 Not far from the edge of our village, there is a well whose opening has been boarded up to keep children like me from understanding the truth. This well had been an important source of water, one of the four main wells that the villagers' 500-ish residents relied on for almost as many years. But keeping us from the truth, or the truth away from us, was more important than keeping every water supply open. The water would have been unfit to drink at this point anyway, I heard my father's friends grumble to each other. I knew the truth, of course, when one child of the village knew, the rest would too. And we had been partial witnesses the day of its condemnation. The last day the well had still been open and inviting. The truth is that my brother had been a hero at that well. They should have put up a statue of him or something to honor at that well, but nobody would go near it after he had gone down and never back up, and they had boarded it up and performed the cleansing, protective rituals over it. This was four years ago. A little girl had fallen into the well one careless afternoon in July when the rest of us had been playing nearby. She had tugged at the rope trying to get a drink of water, and it had given in, reeling in after her, bucket and all, so that we had no way of pulling her out. Now I think of it, she might have been playing tug of war at the time without knowing it, and lost. A few of us ran to get help, but we knew it would be a little too late if someone didn't act now to save the girl. We could hear her echoing calls from the bottom, alive and miraculously unhurt, but fighting to stay afloat, always on the verge of drowning. The water level was so low, we couldn't see anything that far down. We knew she was suspended in utter darkness, and the cold of the underworld were not even the heat of the sun could reach. She had survived till now, but we had given her up for dead. Not my brother, my brother, fourteen and fearless, had made up his mind. He had gone in after her. He lowered himself down the well, inch by inch, by setting his feet flat against one side of the wall, and his back pushed against the other. His arms outstretched on either side as he walked himself farther and farther down. Slowly, he let himself deeper into the well until the light of the fading day could not touch him, and he was lost from our view. All the way down, he called to the girl, coaching her on how to stay afloat until he could get to her. Her splashing grew less frantic, more purposeful, as she heard him and calmed down. My brother was a born leader. All the kids trusted him. Even though we all knew he wouldn't be able to climb back out with her until help arrived, it was a great comfort just to have him waiting alongside you in the depths of nothingness, speaking courage where you had none. I got you. I heard my brother say somewhere in the dark before long, I've got you. Just hold on to me. They'll come for us soon. I promise. And they did come. The village firemen trundled in with their proud new floodlight, precariously attached to their jalopy of a fire engine, followed by a crowd of people, adults and more children, and threw themselves importantly into the scene. This wasn't the first time someone had fallen into one of the village wells. It was an easy shot to glory for them. We children were jostled out of the way to give them room to act. I wanted to stay and watch my brother emerge the hero he was. I could still hear him and the girl calling up to the firemen to let them know they were down there. They were alive. Please hurry. They should have hurried. Instead of putting on a show of keeping people back, the same people they had brought as witnesses. They should have hurried. The scene was getting crowded. I was getting faint from the heat of the sun and the intensity of the situation, having never witnessed a village well rescue myself. But I was famous at home for my inconveniently timed sun fevers, as my father called them, and my weak heart. I was lucky to be alive. The doctors had told my parents at my birth, told them my brother was lucky to have a younger brother to play with. Unfairly, my mother, also present at the scene, sensed my worsening condition and had sent my nurse to drag me home to wait for them and my brother to return. I was already growing bleary with unease, upset at myself for not being able to stay. Finally, I had given in just as the firemen had dismantled the floodlight to bring it over the side of the well, preparing to go in. They hadn't yet lowered a rope. I remember being carried home, half asleep over my uncle's shoulder with my nurse walking close by. My parents had both stayed behind at the well. I remember hearing the firemen shouting, people screaming, the fire engine creaking violently with hurried action. The rescue was well underway, though noisier than I thought it would be. We were far away enough down the dusty path that only the far flung echoes reached us. I fell asleep. When I woke up at home on the outdoor cot in our shaded veranda, it was getting on to evening. The balmy air gave way to a chill and the mosquitoes were dotted on the net over my head like the clingy vestiges of a nightmare. My nurse was sitting on the steps beside me, eavesdropping on the conversation going on inside from the open back door. I shot up and ran around her before she knew I was awake and flew into the house looking for my brother. I found my mother instead crying at the table. My father was on his feet beside her, hands on his hips. He could never sit down when he was upset. His eyes were red as if he too had been crying. I had never seen him cry. Around the table there was a fireman or two, a village constable, the village priest sat near, comforting my mother. The village head had come and gone. I didn't see my brother. No one would talk to me. The discussion had died the moment I barged into the room. My mother wanted to hold me, but hearing her crying into my hair woke up a deep fear in me and since nobody would answer my shouted questions about my brother, I fled the house, leaving my parents pleading calls behind me like footprints. I wanted to run back to the well, sure he would be there, but I was stopped on the way by people coming back the other way, haggard, drawn, ill looking. I recognized one of my friends returning with his own family. It seemed the whole village had made the trip to the well. The later ones were being turned back before they could get there. From what I heard, they had the village holy men praying over the well as the firemen hurriedly boarded up the opening. The rest were told to go home and pray. There would be a general meeting either later that night or early the next morning to discuss what to do moving forward. There was nothing else they could do. We had never seen a village well rescue turn out like this. The drama had always been straightforward. They got the child or they didn't. The follow up hardly needed more than a celebration or a period of mourning. But now they needed a plan. They needed protection. My head felt fuzzy with confusion. And my brother, I asked my friend as we walked back to the heart of the village. He glanced at his parents who were talking to each other in hushed tones, perhaps just as thrown off as we were. Seeing they were distracted, my friend whispered to me, he wasn't there. They shone the light down the well, but he wasn't there. But we saw him go down and we heard them calling. I said fighting down the cold panic in my chest. The firemen were already at the well when we heard them calling. Yes, my friend said, but hesitated before saying more. He couldn't understand it either. His face was ashen in the dimness of evening. They put the light down and he wasn't there and neither was Lina, the girl. But I heard them say there was something there, something else in the water. They had been sent away before anyone knew for sure. I didn't know what was worse, knowing or not knowing. His parents had taken notice of us and had shepherded us into the middle of the walking party like elephants would do with their young, keeping us in the middle of the herd for protection. The whole family had encircled us as we went down the dusty path. I could sense their concern over my well-being, though they hardly said a word, perhaps not knowing what to say. We didn't talk after that. The crowd around us had grown a little and it occurred to me that, with their respectful silence and their lanterns swinging gently in the night, we looked like a funeral march. They were grieving with me. They didn't know what had killed my brother, but they knew he was dead. If he hadn't been at the time, he was now. Never had it that the girl had died the moment she'd hit the water. She couldn't have been calling out. What my brother had descended into was something else waiting for him. The people of my village believe in absolutes. He is dead or he isn't. She was alive or she wasn't. The children were in the well or they weren't. There can be no in between, no shades between black and white, life and death, no matter what we children had insisted that we alone had witnessed. The elders had decided to call the meeting at dawn early enough that we were sure we children would be asleep. I heard about it after. Rumor is the unofficial village messenger and the most efficient one we have. An hour after the meeting had ended. My family was fully aware, as every other family in the village, that we were not to go near that well. There would be the usual funeral rites for each child lost that day. Empty caskets, eulogies that tiptoed around the circumstances of their death, but unless we wanted to lose any more, there would be no tampering with the barriers to the well. Whoever was down there would stay down there. As for what they had seen, no two firemen gave exactly the same description. What they agreed on was that there had been a creature in the dark water, but no children. Any survivors would have been swiftly dealt with, they said, before they could have done anything. The priests were undivided, more certain about what they believed they saw, evil. The beam of light they had thrown into the void had brought up slivers of the truth, a grayish-modeled skin like ancient flesh stretched over long limbs, unblinking fish-like eyes, and there was a smile of some sort on what you might call the face, a hideous, elongated animalistic smile, a grimace of flashing teeth, human-like, but not. They had yanked the light back, afraid to see any more of it, and yet they could hear the children still calling even as they did so. The firemen swore that they heard them, both of them calling out to them to please hurry. They threw the flood of light down before the last echoes had even died out. All they saw was that waiting smile, and the flat dark eyes half emerging from the murky water, waiting. Do you believe in mermaids? In our village, sliced by a river but not so far from any lake or ocean, we have a different lore, a different name for these creatures. I hate to say the word out loud, even in writing. We had not expected them to turn up in wells, but since these creatures are rumored to live in cave pools, it stood to reason they might have traveled through underground reservoirs and found themselves under our village, using our wells as occasional feeding holes. Could they imitate human voices? Who knew? We only know what we heard. Rumor is also our messenger between villages. Ours was not the only one visited from the underground. We were lucky, said the elders of one of the neighboring settlements. We had only one well infested, only two children missing. We didn't have to draw water from our remaining wells that came up cloudy, darkened, smelling of rust. We hadn't had to board up all our wells like other settlements had, and flee the village in mass, leaving only ghosts behind. We didn't have the things climbing out of the wells without warning. When that happened, it was over. Rather than believe what we heard, some of our villagers insisted instead that the firemen were lying, that they had found the children dead, drowned, too late, and used this story to pretend it wasn't their fault. I didn't think so. Our claims were all in dispute, but we agreed on ground rules. Nobody strayed by the open wells too long, and nobody went to draw water alone. The protection of daylight and warnings of the full moon didn't matter. They came out when they were hungry. Time and the absence of further incidents cast the whole event in the vivid blurriness of legend, a nightmare, a bad memory, nothing more. Nothing so far had turned up in the other wells, and slowly but surely, life crept back to its normal rhythms, if not its usual innocence. Still, the other villages remained empty. Nobody came back. We're just waiting our turn, just waiting for a reason. Now that I'm older, I sometimes find myself wandering close by that condemned well my brother had climbed into, stopping by the hidden opening in broad daylight, always in broad daylight. The worn wooden boards were more recently upgraded to corrugated metal sheets, held fast with bolts the size of my fist. I would stand there, lingering and remembering. If the sun is high and my fever returns, I sometimes imagine I hear something, tapping at the covering from the other side, asking in my brother's voice and with a smile to be let out. Hey everyone, I hope you enjoyed this story. Special shout out to Victoria from Alex. Thank you for being you.