My daughter had been missing for weeks, I found a way to bring her back home.
The day Hel disappeared, I was too drunk to drive her to school. She is 10. That's the part that will follow me into the grave. I had been drinking since noon, trying to drown the sound of Maude's silence. The house had been empty for nine months, but her absence was louder than any scream. When Hel shook my shoulder that morning, her backpack already strapped on, I told her to walk. It was only a mile. She was nine. She knew the way.
She never made it.
For three weeks, Kayla and I tore the town apart. We put up flyers, talked to every face we saw, begged the news stations to care. The police dragged the lake, searched the woods, interviewed every registered offender within a fifty-mile radius. Nothing. No trace. No witness. No body. They stopped returning my calls after the second week.
I couldn't live with it. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, couldn't look at Angie without seeing Hel's face. So I did something I will never fully explain, because I don't fully understand it myself. I found a way to bring her home.
The instructions were in a book sold in a novelty and curiosity store. It was bound in leather so old it crumbled when I touched it. The pages were yellow and spotted with what looked like dried blood. The ritual required three things: the body of the deceased, a blood offering from the father, and a vessel that had once carried life.
Below the instruction reads:
Bone to bone, and vein to vein,
Call the soul by secret name.
Cross the flesh and seal the gate,
Leave one vessel desolate.
Take the new, forsake the old—
An empty husk forever cold.
I had two of the three. Maude's body was six feet under in Greenlawn Cemetery. I had plenty of blood. The third thing was the soul of the missing child, which I had to call back from wherever it had gone.
I won't describe the full ritual. Some things should stay buried. But I will tell you the parts that matter.
I dug up Maude's coffin alone, under a moon so thin it looked like a scratch in the sky. The earth was hard and cold, and my hands blistered before I was three feet down. When the shovel finally struck wood, I almost stopped. I almost turned back. But I thought of Hel's empty bed, of the flyers peeling on telephone poles, of Angie asking every night when her sister was coming home.
I pried the lid open with a crowbar. The stench hit me like a physical blow. Maude had been dead nine months. The skin had slipped from her bones in places, drawn tight over her skull like a mask pulled too thin. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a permanent snarl. Her eyes were sunken, the lids half-open, revealing nothing but dark sockets. Her hands were crossed over her chest, the fingers curled into claws. I vomited twice before I could kneel beside her.
The first step required me to feed her my own flesh. I took a fillet knife from my belt and sliced a long strip of skin from my forearm. The pain was white and clean. I watched the fat glisten under the kitchen light I had brought, then pressed the strip against her lips. They were cold and hard as rubber. I forced them open and placed the skin on her tongue, then pressed her jaw shut. "Eat," I whispered. "Eat and become mine."
The second step required me to drink from her. I had to take a mouthful of the fluid that had pooled in her chest cavity and swallow it. It tasted like copper and rot and something sweet I couldn't name. It coated my throat and stayed there, warm and heavy. I dry-heaved for five minutes afterward.
The third step required me to pull out my own front teeth. Four of them. I took a pair of pliers from the toolbox and gripped the first incisor. It took three hard yanks before it came loose, the root sliding out with a wet pop. Blood poured down my chin, hot and thick. I placed the tooth in Maude's mouth, arranging it where her missing incisor had once sat. One by one, I pulled the other three. By the end, my mouth was a ruin of exposed nerves and blood. I pressed her jaw shut and held it, feeling the teeth grind against each other. "Now you can bite me back," I whispered.
The fourth step required me to put my tongue in her ear. I had to whisper Hel's name over and over for a full minute. I leaned down, pressed my lips against the cold, waxy shell of her ear, and pushed my tongue inside. The canal was damp and cold, and I felt something shift as I forced my way deeper. I whispered Hel's name until my lungs burned, then pulled back, gagging.
The fifth step required me to cut off my own little finger and place it in her mouth. I used the bolt cutters. The bone snapped with a sound like a twig breaking. I wrapped the severed digit in a strip of her burial shroud and pushed it past her lips, deep into her throat. "A part of the father must enter the mother's vessel to call the child home," the book said. I felt her throat convulse once, then swallow.
I sat there for an hour, bleeding onto her chest, waiting. Nothing happened. I started to cry. I had mutilated myself for nothing. I had dug up my wife for nothing. I had—
Her hand moved.
It was small, barely a twitch. But I saw it. The fingers uncurled, then curled again. Her chest rose. A sound came from her throat, wet and rattling. Her eyes opened.
They were Maude's eyes, but they weren't. The color was the same—that familiar hazel—but the light behind them was different. Brighter. Younger.
She looked at me. Blinked. And said, in a voice that was Maude's voice but with a child's pitch, "Dad? What happened? Why are you shorter?"
I laughed. I actually laughed. Tears were streaming down my face, mixing with the blood from my mouth. "Nothing, honey. You've just grown a bit taller."
I helped her sit up. Her bones cracked like knuckles. She moved stiffly, like a puppet whose strings were still being learned. I wrapped her in a blanket and carried her home.
That night, I brought Hel in Maude's body through the back door. Brutus, the old retriever, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He took one look at her and started growling, a low, deep sound I had never heard from him before. The hair on his back stood up. He bared his teeth.
"Brutus, stop," I hissed. He didn't stop. He backed away, still growling, and disappeared into the living room. I told myself he was just confused by the smell. Dogs don't recognize decay the way we do. They smell death. They fear it.
I carried Hel to her room. The first thing I did was throw a towel over the mirror. "The mirror is broken," I said. "Don't take the towel off. It's dangerous."
"Okay, Dad," she said. Her voice was sleepy, but there was a flatness to it that I chose to ignore.
I ran her a bath. I covered the bathroom mirror with another towel. I told her to undress and get in. She did, mechanically, like she was following a script. I left her alone for a few minutes. When I came back, she was sitting in the water, staring at the wall. The water was clear. I started combing her hair.
It fell out in clumps. Not a few strands—whole sections, sliding off her scalp like wet leaves. The comb pulled through and came away with a handful of brown hair, the roots still attached. I stared at it. She didn't react.
"Your hair's a bit tangled," I said, my voice shaking.
"I know," she said. "Sorry."
I kept combing. The comb got stuck in the middle of her head. I pulled gently, then harder. It wouldn't budge. I braced my hand against her skull and yanked. The comb came free, taking with it a huge piece of her scalp. It flopped onto the floor, a patch of skin and hair, the underside glistening with a greenish liquid.
I froze. There was no blood. Instead, a thick, oily fluid oozed out of the wound, pooling on her shoulder. The smell hit me a second later—sweet and rotten, like flowers left too long in a vase. It filled the bathroom, thick enough to taste. My eyes watered.
"Oh my God, sweetie! Are you alright?"
"Hm? What's wrong, Dad?" She turned to look at me, her expression blank.
"You didn't feel it?"
"Feel what?"
I looked at the piece of scalp on the floor. I looked at the wound on her head, the exposed bone, the green fluid still seeping out. "Never mind," I said. "I'll get your pajamas."
I ran to her room, grabbed the first pair I found, and threw them at her. "Wear these. I'll be right back."
"Can I use the towel on the mirror?" she asked.
"What?! No! Don't!" I stumbled over my words. "The mirror is broken. It's dangerous. Don't take the towel off."
"Alright, whatever you say."
I sighed in relief. She put on the pajamas and walked to her bed. Every step made her bones crack, a sound like twigs snapping underfoot. She jumped onto the mattress, and I heard her spine pop. I sat beside her, kissed the unblemished part of her head, and asked if she wanted a story.
"Dad, I don't need that anymore. I'm very sleepy."
I leaned in and whispered, "Honey, for the time being, it's better for you to just stay in your room. Don't go anywhere else in the house, alright?"
"Why?"
"We're planning a surprise party for your little sister!"
She nodded. "Alright then."
I left the room and found Brutus at the top of the stairs, still growling at the door. I locked him in the kitchen and went to bed.
The next morning, I woke up ten minutes late. Angie was shaking me, her small hands gripping my arm. "Daddy, I'm gonna be late!"
I jumped out of bed, didn't even change clothes. I refilled Brutus's food bowl, carried Angie to the car, and sped to school. I was back home in fifteen minutes. The dog food was untouched. "Damn dog," I muttered. I ran to Hel's room.
She was still in bed, staring at the ceiling. "Time for breakfast," I said.
She sat up slowly, her spine crackling like a string of firecrackers. She followed me to the kitchen. I made mac and cheese, the way Maude used to make it. I boiled the pasta, added the cheese sauce, sprinkled paprika on top. It was steaming hot, so hot the air above the bowl rippled with heat. I set it in front of her.
She picked up the spoon. She stared at the bowl. Then she set the spoon down.
"It doesn't smell very good," she said.
"Come on, it's your favorite. Just try it."
She shook her head.
I sighed. I picked up the spoon, scooped a generous portion, and held it to her lips. "Open up."
She opened her mouth. I slid the spoon in. She chewed slowly, her lower jaw moving up and down like a piston. I watched her, waiting for a smile. Then her jaw stopped.
"What's wrong?"
She opened her mouth. The mac and cheese fell out, orange and slimy. But mixed with it was something else. A piece of meat, about the size of a thumb, pale and veined with red. I picked it up. It was soft, spongy, and wet. It took me a second to realize what it was.
She had bitten off the front half of her tongue.
I grabbed her face and forced her mouth open. Her tongue was a ragged stump, the remaining half twitching. Blood was pooling under it. "Are you okay? Does it hurt?"
She looked at me with those empty eyes. "I'm fine. Why are you panicking?"
I couldn't speak. I just stared at the piece of her tongue in my palm.
"I told you I wasn't hungry," she whispered.
I took her to the bathroom. I told her to brush her teeth. She just stood there, holding the toothbrush, staring at it like it was an alien object.
"I don't know how to do it," she said.
I took the toothbrush from her. "Just open your mouth." I brushed gently, trying to be careful. I told her about the time she had put a frog in Kayla's purse, about the time she had drawn a mustache on her own face with permanent marker. She didn't laugh. She didn't react.
"Spit," I said.
She leaned over the sink and spat. Five teeth clattered into the white porcelain. They were small, white, perfectly formed. Molars. Canines. Incisors. They lay there in a puddle of pink saliva.
"Sorry, honey," I said, my voice cracking. "I must've brushed too hard."
"There's nothing to worry about," she said. "The teacher said teeth can still grow at my age."
I laughed. It was a broken, desperate sound. I kept brushing. Her tongue. I brushed too hard, and she gagged. She bent over and vomited onto the floor. A ball of hair, brown and matted, splattered against the tiles.
I knelt down. The hair was long, strands interwoven like a nest. I reached into her mouth. My fingers touched something soft and wet. I pulled. A long piece of hair came out, then more, then more. It was like pulling a rope from a well. It kept coming, tangled and slimy, until I had a pile of it on the floor. It was brown. Brutus is a brown golden retriever.
"What did you do?" I asked, my voice shaking.
She looked at me, guilty. "I don't know."
My phone rang. The school. I was late to pick up Angie. "Clean yourself up," I said. "I'll be right back."
I ran out of the room. I called Kayla. "Can you pick up Angie? I'm... I'm dealing with something."
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothing. Just pick her up. Please."
I hung up. I went back to the bathroom.
The towel was on the floor. The mirror was uncovered. Hel was standing in front of it, holding a pair of scissors. She had already cut a slit along her ribcage. I could see her fingers inside, moving, searching. She had cracked two ribs outward. They stuck out of the wound like pale, wet twigs.
"No!" I screamed.
I tackled her. We hit the floor. The scissors clattered away. She struggled, stronger than she should have been. "What did you do to Mom?!" she screamed. "What did you do to me?!"
She grabbed the scissors and stabbed me in the shoulder. The pain was sharp and deep. I fell back. She ran.
She ran to the kitchen. I followed, bleeding. She grabbed a knife from the block—a chef's knife, eight inches, sharp enough to slice through bone. I was ten feet away when she placed the knife on the kitchen table, blade pointing up. She grabbed the handle with both hands. She lowered her head.
"No!" I lunged.
She drove her throat onto the blade.
The knife went in just below her chin, through the soft tissue, and came out the back of her neck. Blood—dark, thick, almost black—sprayed across the table. She made a sound, a wet gurgle, and then she fell. Her body twitched twice and went still.
I don't know how long I stood there. Seconds. Minutes. I don't know.
Then I heard a scream. I turned.
Kayla was at the back door, Angie in her arms. She had seen everything. She ran. I heard her car start, heard the tires screech.
The police came. They took me away.
I woke up in a hospital bed. A psychologist was sitting next to me. Her name was Dr. Indira. She asked me to tell her everything. I did. I told her about the ritual, about the hair, the teeth, the tongue, the knife. I told her about Hel in Maude's body. I told her about the mirror. I knew whatever I told her, he didn't believe one bit. Nobody does.
She listened without interrupting. When I was done, she folded her hands in her lap. She looked at me with something like pity.
"They found Hel in the forest several weeks after she disappeared," she said. "I thought the autopsy would give me an answer."
I stared at her.
"It didn't."
She spoke slowly, deliberately.
"There wasn't a single injury on her body. No cuts. No bruises. No broken bones. No evidence that an animal had touched her. They ruled out starvation almost immediately. Her organs were healthy. Her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—none of them showed the kind of deterioration you'd expect if she'd gone without food for days."
She paused.
"Toxicology found nothing. No poison. No drugs. No disease. No infection. Nothing that could explain why my daughter was dead."
I opened my mouth, but no words came.
"The medical examiner looked me in the eye and told me they'd ruled out every obvious cause. The report listed her cause of death as 'undetermined.'"
I stared at her, my hands trembling.
"They could tell me everything that didn't kill Hel," she whispered. "But they could never tell me what did."
I sat there in the sterile white room, and for the first time since the ritual, I felt the full weight of what I had done.
"Take the new, forsake the old—
An empty husk, forever cold."