The last porch light on Kirkland Street went out at nine.
Abbeville did not stay awake after that. Neon over the old drugstore sank to a weak red. Live oaks leaned over the road, moss hanging like wet hair, and the moon sat above the town as if placed there to watch who was still outside.
Ellis Ward was still outside.
He was fourteen and certain that fourteen was old enough. His mother had told him to be home before dark. She had not raised her voice. In Abbeville she did not have to. She only said the name, the way every mother in Henry County said it when a boy lingered on a corner.
Molly.
He had laughed. He had seen the restaurant downtown, the soda fountain, the joke of it. A tall woman in a black dress. A hug. A story for children.
Belief, in Abbeville, was not required.
Ellis took the long way home because the long way made him feel like a man. He passed the feed store and the empty lot where the agriculture school had once stood. A dog barked once, far off, and then thought better of it.
Behind him, something matched his step.
He stopped.
The sound stopped.
He told himself it was an echo. He started again, faster. The second set of feet started with him. Not heavier. Not lighter. Exact. As if the thing behind him had measured his stride and decided to wear it.
Ellis did not look back. He wanted only the yellow square of his kitchen window.
The footsteps stayed one pace behind.
The streetlamp on Kirkland burned a thin, sick color. Fog had risen from the low ground. It moved around his calves. It did not move around whatever followed him. He heard cloth. A long skirt, heavy, sweeping grit.
“Who’s there?”
No answer. Only the skirt. Only the identical step.
He ran.
The thing behind him did not have to run. It lengthened. The stride that had copied his became longer than a man’s, and still it made almost no sound except that slow drag of black fabric over the street.
The road ahead looked farther than it had at dusk. The houses sat back from the curb as if they had decided not to be involved.
She came around him without passing him.
He was facing forward, and then she was in front of him, as if the night had folded. Seven feet, they always said. They had not said how the height arrived. She was simply taller than the porch posts, a column of black dress and cloak with a wide-brimmed hat that held her face in a hole of shadow.
Ellis’s feet stopped because there was no place left to put them.
She did not speak. First there was the size of her, and the way the fog refused to touch her hem, and the smell off the cloth: not rot, exactly, but a closed room, a dress worn too long.
Her arms opened.
They were too long for the body beneath the cloak. When they closed, they did not embrace him so much as complete a circle that had been waiting all evening. The pressure was immediate and total. His cheek crushed against black wool. His ribs folded inward until his breath became a small, trapped animal. This was not affection and not quite violence. It was a correction. She had taken the late hour and put his body in it.
Then she put her mouth against his ear.
The scream did not travel across the street. It did not wake the houses. It went into him, a single white sound with no words and no bottom, so close it seemed to come from the bone around his own ear. His knees tried to go and could not, because she was still holding him up. When the scream ended, the silence afterward felt injured.
Her arms opened.
She was there, and then the street was only street. Ellis did not look back. He reached his porch so hard the boards complained. His mother was already at the door.
She saw his face and did not ask who had chased him. She pulled him inside and shut the night out with both hands on the wood.
Ellis sat at the kitchen table with his arms around his own ribs. The ringing in his left ear did not fade when the clock marked ten. His mother set water in front of him. It tasted of metal.
“I told you,” she said, very quietly.
He nodded. He could still feel the exact width of those arms, and how little effort she had used. A woman that tall, the stories said, and as big around as a bale of cotton. The stories had not prepared him for how still she was. Anger would have been simpler. What she had done felt like the town itself closing.
Through the window the street looked empty. Ellis knew better. Emptiness in Abbeville after nine was only a kind of waiting. Somewhere beyond the oaks, a skirt was moving through grit, measuring some other boy’s stride, matching it, wearing it.
He lay awake with his ear against the pillow. The ringing sounded almost like a voice trying to become words. Near midnight, he thought he caught them.
Go home.
He was home.
The ringing did not care.
Outside, fog held the shape of a long dress for a moment after nothing was there to fill it. In the houses, mothers checked latches they had already checked. In the road, if you stood in it, you might hear two sets of footsteps when you had only brought one.
Ellis did not stand in it again.
The legend did not need him in order to continue. It only needed the dark, and the habit of staying out in it, and a woman in a wide black hat who knew how tightly a child must be held before he remembers the way back.
Some nights people still say they see her at the far end of Kirkland, too tall against the porches, face kept in the hat’s shadow, arms hanging empty and ready. They do not call out. They go inside.
The ones who do not go inside learn what Ellis learned, in the same order.
The copied step.
The folded street.
The hug that has no comfort in it.
The scream that fits inside one ear and stays.
