Escape or Sacrifice

Rain hurled itself against crumbling glass and shattered slate, the sky a bruised, seething mass above the mill’s splintered crown. The wind shrieked—animal, triumphant, as if the storm itself was complicit in the binding of the guilty to these rotting walls.

Leah was the first to move. Still on her knees, shivering in the cold, she lifted her head and croaked, “We go up. The wheel’s calling us. That’s where she is.”

Eli’s lips barely parted. “We stay here and it’ll take us one by one.”

Darius nodded, pale as bone, hand fumbling for Leah’s. They rose, steadied by desperation and collective resolve. Victor watched them, grief carving fresh hollows in his face, but followed when Leah beckoned—his only hope now bound to theirs.

They picked their way toward the staircase. Every surface sweated with condensation, dust swirling underfoot as if disturbed by unseen breaths. Overhead, the old machinery creaked; gears shifted with intermittent spasms, as if the mill was flexing its own decrepit skeleton.

With every step up, the air thickened, humming—a resonance that tingled the nerves, a dirge with the gravity of chains. As they climbed, the carpet of memories unfurled beneath their feet: flashes of childhood games, shrieks and laughter echoing up the stairwell of memory, sharp and shattering.

The landing was colder still, unnatural, streaked with the melted light of lightning beyond the win-blind window. Leah’s teeth chattered as she pressed forward, each footfall reminiscent of a funeral march. Something moved in the distant shadow at the upper hallway’s end.

“Stephanie!” she called, her voice burr-rough with dread.

A thin silhouette flickered in the dark—a girl’s shape, water-threaded hair, blue scarf trailing like a river. Stephanie hovered before an iron-framed doorway, her head bowed, hands limp at her sides. At her feet a dark stain spread slowly, fed by the relentless drip from overhead.

“Steph,” Darius whispered. “We’re here. We’re—sorry.”

She didn’t move. As they reached her, a cold force pressed against their chests—resistance, as from a membrane thin as the difference between life and death. Stephanie’s head twitched upward, her eyes mirrors for the lightning’s seizure. Leah was struck by how old she looked; how young.

“You said you’d come,” Stephanie intoned, voice braided with another—rough, broken, utterly alien. “But you didn’t come in time.”

The Wheel Turns

Without warning, the floor trembled. The weight above them shifted, a thunderous noise—the wheel, surely, beginning to grind once more. Wind lashed through a crack, making a spiral of dust and old paper. Behind Stephanie the iron door yawned open of its own accord, spiraling darkness beyond.

“No more running,” Leah said. She advanced, her voice steadier than she felt. “You want the truth. You want us to see.”

She reached for Stephanie’s hand. For an instant, a hallucinatory tableau: the mill as it once was, bright under gaslight, full of hurrying, bone-thin children; the wheel spinning, the foreman’s voice barking orders. A girl—Agnes, or Stephanie’s mother—slips, falls between the gears, her scream cut short by the clamor. Around her, others look away, pretending not to see. Older now: Leah, Darius, Eli, years later, slamming the door on Stephanie in an echo of that first abandonment. A chorus of pleas ignored.

The vision shattered. Leah clung to Stephanie’s hand. “We…we left you. We locked the door. We heard her crying. We did nothing.”

Eli shuddered. “We thought it was a joke. And then the screams—we ran, we let you take the blame—”

Darius, weeping openly: “If I could take it back—God, if I could—we were cowards.”

Victor staggered forward, overcome by the infectious agony of confession. “My sister came here looking for the truth; she trusted your answers. You never gave them.” He looked to Leah. “Can you fix any of this?”

Stephanie’s mouth moved, working words as if through clay. “The wheel turns for the forgotten. But it will take a name, if one is given freely.”

A sudden gale howled through the open door, drawing them toward the darkness. The spirit’s form billowed up—Agnes’s face, hollow-eyed, hair writhing like a nest, mouth torn open with grief. “One must take my place. One must spin, so the others may leave.”

Eli instinctively recoiled, chest hitching in terror. Darius reached for Leah, but she was already stepping into the narrowing pool of spectral light, raising her voice above the din:

“Then let it be me! I did nothing, I deserve this. Let the others go.” She looked at each friend, apology and love etched into every line of her face. “I’m not running anymore.”

Victor surged forward, shaking his head. “No. I was angry, but I—my sister came because of me. She believed the lies. This is my debt.” His voice was ragged, desperate. “Let me take her place. Let them go free.”

Agnes-entity’s eyes regarded them, black pools against stormlight. “One must spin. One must pay. The wheel turns for sacrifice.”

Stephanie, tears streaking her white cheeks, reached for Victor’s trembling hand. “It can’t be forced. You have to choose.”

Wind screamed through the mill as Victor stepped fully into the ghost’s path. He knelt, pressing both palms flat to the cold floor. “I choose. For my sister—for everyone.”

For a heartbeat, time fractured. The spinning shadow encircled Victor. The roar of the wheel swallowed Leah’s cry—and then, silence. The pressure in the room inverted; the air uncoiled, the room seeming to breathe for the first time in decades.

Agnes’s form shrank, the hate and despair fading from her face. “Bounds broken. One paid. The others—may walk.”

Victor looked back once, pain mingled with strange peace in his eyes. Leah tried to rush after him, but Stephanie held her fast, strength renewed. “It’s done. We have to go—now.”

Release

The mill shook violently, timbers groaning and walls buckling as if eager to collapse now that their hunger was sated. The open door led not into further darkness but dawn: pinkish slats of morning just beginning to break the storm. Eli and Darius herded Leah and Stephanie out, all sobbing, clutching each other, not looking back until the mill’s hulk was swallowed by rain and shadow.

Victor’s final words lingered, barely audible across the wind: “Remember me.”

Outside, the air was cold but gemstone-clear. The storm had passed. Sun pressed feebly through rended cloud, touching the world with the faintest suggestion of hope.

Behind them, the mill quieted, settling into uneasy rest. Deep within, the wheel resumed its ancient creaking, its rhythm now more solemn—one soul claimed, others set free. Leah, Darius, Eli, and Stephanie—changed, lightened of their numbing burden but marked forever by the cost—crossed the muddy road back toward Gallenford, not daring to speak of whether escape meant forgiveness, or simply release.

From the upper windows, a thin figure watched as the dawn spread across the village, her song barely more than a sigh—whispering, whispering, to all those who would still dare the old mill.