Maybe it was Alma, the one trembling beside me.

Maybe it was my mom, sitting in the backyard with her hands clasped, praying so fast she was unintelligible.

Or maybe it was me, though at that moment, I felt as if fear had left me mute, as if my mouth had been filled with water from the well.

The hands kept rising.

They weren’t shadows or reflections. They were real hands. Pale, waterlogged, some small, some enormous—all of them striking and scratching at the wet stone from below, searching for the edge as if they had spent years waiting for someone to finally break the right lid.

The black water was already reaching our shoes.

Mateo remained standing in front of the “other” Alma, clutching the wet stone in his hand, looking at her with that sick obedience some children show the wrong people. The woman from the well, identical to my sister and yet completely alien, smiled without blinking. Her hair was plastered to her face, her white dress floating barely an inch in the current still surging from below, and that smile was stretched so wide it looked like it must have hurt.

“You were the one who finally opened it,” she repeated to me.

I wanted to back away, but the water anchored my feet.

Alma grabbed my arm.

“Don’t answer her.”

“What is it?” I gasped, my voice barely a whisper.

She shook her head, gasping for air.

“I don’t know what to call it. But it learned. Down there, it learned how to speak like us.”

The other Alma tilted her head, amused.

“I didn’t just learn to speak.”

Then, she flicked her hand.

Mateo walked toward her.

My mom screamed his name and tried to run to grab him, but she slipped on the flooded patio and fell to her knees. I lunged before I could think. I caught the boy by his backpack and pulled with all my might. Mateo stopped for a split second, as if he were being pulled by a rope from two different directions. He turned toward me, and for a second, I saw his eyes—completely black. Not empty. Full of water.

“Let go,” he said in a voice that didn’t sound like a child’s. “My mom is calling me.”

“Your mom is right here!” I yelled, pointing to Alma, the living one, the one trembling.

But the other one laughed. Not loudly. Just a low, soft sound—like someone mocking a childish mistake.

“Mothers make mistakes, too,” she said.

And behind her, in the well, something struck with such force that the stone rim cracked. One hand managed to emerge completely: thin, brown, with long, ragged, mud-caked nails. It gripped the rim and began to pull the rest of the body up.

My mom let out a shriek that pierced my stomach.

Alma finally reacted. She threw herself toward Mateo, snatched the stone marked with a date from his hand, and slammed it against the ground with all her might. The stone shattered in two.

The boy dropped as if his strings had been cut. He didn’t faint; rather, he came back. He blinked rapidly, disoriented, and began to cry in a normal, human way—the way he should have been crying from the start.

The smile on the woman from the well vanished.

It was just a centimeter, a tiny drop of the lips. But it was enough to change the air in the yard. The water stopped advancing for a second. The hands below went still. The “other” Alma fixed her eyes on the broken stone and, for the first time, looked annoyed.

“I told you not to bring that,” she whispered to Mateo.

He clung to Alma, finally terrified.

“I didn’t want to open you any further,” he stammered.

My sister hugged him, never taking her eyes off her double.

“What are the stones?” I asked.

Alma swallowed hard.

“Dates.”

“Dates of what?”

She didn’t answer right away. My mom did.

“The days I heard her,” she said, sobbing. “The days that thing called out from the yard in your sister’s voice. At first, it was at night. Then at dawn. Then it started talking to the boy since the day he was born.”

My stomach turned.

“What boy?”

Nobody said anything.

But I already knew.

I turned to look at Mateo. Then at Alma. Then at the other thing, soaked and smiling, standing half-out of the well as if it had never truly belonged to this side.

I suddenly understood why my sister had returned after seven years. I understood why the boy seemed so tired for his age. I understood why my mom had looked at him strangely the moment he arrived, searching for features that didn’t fit. Mateo wasn’t strange because he heard voices.

He was strange because a voice had raised him.

“No,” I said, feeling the air leave my lungs. “Don’t tell me…”

Alma closed her eyes for a heartbeat.

“I left while I was pregnant.”

My mom let out a broken sob.

“I didn’t know what you were carrying,” she whispered.

“Neither did I,” Alma spat, with a rage that made her lip tremble. “I thought it was mine. I thought if I went far enough away, it wouldn’t find me. But since he was born, he called me the same name as her. He called me ‘the other mom,’ even though he couldn’t even speak yet. He’d stand in his sleep in front of closed doors. He’d point to cisterns, drains, puddles. And every year, on the same night, a stone would disappear from his backpack.”

The other Alma smiled again.

“Because they belong to me,” she said. “Every date opened me up a little bit more.”

Behind her body, the hands in the well began to move again. Faster. More desperate. A face began to emerge from the water. Then another. Not whole—just foreheads, mouths, water-softened cheeks, as if several people were trapped under wet glass, all searching for the same hole to breathe.

“We have to close it,” I said.

My mom laughed. A dreadful, empty sound.

“With what? Prayers? Another slab of concrete? We left her down there once and it did no good.”

“Because you left the wrong one,” the woman from the well said, and this time she looked at all of us, one by one, enjoying it. “And because I was never alone down there.”

The entire yard creaked.

Cracks in the cement spread to the wall. The water running along the bricks no longer looked like a leak; it looked like the house was sweating. From the kitchen, we heard glass fall and shatter. Then, a voice.

My voice.

“Mom…” it said from inside the house.

I froze.

I wasn’t speaking.

It came from the kitchen—clear, trembling, exactly like mine.

My mom covered her face with both hands.

“It’s started,” she whispered.

The other Alma smiled with tenderness, almost maternal.

“You learn quickly down there.”

And it called me again, this time with my father’s voice:

“Sweetheart.”

I hadn’t heard him call me that since he died. My knees buckled. It was a second of weakness—just one—and that was enough for the thing to notice. Its eyes glowed, satisfied. It had found something.

“No,” Alma said, shaking me by the shoulder. “Don’t give it anything of yours.”

“What do you mean, nothing of mine?”

“No memories. No names. And don’t answer when it uses Dad’s voice.”

But it was too late. I had already heard it. And something inside the well had heard it with me.

The hands flailed more violently. One managed to climb up to the elbow. Another dug into the rim right next to the other Alma’s dress. The water rose a few inches in a single pulse.

Mateo began to hyperventilate.

“She’s angry,” he said.

“Who?” I asked, though I was tired of asking stupid questions.

The boy turned toward the inside of the well with terrifying lucidity.

“The one deeper down.”

And then, something pushed from the bottom.

Not like a person climbing up.
Like a floodgate opening.

The black water swelled upward, and for an instant, we saw an impossible depth below. The well was no longer a well. It was a wide, bottomless pipe lined with old stone that went on and on beyond what any house in Savannah, Georgia, could contain. On the walls were marks, niches, rusted hooks, rags, ribbons, locks of hair. And on every ledge, faces.

Human faces.

Stuck to the stone as if the dampness had absorbed them.

The other Alma took a step back from the edge.

For the first time, I saw fear in her.

“No,” she whispered, and that single word hurt me more than everything else. “Not yet.”

Something was obeying her only halfway. She wasn’t the owner of that place. She was just the first thing that had learned how to climb up.

Mateo began to tremble so hard I thought he would have a seizure. He grabbed my sweater.

“She says it’s my grandmother’s turn.”

My mom let out a choked scream.

“No, no, no…”

The voice returned from the kitchen.

It wasn’t mine anymore, nor my father’s. It was my grandmother Consuelo’s—dead for eleven years.

“Daughters,” she called out, sweet, just like when she served coffee. “Come on, it’s getting cold.”

My mom started walking toward the house. Just like that. With teary, empty eyes, taking short steps over the freezing water as if nothing in front of us mattered anymore.

I pulled her by the arm before she reached the door.

“Mom!”

She blinked and looked at me, lost, as if she hadn’t recognized me for a second.

“It was your grandmother,” she said. “I heard her clearly.”

“It wasn’t her.”

The other Alma took a step toward us.

“Let her go. It’s been calling her for years, too.”

Alma stepped in between. I don’t know where she found the courage, but she did. She planted herself between her double and us, with Mateo behind her, as if her fear had been broken from the inside and now only pure rage remained.

“You aren’t taking anyone else.”

The other one smiled, weary.

“Do you still think you decide anything?”

And then, she raised her hand toward Mateo.

The boy screamed.

Not from pain. As if something were coming out of his mouth. He fell to his knees and began to vomit water. Black, thick water, with bits of slime and rotted leaves. My mom shrieked. I crouched down to hold him and felt something solid hit the floor amidst the liquid. A stone.

Then another.

And another.

Wet, round stones, each with a date written in permanent marker.

The backpack hadn’t been empty.

The backpack had been inside him.

Alma fell beside her son and began clearing the water from his mouth with her hands, crying, calling him by his name over and over. The other Alma watched the scene with a horrible serenity, like someone waiting for a known countdown.

“When the last one comes out,” she said, “you won’t be able to carry him again.”

I felt a hatred so brutal that I grabbed the sledgehammer from the ground without thinking.

“Do it right,” Alma told me, without looking at me, busy with Mateo. “If you’re going to hit, don’t aim for the head.”

I didn’t know if she was talking about the thing or the well.

But I understood.

I ran.

The other Alma barely turned her face when I swung. Not at her. At the stone rim, right where she was leaning. The hammer hit with a dull thud. The stone cracked. The rim gave way on one side, and the woman’s body wobbled. Her smile vanished completely.

“Stupid,” she said, now with a voice that was old, hollow, filled with water.

She raised her arms to hold on, but at that very moment, the hands from below found her. One on the ankle. One on the wrist. One on her dress. They pulled.

She screamed.

And it didn’t sound like Alma anymore.

It sounded like many women all at once.

“Don’t send me back!” she howled.

The faces in the well rose a little higher, hungry, pressed against the edge. One of them opened its eyes, and I saw they were completely white. Another had its mouth sewn shut with black thread. Another was smiling at me with my own face—just for a second, enough to freeze me.

The thing struggled with monstrous strength, digging its nails into the stone. One of its hands reached Mateo’s ankle. He squealed. Alma pulled him toward her. I lifted the sledgehammer again and hit the thing’s fingers. The bones snapped. The hand opened. The ones below took advantage and pulled with everything they had.

The other Alma fell backward into the well.

Not whole.

First the legs.
Then the waist.
Then the torso.

Her face was the last thing left outside, looking at us with an ancient, immense hatred.

“You’ve woken her up now,” she said.

And she disappeared.

Everything exploded at the same time.

The water rose in a black wave and lashed our legs. The hands went frantic, clawing at the air. The back wall cracked from the floor to the roof. From the kitchen came a horrifying crunch, as if something heavy had fallen onto the tiles. Mateo expelled the last stone and fainted in Alma’s arms.

And from the well, for the first time, a voice rose that wasn’t imitating anyone.

It wasn’t a woman.
It wasn’t a man.
It wasn’t old or young.
It was a deep, damp voice, as if it spoke from inside the earth.

“The first one is missing.”

My mom stopped praying. She turned toward the well with her mouth hanging open.

“The first what?” she whispered.

The voice answered using mine.

“The first daughter.”

No one needed to explain who it meant.

Me.

The water began to recede abruptly, but not downward—toward the house. As if the well had changed direction and was now draining the entire yard through the kitchen. Left on the floor were mud, stones, and those finger marks everywhere.

Alma stood up with Mateo in her arms, swaying.

“We have to get out.”

“And then what?” I asked. “Leave this open?”

My mom kept staring at the well. She didn’t move.

“Mom,” I said, louder.

She reacted barely. Very slowly, she lifted her hand and pointed to something on the other side of the rim.

In the mud, half-buried next to the broken stone, was another chain.

Not hers.

A small, rusted child’s necklace with a tiny teddy bear charm.

My breath caught.

I had had one just like it.

I lost it when I was six years old.

The night I fell into the neighbor’s well playing hide-and-seek.

The night everyone swore my dad pulled me out in time.

The night I remembered nothing about.

The voice from the well spoke again.

Now with the exact voice of the little girl I had been.

“You took too long to come back.”

And behind that voice, rising from deeper down than all the others, a wet little head began to appear, two small hands gripping the stone, and eyes that were identical to mine.