Revelations

Eli slumps fully against the cold wall, eyes ringed with exhaustion and bruised shadow—every tendon of his neck drawn tight as wire. Leah feels the urge to shake him, to rouse the others, but instead she speaks softly, careful not to antagonize the hateful hush gathering in patches among them:

“We need light. We need to think.”

Darius’s voice comes hoarse, brittle: “She took Steph. If we stay put, we’re next.”

Victor paces, boot-heels echoing against warped boards. His stare pins the others: “You said ‘we can’t just leave her.’ What happened last time—what aren't you telling me?”

Leah struggles with the weight of his gaze and her own memories, flashes of screaming, laughter, blood on the stairs—how easily guilt can be confused with dread. But before she can answer, Eli kicks something in the dust. It skitters—a thin copper plaque, half-buried beneath decades of grime.

He picks it up. The light from the cracked emergency panel limns words etched in careful, wobbly letters:

IN MEMORY OF AGNES WELLS, LOST TO THE MILL, 1968. ‘SHE WILL FEED THE WHEEL.’

Eli snorts, voice forced and too loud. “See this? Proof. Locals, always hiding the truth in plain sight.”

But as he gestures, his foot cracks through rotted boards. A stack of aged papers spills from the cavity he’s opened. Leah stoops, feeling her way through the fragile leaves. Darius, curiosity chasing fear, bends close as she gently exposes bundles of notebooks, rumpled work-slips, and brittle pay ledgers.

The ceilings groan. Something scurries—rat or something else—behind the wainscoting, and the room grows colder still. Leah leafs through the documents. Names and dates, whole shifts of workers listed and suddenly, between them, notations: ‘Disappeared after night shift’; ‘Sent to spinner’s room’—names crossed out, ink blotted in violent strokes.

Eli leans over, voice thin with disbelief: “August Wells. Isn’t that—?”

Leah nods, eyes wide. The Wells name repeats, circled in ink, sometimes under ‘owed wages’ or ‘sick leave unpaid.’ In one ledger, scrawled with a shaking, angry hand: “Agnes and child both gone. Mill blames the water. Not the blood.”

Darius backs away, running both hands through his hair. “Wells. Stephanie’s mum? Her family? That’s why she—”

Victor’s stare gets sharper, face flushing: “No one told me this. You all—what the fuck happened here?”

Leah’s voice trembles. “They warned us never to come after dark. But we did. That summer. We found… something.”

Rain hammers the glass, the sound gone slow and thick. A metallic scent steals into the room. Somewhere overhead, footsteps—careful, dragging, unmistakably deliberate.

Victor fists the ledger, shoving it under Leah’s nose. “What happened to my sister?”

An answer coils inside Leah, but she can hardly force her mouth open. Her own memory is molasses-thick: the shouting, the flickering shadows, the slamming of a forbidden door.

Eli interrupts, his skepticism unraveling. “Nothing got her. There aren’t ghosts. Just old workers, angry villagers, bad air—”

A low, humming vibration passes from the walls into the group’s bones, and a filament of blue light twists down the banister—drawing their eyes upward. The air pulses cold; a shriek, part wind, part animal, rips through the rafters. The blue eddy resolves itself: a woman’s face, seamed by shadow, hair askew like matted thread pulled from a loom. Her arms, inhumanly long and jointed, curl round an invisible wheel, pushing, pushing, until her head snaps toward them.

She will feed the wheel. You all turned. You left me here.

Victor stumbles backward, tripping over broken slats, pain contorting his face. The apparition’s gaze finds Eli first, then Darius, and then Leah. Each feels the weight of judgment—a memory rowed up from beneath:

Eli, trespassing with his cousin, laughing as they broke locks and scattered relics. Darius, coaxing Stephanie to hide behind the old cotton press, then locking the door--as a dare. Leah, watching, not protesting, always just out of frame but never innocent. And always, the echo: the screaming, the pleading, the silence that followed.

Thunder shudders the old skeleton of the mill. The ghost’s voice layers over itself—one girl’s, then a dozen, then hundreds, all the mill’s lost girls:

“Betrayal is a wheel. Guilt feeds it. All must answer.”

A sickening vertigo sweeps over the group; images flash—children pressed into dark rooms, a spinning wheel swallowing blood, the villagers muttering, “She’ll never forgive, or let you go.”

Leah grips Darius’s hand; Eli weeps silently, mouth clenched shut. Victor, eyes unblinking, whispers, “It’s us. It’s all us. We did this.”

In the fever-dream hush, the ghost’s face swims above Leah, close, those endless black-threaded eyes boring into her:

“You watched her drown.”

Leah collapses to her knees, sobbing—because it’s true. That summer, Stephanie’s mother vanished, and the group had played their games, believing it all consequence-free. But then, that day in the mill, teasing Stephanie, locking the door, making her beg—never knowing her mother was in the walls, dying, cursing, turning the wheel forever.

Victor falls with her, clutching the copper plaque. “How is my sister part of this?”

A final vision: the sister, lured by whispers, the pain of the old injustice drawing her here—trapped, consumed by the same cycle.

The ghost’s shape flickers, a corona of rage and heartbreak. “She can’t leave. None of you can leave. The debt is yours. Repentance, or turn the wheel forever.”

Wind batters the high windows. The lights go dead. For a moment, total blackness falls, broken only by the echo of a spinning, echoing, weeping sound—the sound of the wheel beginning to turn, deep in the heart of the mill, and the certainty that the only way out leads deeper in.