The night my daughter asked me to check under her bed for monsters, I laughed. Not the warm kind, but the brittle, exhausted chuckle of a single mom working two shifts. Ellie was six, all skinned knees and bedtime stories, her fears as simple as shadows. I kissed her forehead, told her the only monster here was the pile of laundry on her floor, and shut the door.
She was gone by morning.
Not vanished—taken. The cops found her pajamas in the woods behind our trailer park, neatly folded atop a rotted stump. One tiny sock inside-out, like she'd kicked it off mid-stride. They dredged the creek, brought in dogs, printed MISSING posters with her gap-toothed smile. But I knew. The way you know a storm's coming by the ache in your bones.
Ellie's voice came back first.
It started as a hum through the baby monitor I couldn't bring myself to unplug. A nursery rhyme we'd sung together, You are my sunshine, warped and watery, like she was singing through a mouthful of river stones. I smashed the monitor. Then I heard her in the drip of the kitchen faucet. In the static of dead radio channels. Mommy, she'd gasp, it's so cold here.
The social worker called it "complicated grief." The pastor, a "test of faith." But Mrs. Peeler, the widow next door who chain-smoked Parliaments and fed feral cats, pressed a rusted key into my palm. "Your grandma's farmhouse," she said. "Sit empty since the '90s. Go dig up whatever's calling that child."
The farmhouse crouched at the end of a mud-choked road, its porch sagging like a broken jaw. Ellie's laughter echoed from the attic before I'd even turned the key. Mommy, you found me! Her voice was bright, alive—a trick. I knew it was a trick. Didn't care.
The attic stairs groaned. Dust-swirled sunlight caught the edges of a rocking horse, its mane matted with cobwebs. Ellie's favorite stuffed bear sat propped against an old crib, fur streaked with something dark. And there, in the corner, was a small figure in a yellow sundress—the one she'd been buried in.
Her head tilted. Too far.
"You shouldn't have left me," she said, except it wasn't Ellie. The thing wearing her face had eyes like oil spills, seeping into the whites. Its skin sagged, gray and waxy, stitches crisscrossing its throat where the coroner's incision had been. It held out arms mottled with grave dirt. "Hold me, Mommy."
I ran. The house wouldn't let me. Doors sealed shut. Windows hardened to stone. The thing crawled after me, joints popping, whispering in a chorus of voices that weren't hers—hungry voices. I barricaded myself in the root cellar, phone long-dead, and found the bones.
Dozens of them. Small. Buried beneath the dirt floor.
A journal too, dated 1932, filled with my grandmother's frantic scrawl: It asks for a child. Give it yours, or it takes everyone. Forgive me. Forgive me.
Ellie's funeral was closed-casket. They never let me see her.
The thing is pounding on the cellar door now. It's learned to cry. To sob her exact hiccuping wail. I'm writing this by flashlight, bones scattered around me, and I finally understand Grandma's last entry: It doesn't want love. It wants a mother.
The door's splintering. I can smell it—wet earth and spoiled milk.
When it gets in, I'll hold it. I'll rock it. I'll sing You are my sunshine until my voice shreds.
Because somewhere under those stitches, my baby is still screaming.