Pain spreads slowly when a body is used to it.
In the summer of 1856, on a sprawling plantation carved into the red earth of Georgia, pain moved like a familiar shadow, never gone, only shifting its shape.
The day the curse was born began in the suffocating stillness of early afternoon, when the air felt thick enough to chew, and the sun bore down like an accusation.
Near the edge of the sugarcane fields, where the soil turned to a muddy bank along a murky pond, a young enslaved woman named Elsie lay on her side, ribs heaving.
Each breath a ragged struggle against the tightness in her chest.
Her dress was torn and crusted with the dust of the fields.
Sweat ran in shining tracks along her dark skin, but her hands trembled with a deeper chill.
She knew what was happening to her.
She had seen it before, the coughing, the fever that came and went like a cruel joke.
The way strength leaked out of a person day by day until even lifting a bucket felt like lifting a house.
Her lungs felt smaller, tighter, as if invisible fingers were closing around them.
Each gasp scraped her throat raw.
She tasted iron.
When she coughed, the red stain on the ground confirmed what she feared.
Something inside her was breaking.
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Elsie’s fingers clawed weakly at the earth, nails digging into the damp soil.
She was young, no more than 20, but years of forced labor had carved a hard wisdom into her eyes.
She had been born on this land, a property called Fair View, a name that sounded elegant when White Tongue said it over fine china and silverware.
But to those in the slave quarters, it meant something else.
A place you might die without anyone remembering the sound of your laughter.
Fair View belonged to Charles Whitfield, a plantation owner whose wealth came from sugar and cotton, and the bodies that harvested them.
His wife, Maranne Whitfield, moved through the estate like a queen whose crown was made of other people’s suffering.
She was not old, perhaps in her early 30s, with pale, carefully powdered skin and soft hands that had never known a day of work.
Yet there was something in her eyes, an icy detachment, an almost bored cruelty that made the enslaved people flinch when she passed.
That afternoon, Marannne’s buggy rolled slowly along the path that sliced between the fields and the pond, its wheels sending up lazy spirals of dust.
She had insisted on taking a drive to escape the stifling heat inside the big house.
The coachman, an older enslaved man named Isaac, kept his eyes forward, his hands steady on the rains, every muscle in his back tense whenever his mistress shifted.
Beside Marannne, sat her younger sister Lydia, visiting from Savannah, curious, impressionable, always watching.
“Stop,” Maranne said suddenly, her voice sharp.
Isaac pulled the reinss, and the horse snorted, stamping the ground.
Maranne had seen something.
No, someone out of place on her perfect property.
There, near the water’s edge lays, curled like a discarded rag, shoulders jerking with each shallow breath.
To Marannne, the sight was not one of concern.
It was an offense.
What is that girl doing? Marannne asked, her voice cool as ice water.
Isaac swallowed.
Ma’am, that’s Elsie.
She’d been sick.
Overseer said she I did not ask what the overseer said, Marannne cut in.
I asked what she is doing.
Lydia leaned forward, squinting.
She looks like she’s dying, she murmured almost to herself.
Dying.
The word drifted across the heavy air and settled over the scene like dust.
For a moment, something tight flickered in Marannne’s chest.
Annoyance, not pity.
Dying out here where anyone could see her, as if misery had forgotten its place.
Get up, Marannne called out, lifting the hem of her well-tailored dress, as if the very sight of Elsie might stain it.
Elsie heard the voice before she fully saw the face.
Every nerve in her body wanted to obey, to push herself up, to stand straight, to prove she was still useful, but her limbs felt like they had been replaced with logs.
She pushed with her arms, tried to roll onto her knees, and a blade of pain sliced through her chest.
Her vision blurred.
Sound grew distant and strange, as if she were underwater.
With a strangled gasp, she collapsed back onto the ground.
Maranne watched her fall as one might watch an animal failed to perform a trick, her lips curled.
They grow so lazy when they think they are about to leave this world, she said with a light laugh, turning slightly to Lydia.
Even death becomes an excuse.
Lydia shifted uncomfortably, glancing between her sister and the dying girl.
The laugh sounded wrong even to her.
It echoed against the still water, bitter and sharp.
Elsie heard it, too.
The laughter slid into her bones like a blade.
Somewhere beneath the crushing weight of her sickness, beneath the years of orders and blows and swallowed screams, something deep and ancient stirred.
She lay there, cheek pressed to the dirt, the taste of blood and grit mixing on her tongue.
She could feel her heart stuttering, each beat slower than the last.
Around her, the world had narrowed to the burning in her lungs and the distant murmur of voices above her.
But then another sound rose in her memory, the soft rolling tambber of her grandmother’s voice.
Not the grandmother given to her by the ledger and the salepapers of the slave market, but the grandmother remembered through stories a woman stolen from a village across the ocean long before Elsie’s birth.
Her mother had repeated those stories in the darkest corners of the night when the overseer slept and the stars felt like watchful eyes.
“Blood remembers,” her mother would whisper as she braided Elsie’s hair.
They can chain your body, child, but your spirit runs deeper than their fields.
Your grandmother knew the old ways.
She spoke to rivers, to ancestors, to the spaces between breaths.
Hurt her children, and the world itself might turn against you.
As a girl, Elsie had clung to those stories like a secret talisman.
But stories did not stop whips.
Stories did not stop children from being sold.
By the time she turned 16, her faith had thinned into something fragile and distant.
Life on Fair View crushed hope like it crushed bodies slowly, efficiently.
And yet, as she lay there with her face in the earth, listening to a white woman’s laughter float above her as she slipped closer to death, the stories did not feel distant at all.
They felt close.
Pressing in, waiting, Elsie tried to speak and choked instead.
A cough tore up from deep in her chest, racking her entire body.
Warm liquid flooded her mouth.
When it spilled onto the ground, it was dark and red.
Lydia’s hand flew to her throat.
Mararyannne, she she’s really not well.
Perhaps we should send for for what? Marannne’s voice was edged with irritation now.
A doctor for her? She let the question hang in the air as if the absurdity should be obvious.
The doctor is for the house.
They have each other.
They are not my concern when they are no longer of use.
Isaac’s jaw tightened, but he stayed silent.
He knew better than to speak when white anger simmeed so close to the surface.
He stared straight ahead.
eyes fixed on a tree in the distance, forcing himself not to look at Elsie.
Maryanne motioned with a flick of her wrist.
“Isaac, get her on her feet.
If she dies, she will not do it here where I have to look at her.
” Isaac hesitated just a breath too long.
Marianne’s gaze snapped to him now.
He climbed down from the buggy, his knees protesting as he landed.
Slowly, he walked to Elsie’s side, his shadow falling over her, her eyes fluttered open, cloudy with pain.
For a moment, their gaze locked.
Two people bound by chains, one visible and one invisible.
Child, he whispered, barely moving his lips.
Try.
Please, if you don’t, she’ll He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to.
He slipped his hands under her arms, feeling the startling lightness of her body.
She had always been thin, but now she felt almost hollow, as if sickness had eaten her from the inside out.
He lifted, trying to be as gentle as he could without drawing attention.
her feet dragged in the dirt.
For a brief second she stood, swaying, her head drooping.
Marianne watched, unimpressed.
“She looks like a drunkard,” she remarked, the corners of her mouth twitching.
“Imagine, too weak to hold herself up, yet strong enough to waste a whole afternoon with this performance.
” The laugh came again, soft, disdainful, and cold.
It washed over Elsie like a wave of fire.
Something in her snapped, her knees buckled.
She sagged in Isaac’s arms, and he lowered her back to the ground before she tore herself free and collapsed completely.
She rolled onto her back this time, staring up at the white sky.
The edges of her vision were darkening, closing in like curtains drawing shut.
She knew this feeling.
It was the bridge between this world and whatever waited beyond it.
Her breath came in thin, ragged threads, but somewhere between one shallow gasp and the next, a strange calm settled over her.
The pain didn’t leave, but it changed.
Sharper, clearer, focused.
It felt as if all her suffering, all her humiliation, all the nights she had cried silently into a thin blanket while her body achd from labor were gathering themselves into one burning point inside her chest.
The stories, her grandmother, the old ways.
Elsie’s lips moved at first without sound.
Isaac leaned closer, thinking she was asking for water, for help, for something he could not give.
Then slowly the words arrived, not in English, but in a cadence older than the plantation, older than Marannne’s family name, older than the country itself.
The syllables came in broken fragments, inherited through whispers, incomplete yet potent.
Marannne stiffened.
“What is she saying?” Lydia asked, her voice small.
Isaac’s throat tightened.
He recognized the rhythm, even if he did not know every word.
It was the rhythm of prayers said over unmarked graves of songs hummed into children’s ears to keep old memories alive.
It’s it’s nothing, ma’am, he said quickly.
She just talking foolish fever talk, but the fever felt like something else to Elsie.
As she spoke, her voice grew clearer.
The language was a patchwork of memory.
Some words correct, some guessed, some replaced with English.
But the intention behind them ran strong and pure, her hands weak just moments before, clawed at the air, fingers curling as if pulling invisible threads together.
In the name of those taken from the water and the land, she whispered, eyes wide, staring up at a sky that suddenly seemed much closer.
In the name of those who cried, and no one listened.
Hear me, Maryanne shifted in her seat, irritation flickering into unease.
Make her stop, she snapped.
I do not want that noise on my land.
But Isaac couldn’t make her stop.
No one could.
The words had taken hold.
Elsie’s voice gained a strange power, the sound thin but clear.
“You laugh,” she said, still staring at the sky, though everyone knew who she meant.
“You laugh while I die.
You laugh at my pain.
You laugh at the work that broke my body.
You laugh at the blood in my mouth.
You laugh at my life like it is nothing,” Marianne’s fingers dug into the fabric of her dress.
She is delirious,” she said sharply.
But the brittle edge in her tone betrayed something else.
Lydia’s gaze darted between her sister and Elsie, caught in a fear she could not name.
“You laugh,” Elsie repeated, voice cracking but unyielding, tears slipped from the corners of her eyes, sliding into her hairline.
“So let your laughter be taken.
Let your joy turn to ashes.
Let your sleep be full of the faces you never saw as human.
Let the sound of your own voice bring you no comfort.
The air seemed to thicken around them.
The slight breeze that had rustled the cane stalks just moments earlier stilled, leaving the field in a breathless silence.
Even the insects seemed to pause as if the world itself were listening.
Elsie took another shuddering breath.
The burning point in her chest flared, then began to spread outward, as if every nerve in her body were catching fire.
She clung to the heat, poured her rage and grief into it, shaping it with the last of her will.
By my blood,” she whispered, barely audible now, “and by the blood of my mother and her mother and all who died with no one to speak for them.” Her eyes rolled slightly, but she forced them back, focusing, anchoring herself in this final act.
“I bind you, Marannne Whitfield.
As you have made others beg, so shall you beg.
As you have watched others suffer without mercy, so shall your heart be broken, your hands will itch with helplessness.
Your eyes will know tears, and you will call for help and find none, not even in your own house.” The last word came out on a breath that sounded more like a sigh than a sentence.
Her chest rose once, twice, then with a long rattling exhale, it stilled.
Silence crashed down over the pond.
For a few seconds, no one moved.
Lydia’s lips parted, but no sound came.
Isaac knelt frozen, his hands still hovering inches above Elsie’s limp shoulders.
The world felt oddly distant, as if they were all standing inside a glass jar and someone had sealed the lid.
Marannne was the first to break the stillness.
She scoffed, though the sound rang slightly hollow.
“What nonsense!” she muttered.
She wasted her last breath on foolish threats, but she could not quite shake the prickling at the back of her neck.
The sensation of having been watched by something she could not see and did not believe in.
Isaac bowed his head over Elsie’s body, murmuring a soft prayer under his breath.
He did not understand exactly what she had done, but he felt the weight of it.
He had heard stories whispered at night, stories of words that lingered after death, of curses born not out of superstition, but out of desperation so deep it tore open the fabric between this world and the next.
He did not dare repeat those stories here, not with Marianne’s eyes so sharp upon him.
“Take care of that,” Marianne said, gesturing vaguely in Elsie’s direction, as if she were talking about trash that needed to be cleared.
Bury her somewhere appropriate and make sure the others do not see her like this.
They grow too attached to their own tragedies.
She snapped open a small fan and flicked it lazily in front of her face as if to brush away the remnants of the scene.
Come, Lydia.
We are losing the day to this spectacle.
Lydia hesitated.
Mararyannne, what if? What if what? Marannne interrupted, her voice tight.
What if what she said? What if it does something? Marannne let out a short, harsh laugh.
Do you truly believe a dying slave girl has power over me? You have been reading too many Gothic novels.
This is the real world, Lydia.
Power is money, land, and law.
It is not muttered gibberish in the mud.
She gestured sharply to Isaac.
Do as you are told, Isaac nodded silently, his eyes never leaving Elsie’s face.
Her expression in death was strangely peaceful, as if she had finally laid down a burden far heavier than her frail body.
As the buggy wheels turned and rolled away, carrying Marannne and Lydia back toward the mansion, the sound faded into the distance, leaving only the creek of leather harnesses and the faint rustle of cane leaves.
When they were gone, Isaac let out a long breath.
He hadn’t realized he was holding.
“Child,” he whispered to Elsie’s still form.
“Whatever you called, I pray it finds its way.” His voice trembled, “And I pray it don’t burn us with it.” He gathered a few fallen reeds and laid them gently over her hands.
A small gesture of respect in a world that offered so little.
He knew he would have to fetch others to help carry her body, dig a grave out beyond the quarters where unmarked mounds rose like quiet accusing hills.
But for a moment he stayed, kneeling beside her, the weight of her final words pressing against his skin like humidity.
From the field a few enslaved workers had paused in their labor, squinting toward the pond.
They had seen the buggy stop, seen Isaac lift and lower a limp shape, seen the white mistress’s rigid posture against the sky.
They did not need details to know what had happened.
On plantations like Fair View, death rarely arrived as a surprise.
It came like an old visitor, familiar and unwelcome, but never unexpected.
Still, something about this death felt different.
As whispers began to snake through the rows of Cain.
Elsie gone, she died by the water.
She said something at the end.
A new note threaded itself through the usual mix of sorrow and resignation.
Fear, yes, but also something else.
A low, uneasy anticipation, as if the entire plantation had taken a breath and was waiting, without knowing why, for something to change.
Back at the big house, Marianne stepped down from the buggy with practiced grace.
Servants rushed forward to assist with her packages, her parasol, the small details of her comfort that defined their lives.
She moved through the front doors into the cool shadow of the hallway, the polished wood floors and grand staircase welcoming her like an old friend.
Here, surrounded by portraits of Witfield’s long dead and furniture imported from across the ocean, she felt the full weight of her status.
Whatever had happened by the pond was already receding in her mind, shrinking into a minor inconvenience in an otherwise ordinary day.
Yet, when she passed the large mirror in the foyer, something made her glance at her reflection.
Her face, carefully arranged into its usual controlled expression, stared back, but for a brief, flickering instant, she thought she saw something else in her eyes, a shadow, a doubt, a hairline crack in the glass of her certainty.
She dismissed it with an impatient tilt of her chin, and climbed the stairs.
Behind her, far from the polished floors and framed paintings, the earth around the pond held the last warmth of Elsie’s body.
The words she had spoken seemed to cling to the air, invisible and persistent.
They did not vanish with her last breath.
They hung there like smoke that refused to disperse, waiting for a wind strong enough to carry them into the heart of the house that had broken her.
The curse had been spoken.
The woman who laughed at a dying slave believed herself untouchable.
She was wrong.
The first night after Elsie’s death passed without incident.
Marianne slept soundly in her feather bed wrapped in linens imported from France.
her breathing slow and even beneath a canopy of white lace.
The house settled into its familiar rhythms, the soft creek of old wood cooling in the night air, the distant chirp of crickets through open windows, the occasional shuffle of a house servant moving quietly through darkened hallways.
Nothing seemed different.
Nothing felt wrong.
But change does not always announce itself with thunder.
Sometimes it arrives in whispers, in small disturbances so subtle they are mistaken for coincidence.
A door that will not latch properly.
A candle that flickers and dies despite no draft.
A sensation of being watched when you are alone in a room.
These are the tremors before the earthquake.
The first drops before the storm breaks open the sky.
Marannne woke the next morning with a faint headache pressing behind her eyes.
She blamed it on the heat, the long afternoon ride, perhaps the wine she had drunk at dinner.
She rang the small silver bell on her nightstand, summoning her personal maid, a young enslaved woman named Ruth, who had learned to anticipate her mistress’s needs with the precision of someone whose survival depended on it.
Ruth entered quickly, eyes lowered, hands already moving to open the heavy drapes and let in the morning light.
“Good morning, Mom,” she said softly.
Maranne did not respond.
She rarely did.
Acknowledgement was a kindness she did not waste on servants.
She sat up slowly, pressing her fingers to her temples.
“Bring me tea,” she said.
“And tell Cook I want eggs properly done this time.
Not that runny mess from yesterday.” “Yes, ma’am.” Ruth moved toward the door, but paused when Marannne spoke again.
“That girl who died yesterday.” “What was her name?” Ruth’s shoulders tensed slightly.
“Elsie, ma’am.” “Elsie.” Mararyannne repeated the name as if tasting something bitter.
She has been buried.
“Yes, ma’am.
last night.
Isaac and some of the field hands took care of it.
Good.
Marianne waved her hand dismissively.
Make sure the others do not linger over it.
Grief slows work, and we cannot afford delays during harvest season.
Ruth nodded, her face carefully blank.
She had learned long ago not to let emotion show in front of Marannne Whitfield.
But as she left the room and descended the back stairs toward the kitchen, her hands trembled slightly.
She had heard the whispers spreading through the quarters, whispers about what Elsie had said before she died, about the strange heaviness in the air around the pond, about the way Isaac’s face had looked when he returned from burying her.
Ruth did not know if she believed in curses, but she knew enough to be wary of dismissing them entirely.
The world held too many mysteries, too much suffering that could not be explained by logic alone.
Downstairs, the kitchen was already thick with heat and the smell of bread baking in the wide brick oven.
The cook, an older woman named Buler, who had worked at Fair View longer than anyone could remember, stood over the stove stirring a pot of grits.
Her broad shoulders moved with the practiced efficiency of someone who had made this same motion 10,000 times before.
When Ruth entered, Bulaher glanced up briefly.
She asking about Elsie.
Bulaher’s voice was low, barely above a murmur.
Ruth nodded.
Just wanted to know if she was buried.
Buler grunted, turning back to the pot.
That woman got no heart.
child died right in front of her and all she cared about is keeping the work moving.
She shook her head slowly.
But Elsie, I heard what she did before she passed.
Isaac told me.
Ruth stepped closer, lowering her voice even further.
You think it was real what she said? Buler’s hand paused mid stir.
She stared into the bubbling pot as if searching for an answer in the swirling grits.
I think, she said carefully, that when a person dies with that much pain in their heart and that much anger in their soul, something has to go somewhere.
Don’t just disappear like smoke.
It lingers.
A shiver ran down Ruth’s spine despite the heat.
She wanted to ask more, but the sound of footsteps above.
Maranne, moving across her bedroom floor, reminded her that she had tasks to complete.
She gathered the tea service and a small plate of biscuits, balancing them carefully as she climbed back up the narrow servant stairs.
When she re-entered Marannne’s room, her mistress was standing at the window, staring out over the fields.
The morning sun cast long shadows across the neat rows of sugarcane, painting the landscape in shades of gold and green.
It was beautiful in the way that things built on suffering can still appear beautiful if you do not look too closely.
“Your tea, mom,” Ruth said quietly, setting the tray on a small table near the window.
Maryanne did not turn.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Ruth paused, listening.
She heard the usual sounds, birds calling from the trees, the distant voices of workers heading toward the fields, the creek of the house settling.
“Hear what, ma’am?” Mararyannne frowned slightly.
“Nothing, never mind.” But something in her tone suggested she had expected to hear something specific, and was disturbed by its absence.
She turned away from the window and picked up the delicate porcelain teacup, bringing it to her lips.
The tea was perfectly brewed, hot, but not scolding, sweetened exactly as she preferred.
Yet, as she swallowed, a strange sensation crawled up the back of her throat.
Not the tea itself, but something else.
A tightness, a faint metallic taste that lingered on her tongue.
She set the cup down with a sharp clink.
This tastes off.
Ruth’s eyes widened.
I’m sorry, Mom.
I can make fresh.
No.
Marannne waved her off, irritation sharpening her voice.
Just leave it.
Go.
Ruth fled quickly, relieved to escape before the irritation turned into something worse.
Alone again, Marianne stood by the window, her fingers drumming restlessly against the sill.
The headache had not improved.
If anything, it was spreading.
A dull, insistent pressure that seemed to wrap around her skull like a vice.
She pressed her palm to her forehead, willing it away.
From somewhere deep in the house, a door slammed.
The sound echoed through the hallways, sudden and sharp.
Marannne flinched, her heart skipping a beat.
She waited, listening for footsteps for an explanation, but none came.
The house fell silent again, as if holding its breath.
“Just the wind,” she muttered to herself, though she knew there had been no wind strong enough to slam a door.
The day unfolded slowly, each hour dragging under the oppressive heat.
Maranne tried to occupy herself with correspondence, writing letters to relatives in Charleston and Savannah, but the words came sluggishly, her hand cramped around the pen.
The ink seemed to smudge no matter how carefully she wrote.
Twice she had to start a letter over because her usually elegant script came out shaky and uneven.
By mid-afternoon her frustration had curdled into something darker.
She snapped at the housekeeper for a crooked curtain.
She berated a servant for bringing her lemonade that was too warm.
Every minor imperfection grated against her nerves like sandpaper.
Yet beneath the anger was something she would not name.
Unease.
That evening, as the sun dipped low and painted the sky in shades of red and orange, Marianne sat in the drawing room with Lydia.
Her sister had been quieter than usual all day, her eyes occasionally drifting toward the windows, as if expecting to see something outside now, as the shadows lengthened across the room.
Lydia finally spoke.
“Maryanne, about yesterday, that girl by the pond.” Marannne’s jaw tightened.
“What about her? The things she said before she before she died?” Lydia hesitated, choosing her words carefully.
“Do you think could there be anything to it?” Maranne let out a short, derisive laugh, though it sounded forced even to her own ears.
“You cannot be serious.
” “I am not saying I believe it,” Lydia said quickly.
“But people talk about such things.
Curses, hexes, old superstitions brought over from superstitions,” Maranne interrupted sharply, “are for the ignorant and the weak-minded.
That girl was delirious with fever.
She spoke nonsense because her mind was failing along with her body.
There is nothing more to it.
Lydia looked down at her hands folded neatly in her lap.
“Of course,” she said softly.
“You are right.” But the words hung in the air, unconvincing.
Marianne could see the doubt in her sister’s eyes, and it irritated her more than the headache, more than the strange taste in her tea, more than the door that had slammed for no reason.
Doubt was dangerous.
It crept in like water through cracks, widening them, eroding certainty until everything felt unstable.
I am going to bed, Marianne announced abruptly, standing.
This heat has been unbearable.
Lydia nodded, watching as her sister swept from the room, her silk skirts rustling against the polished floor.
When Marannne was gone, Lydia sat alone in the drawing room, staring at the flickering candles.
Outside the plantation settled into its night rhythms, the quiet murmur of voices from the slave quarters, the chirp of insects, the distant hoot of an owl.
But beneath those familiar sounds, Lydia thought she heard something else.
A faint whisper, barely audible, like breath moving through the walls.
She shivered and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders.
Upstairs, Marianne prepared for bed with Ruth’s help, allowing the maid to unlace her corset and brush out her hair.
The routine was familiar, grounding, a series of motions that had been repeated so many times they required no thought.
Yet tonight, every touch felt wrong.
The brush caught in her hair.
The night gown felt too tight around her throat.
When Ruth finally left and closed the door softly behind her, Marannne climbed into bed and lay staring at the canopy above her.
Sleep did not come easily.
She tossed and turned, the sheets tangling around her legs.
Every time she closed her eyes, strange images flickered behind her eyelids.
The face of the dying girl by the pond, her lips moving in that incomprehensible language, the dark stain of blood on the ground, the way the air had seemed to thicken and pressed down like a weight.
Marannne forced her eyes open, shaking her head as if to dislodge the images.
Foolishness, she whispered into the darkness, but the darkness did not answer.
Hours passed.
The candle on her nightstand burned lower, wax pooling at its base.
Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed midnight.
Marannne was still awake, her heart beating a little too fast, her skin prickling with a sensation she could not name.
She told herself it was the heat, the humidity, the heaviness of summer nights in Georgia.
Then she heard it, a sound faint and distant, like someone crying.
It came from somewhere deep in the house, or perhaps outside, carried on the night air.
Marannne sat up slowly, straining to listen.
The sound came again clearer this time, a soft keening whale that rose and fell, mournful and broken.
Her first thought was that one of the servants was mourning Elsie.
That would explain it.
Grief, unchecked and excessive, disrupting the night.
She would have to speak to the overseer in the morning, remind him to keep better control over the quarters.
But as the sound continued, something about it felt wrong.
It was not coming from the direction of the slave quarters.
It was closer, much closer.
It seemed to be coming from inside the walls themselves.
Marianne’s breath caught in her throat.
She swung her legs out of bed, her bare feet touching the cool wooden floor.
For a moment, she considered calling for Ruth, but pride stopped her.
She would not be the kind of woman who trembled at strange noises in the night.
She crossed to the door and opened it slowly, peering into the darkened hallway.
The sound had stopped.
Silence pressed in from all sides, thick and suffocating.
Marannne’s hand tightened on the doorframe.
She was about to retreat back into her room when she saw it.
A flicker of movement at the far end of the hall near the top of the stairs.
A shadow darker than the surrounding darkness, shaped almost like a person, but wrong somehow.
Its edges blurred and shifting.
Marianne’s heart slammed against her ribs.
“Who is there?” she demanded, her voice sharper than she felt.
The shadow did not move, did not answer.
It simply stood there watching.
For a long, breathless moment, Marannne could not move.
Her entire body had gone rigid, her mind racing through explanations.
A servant, a trick of the candle light, her own exhausted eyes playing tricks.
Then the shadow turned and glided, not walked, but glided toward the stairs, disappearing down into the darkness below.
Maranne slammed the door shut and pressed her back against it, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps.
Her hands were shaking.
The headache that had plagued her all day flared into a sharp, stabbing pain behind her eyes.
She stumbled back to the bed and sat on its edge, gripping the blankets as if they could anchor her to something solid and real.
“It was nothing,” she whispered to herself.
“A shadow, a servant.
Nothing.
But the words felt hollow.
Somewhere in the house, the crying began again.
Morning came slowly, dragging itself over the horizon like something wounded.
Maranne had not slept.
She had lain rigid in her bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the house breathe around her.
The crying had stopped eventually, fading into silence sometime before dawn, but the damage was done.
Her nerves felt frayed pulled tight as piano wire.
Every creek of wood, every whisper of wind through the windows had made her flinch.
When Ruth knocked softly and entered with the morning tray, she found her mistress already awake, sitting by the window with dark circles carved beneath her eyes.
Marannne’s hair hung loose around her shoulders, unwashed and tangled.
Her hands, usually so controlled and elegant, twisted restlessly in her lap.
“Good morning, Mom,” Ruth said carefully, setting the tray down.
She had learned to read Marannne’s moods the way sailors read storm clouds by the small signs, the subtle shifts in atmosphere that warned of danger ahead.
Maranne did not respond immediately.
She stared out at the fields, watching the first workers begin their long day under the rising sun.
Finally, without turning, she spoke.
“Did you hear anything last night?” Ruth hesitated.
The question felt like a trap.
“Hear what, ma’am?” “Crying.
Someone crying in the house.” Ruth’s throat tightened.
She had heard nothing from her small room off the kitchen, but she had felt something.
A heaviness in the air, a sense of unease that had kept her awake longer than usual.
“No, ma’am,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t hear anything.” Marannne’s fingers stopped their restless movement, her jaw clenched.
Of course you didn’t,” she muttered, more to herself than to Ruth.
She stood abruptly, her night gown swirling around her ankles.
“Tell my husband I will not be joining him for breakfast.
I have a headache.” Ruth nodded and retreated quickly, grateful to escape the suffocating tension in the room.
As she descended the stairs, she nearly collided with Lydia, who was coming up from the dining room with a troubled expression on her face.
“Ruth,” Lydia said, catching her arm gently.
“Is my sister unwell?” Ruth chose her words carefully.
She said she has a headache, Mom.
She won’t be down for breakfast.
Lydia’s frown deepened.
She has been acting strangely since yesterday.
Distracted, irritable.
She lowered her voice.
Last night, I thought I heard something like someone weeping.
Did you? No, ma’am.
Ruth interrupted perhaps too quickly.
I heard nothing.
Lydia studied her face for a moment, then nodded slowly.
Very well.
Thank you, Ruth.
As Ruth continued down to the kitchen, Lydia climbed the stairs toward her sister’s room.
She knocked once softly and opened the door without waiting for permission.
Marannne was standing at the wash basin, splashing cold water on her face with shaking hands.
When she looked up and saw Lydia in the mirror’s reflection, her expression hardened.
“I did not invite you in,” Marianne said coldly.
“You look terrible,” Lydia replied, ignoring the rebuke.
She closed the door behind her and crossed the room.
“What is wrong? And do not tell me it is just a headache.
I know you better than that.
For a moment, Marannne’s carefully constructed mask slipped.
Her shoulders sagged.
She pressed her damp hands to her face, and when she spoke, her voice was quieter, almost vulnerable.
I heard something last night, crying.
It sounded It sounded like it was coming from inside the walls.
Lydia’s breath caught.
I heard it too, she admitted.
I thought perhaps one of the servants.
It was not the servants, Marannne snapped, the vulnerability vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.
It was something else, something.
She trailed off, unable or unwilling to finish the sentence.
Lydia moved closer, her voice gentle.
Maranne, what that girl said before she died.
What if, do not, Marannne’s voice was sharp as a blade.
Do not say it, but what if it is real? Lydia pressed.
What if she did something? What if she did nothing? Marannne’s voice rose, echoing off the walls.
She was a dying slave who spoke nonsense with her last breath.
There is no curse.
There is no magic.
There is only She stopped, her hands clenching into fists.
There is only my household, and I will not allow superstition to disrupt it.” Lydia fell silent, but the doubt remained in her eyes.
Maranne could see it, and it infuriated her.
Doubt was a disease spreading from person to person, weakening resolve.
She would not allow it to take root.
“Leave me,” Maranne said, turning away.
“I need to dress.” Lydia hesitated, then nodded as she left the room, closing the door softly behind her.
Maranne stood alone in the morning light, staring at her reflection in the mirror.
The woman looking back at her seemed almost like a stranger, pale, holloweyed, uncertain.
Maranne forced herself to stand straighter, to lift her chin.
She would not be broken by shadows and strange sounds.
She would not give credence to the desperate words of a dying girl.
But even as she thought it, a flicker of movement in the mirror’s edge caught her attention.
She spun around, heart hammering, but the room was empty.
Nothing moved.
Nothing breathed except her.
The day unfolded with agonizing slowness.
Marannne forced herself through her routines, correspondence, household management, a brief walk through the garden, but everything felt offkilter, as if the world had tilted slightly on its axis, and she was the only one who noticed.
At midday, the overseer came to report on the harvest progress, and Marianne found herself unable to focus on his words, numbers and yields blurred together, her mind kept drifting back to the crying, to the shadow in the hallway, to Elsie’s face twisted in pain and fury.
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That evening, as Twilight settled over Fair View, Marianne insisted on dining with the family despite her exhaustion.
She would not let anyone see weakness.
Charles Whitfield sat at the head of the table discussing business matters with a neighbor who had stopped by for dinner.
The conversation flowed around Marianne like water around a stone.
She heard it but did not absorb it.
Her hands trembled slightly as she lifted her fork.
The food tasted like ash.
Across the table Lydia watched her sister with growing concern.
The change in Marianne was undeniable now.
Her skin had taken on a grayish palar.
Her eyes darted nervously toward corners and doorways.
When a servant entered to refill the wine glasses, Marannne flinched so visibly that Charles paused mid-sentence.
My dear, are you quite well? He asked, his tone more irritated than concerned.
A wife’s illness disrupted the smooth functioning of his household, and Charles valued smooth functioning above nearly everything else.
Perfectly well, Marannne lied, forcing a smile that did not reach her eyes.
simply tired, Charles studied her for a moment, then returned to his conversation, dismissing her discomfort, as he dismissed most things that did not directly affect his interests.
Marianne felt a flash of anger at him, at Lydia, at the servants moving silently around the table, at the entire world that continued as if nothing had changed, but something had changed.
She felt it in her bones.
After dinner, she retreated to the drawing room while Charles and his guest retired to the library for cigars and brandy.
Lydia followed her, closing the door softly.
The two sisters sat in silence for a long moment.
The only sound the ticking of the mantel clock.
It is getting worse, isn’t it? Lydia finally said.
Marianne’s hands tightened on the armrests of her chair.
I do not know what you mean.
Yes, you do.
Lydia leaned forward, her voice urgent.
Something is happening.
Something that started when that girl died.
You cannot keep pretending.
I am not pretending anything, Marannne interrupted.
But her voice lacked conviction.
The exhaustion was catching up with her, eroding the walls she had built around her fear.
Lydia reached out and took her sister’s hand.
Maranne was so surprised by the gesture that she did not pull away.
Tell me what you have heard, what you have seen, all of it.
For a moment, Marannne resisted.
Pride wared with fear.
Then, slowly the words began to spill out.
The crying in the night, the shadow in the hallway, the constant sensation of being watched, the way doors seemed to slam on their own, the taste of metal on her tongue that would not go away, the dreams.
She had not mentioned the dreams before, not even to herself, but now they came pouring out.
Dreams of drowning in red water, dreams of hands reaching up from the earth, clawing at her ankles.
Dreams of Elsie’s face closer and closer, whispering words Marannne could not understand, but felt in her marrow.
When she finished, the silence in the room felt heavy as lead.
Lydia’s face had gone pale.
“Maryannne,” she whispered.
“We need to do something.
We need to What?” Maranne demanded, yanking her hand away.
“What exactly should we do? Call a priest? Burn sage? These are the things slaves do,” Lydia.
“Not us.
We are not,” she trailed off, unable to finish.
“But what if it works?” Lydia pressed.
“What if there are things we do not understand? things that do not fit into our neat, logical world.
Marannne stood abruptly, pacing to the window.
Outside, darkness had fallen completely.
The fields were invisible now, swallowed by the night.
Only a few distant lights from the slave quarters flickered like dying stars.
If I acknowledge it, Marianne said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper.
If I admit that she had power, even in death, then everything I believe falls apart.
Do you understand? Everything.
Lydia rose and crossed to her sister’s side.
Perhaps, she said gently, “It is already falling apart.” Marianne closed her eyes.
The headache was back, pounding behind her temples with renewed force.
She felt so tired, tired of fighting the fear, tired of maintaining the facade, tired of pretending the world made sense when it so clearly did not.
A sound broke the silence.
Footsteps, rapid and urgent, coming up the main staircase.
Both women turned as the drawing room door burst open.
Ruth stood in the doorway, her chest heaving, her eyes wide with panic.
Ma’am, she gasped.
You need to come now.
Marianne’s heart lurched.
What is it? What has happened? It’s It’s your bedroom.
Ma’am, something’s wrong.
The three women rushed up the stairs.
Marianne’s exhaustion forgotten in the surge of adrenaline.
As they reached the second floor, Maranne could see that her bedroom door stood open, light spilling out into the hallway.
Other servants had gathered nearby, their faces tight with fear.
Marannne pushed past them and stopped dead in the doorway.
Her room had been destroyed, not violently.
There were no broken windows, no overturned furniture, but systematically, methodically, every drawer had been pulled open, its contents scattered across the floor.
The bedclo had been torn from the mattress and twisted into knots.
The mirror above her vanity was cracked, a single fracture running diagonally from corner to corner.
And on the walls, written in what looked like ash or soot, were words.
The same strange words Elsie had spoken before she died.
Repeated over and over in cramped, desperate script.
Marianne’s legs gave out.
She stumbled backward, caught by Lydia’s arms.
“No,” she whispered.
“No, this cannot, but it was.
It was happening.
” Charles appeared at the end of the hallway, drawn by the commotion.
“What in God’s name?” He stopped when he saw the room, his face draining of color.
For once his usual bluster failed him.
He simply stood there staring.
One of the older servants, a man named Samuel, who had worked at Fairview for decades, stepped forward.
His voice was grave.
Mr.
Whitfield, Mom, this is old magic, the kind that don’t let go easy.
Magic? Charles sputtered, finding his voice at last.
There is no such thing as, “Sir,” Samuel’s tone was respectful, but firm.
“I know what I know, and I know this.
That girl who died, Elsie,” she called something before she passed, “Something that answered.
” Maranne felt the room spinning.
She gripped Lydia’s arms, nails digging in.
“Make it stop,” she whispered.
“Please make it stop.” But no one answered because no one knew how.
The words on the wall would not stop moving.
Marianne stood in the doorway of her ruined bedroom, her hand clamped over her mouth, staring at the looping, jagged script scrolled across the pale wallpaper.
The marks looked fresh, as if the ash or soot were still damp.
Yet, when Lydia reached out with trembling fingers to touch one of the letters, nothing smeared.
It felt dry, as though it had been there for years.
How? Lydia whispered.
Who could have done this? All eyes turned instinctively to the servants clustered in the hallway.
Ruth, Samuel, Isaac, and several others stood in tense silence, their expressions a mixture of fear and grim resignation.
Charles’s gaze sharpened, seizing on the most familiar explanation: disobedience.
“Which one of you is responsible for this?” he demanded, his voice rising.
Confess now and I may be inclined toward mercy.
Otherwise, no one here did this, sir,” Samuel said quietly.
“Not with their hands anyway,” Charles’s face flushed.
“You dare these words,” Samuel continued, nodding toward the walls.
“They’re like what Elsie spoke by the pond.
Not exact, but close.” “Thirst ain’t common talk, and no one here would be fool enough to risk their life to play at ghosts in the mistress’s room.
” Marianne’s knees shook.
She clutched the door frame so hard her knuckles widened.
The headache pounded behind her eyes, but beneath it something sharper had taken root.
Stark, icy terror.
“What do they say?” she asked barely audible.
Samuel hesitated, his gaze flicked to her, then to Lydia, then back to the wall.
“It don’t translate clean,” he said slowly.
“It’s like a calling and a binding mixed together, but the meaning is clear enough.” He pointed to a line that curved across the wall above the bed, circling the cracked mirror.
This here, this says, “Let her see what she never saw.” And this part, he traced another cluster of looping characters, is about turning laughter into mourning, about tears that won’t dry.
“About a house that won’t give her peace.
The air seemed to thin around Mararyannne.
You’re lying,” she whispered.
“You’re trying to frighten me.” Samuel looked at her, his expression heavy but steady.
“With respect, ma’am.
I don’t need to.
Whatever else he did, that’s already frightening enough.
Charles snapped.
Enough of this nonsense.
Ruth, fetch water and cloth.
We’re scrubbing these walls clean.
And if I find out who among you had a hand in this, I will have you whipped until you cannot stand.
Ruth didn’t move.
It was not defiance.
Her feet simply felt rooted to the floor.
Move.
Charles barked.
Samuel placed a gentle hand on her arm and stepped forward.
Sir, you can try to clean it, but it won’t matter.
This ain’t chalk.
It’s a mark.
You wash the walls.
the thing behind it still be here.
Charles rounded on him.
I will not tolerate this superstition under my roof.
This is my house, my land, my rules.
I own everything on it.
Walls, floors, and every soul standing here.
Something in Samuel’s eyes hardened at that.
Maybe that’s the problem, he said under his breath.
Charles took a step toward him, fists clenched, but Lydia moved between them quickly.
Please, she said, her voice taught.
Arguing will not help.
Marannne.
She turned to her sister, whose eyes were glazed with shock.
Come away from here.
You cannot sleep in this room tonight.
Marannne forced her gaze from the walls.
The words seemed burned into her vision.
Even when she looked away, she still saw them faintly glowing in her mind.
“Where? Where would I go?” she murmured.
“You can stay in the guest room next to mine,” Lydia said.
“Just for tonight.
We’ll we’ll figure everything out in the morning,” Charles scoffed.
“We will not rearrange the household over a childish prank.
This is not a prank, Lydia snapped, sharper than anyone had ever heard her speak to him.
Look at her, Charles.
Look at your wife.
He did.
Marianne’s hands were shaking uncontrollably now, her breath coming in quick, shallow bursts.
For the first time, some crack of recognition showed in his eyes.
Not empathy, perhaps, but the realization that whatever was happening threatened the order he relied on, and Charles valued order above pride.
“Very well,” he said stiffly.
One night in the guest room, tomorrow this nonsense is erased and life returns to normal.
Normal.
The word sounded meaningless, almost absurd, in the doorway of that violated room.
Lydia guided Marannne away, one arm steady at her back.
As they walked down the hallway, Marannne felt eyes on her, not just from the servants, but from the house itself.
Every painting, every closed door, every shadow seemed to watch her with silent, unblinking judgment.
behind them.
Charles ordered the servants into the room with buckets of water.
Ruth, Isaac, and two others stepped in reluctantly, dipping cloths into water and pressing them against the marked walls.
They rubbed until their arms burned.
The words did not fade.
The soot, if it was soot, did not smear, did not run.
It clung stubbornly to the wallpaper as if part of it.
The water darkened the paper around the letters, but the script itself remained hard and sharp like carved stone.
Ruth’s hand trembled as she worked.
It’s like it’s under the wall,” she whispered to Isaac.
He nodded grimly because it ain’t the wall that’s marked.
It’s her.
That night, Marianne lay in the unfamiliar bed of the guest room, staring at the ceiling.
Lydia slept in a small shay near the window, her presence meant to comfort, but it did little.
The sounds of the house were all wrong from this vantage point.
The creeks and sigh came from different angles.
The rhythm of footsteps in distant hallways shifted.
Every noise felt alien.
She did not expect to sleep.
She did not want to, but exhaustion was a heavy hand.
Sometime past midnight, as the cicadas outside buzzed in a slow, hypnotic drone, Marianne’s eyes slipped closed.
Darkness took her.
In the dream, she was standing in the sugarcane fields at noon.
The sun was directly overhead, burning her skin.
Yet she felt cold, bone deep, marrow, deep cold.
The stalks rose around her, taller than usual, towering over her head like a green whispering forest.
Wind rushed through them, making them sway and hiss.
But when she looked up, the sky was perfectly still.
No clouds, no movement.
She began to walk.
With every step, the ground beneath her feet grew softer, wetter.
She looked down and saw that the dirt had turned to dark mud, then to slush, then to blood.
thick, dark, seeping up between her toes.
She lifted her foot and watched the red liquid cling to her skin, staining it.
She tried to turn back, but there was no path behind her anymore, only endless cane and the rustle of unseen bodies moving just out of sight.
“Hello,” she called, her voice thin.
“Is someone there?” “Silence, then from somewhere deep in the field, a cough, wet, ragged, familiar,” she froze.
“Who’s there?” she demanded louder now.
fear sharpening her voice.
The stalks to her right parted, and Elsie stepped out.
She wore the same torn dress she’d died in, the cloth stiff with dried blood and pond water.
Her eyes were not milky or lifeless, though.
They were clear, far too clear.
They fixed on Marannne with a gaze that felt like a hand closing around her throat.
“You laughed,” Elsie said.
Her voice was soft, but it carried easily through the field.
There was no anger in it, no shouting, no wildness, just a simple devastating certainty.
You laughed while I died.
Marianne tried to speak, but her tongue felt thick.
It stuck to the roof of her mouth like wax.
“You were?” The words scraped out slowly.
“You were nothing to me,” Elsie tilted her head considering that.
“And you think you were something to me?” she asked.
“You think I spoke those words just for you?” “No, I spoke them for everything you stand on, everything you feed, everything you call yours.
The blood around Marianne’s feet thickened, rising to her ankles.
She tried to move, but her legs would not obey.
Panic flared.
“Release me from this,” she hissed.
“I command you.
I am the mistress of Fair View.
You will.” Her voice choked off as Elsie stepped closer.
With each step the other woman took, the air grew heavier, denser.
It pushed down on Marannne’s chest until breathing was a labor.
“You command nothing now,” Elsie said calmly.
“Not here.
From all around, more figures began emerging from the cane.
Men, women, children, some wore chains, some wore rope burns, some bore whip scars that never healed.
None of them spoke, but their eyes followed Marannne with the same unwavering focus.
Who are they? Marannne whispered.
Those you never saw, Elsie replied.
Those who died in your fields, in your sheds, under your sky.
Their sweat built your home.
Their bodies fed your land.
Their names died on other people’s tongues.
She raised a hand, and the crowd seemed to lean forward, closing in.
“You called yourself mistress, yet you never saw who you stood on.
” Marianne’s heart hammered.
“What do you want from me?” Elsie’s eyes darkened.
“Want?” She seemed to taste the word, roll it around.
“I wanted to live.
I wanted to breathe without drowning on my own blood.
I wanted my grandmother’s stories to be something other than funeral songs.
You gave me nothing of what I wanted.
” She stepped closer still until her face was inches from Marannne’s.
Now I will give you what you gave us.
The cane around them began to rot.
The green faded to brown, then black.
The stalk sagged and split, oozing a dark, foul smelling sap.
The air filled with the stench of decay.
Maranne gagged, but she could not turn away.
“You will not die quickly,” Elsie said.
“You will not be spared.
You will know fear as a constant companion.
You will know helplessness as your closest friend.
Your tears will fall for those whose tears meant nothing to you.
Marianne’s pride flared even in terror.
You cannot touch me, she rasped.
You are dead.
I am alive.
I have walls.
Money.
Power.
Walls.
Elsie’s voice sharpened.
You think walls keep out what you dragged in with every body you bought.
You think money feeds you without the hands that bled to earn it.
Your power is a house built on bones.
I have cracked the foundation.
Now it will settle.
You will feel every shift.
The blood had risen to Marannne’s calves now, thick and clinging.
She could feel things in it, hands maybe, fingers curling around her ankles.
“Please,” she whispered.
The word ripped from someplace deep she had never let herself access.
“Please stop!” Something changed in Elsie’s gaze, not softening, but intensifying.
“You will beg,” she said, echoing her curse by the pond, but not yet.
“This is only the beginning.” The ground opened beneath Marannne’s feet.
She fell, plunging through thick, wet darkness.
Hands clawed at her, dragging down, pushing, pulling.
Voices screamed in her ears.
Languages she did not know.
Prayers she had never heard.
Cries doled out to a god who had remained silent.
Then all at once, the darkness slammed shut.
Marannne woke up screaming.
Lydia jolted from the shayes, nearly falling to the floor.
Marannne.
She stumbled to the bed, grabbing her sister’s shoulders.
Marannne, wake up.
It’s a dream.
It’s just a dream.
Marannne’s eyes flew open.
She gasped for air, clutching at her throat.
The room swam around her, shapes blurring.
Her night gown clung to her skin soaked through.
When she threw off the covers, both women froze.
The sheets beneath her were stained red.
For a long, terrible moment.
Neither of them moved.
Then Lydia reached out with a trembling hand and touched the stain.
It was still damp.
She held her fingers up, her face twisting.
“It’s not blood,” she whispered, though her voice shook.
It’s It’s like muddy water, like the clay by the pond.
Marianne stared, her mind scrambling for explanations.
A spilled basin? No, there was no basin.
An injury.
Her body shook, but when she ran her hands over her arms, her legs, her chest, she found no wounds.
The smell hit her then, a faint earthy odor like wet soil after rain, the same smell that had clung to Elsie by the water.
She vomited over the side of the bed.
Lydia rushed to her, one hand on her back, the other covering her own mouth against the stink.
Tears burned behind her eyes.
We have to tell Charles, she said.
We have to show him this.
He won’t be able to deny it when he sees.
Marianne shook her head violently, hair whipping.
No, no, he’ll say it’s it’s some trick or that I did it or that you did.
He’ll blame anyone but himself.
But this isn’t about him.
She said she said it’s me.
It’s my laughter.
My her voice broke.
Lydia knelt in front of her, gripping her hands.
“Then what do we do? There must be something.” The word from Samuel the night before hovered between them.
“Old magic.
Someone must know how to undo it,” Lydia pressed.
“If Elsie called it, there must be others who understand what she did,” Marianne flinched.
The thought of asking the people she had owned for help was like swallowing glass.
“You want me to beg them?” she asked hollowly.
“Them?” Lydia held her gaze.
“Do you want this to stop?” Marannne’s mouth opened, closed.
Pride wared with terror.
Beneath that, something new smoldered.
A fragile, flickering shame.
Images from her dream hovered.
The faces in the field silent and accusing.
The bodies upon which her life had been built.
She swallowed.
Who? Lydia hesitated.
Samuel seems to know more than he’s saying.
And Buler in the kitchen.
I’ve heard the others speak of her like she knows things, old things.
Marannne squeezed her eyes shut, fighting dizziness.
The idea of going to the kitchen, of standing in that hot, smoky room, surrounded by the people whose suffering had been the background noise of her existence, and asking for mercy.
It felt impossible.
A whisper echoed in her mind.
“You will beg,” her shoulders slumped.
“Send for Samuel,” she said horarssely.
“And Buler, but don’t let Charles know.
Not yet.
If he sees me like this,” or her voice turned brittle, “he will not help.
He will only demand silence.
Lydia nodded.
I’ll bring them myself.
She slipped out of the room, leaving Marannne sitting alone on the edge of the stained bed.
The red clay imprint beneath her looked like a wound the house had suffered through her body.
Her hands moved to her face, covering her eyes.
For the first time since she’d stepped onto Fair View as a bride, Marannne Whitfield sobbed, not with frustration or spoiled anger, but with the raw, jagged sound of someone who has finally seen the ground under their feet.
Down in the kitchen, morning preparations were underway.
Bulaher moved between the stove and the chopping table with her usual calm efficiency, but her mind was elsewhere.
The night had been thick with unease.
Even the fire in the hearth had seemed reluctant to burn, its flames low and sullen.
When Lydia appeared at the doorway, the room fell still.
White ladies did not enter the kitchen often, and certainly not at this hour, not without servants announcing them.
Bulaher turned slowly.
“Ma’am,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron.
Lydia’s composure was brittle, barely holding.
I need to speak with you and Samuel privately.
Samuel, who had been stoking the oven, exchanged a quick glance with Buler.
They followed Lydia into the small pantry off the kitchen, closing the door behind them.
Shadows pressed close in the cramped space, but the air felt clearer here, away from prying ears.
Lydia did not waste time.
Something happened in my sister’s room, the guest room, and last night she had a dream.
The sheets were, Her voice faltered.
She needs help.
She is afraid.
Buler studied her face, afraid enough to listen.
She asked quietly.
Lydia nodded.
Yes.
Samuel’s jaw worked.
Elsie’s words took hold.
He said, “I told you, Miss Lydia.
This wasn’t just a dying girl talking wild.
She called down something that’ been waiting a long time, and it chose your sister as its road.
” “Then you must know how to stop it,” Lydia said desperately.
Bulaher shook her head.
“Not stop.
Not like you mean.
You can’t pull back thunder once it’s left the sky, but you can guide where it hits.
Maybe ease how hard it cracks.
Lydia clutched at that sliver of hope.
What does that mean? It means, Bulaher said slowly, that your sister got to walk through what she spent her life walking around.
She thinks she sits above this place, above us.
But the curse pulls her down into it, makes her feel the weight she never carried.
The only way through is to face it, truly face it, and ask forgiveness from the ones whose backs built her life.
The idea sounded like blasphemy in Lydia’s ears.
You want her to? I don’t want anything from her.
Buler cut in.
But the thing Elsie called.
It does, Samuel added.
Elsie said she’d no tears.
That she’d beg.
That she’d call for help and find none in her own house.
The only help she might find is here.
He glanced between them.
If she’s willing to see us as people, not just hands in the guest room upstairs.
Marannne sat trembling, unaware that the first condition of mercy being discussed in the pantry below was the one thing she had never granted, recognition.
The walk from the guest room down to the kitchen felt longer than any journey Marannne had ever taken.
Each step was a descent, not just through the house, but through layers of identity she had wrapped around herself like armor.
With every footfall on the narrow back staircase used by servants, something cracked.
Pride, certainty.
the carefully maintained fiction that she stood apart from and above the machinery of suffering that sustained her life.
Lydia walked beside her, one hand hovering near her elbow in case she stumbled.
Marianne had changed into a simple day dress, though her hands shook too badly to fasten all the buttons.
Her hair hung in a loose disheveled braid.
Dark circles shadowed her eyes.
She looked for the first time in her life like someone who had been brought low.
When they reached the kitchen door, Marannne hesitated through the crack.
She could see Buler at the stove, Samuel near the window, Ruth and Isaac standing quietly to the side.
The room smelled of wood smoke and baking bread, familiar scents, but now they felt foreign, as if she were entering a country whose language she had never bothered to learn.
Lydia pushed the door open gently.
“They’re here,” she said softly.
All eyes turned.
The silence that followed was heavy, layered with decades of unspoken words.
Maranne forced herself to step inside.
Her legs felt weak.
The kitchen, which he had walked past a thousand times without truly seeing, now seemed impossibly large and impossibly small all at once.
Every surface bore the marks of labor, the worn wooden table scarred by knives, the blackened pots hanging from hooks, the flower dusted floor swept clean each night and dirted again each morning.
These were the hands that fed her.
These were the bodies that kept her world turning.
She had never looked at them this way before.
Buler set down the spoon she’d been holding and crossed her arms loosely over her chest.
Her gaze was steady, unreadable.
“Ma’am,” she said, the word carrying neither deference nor hostility, just acknowledgement.
Marianne’s throat tightened.
She had rehearsed words on the way down, but they felt hollow now, inadequate.
Still, she forced them out.
“I need I need your help,” Samuel shifted his weight.
“Help with what, Mom?” “The curse,” Maranne said, voice barely above a whisper.
what else he did.
It’s It’s not stopping.
The dreams, the marks, the sounds.
I Her breath hitched.
I don’t know what to do.
Buler’s expression didn’t soften, but something flickered in her eyes.
Recognition perhaps that this was the first honest thing Marannne Witfield had ever said in this kitchen.
You come down here asking us to fix what you broke? She asked quietly.
Marannne flinched.
I didn’t break.
Yes, you did.
Samuel<unk>s voice was firm, but not cruel.
Maybe not with your own hands, but you laughed when that girl died.
You stood over her and made her suffering a joke.
That kind of cruelty and it tears something open.
And Elsie, she made sure you’d feel that tearing yourself.
Tears burned behind Marianne’s eyes.
She blinked them back furiously, unwilling to cry in front of these people, but the tears came anyway, hot and bitter, spilling down her cheeks before she could stop them.
I didn’t think, her voice cracked.
I didn’t think she was human.
Buler finished for her.
You didn’t think she was human.
None of us are to you.
We’re just pieces of your life.
Things that work or break.
The words struck like a physical blow.
Marianne’s knees buckled slightly, and Lydia caught her arm steadying her.
Please, Lydia said, her own voice trembling.
She knows she was wrong.
She’s suffering now.
Isn’t that enough? Enough for what? Isaac spoke for the first time, his deep voice rumbling through the room.
Enough to make Elsie come back.
enough to undo all the others who died before her.
Suffering don’t balance the scales, Miss Lydia.
It just spreads the weight around.
Marianne sank into a chair at the kitchen table, her legs giving out completely.
She pressed her palms flat against the scarred wood, staring at the surface as if it might offer answers.
“Then what do I do?” she asked, her voice hollow.
“If my suffering isn’t enough, “What will break this?” Baher moved closer, her shadow falling across the table.
“The curse ain’t about breaking you, Mom.
It’s about making you see.
You spend your whole life looking past us, looking through us, never once looking at us.
Elsie’s words, and they force you to see what you’ve been refusing.
I see you now, Marannne whispered.
Do you? Buler’s tone was skeptical.
Or are you just scared and reaching for the closest help? The question hung in the air, unanswerable.
Marannne didn’t know.
She couldn’t separate her terror from her newfound awareness.
Were they the same thing? Had it taken a curse to make her recognize the humanity of the people she’d owned? Samuel pulled up a chair across from her.
His movements were deliberate, unhurried.
Elsie called down something old, he said.
Older than this plantation, older than slavery itself.
It’s the kind of justice that don’t wait for courts or laws.
It comes when blood cries out from the ground and the ground answers back.
But there must be a way to Marianne searched for the word to appease it to make amends.
Amends? Ruth spoke softly from her place by the wall.
You think you can pay off a curse like a debt? I don’t know.
Marannne’s voice rose, desperation cracking through.
I don’t know anything anymore.
The walls in my room are marked with words I can’t read.
I dream of drowning in blood.
I hear crying that no one else hears.
My own house feels like it’s turning against me.
Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
The kitchen fell silent.
Bulah and Samuel exchanged a long look, some wordless communication passing between them.
Finally, Bula spoke.
“There might be a way,” she said slowly.
“But it ain’t easy and it ain’t quick.
” Marannne leaned forward, grasping at hope.
“Tell me, you got to go to Elsie’s grave,” Buler said.
“You got to kneel there in the dirt.
And you got to speak to her.
Not like she’s beneath you.
Not like you’re granting her something, but like she’s your equal.
Like her life mattered as much as yours,” Marianne’s breath caught.
“And then, and then you listen,” Samuel added.
“You listen for what the land tells you.
The curse was born from pain and mockery.
If you want it to ease, you got to offer something true.
sorrow, respect, acknowledgement that she existed, that her suffering was real.
Will that break the curse? Lydia asked, her voice small.
Buler shook her head.
Might not break it, but it might redirect it, soften it.
The curse wants recognition.
It wants the ones who caused the pain to see what they done.
If Maranne can give that, really give it, not just say words, then maybe Elsie’s spirit will let her carry the weight without crushing her under it.
Marannne closed her eyes.
The thought of going to the unmarked grave beyond the quarters, of kneeling in the red Georgia clay where Elsie had been buried like refu of speaking to a ghost, it felt impossible.
But the alternative, living under the weight of this curse, feeling the house close in around her, drowning nightly in dreams of blood, felt worse.
“When?” she asked quietly.
“Tonight,” Samuel said.
“Under the moon.
That’s when the boundary between this world and the next is thinnest.
That’s when she’ll hear you clearest.” Marannne nodded slowly.
Her hands still trembled, but something in her had shifted.
Not redemption.
She was not foolish enough to believe one act could undo a lifetime, but the beginning of a crack in the foundation of her old self.
The day passed in a haze.
Marianne stayed in the guest room, unable to face Charles, unable to face the ruins of her own bedroom.
Lydia brought her water and bread, but she could not eat.
Her stomach twisted with dread and something else, shame, raw, and unfamiliar.
As the sun began to sink toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of blood and gold, Samuel came to the door.
“It’s time, Mom,” he said.
Maranne rose on unsteady legs.
She had dressed in her simplest gown, dark and unadorned, no jewelry, no carefully arranged hair.
She looked almost plain, almost like someone who might belong in the fields rather than the big house.
Lydia offered to come with her, but Buler shook her head.
“This walk she’s got to make alone.” So Marianne followed Samuel through the back of the property, past the slave quarters, where people paused in their evening routines to watch her pass.
No one spoke.
No one smiled.
They simply watched, their faces carved with generations of grief.
Beyond the quarters, where the land sloped down toward a marshy area thick with pines, Samuel stopped.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a low mound, barely distinguishable from the rest of the earth.
A few wilted wild flowers lay scattered across it, offerings from those who had cared for Elsie in life.
Marannne stared at the grave.
It looked so small, so insignificant.
A life reduced to a patch of dirt.
Samuel stepped back.
I’ll be over there, he said, nodding toward a tree.
Call if you need me, but this part, this is yours to do.
Marianne took a shaky breath and approached the grave.
The ground was still soft from recent rain.
When she knelt, the mud soaked through her dress, immediately cold and clinging.
She didn’t care.
For once, discomfort felt appropriate.
She placed her hands flat on the grave, feeling the earth beneath her palms.
“Elsie,” she whispered.
The name felt strange on her tongue.
Too personal, too real.
“I I don’t know if you can hear me.” The evening air was still.
Insects hummed.
Somewhere in the distance, a bird called out lonely and clear.
“I laughed at you,” Maryanne continued, her voice breaking.
I stood there while you died and I laughed.
I thought I thought you were nothing.
That your pain didn’t matter.
That you were just just part of the machinery of my life.
Tears fell freely now splashing onto the dirt.
I was wrong.
I was so wrong.
You were a person.
You had a name.
You had a grandmother whose stories you carried.
You had dreams maybe or hopes or just the simple wish to breathe without pain.
And I took all of that and made it into a joke.
Her voice rose anguished.
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.
I can’t bring you back.
I can’t undo what I did.
But I see you now.
I see you, Elsie.
I see that you mattered.
That you were real.
That your life, your short, hard, painful life, was worth mourning.
The wind picked up suddenly, rushing through the pines with a sound like distant voices.
Marannne felt something shift in the air around her, a presence neither malevolent nor kind, simply there, watching, weighing.
Please, she whispered.
I know I don’t deserve mercy, but if there’s any way to ease this, if there’s anything I can do to honor you, I tell me, I’ll do it.
For a long moment, nothing happened.
Then, faintly, as if from very far away, she heard it.
A voice soft and familiar, speaking words she could almost understand.
It was not Elsie’s voice exactly, but something older, something carried through her.
The words settled into Marianne’s mind like stones into water.
You will carry this, but you will not carry it alone.
Speak our names.
Tell our stories.
Let the world know we existed.
Marannne gasped, her hands pressing harder into the earth.
Yes, she said.
Yes, I will.
I promise.
The presence lingered a moment longer, then began to fade.
The wind died down.
The evening settled back into its quiet rhythms.
But something had changed.
The crushing weight on Marannne’s chest.
The suffocating dread that had followed her since Elsie’s death had not disappeared, but it had shifted.
It felt less like a noose and more like a burden she could learn to carry.
She stayed kneeling for a long time, her hands in the dirt, her tears watering the grave.
When she finally stood, her dress was filthy, her face stre with mud and tears.
She looked nothing like the polished mistress of Fair View.
She looked human.
Samuel walked her back to the house in silence.
When they reached the kitchen door, he paused.
Ma’am, what you did tonight, that’s a start.
But it’s only a start.
Words at a grave don’t rebuild a world.
Marannne nodded slowly.
I know, but I have to start somewhere.
Over the following weeks, Maranne began to change.
Not dramatically.
Old patterns die hard, but in small, significant ways.
She learned the names of the people who worked her land.
She asked Ruth about her family.
She stood in the kitchen and listened when Bulaher spoke about the old ways, the lost languages, the histories that had been carried across the ocean in the holds of ships.
She commissioned a marker for Elsie’s grave.
A simple stone, but one that bore her name and the words, “She mattered.” Charles was furious.
He called it foolishness, sentimentality, a dangerous precedent.
But Marianne no longer bent to his anger.
The curse had broken something in her.
Yes, but it had also revealed something.
She had lived her entire life in a house built on bones, and she had pretended not to hear them rattle.
She heard them now.
The dreams still came.
Sometimes she still woke in the night with the taste of blood in her mouth, but they were less frequent, less crushing.
The house no longer felt like it was turning against her.
The shadows no longer moved with menace.
And in the quarters, where stories were passed from mouth to ear in the quiet hours, a new tale began to circulate.
The story of the mistress who laughed at a dying slave and the curse that brought her to her knees.
Some told it as a warning, others told it as a small, bitter victory, but all agreed on the ending.
that sometimes justice came not from the hands of the powerful, but from the voices of the powerless, crying out until the very earth answered.
Elsie was gone, but her words remained, carved into the walls of a house that would never forget, and into the heart of a woman who had learned too late what it meant to see.
This story was inspired by the real histories of countless enslaved people, whose names were never recorded, whose suffering was never acknowledged, whose humanity was denied.
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