I Found Wet Footprints Leading From the Well to My Bed. I Never Should Have Come Here.

The bus driver didn't turn off the engine. He opened the door, looked at my rucksack, then at the dark behind me, and said nothing. I stepped down into Marcinkonys at ten to five and the door hissed shut before I got my other boot on the ground.

It was already dusk, and the lane doesn't have lights after five. The bus pulled away and took its headlamps with it. I stood there letting my eyes catch up. Pines leaned over the sandy road on both sides, and a thin layer of snow lay on it, not enough to cover the ruts. It squeaked under my boots the whole way. Nobody else was out. One window had a television going blue behind a curtain, and then that was behind me too.

The key was in my coat pocket. My aunt Rasa had pressed it into my hand at her door before I left, closed my fingers over it, and said, "Go on. Sleep for a week. You look terrible." I told her rest sounded good. She believed me, which is the only reason it worked.

The farmhouse sits last on the lane, right where the village stops and the park starts. It's wooden, dark, and lower than I remembered. The key stuck in the lock and I had to lift the door a little by the handle, the way you had to when we were kids. Then I was inside.

Woodsmoke first, old and soaked into the walls, though nobody had lit the stove in months. Under that was cold linoleum, which has a smell if you've ever stood barefoot on it. Along the kitchen rafters hung strings of dried mushrooms my aunt must have left, small and brown and curled, turning slightly in the draft I'd let in. I found the switch. The bulb came on yellow and weak.

I dropped the rucksack on a chair and didn't take my coat off. I walked straight through the kitchen and out the back door.

The yard was blue-grey and mostly snowless. The pine forest came right up to the back fence, and the trees were black and close together. There was the well. It's hand-dug, a ring of fieldstone about knee high, with a plank lid on it that somebody had nailed together from three boards and a crosspiece. I stood a few steps off. I didn't touch it.

My left palm was itching. It does that. I rubbed my thumb along the scar, the pale ridge that runs from under my first finger down toward the wrist. If anybody asks, it's fence wire. I was small, I grabbed the wrong fence, that's all. I've said it so many times it comes out before the question is finished.

I stayed until my ears hurt from the cold, then went back in and locked the door behind me, which I'd never done in this house.

I'd like to say I came here to rest. My aunt thought so and I let her. But three winters ago my cousin Tomas walked out of this house and didn't come back. He was twenty-three. The village said he'd gone into the forest drunk, and that was that. They said it kindly, the way you say something you've already stopped thinking about. Nobody found a coat, or a boot, or a track. The snow that year came in the night and did the rest.

Tomas drank. That part was true. He was loud and rough and looked after me more than I ever looked after him. He'd have laughed at all this, me standing in his kitchen with my coat on.

I lit the stove because it gave me something to do. I found a kettle and boiled water and didn't drink it. Then I sat at the table with my phone flat in front of me, and I played the voicemail.

I had already played it maybe forty times. It came through last month, out of nowhere. It was the middle of the day, and I was on a bus. My phone buzzed and the screen said voicemail from Tomas, and for a second I forgot how to breathe. The timestamp was the night he vanished. Three years old, and it showed up like it had just been sent.

I put it to my ear. First there's nothing, a minute of breathing. Slow, wet, close to the microphone. Somebody's mouth was right up against it. You can hear a chair or a floorboard, I've never decided which. Then a woman starts counting. Her voice is low and even, and she speaks in the old Dzūkian way my grandmother used, with the vowels stretched flat. She isn't in any hurry. One. Two. Each number sits there for a while before the next one comes.

She doesn't sound unkind, and that's what I can't stand.

I sat with the stove ticking and the mushrooms turning overhead. The thing I don't tell people is that Tomas called the night before, too. The phone lit up on my bed in the dorm. It said his name and I watched it. I was tired and I was twenty-one hours into being angry at him about something so small I can't even remember it now. I let it ring out. I thought, tomorrow. He'll be drunk and sorry tomorrow, and I'll pick up then.

There was no tomorrow, not with him in it. The next night is the one on the voicemail.

I never told my aunt. I never told the police, who came once, walked the tree line and left. I told myself that a missed call doesn't change where a man goes. Some nights I even believed it.

Four, five. My thumb was pressed white against the edge of the phone. The stove ticked. Outside, a branch let go of its snow and thumped down somewhere in the yard.

The woman said six.

Then the recording stopped.

I woke up with my feet cold and didn't know why until I sat up and looked at the floor.

The back room has a bed, a wardrobe with a door that won't stay shut, and a strip of linoleum between them. There were prints on it. Bare feet, wet, the toes spread. They started at the bedside and went out the door, and when I got up and followed them, they crossed the whole kitchen under the mushrooms and stopped at the back door.

The door was still locked. I'd locked it myself, the first time I'd ever done that in this house. The key was in it, turned.

I stood there in my socks with my hand on the key. Then I unlocked the door and opened it, because I had to look.

The yard was grey and stiff with frost. The prints didn't show on the ground, but I didn't need them to. The well was twenty steps from the door, and the lid was wrong. I'd stood by it last night and looked at those three boards and the crosspiece, and they'd sat square on the ring of stones. Now the whole thing had slid over. A hand's width of black showed along one side. I measured it with my own hand, which I'm not proud of. Fingers spread, it was about right.

I didn't go closer. Cold air came off the gap, or I imagined it, and my left palm started itching.

Back inside, I got down and looked at the prints properly. I'm not big, but I put my bare foot next to the nearest one, on the cold floor, and the print was a good two fingers longer than my foot. My heel sat well short of the end of it. I stood up quick.

Sleepwalking. That was what I settled on while I put the kettle on. I'd been up half the night with that voicemail, I was worn out, and people do things. I'd unlocked the door, gone out, and soaked my feet in the wet grass or the frost. I'd nudged the lid with my knee on the way past. Then I'd come back, locked up again, and gone to bed like a good boy. It held together if I didn't press on it. I got a rag and wiped the floor and didn't press on it.

There was nothing to eat in the house except Rasa's mushrooms, and I wasn't touching those. So I pulled my boots on and went to buy eggs. Onutė Petkevičienė lived four hundred metres down the lane, through the pines, and I remembered her having hens. She'd been old when I was a kid. I didn't even know if she was alive.

She was. I could see smoke from her chimney before I saw the house. The path between the trees was sand with a skin of snow, and my boots squeaked the whole way. It was quiet enough that I heard my own breathing, and I caught myself walking faster than I needed to. I didn't look back at the farmhouse. I didn't want to check whether anything was standing in the yard.

Her gate was tied shut with a piece of wire. Hens were scratching around the yard in the frozen dirt, and a small woman in a wool coat and a headscarf was coming out of the coop with a basket. She stopped when she saw me. Her eyes are a watery blue, and they went over me slowly, and then over the direction I'd come from.

"You're Rasa's boy," she said. "The one from the city."

"Jonas."

"I know who you are." She kept her hand on the basket. "You're in the house."

I said I was, for a week or so, and asked if she had eggs to sell. She said she did. She set the basket on a stump and started counting them into a cardboard tray, and I dug out my wallet. I pulled out a ten-euro note and held it out. She took the note. Then she took my wrist too, quick, and turned my hand over.

I hadn't meant to show her. My palm was open and there was the scar, from under the first finger down toward the wrist, pale and puckered.

"Fence wire," I said. "When I was little."

She didn't answer. She let go of me and crossed herself, forehead, chest, one shoulder and the other, fast, and then did it again. The eggs sat in the tray between us.

"Onutė?"

"Did you sleep in the house?"

"Where else would I sleep?"

"Don't be clever." She looked toward the pines. "Did anything come in the night? Anything wet?"

I didn't say anything, and she nodded as if I had.

"There's a skaitytoja in that well," she said. Her voice was flat, the way she'd say it was going to snow. "A counter. My mother said it, and her mother. It counts everyone who sleeps under that roof. Every one, one after another. It keeps them in order. And when the count is full, it takes the last number."

"Takes them where?"

"Down." She said it plainly. "The night the count is full, whoever's got the last number goes down."

I could feel the cold coming up through my boots. I thought of the woman's voice on the phone, low and unhurried, and I thought, don't. Not out loud. Not here.

"You can't sleep in the house," Onutė said. "Not any more. You take a blanket and you sleep outside, in the snow if you have to. Under the sky. It can't count you there."

I laughed. It came out of me before I'd decided anything. It was the kind of laugh you give somebody's grandmother when she tells you about a witch. I said something like, sure, I'll put a tent up, and I looked at her to see whether she was smiling.

She wasn't. She was holding the edge of the stump, and both her hands were shaking, hard, the knuckles white and the loose skin jumping over the bones. She wasn't trying to hide it. She just looked at me and let me see.

I stopped laughing. Somewhere behind her a hen made a low noise and the rest of the yard was silent.

I did it that night. I'd like to say I argued with myself first, but mostly I just didn't want to be in the house when it got dark. I took the blanket off the back-room bed and the last of the eggs in my pocket, boiled, and dragged a kitchen chair out onto the veranda to sit on. The veranda ran along the back of the house and looked straight down the yard to the well, twenty steps away. I told myself that was so I could keep an eye on it. Really it was the only place with a roof and no door behind me that I had to keep looking at.

By nine it was too cold for the chair. I lay down on the boards in my coat with the blanket over my legs and my rucksack under my head. The boards were old and dry and the cold came straight up through them, first in my hips, then my shoulder blades. No wind. The pines stood still against the back fence. Every so often one of them ticked as it froze.

I lay there feeling stupid. A twenty-year-old in a coat on a porch in Dzūkija in December because a woman with shaky hands had told him about a witch in a well. I thought about how I'd tell it later. Somebody's grandmother, I'd say, and I'd get the laugh. I turned that over for a while and got as far as picturing the laugh, and then my palm started to itch and I quit.

I don't know when I dozed. The moon was up over the pines when I opened my eyes, thin and white, and the yard was blue. My ears hurt. I was about to sit up and go find socks when I heard it.

It came up through the planks. Right under my head, under my whole body, from beneath the floor of the house. A woman's voice, low, in my grandmother's dialect with the flat stretched vowels.

"One."

Just like on the phone. Clear and slow. She left a long gap before the next.

I didn't move. I think I stopped breathing so I could hear better, which is a stupid thing to do. The boards had gone very still under me. She said two. Then three, and a long wait. Four. I had my hand flat on the wood without remembering putting it there, and I could feel it in the grain, a small hum in my fingers every time she spoke.

On the phone she'd stopped at six. I lay there waiting for six and it came, and I waited for the quiet after it, the way it had gone quiet in the kitchen. It didn't go quiet.

"Seven."

Louder. Not shouted, she never shouted. Just closer, as if she'd moved up from under the floor to right under the boards where my ear was.

"Seven."

Again, louder. Then again. Each time the same word and each time more of it. The blanket had slid off my legs and I didn't pull it back. Seven was me. I knew that the way you know your own name being called across a room, without anybody telling you.

I got my elbows under me. I was going to stand up, and go where, I didn't know. Out of the yard. Down the lane in the dark to Onutė's.

Then the counting stopped, and the house was quiet, and someone spoke inside it.

"Jonukas."

I froze on my elbows.

It came from the kitchen, through the open crack of the back door I'd left for the cold air. It was a man's voice, thick and slow, the voice of someone who'd been at the bottle since noon. There was a wet catch in it where he swallowed.

"Jonukas. Hey. Come out to the well."

Jonukas. My aunt's word for me, the baby version of Jonas that stuck to me till I was ten and made me want to hit people. I hadn't heard it in that voice in a long time. Three years, and before that, and I couldn't have told you why my whole body knew it anyway. The slur. The little laugh at the back of it.

"It's cold, Jonukas. Come on. Come out here, it's freezing."

I was on my feet. I don't remember standing. The blanket was on the boards behind me and my foot caught the leg of the chair and it went over with a crack that I didn't hear until later. I was down the veranda steps and into the yard, and the frozen ground was hard under my boots, and I was saying "Tomas," out loud, I heard myself say it. "Tomas, where are you?" My throat was tight and my eyes were running from the cold or from something else.

"Here," said the voice, behind me now, in the house, patient. "Right here. Come on, it's cold."

Ten steps. Twelve. The moon was lying flat across the yard and I could see the well ahead, the ring of stones with frost on the tops, and the lid.

The lid was up.

Not slid aside this time. Lifted, tilted, one edge of the boards propped on the rim, and the gap under it was a full hand, more than the morning. Black. The cold coming off it reached me from where I stood, thin and steady on my face.

I stopped so hard I nearly went down. My stomach turned over and I had to bend with my hands on my knees. I thought I'd be sick in the snow.

Jonukas.

Tomas never called me that. Not once, not drunk, not sober, not as a joke. Tomas called me Vabalas, Beetle, since I was four years old and used to walk along the fence line staring at the ground. He'd say it across a field, across a bar, on the phone. If he were calling me out into a yard on a cold night, drunk and stupid and glad, it would be Vabalas, get out here. He'd never have said the other one.

Whatever was in the house had my cousin's voice, and it had my aunt's name for me. It had one of them off a minute of breathing on a phone, and it had picked up the other from somewhere I hadn't even thought about. It was learning. It had been listening to the same recording I had, and it didn't have it right yet.

And it hadn't sent me to the well to look. It wanted me at the lid, with my hands under the boards, lifting it the last of the way myself.

Behind me, in the dark kitchen, Tomas's voice said, "Jonukas?" and then, more gently, "Come on."

I didn't turn around.

I didn't go back in until the window over the sink turned grey. By then I'd decided the voice hadn't been coming from the kitchen at all. It had been coming from under it.

The linoleum was cracked along the wall by the stove, old brown squares gone yellow at the edges. I got a knife from the drawer, the one with the wooden handle worn thin, and worked the tip under the seam. The linoleum came up in strips. Under it were floorboards, wide and grey, nailed down with square-headed nails. I dug at the first board until the knife blade bent, then I put the knife down and used my fingers. Two nails screamed out of the wood. A third one wouldn't go, so I stood on the board and pulled the other end until it split.

My palm was bleeding by then. I didn't stop to look at it.

Under the boards was dirt, and cold air with a smell of wet clay and something sweeter. I got down on my stomach with my phone light. Three boards up, then four.

Shoes.

They were set in a row along the joist, toes toward the wall, each pair side by side and neat. Felt boots, gone black. A woman's lace-up with the heel worn down on one side. Rubber galoshes. A child's sandal with the buckle still done up. One more I couldn't name, just leather that had gone soft and green. Then the last pair at the end, brown work boots with one lace replaced by orange twine. I knew that twine. I'd watched him tie it in this kitchen.

I counted them twice. Six.

Tomas's red scarf was folded on top of the boots. Folded, not dropped. Somebody had smoothed it flat.

Beside the last pair the dirt had been dug out in a shallow oblong, wide as a person is wide, and the loose soil pushed back neat along its edges. It was the right size for one more pair of shoes.

I lay there with the light shaking on the dirt. Three winters I'd let myself believe he was in the forest somewhere, in a ditch or a bog, and that it was only a matter of nobody looking hard enough. He'd never gone into the trees. He'd never left the house.

"Boy."

I got my head out from under the floor too fast and hit it on a joist. Onutė was standing in the back doorway with her scarf pulled low and a glass jar held against her chest. In her other hand was a branch of rowan with a few dried red berries still on it.

"The door was open," she said. Then she saw the floor and the strips of linoleum and didn't say anything else for a moment.

I showed her. She crouched at the hole, slower than I would have, and looked for a long time. She didn't touch the scarf. She crossed herself once and her lips moved.

"I didn't know it was under the house," she said. "I thought only the well."

"It's been counting under the veranda. It was under the kitchen last night, too. That's where he talked from."

"Who talked?"

I told her. The name it used, and how wrong it was. She listened with her eyes on the boots.

"Then we do what I know," she said, and got up by her knees.

She walked the whole house. She started at the front step and unscrewed the jar and let salt run from her fist onto the sandy snow, a thick white line, muttering in the old way I only half followed. Around the corner, along the wall, past the back window. She took the veranda steps one at a time. I walked behind her. I could have told her it wouldn't help, but her hand had stopped shaking while she poured, and I thought that was worth something. When the line met itself again by the front step she pressed the rowan branch into my hand and told me to hold it while she went in.

I stood on the step. I heard her boots cross the kitchen and stop.

She stood there a long time. I looked in through the door. She had her head tilted toward the floor, her mouth slightly open, listening to a house that at that hour was making no sound at all. The mushrooms turned overhead. Then her face went slack and old, older than it had been in the yard.

"Ah," she said. "No."

"What?"

"It doesn't need you to sleep." She said it to the floor. "My mother said sleepers, and I heard sleepers. But the counting isn't sleeping. Sleeping is only when you can't answer." She looked up at me. "It counts, and it waits for the one it's counting to say yes. That's all it wants. You say yes, it's done."

"Yes to what? To seven?"

"To anything. Your name. A word." Her hands had started again, and she pushed them into her coat. "I told you to lie in the snow. It would've worked on the ones who slept sound. Maybe that's all who ever went down."

"I didn't answer last night."

"You ran at it. That's close." She took the branch back from me and held it as if it weighed more than before. "The salt might do something. The rowan. I don't know now."

I didn't ask her to stay. She stayed until the light started going, and we ate the last hard-boiled eggs at the table without talking, both of us keeping our feet off the open floor. Before dusk she stood in the door and told me she'd sit up at her window, the one that faced this way, with the lamp on. If I needed anything I should shout. Four hundred metres, I said, and she said the pines carried sound at night. It didn't feel like an answer.

"Don't say anything to it," she said. "Whatever it says."

"I know."

She went down the lane in the last of the light with the branch held out in front of her. I watched until the pines took her, then I latched the door and sat down at the kitchen table with the knife in front of me, which was useless, and the phone, which I turned face down.

It started a little after ten.

It didn't start under the veranda this time. It came from the whole house, from the wall behind my back and the floor under my boots and the boards over my head. One. Two. Slow and even, in the flat dialect I would have known anywhere. I looked at the door. The salt line sat white in the snow outside the window, unbroken, and the counting came right across it.

Three. Four. Five.

I put my hand over my mouth, and I kept it there.

Six.

The pause after six went on longer than it ever had on the phone.

"Seven," she said, gently, from under my chair.

I didn't answer.

I kept my hand over my mouth until the window over the sink went grey. At some point the counting stopped. It didn't finish on a number. It just wasn't there anymore, and the only sound was the stove ticking as it cooled.

I sat another few minutes to be sure. Then I took my hand away and my lips were cracked where I'd pressed.

I didn't stop to put the knife down. I went out the front, past the salt line, which was still white and still whole, and down the lane. My boots squeaked on the snow, and every squeak sounded like a word. The pines dripped. I thought about the lamp in her window and how I hadn't looked for it once all night. I'd had my back to it, and the kitchen window faced the yard.

There was no smoke from her chimney.

The gate wire was untwisted and lying in the snow, and the hens were out, scratching around the stump where she'd counted eggs into a tray. The coop door stood open. The house door was open too, all the way back against the wall, and a little snow had blown across the threshold and stayed there.

"Onutė?" I said. Then louder. Nothing came back.

Inside it was colder than the yard. The lamp sat on the sill of the window that faced my house, burned down, the wick black and the glass fogged. A chair was pulled up close to it with a folded shawl on the seat. The kettle was cold. On the mat by the door there were two dents in the dust where boots usually stood, and the slippers next to them were dry.

I went through the two other rooms. The bed was made. I said her name again in the second room, and I heard how small it sounded, and I stopped.

I ran back. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. The knife was still in my hand and I threw it into a snowbank somewhere along the lane and didn't go back for it.

I came around the corner of the house into the yard and stopped where the veranda ended.

Her boots were standing by the well. Black rubber over felt, the tops folded down, the left one with a crack across the toe that she'd taped with grey tape. They stood side by side with the toes pointing at the stone ring, close enough that you could have stepped from them onto the rim. Snow had sifted into them. There were no tracks. The yard was mostly bare, frozen ground with a skin of white, and the only prints anywhere were mine from the night before, going down to the well and back.

I didn't touch them. I stood over them a long time. Twenty steps from my back door I had looked at that lid every morning and thought of it as a lid. Three boards and a crosspiece. It was shut now, sitting almost square. I'd been afraid of what would come out of it, and I'd never once thought about what it could take from the outside. A seventy-four-year-old woman with shaking hands had walked four hundred metres in the dark to my yard, and I hadn't heard a thing.

I'd told her I knew. Don't say anything to it. I did know. She was the one who'd forgotten the other half of it.

I couldn't stand still. My legs started shaking when I did, so I walked. Down the fence line to the pines, along the back fence, across to the shed and the woodpile and back. Around again. The numbers wouldn't leave. One, two, three, all the way up, in that voice, and I found myself keeping time with my steps and made myself stop. Then I was doing it again. I walked until I couldn't feel my toes, and then until I couldn't feel my feet, and it was full light and the frost on the boards had gone from grey to white.

On the fourth or fifth lap I looked at the well again, from the side this time, and saw the branch.

It was Onutė's rowan. I knew it by the berries, dried and dark, four or five of them left. It was jammed into the crack where the lid had shifted, wedged between the edge of the boards and the stone rim, standing nearly upright. She must have carried it home last night in front of her the whole way. Then at some point she'd come back with it and done this, in the dark, alone.

I went over and crouched. I put my face close, not touching it.

The bark on the lower end was peeled and split in long strips, the wood underneath pale and crushed. The branch wasn't sitting in the gap the way a stick sits in a door. It was bent. It bowed outward, toward the yard, toward me. The rim stones under it were scraped clean of frost, and along the underside of the boards the grain was pushed up and shiny, rubbed by something that had leaned on it from inside and kept leaning.

I put two fingers on the lid, barely. It was warm. Not warm like a hand, but warmer than the stones around it, and it trembled, faintly, under my fingertips.

I took my hand back.

Every morning I'd come out and found it moved a hand's width, and I'd thought of it as something getting out, or getting in, or reaching for me. I'd even measured it against my own hand. But nothing had ever been locked in there. Something had been holding the lid down.

And each morning it had held a little less.

I sat down where I was. The ground was frozen hard enough that I felt it through my coat, and I stayed there with my back against the woodpile side of the yard where I could see the lid without turning my head. My feet had stopped hurting some time ago. I didn't check the time. I watched the light go off the top of the pines.

I was six when I fell in. I hadn't thought about the details in years, because thinking about them had never gotten me anywhere. It was summer. The lid was off, leaning against the stones, and somebody had left the bucket rope coiled on the rim. I remember wanting to see how far down the water was. I leaned, and the stones were wet and green, and then there was no rim.

What came back now was the cold. I hadn't remembered that part. It wasn't the cold of water, it was the cold of being somewhere that had been waiting. I went under and everything was black, no bottom, no sides, my mouth full. I remember hearing her. Not clearly, water does that, but low and flat and slow, a woman's voice, and it was counting. I couldn't tell you what number. It was in no hurry.

And then an arm. It came up under mine from below, not from above, and it was solid and cold and it shoved me. It shoved me toward the circle of light, which was small and very far off and had a boy's head in it. I kicked. I came up. Tomas got me by the collar and then by both wrists and hauled me over the stones, swearing, and I lay in the grass and my left hand was open from the base of the fingers to the wrist and I couldn't feel it yet.

Nobody asked what cut it. There was a fence not far off with old wire on it, and that was what got said, and I said it too, until it was true enough.

I turned my hand over on my knee. The light was going but the scar was still pale, a line with puckered edges, running under the first finger and down. I'd looked at it a thousand times. I had never once looked at how it was shaped. Wire doesn't do that. A stone doesn't do that. It was wider at the top than the bottom. It looked like something I'd closed my fist on while someone else's fingers were still in it, and pulled hard against.

Somebody had been holding my hand. Down there, in the black, somebody had taken hold and not let go, and had pushed me up with the other arm. I didn't think it was the woman.

I sat with that a while. The frost was coming back up on the boards of the lid, white, creeping in from the edges.

Then I thought about the rest of it, and the thing I'd been calling luck started to come apart. She had counted me. I'd been six, and I'd been in her water, and she'd been counting. Nobody just gets out of that. Not at six, not with a split hand. She let me go. And I remembered, not the words, just the sound of it, a boy's voice somewhere close to the water, cracked and loud, saying something back to her.

Answering. Tomas was twelve. He answered for me. I didn't know what he said and I didn't want to, and I knew he'd never told anyone, because he never told anyone anything. He kept the drinking loud so people would look at that.

I put my head down on my knees for a minute. Not long. When I lifted it the yard had gone blue.

The voicemail was next. I'd played it forty times and I'd been hearing it wrong for all forty. I'd heard breathing so close to the microphone that it sounded like a mouth, and I'd thought it was her, coming for me down the phone line. But it was wet, ragged breathing. It was someone working hard. Someone with his face pushed up against a lid, or a floor, or a wall, holding on to it. And the counting behind him, low and even, went one to six, and stopped. It stopped at six because that was all of them. Six pairs of shoes in a row. The seventh was me.

He wasn't playing it to lure me. Tomas had been counting too. He'd held the phone up so I could hear how many there were, and how close I was to the end of it. He'd called the night before and I'd let it ring. He tried again the next night, when he couldn't do anything else, and I wasn't there to answer that either. The message just took three years to find me.

I couldn't do anything with that. I sat and let it be what it was.

The last thing I looked at was the yard itself, the stretch of frozen ground between the back step and the well. I'd wiped the prints off the linoleum that first morning, with a rag, and I'd been sure they were coming toward me. Bare feet, wet, toes spread, longer than mine. They started at the side of my bed and went out the door and through the kitchen and stopped at the back door, which I'd locked. I'd read them as something coming in for me.

But they'd started at the bed. Whoever it was had gotten to where I slept and then turned around and gone back. They'd been wet because they'd come up out of the water. And they'd stopped at the door because that was the way to the well, and the well was where he had to be.

Someone had climbed up the whole way, in the dark, barefoot, to see if I was still breathing. Then he'd gone back down to hold the lid.

I stayed there until I couldn't see the boards anymore.

I didn't decide anything. Around eleven I got up off the frozen ground, my legs mostly not working, and walked the twenty steps to the well. The frost on the boards squeaked under my boots. I stepped up onto the lid and it took my weight without a sound.

I stood there a while. The moon was up over the pines, thin and white, and my breath went straight up. The lid was warm through my soles, and I could feel it trembling faintly. I took my left glove off and crouched and laid my hand flat on the crosspiece. The cut from the floorboards was still open across the palm, and the wood was cold against it. I wanted to feel what he'd been feeling. That's as much of a plan as I had.

The counting started a little after that. It came up through the boards and through my hand. One. Two. She took her time, same as always, and the numbers were flat and stretched and in no hurry. I got through three, and four, and five by looking at the fence and not breathing much.

Six.

Then nothing. The pause was longer than the one in the kitchen. I heard my own pulse. I thought, maybe that's it, maybe it stops here like it did on the phone.

The lid shuddered under my hand.

It wasn't the tremble, which I'd gotten used to. It was a jolt, like something had hit it from below. The boards jumped a finger's width against the stone. Cold air came out of the gap and I smelled wet clay and that sweet smell from under the floor. Fingers came through. Grey, long, thin, no nails that I could see, curling around the edge of the board one at a time. They didn't grab. They rested there and felt for the edge.

I couldn't move. My hand was still on the crosspiece a few inches from them.

She spoke right at my ear. Not from the well, from beside my head, close enough that I felt it on my skin.

"Seven."

It was gentle. That was the worst of it. She said it kindly, the way you'd tell a kid it's time to come in. My mouth was already open. Everything in me wanted to say yes, or what, or Tomas, or my own name, anything, just to have something come out. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, and I shut my mouth.

I did not run. I thought about it, and my legs even started to, one heel lifting. But the lid was right there under me and there was a hand-width of black beside my boots. If I ran, it would be open by the time I hit the veranda. I knew that the way you know a stove is hot.

So I got down on my knees on the boards and put both hands flat on the lid and leaned my weight onto it. I locked my elbows. The fingers slid back through the gap and were gone.

Then everything under the wood pulled.

I don't know how else to say it. It wasn't one thing. It was a lot of arms, more than I could count, all of them reaching up at once and hauling on the boards from below. The whole lid bowed up into my palms. The nails groaned in the crosspiece. My shoulders took it and my knees skidded on the frost, and I put my forehead down almost on the wood and pushed.

"Seven," she said, from under my hands now. "Seven. Seven."

I didn't say anything. I breathed through my nose. She said it again and again, and each time it was softer, patient, like she had all night. She did.

It went on like that. I lost track of the time in the first hour. My arms burned, then went hot and heavy, then went numb, and I kept pushing on numb arms because there was nothing else to do. Somewhere in there she stopped saying seven and started over. One. Two. Three. All the way up. I understood she was going to do the whole count again, and again after that, and I'd hear every number until it was done with me.

My knees went first. I shifted, and the lid gave a half inch, and cold poured out of the gap, and I threw my whole body across it. That was how I stayed for a long time, flat on my chest over the boards with my arms spread and my cheek on the wood, and the pull coming up through my ribs.

I had the left side of the lid under my palm, close to the crosspiece, and somewhere in the third or fourth hour I noticed the pressure there was different. The rest of it pulled. This spot leaned the other way. It was faint, and it was tired. It was a weight pushing up against the pull and holding it back, just barely. I moved my hand over it and pressed harder, and it didn't get any stronger, but it didn't go away.

I didn't say anything to it either. I didn't trust my voice. But I stayed on that spot.

The stars went around. The moon went behind the pines and came out the other side. My breath froze on the collar of my coat and I couldn't feel my feet or my face. The counting reached six a dozen times. Each time, she waited, and said the last number gently in my ear, and each time I bit my cheek until it bled again. Once I heard my own name in there, in the wrong voice, and Tomas's voice too, slurred, saying it was cold. I put my teeth together and pushed.

Toward the end the sky went grey behind the trees. I noticed it because I could suddenly see the fence. The frost on the boards was turning from grey to white and the pines had edges again. The pull got worse, if anything, like she knew. I could feel it in my teeth. I thought about the sound Onutė's boots would make if she stepped out of them. I thought about the scarf.

Then the top of the sun came over the pines, and the first light hit the boards, and the counting stopped.

It stopped in the middle. She got to four and just didn't say five. The pull went slack, all at once, and I nearly fell forward onto my face. The yard was quiet. A crow made a noise somewhere in the trees.

I stayed where I was. My arms were shaking so hard I could see the frost jump on the boards. The lid didn't move, but it was heavier than it had been all night, a real dead weight. I knew, without lifting anything, that if I got up it wouldn't hold.

I tried anyway. I lifted my right hand and it came away from the wood, slow and stiff. The left didn't.

I pulled again. It stayed where it was, flat on the crosspiece where I'd laid it hours ago. I looked at it. The cut across my palm had opened all the way, the whole old line of it from under the first finger to the wrist. The blood had run out and into the grain of the board and frozen there in dark lines. I tried again, harder, and felt the skin pull. Not tear. Hold.

The sun was fully up now. I sat there with my hand on the lid and watched my breath.

It took until almost ten for my hand to come loose. The sun got onto the boards around eight, and the blood thawed from the edges in. I worked my fingers a little at a time, and when the palm finally let go it left a thin layer of skin behind. There was a dark print on the crosspiece, my whole hand with the scar line right down the middle. I tore a strip off my shirt tail and wrapped it. Then I stood up, and my knees nearly went.

I stepped off the lid. It was a small step, and I felt the weight settle behind me.

I got as far as the fifth step toward the veranda. "One," she said, thin and flat, from the well, in full daylight. At the eighth step it was "Two." I turned around and walked back and put my boot on the boards, and it stopped. I'd like to say that was enough for me. I did it a second time, all the way to the veranda steps, because the first time I'd hoped I'd misheard. I hadn't. She got to three before I was back on the lid, and my heart was going so hard I could hear it in my ears.

So I could leave. Nothing was stopping me. I could have walked down the lane to the road and waited for the bus, and the count would have started up behind me, wherever I was, from one. And the lid wouldn't have anyone on it. I thought about the driver looking at my rucksack and then at the dark behind me. He hadn't said a word. I understood him better now.

I sat on the lid until noon, thinking it over. It didn't take that long, really. It just took a while to stop pretending it might.

The key was still in my coat pocket. In the kitchen drawer, under the string and a candle stub, there was a stack of envelopes Rasa must have left, the long kind with a picture of a stork on the stamp. I took one. I stood over the kitchen table with the floorboards still torn up beside my boots, six pairs of shoes down there and the red scarf on top, and I put the key in and licked the flap. Then I wrote her address on the front. That was all. I'd started a note a dozen times on the bus and never got past her name. And if I wrote anything true she'd come. She'd show up with soup and a bag, and she'd sleep in that back room because she'd think it was the kind thing to do.

The mailbox was on the front fence, fifty-some steps around the house. I did it at a run. The count started as I passed the corner of the wall, "One," and I heard "Two" while I was jamming the envelope in and pushing the little tin flag up. I ran back. I was on the lid again before she got to five, bent over with my hands on my knees, breathing like I'd been hit. The silence after was very complete. A crow was in the same tree as before.

The flag was down the next morning. I saw it from the corner of the house, and that's as far as I looked.

The shed took me most of that afternoon, a trip at a time. It stood at the side of the yard, closer to the fence than the well, with a woodpile stacked against one wall and a window on the side facing the lid. The window had one cracked pane. Inside were a broken sled, some rakes, two paint cans stiff with age and a smell of old sawdust. I cleared a corner and dragged the mattress out of the back room, and the blanket, and then my rucksack. The kitchen stove I gave up on. I couldn't be in that house long enough to keep it lit. Every time I set foot on the linoleum there was a low sound, patient, from under the boards, like something clearing its throat. I got what I needed and went out.

There was nothing to eat but Rasa's mushrooms. I took down a string of them that evening and chewed one standing in the yard. It was dry and tough and tasted exactly like the smell of that kitchen, woodsmoke and cold. I ate four. They weren't bad.

Onutė's hens got in over the fence a couple of days later, or they'd always been able to. They scratched around the woodpile. I didn't have anything to feed them but crumbs, and I fed them those. I don't think about her boots much anymore. They stood by the well for two weeks until the snow drifted in over the toes, and then one morning I looked and they weren't there. I didn't ask where they went.

I don't sleep at night. That's the main thing. Around ten I put on my coat and both gloves and walk the twenty steps out, and I step up onto the boards. I sit with my legs crossed, and I put my left hand back in its own print on the crosspiece. The blood dried in the grain a long time ago, dark in the shape of my palm. It fits like it was made for it.

She starts a little after that. She doesn't need the dark now. But it's still the dark she likes.

"One," she says, from under me, unhurried, in my grandmother's flat vowels. Then a long wait. "Two." I know all the waits now. I know how long she'll leave after three. Somewhere around four or five, under my left hand, on that one spot near the crosspiece, something pushes up against the pull. It's slow and tired and it's been doing it a long time. I press down there and push back. Neither of us says anything.

At six she stops and waits. That's the longest wait of all, and I've learned to sit through it with my teeth together. Then she says the last number, gentle and close to my ear, the way you'd call someone in for supper, and I don't answer.

Then she starts over from one. I sit on the lid in the cold with my hand on the wood and listen to the numbers climb.