I

The well was the first thing I noticed about the farm.

It stood in the centre of what had once been a garden, a circle of stone six feet across, capped with a wooden roof supported by four posts that were rotting slowly into the earth. The rope that hung from the pulley was thick and brown with age, and at its end was a bucket that had been rusted into a shape that was almost beautiful if you looked at it from the right angle.

I lowered the bucket and pulled it up and the water that came out was dark and tasted of metal and something sweet, like flowers left too long in a vase. I drank it anyway. Thirst does not ask questions.

Edgar Winter was thirty-two years old when he came to this farm outside Massachusetts, and he was a man who had stopped asking questions. He had been a painter in Boston once—a decent painter, not a great one, but good enough to make a living and good enough to make his fiancée, Isabelle Walton, proud. Isabelle, who came from money and had taste and could look at one of Edgar's paintings and say, with complete sincerity, "This is the colour of grief," and mean it in a way that made Edgar feel like he had finally captured something true.

Isabelle died in the spring of 1889 of a fever that the doctor could not name and could not cure. She was twenty-two. Edgar was thirty-one. He buried her in a cemetery in Cambridge and went home to his studio and stood in front of his half-finished canvases and realized that he could not paint. Not because he had lost his skill—though he had—but because he had lost the colour of grief, and without that colour, everything was just paint on canvas and nothing was true.

He sold the studio. He sold the paintings. He bought this farm with the last of the money Isabelle's family had given him for a wedding that never happened.

The first night, he dreamed of Isabelle. She was standing in a garden that was not the garden on this farm, a garden full of flowers that did not exist, and she was holding the hand of a little girl with golden hair, and she said to Edgar: "She needs you."

Edgar woke up and the dream was gone but the feeling was not. The feeling was a hand on his chest, warm and heavy, and it stayed there all day.

II

He began to paint again on the second week.

Not the paintings he had been trying to paint in Boston—dark abstract things that were supposed to be about grief but were only about grief's shadow. He painted something else. He painted a little girl.

She had golden hair and a white dress and she was standing in a garden full of flowers that Edgar had never seen but somehow knew the names of. He did not know why he painted her. He did not know where the image had come from. He simply picked up a brush and the paint flowed onto the canvas and the girl appeared, and when he finished, he sat back and looked at her and felt something he had not felt since Isabelle died: the feeling of being seen by somebody who loved him.

The girl lived in the painting. She stood in her garden and smiled at nothing, her golden hair catching a light that did not exist in Edgar's small farmhouse kitchen. He painted her every day. He painted her in different poses—sitting on a rock, reaching for a butterfly, lying in the grass with her arms spread wide. He painted her with a intensity that bordered on obsession, and the paint piled on the canvas thick and textured, as if the girl was not painted but built, layer by layer, from something solid and real.

He called her the Little One. Not because she was small—though she was, in the paintings she was always a child of three or four—but because she was the only thing in his life that mattered. The farm did not matter. The well did not matter. The memory of Isabelle mattered, but it was a sharp painful thing, like a toothache, and the Little One was something soft and warm and alive.

The neighbours began to notice.

A woman walking her dog along the road that bordered the farm stopped one afternoon and looked at Edgar through the kitchen window, where he had left a painting propped against the wall to dry. She saw the golden-haired girl in the white dress and she stopped walking her dog and the dog stopped sniffing a bush and they both just stood there and stared at the painting and the woman felt something in her chest loosen and tighten at the same time.

She went to the general store and told the proprietor that Edgar Winter was painting ghosts. The proprietor told her that Edgar Winter was a grieving man and grieving men do strange things. The woman said, "It's not the painting that's strange. It's the girl in it. She looks...she looks like she's waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

The woman did not know. She only knew that when she looked at the painting, she felt the way she felt when she heard a lullaby that had been played backwards—familiar and wrong and impossible to forget.

III

Dr. Moriarty arrived on a Thursday.

He was fifty-five, a physician from Boston who had been Isabelle's uncle's friend and had come to the farm at the request of Isabelle's family to assess Edgar's condition. He was a careful man, meticulous in his examination and conservative in his diagnoses, and he carried with him the kind of authority that comes from wearing a waistcoat and speaking in a voice that has been trained to sound reassuring.

He found Edgar in the garden behind the farmhouse, kneeling in the dirt with his hands buried up to the wrist, the way Blind Sam had described the Blackwood women in some story Dr. Moriarty had heard but not believed.

"Mr. Winter," Dr. Moriarty said. "I am Dr. Moriarty. Isabelle's family sent me."

Edgar did not look up. "Isabelle is dead."

"I know."

"The garden is dead."

"The garden is not dead, Mr. Winter. It is the most alive thing I have ever seen."

Edgar looked up. His hands were covered in soil, and the soil was dark and rich and smelled of something that was not quite earth—it was something older, something that predated earth and would outlast it.

"The garden is alive," Edgar said. "But it is not a garden. It is a mouth."

Dr. Moriarty did not respond. He knelt beside Edgar and took his hands and turned them over and examined the fingers and the palms and the nails, the way a doctor examines a patient's hands, and then he did something that was not in his job description: he put his own hands in the soil and he felt it.

The soil was warm. Not warm from the sun. Warm from something beneath the sun, something deep in the earth that was generating heat the way a body generates heat, the way a living thing generates heat.

Dr. Moriarty pulled his hands out of the soil and looked at Edgar with an expression that was not fear but something close to it—the look of a man who has spent his life believing in science and has encountered something that science cannot explain.

"What is happening here, Mr. Winter?" he asked.

Edgar smiled, and it was a sad smile. "Something is taking care of me, Doctor. Something is taking care of me, and I do not know if I should be grateful or afraid."

IV

Isabella Walton came in the autumn.

She was Isabelle's younger sister, twenty-four years old, with dark hair and dark eyes and a face that was similar to Isabelle's but harder—sharper, as if the grief of losing a sister had made her into something more dangerous than Isabelle had ever been.

She arrived at the farm with Dr. Moriarty riding beside her in the carriage, and she looked at the farmhouse and the garden and Edgar and she knew, in the way that some people know things without being told, that something was wrong.

Edgar met her at the door. He was holding a painting—the latest of the Little One paintings—and he did not hide it when she saw it. He simply stood there holding it and watching her face.

Isabella looked at the painting and her breath caught and she took a step backward and said, "Where did you see her?"

"See who?"

"The girl. The little girl with the golden hair. Where did you see her?"

"I didn't see her. She came to me in a dream."

"In a dream," Isabella repeated flatly.

He showed her the studio. It was full of paintings—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all of them the Little One in different poses and different gardens, all of them painted with the same obsessive intensity, all of them featuring a girl who was real in a way that painted figures are not real. Isabella walked from painting to painting, her face getting paler with each one, until she reached the last one on the last wall, and she stopped.

This painting was different. In it, the Little One was standing beside a well—the same well that stood in the garden behind the farmhouse—and she was looking directly at the viewer with her golden hair catching the light and her white dress flowing in a wind that did not exist inside a painting, and she was smiling a smile that was not a child's smile. It was an ancient smile, a smile that had seen everything and would see everything after the viewer was gone.

Isabella turned to Edgar. "When was this painted?"

Edgar looked at the date he had inscribed in the corner. "Three months before I met you."

"That's impossible," Isabella said. "I didn't know you then."

"I know."

"Then how could you paint me?"

"I didn't paint you," Edgar said. "I painted her. She was looking at you."

Isabella felt cold. Not the cold of autumn air—the cold of standing in a room with somebody who is not entirely present in the world you share. She looked at Edgar and she saw a man who was physically there but mentally somewhere else, somewhere in a garden full of impossible flowers, painting a girl who did not exist.

Or a girl who existed in a way that made Isabella's skin prickle.

V

She began to hear the singing on the third night.

It was a soft sound, like a child humming to herself, coming from somewhere outside the farmhouse. Isabella lay in her bed with her eyes open and listened to the sound and could not identify it as a lullaby or a nursery rhyme or any kind of song she had heard as a child. It was something older than songs. It was a sound that the earth makes when it is happy, if the earth could be happy.

She got out of bed and walked to the window and opened it and the night air was cool and smelled of wet earth and sweet flowers and the singing was louder now, coming from the direction of the well.

Isabella walked out of the house and across the yard and down the path to the garden, and the singing led her straight to the well, and she stood at the edge of the stone circle and looked down.

The well was dark. But in the darkness, far below, she saw a light—a soft blue light, the same colour as the pool water in Arthur Windsor's cursed manor, the same colour as Portia Blackwood's eyes, the same colour as the water that had once flowed through Thomas Miller's irrigation channels and made the Kansas earth bloom.

And she heard the singing clearly now. It was a child's voice, small and sweet and impossibly old, and it was singing in a language that Isabella had never learned and somehow understood.

She leaned over the edge of the well and looked deeper into the darkness, and in the blue light below, she saw a face. It was a little girl's face, golden-haired and white-dressed and smiling that ancient smile, and she was looking up at Isabella with eyes that were green-gold like the well water, and she was singing, and Isabella knew with a certainty that bypassed thought and went straight to the bone:

The girl was not Edgar's imagination. The girl was not a painting. The girl was something that lived in the earth, and she had found Edgar, and she had chosen him, and she had painted herself into existence because that was the only way she knew how to make herself real to a man who needed her.

And now she was singing to Isabella, and Isabella did not know whether to be afraid or grateful or both.

She turned and walked back to the house. In the kitchen window, she saw Edgar sitting at his easel, painting by the light of a single lamp. He was painting a new picture, and she could see the shape of it from the yard: a woman standing at the edge of a well, looking down into the darkness, and a golden-haired girl looking up from the darkness, and between them, the space where understanding might exist if either of them were brave enough to reach across it.

Isabella stood in the yard and watched Edgar paint, and she listened to the girl sing from the bottom of the well, and she made a decision.

She would not take Edgar to Boston. She would not put him in an asylum. She would not let the doctors with their instruments and their diagnoses try to explain away the girl in the well and the garden that would not die and the soil that was warm beneath the hands.

She would stay. She would watch. She would listen.

And when the singing stopped, she would go to the well and she would look down and she would see the golden-haired girl looking up, and she would say: "I hear you. I am here."

Because some things cannot be explained. And some things should not be.