Aftermath

Leah stood at the edge of the village road, suitcase heavy in her hand despite the meager weight inside. The battered taxi idled behind her, exhaust snaking upward in wraithlike coils that dissolved into the dawn-streaked drizzle. She had not slept, but that wasn't unusual—sleep had slipped from her, impossible, chased away by the things she had seen and done and the silence that pressed in around those parts of memory she could still not acknowledge.

The others had already left. Stephanie, pale and trembling, had fled the morning after, eyes rimmed red, refusing to speak even to Leah, clutching her blue scarf with knuckles white as bone. Eli had vanished before sunrise, leaving only an unsigned note at the empty inn bar: I'm sorry. I don't know what's real. I can't stay here. Darius lingered longest, haunted by the quiet that now seemed the only proper response to all they had unleashed; but when Leah woke before dawn, she found his bed empty too, a fresh set of muddy footprints trailing out the door and into the dissolving mist.

She stood alone—as she always had, as she always would—staring back at the road winding through Gallenford. The village looked unchanged, indifferent: squat houses hunched against the trace of wind, windows shut, eyes shielded. Only the black hulk of the mill, perched up on its gnarled hill, marked the landscape with its blight. Half-shrouded in fog, it looked less like a building than a wound that had never healed over, old blood seeping from brick to sodden earth.

The driver shifted behind the wheel, glancing at her through the cracked mirror. He did not ask questions. In Gallenford, no one asked questions. Leah ran a thumb along the edge of her suitcase, feeling for a moment the raised seam, the impression of an old sticker she had never scraped away. In her mind, she could still hear the voice—a girl's, but not quite—a memory etched into marrow: One must spin. One must pay. The wheel turns for sacrifice.

Every breath hurt. She closed her eyes, but the images marched steady behind shut lids: Victor, vanishing into that swirl of ghost and grief, his gaze not quite accusatory, not quite forgiving. Stephanie's scream as the door snapped shut, the hollow echo of her apologies colliding with the mill's vast, unanswerable hunger. The face of Agnes—impossibly old and forever young—wreathed in dust and rage, mouth torn wide in an endless question.

Was it over? Could it ever be over, when time itself seemed to spin in the old mill’s gut, chewing guilt and memory alike? She doubted it, but there was only one place to go: away. The world beyond Gallenford might be no less haunted, but at least its ghosts would not know her name.

She forced herself to look up at the black silhouette, rain streaking down its broken windows. The storm had scoured the air, but the mill seemed unchanged, eternal—a shadow that would outlast every living thing in the valley. For a moment, Leah’s breath caught on something in the upper window: a shift, subtle as a blink. She could almost see the outline of a figure, watching. It might have been her own reflection caught in the dull morning glass.

Or Victor.

She told herself he was gone. That his sacrifice had ended it. There was no booming, no weeping, just silence—and yet, the mill still leaned against the coming day as if gathering its strength.

The taxi’s radio hissed quietly, static and fractured news. The driver met her eyes—a brief flicker—and, in that glance, Leah thought she saw a flash of knowing. He’d driven enough people out of Gallenford over the years. Some had left weeping, some screaming. All had left changed.

She slid into the back seat. The engine knocked, then found its rhythm. As the taxi turned away, Leah allowed herself a last look at the village: the twisted trees, the overgrown yard, the iron spine of the mill’s broken wheel. The road wound away, climbing toward distant, kinder hills.

But she could not banish the thought that followed her, sharp and chill as the rain: the mill was only sleeping. Its hunger had quieted but not died. The debt had been paid in part, not full. There would always be others—drawn by guilt, by curiosity, by the endless lure of secrets that would not stay buried.

As the village dwindled to nothing in the rearview, fog swallowing the shapes of home and memory alike, Leah pressed her trembling palm to the window. Beyond, the landscape rolled outward, but she could feel the pressure of something watching—waiting for the wheel to spin again.

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the sound of pure morning birdsong, before memory was tainted and the whisper of the mill’s stones grew louder with every mile.