling she couldn't quite place—came down out of the Green Mountains through a series of granite ledges and dropped forty feet into a pool that was, according to the historical society's pamphlet, "of unknown depth." The sound of the falls was the town's heartbeat. You heard it everywhere. You heard it in your sleep. After a few days, you stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing your own breathing, and then something would shift—the wind, the water level, your attention—and it would come flooding back, and you'd realize it had been there all along, filling every silence.

The town had been founded in 1787 by a man named Josiah Dodd. The historical society pamphlet was very clear about this. Josiah Dodd and his wife, Temperance, had come north from Connecticut with twelve other families and carved Denton Falls out of the wilderness. Josiah had built the mill. Temperance had organized the church. Together they had established the town registry, a leather-bound ledger in which every birth, death, and marriage in Denton Falls had been recorded for more than two hundred years.

The pamphlet did not mention Abigail Rill.

Laura checked.

---

She read the journal that first night, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of decaf tea that went cold in her hands.

Abigail Rill's handwriting was difficult but not impossible. The ink had faded unevenly, and some pages were water-damaged, the words bleeding into brown ghosts of themselves. But Abigail had been educated—unusually so for a rural woman in 1799—and her prose was clear and direct, stripped of the ornamental piety Laura would have expected.

Abigail had been the midwife of Denton Falls for eleven years. She had delivered every child born in the town during that time. She recorded their names, their weights, the duration of their mothers' labors, the position of the moon. She was meticulous.

The tone changed on the entry dated March 14, 1799.

*Delivered this day of Temperance Dodd, wife of Josiah, a daughter. Stillborn. The cord had wrapped twice and the child was blue and I could not bring her back though I tried all I knew. Temperance did not scream. She held the child and looked at me and said nothing and I wish to God she had screamed.*

Laura set the journal down.

She put her hand on her stomach. Eleven weeks. The size of a fig, according to the app. She could not feel it yet—would not feel it for weeks—but she pressed her palm flat against herself and held it there, as though she could communicate through skin and muscle and the dark warm water between them.

I'm here, she thought. I'm keeping you.

She picked the journal back up.

Abigail's entries after the stillbirth grew shorter, more urgent. Temperance Dodd did not recover. She did not grieve the way the town expected—publicly, then privately, then not at all. Instead, her grief seemed to intensify, to curdle, to take on weight and direction.

*April 2. Temperance walks at night. I have seen her from my window, moving toward the falls. She carries something wrapped in cloth. I do not know what it is. I do not want to know.*

*April 19. The Burwell infant died in the night. Healthy at sundown, dead by dawn. The child was wet when they found her, though the cradle was dry. There were marks on the swaddling cloth. Small. Like hands.*

*May 3. Another child. The Pratt boy. Same as the Burwell girl. Blue-lipped, wet-haired. His mother said she heard crying from outside the window, but when she looked there was nothing. Only the sound of the falls.*

Laura read until her eyes burned and the tea was ice-cold and the house had settled into the particular silence of very old buildings at night—not true silence, but a layered quiet made of creaking wood and ticking pipes and the distant, constant voice of the falls.

She closed the journal and went to bed.

That night, the house changed.

---

She woke at 2:47 a.m. to a sound she couldn't identify.

Not the falls. Not the house settling. Something else. A wet sound, like cloth being dragged across a floor.

Laura lay in the dark and listened.

The bedroom door was open.

She had closed it. She was certain of this, because she had developed the habit of closing every door in the house before bed, a small ritual of control in a life that had recently shed most of its controllable elements. She closed the bedroom door, the bathroom door, the door to the room she had been thinking of as the nursery, though she had not yet moved anything into it, and the cellar door, which she locked.

The bedroom door was open.

The hallway beyond it was dark, but not uniformly dark. There was a quality to the darkness that suggested movement—a shifting density, like smoke, or like something large and slow passing between her and a light source she couldn't see.

Laura reached for her phone on the nightstand. The screen lit up and the darkness flinched—she would swear later that it flinched, that it pulled back from the light like a living thing—and then the hallway was just a hallway, empty and still.

She got up and closed the door.

It took her a long time to fall back asleep.

In the morning, the nursery was cold.

Not cool. Cold. Laura stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and felt the temperature drop like a step down into water. The rest of the house was warm—she'd left the heat on, the old oil furnace clanking away in the cellar—but this room was ten, maybe fifteen degrees colder than the hallway. Her breath didn't quite fog, but it came close.

The room was empty. Bare floors, bare walls, one window looking out toward the falls. Nothing to explain the cold.

Laura closed the door and went downstairs to make breakfast.

She did not think about the cold room. She thought about protein and folic acid and the fact that she had a prenatal appointment in Montpelier next Tuesday and the roads were supposed to be bad.

She did not think about the door she had closed.

She did not think about the wet sound in the hallway.

She ate her eggs and looked at the journal sitting on the kitchen table and did not open it.

Then her phone buzzed.

Dean.

*Can we talk properly? This is about our baby.*

Our baby. The possessive pronoun landed like a small, precise blow. Our baby. As though the four rounds of IVF had been a team sport. As though he hadn't been sleeping with Kenzie during the third round, when Laura was bloated with hormones and crying in the bathroom at two in the morning and he'd told her she was "being dramatic about a medical procedure."

She deleted the message.

Then she opened the journal.

---

That evening, Laura set up the fetal Doppler.

She'd bought it online during the two-week wait after the embryo transfer, in a fit of anxious optimism that she'd recognized even then as slightly unhinged. Her OB had gently discouraged home Dopplers—"They cause more anxiety than they relieve," she'd said—but Laura had bought it anyway, because anxiety was not the problem. The problem was not knowing. The problem was the silence between appointments, the vast dark space in which anything could be happening inside her body without her knowledge or consent.

The Doppler connected to an app on her phone. She lay on the bed, squeezed gel onto her lower abdomen, and pressed the wand against her skin.

Static. The oceanic whoosh of her own blood. Then—

There it was. The baby's heartbeat. Fast and light, like a bird trapped in a box. 156 beats per minute. Strong. Alive.

Laura closed her eyes and let the sound fill the room.

And then the app recorded a second heartbeat.

It appeared on the screen as a separate waveform, overlapping the first but distinct from it. Slower. Irregular. Not the steady gallop of a healthy fetus but something arrhythmic and strange, like a heart that had forgotten how to beat and was trying to remember.

Laura stared at the screen.

The second waveform pulsed for eleven seconds. Then it was gone.

She replayed the recording three times. The second heartbeat was there each time, faint but unmistakable, occupying a frequency just below her baby's.

She called her OB's after-hours line.

The nurse who called back was patient and kind and explained that home Dopplers frequently picked up maternal blood flow, echoes, and artifacts. "If you're concerned, we can move your appointment up," she said.

Laura moved her appointment up.

The OB found one heartbeat. Strong. Healthy. 158 beats per minute.

No second waveform.

No anomaly.

"Everything looks perfect," the OB said, and Laura wanted to believe her with a desperation that felt physical, like hunger.

She drove back to Denton Falls in the dark. The falls were louder than usual—there had been rain—and as she pulled into the driveway of Rill House, her headlights swept across the front porch and caught something that made her foot slip off the brake.

Wet footprints.

Small ones.

Leading from the porch steps to the front door and stopping there, as though whatever had made them had walked up to the door and then simply ceased to exist.

Laura sat in the car with the engine running for a long time.

Then she went inside.

The footprints were gone by morning. But the nursery door, which she had closed, was open again.

And the room was colder than before.