"Echoes of the Past"

In the summer of 1952, a woman who should not have existed knelt in a garden behind the oldest house in Nowhere, whispering to creatures older than the house itself.

The Pukwudgies emerged from the undergrowth like smoke given form three-foot-tall beings with heads too large for their bodies, eyes that reflected starlight even at noon, fingers that ended in points. They spoke in a language like wind through dead leaves, and Clara Sterling answered in kind. They told her something was stirring, something hungry. She acknowledged she'd felt it too.

From the house, a man's voice called her name. Clara waved the little creatures away and turned to face Thaddeus Beaumont young, then, and standing on his own two legs with the easy confidence of inherited power. He observed that they were getting bolder. Clara told him they were scared. Something was waking up.

Sixty-seven years later, Clara stood in the same spot. The garden had gone wild. The house had darkened. The man was old now, confined to a chair, his legs taken by something she'd never explained to anyone living.

But she looked exactly the same.

And the Pukwudgies were scared again.

Abigail had grown accustomed to dreaming of things that hadn't happened to her.

Every night for a week, she'd seen a woman who looked like an older version of herself standing in a place that felt like Nowhere but wasn't. The woman held something in her arms a bundle, a weight, something precious. And she was performing a ritual, weaving protection spells around the thing she carried, hiding its true nature from something that hunted it.

Abigail woke each morning with the certainty that she'd been the bundle. The baby. The thing being hidden.

But hidden from what?

The summons to Beaumont Manor came while she was still shaking off the dream's residue. Thaddeus Beaumont needed her expertise. Someone had been stealing from him.

The thefts were strange small things taken, specific things. A silver spoon from 1920. A photograph from 1935. A button from a coat Thaddeus hadn't worn in decades. And last night, the most precious item of all: a locket that had belonged to his mother.

Thaddeus wheeled through the manor's shadowed halls, explaining there had been no forced entry, no signs of intrusion. Security cameras showed nothing. It was as if the items simply vanished.

Clara followed at a distance, silent in a way that felt deliberate. When Abigail asked if she'd seen anything, Clara's answer came wrapped in riddles about old bargains fraying, about what was peaceful becoming restless.

Benji helped Abigail translate. In his video store archives, buried in a box of folklore collections, they found accounts of the Pukwudgies creatures from Wampanoag tradition, trickster spirits known for mischief, for leading travelers astray, for collecting shiny objects that caught their fancy.

Abigail observed that these thefts weren't random. They were taking specific things. Things with history. Things with meaning. Benji admitted that Pukwudgies aren't supposed to be that sophisticated unless they're scared, unless they're building something. His face went pale as he explained what they might be building: a memory shrine, a last defense against something that wants to make them forget they exist.

Abigail found the hollow beneath the garden by following her own sensitivity. The electromagnetic signature was unlike anything she'd felt before not machine interference, but something older, something that hummed with the frequency of living memory.

The shrine filled an underground chamber the size of a church basement. Photographs papered the walls, spanning a century of Nowhere's history. Jewelry hung from strings like wind chimes. Buttons and coins and ticket stubs covered the floor in overlapping layers, each item placed with deliberate care.

The Pukwudgies watched her from the shadows dozens of them, their too-large eyes reflecting her flashlight beam. Abigail told them, her voice trembling, that she wasn't there to stop them. She just wanted to understand.

Clara emerged from a side passage, and Abigail's heart nearly stopped. Clara explained that they'd been doing this for years, ever since they started feeling the Wendigo stir. Memories have power here, she said. Human connection, human meaning it anchors things to reality. They're building this shrine because they're terrified of being forgotten.

She moved among the Pukwudgies like a mother among children, touching their heads, murmuring in their language. She explained that she'd brokered a peace between them and the Beaumonts seventy years ago. They would guard the boundaries between worlds. In exchange, they could remain in Nowhere, protected. But the Wendigo's power was growing. The boundaries were weakening. And when they fall, everything would be erased everything that doesn't feed on fear.

Thaddeus found the hollow, of course. Thaddeus always found what he was looking for. He wheeled to the edge of the chamber's entrance, his face carved from something harder than stone. He demanded his mother's locket back. Clara tried to intervene, but he wouldn't hear it. These creatures had been stealing from his family for decades. He'd tolerated it because she'd asked him to. But that locket was the last thing his mother gave him before she died.

The change happened mid-sentence. The Wendigo's influence seeped into the hollow like poison into water, and the Pukwudgies transformed. What had been fearful became feral. Their large eyes narrowed to slits. Their delicate fingers curled into claws.

They attacked.

Clara threw herself between the creatures and Thaddeus, speaking their language in rapid, desperate bursts. But the Wendigo's corruption had gone too deep. The Pukwudgies weren't listening anymore. They were fighting for their existence, and anything that threatened their shrine human or otherwise had to be destroyed.

Abigail reached out with her abilities, trying to find the frequency of the creatures' fear. She touched something vast, something ancient something that wasn't the Pukwudgies at all.

The vision hit her like a physical blow.

She saw Clara, centuries ago, stepping out of a landscape that defied geometry into the ordinary forests of what would become West Virginia. She saw the original compact the bargain between Clara's people and the things that lived in the dark places of this land.

And then she saw herself.

A woman a woman with Abigail's eyes, Abigail's jawline, Abigail's stubborn set of shoulders holding a baby. Performing a ritual so complex it made Abigail's head throb just to witness it. Weaving layers of protection around the infant, hiding its true nature, disguising it as something ordinary and human.

The woman whispered to the sleeping baby that she must never know what she was. Not until she was ready. Not until she was strong enough to choose.

The baby was Abigail.

The woman was her mother.

And Clara stood in the background of the vision, watching over them both with the same unchanging face she wore today.

The vision broke the Wendigo's hold. The Pukwudgies stumbled, their aggression draining away as suddenly as it had appeared. Clara caught them as they fell, murmuring comfort in a language older than English.

Thaddeus sat in his wheelchair, pale and shaking. He'd witnessed something through Abigail's power, fragments of the same vision, enough to understand that he was in the presence of forces he'd never truly comprehended. His voice hoarse, he told them the Pukwudgies could keep the locket.

Clara shook her head that wasn't how bargains work. She turned to the Pukwudgies and told them to return the locket. In exchange, they could keep one photograph the oldest one, the one with the most memory.

The creatures conferred in their wind-language. Then, solemnly, one of them retrieved the locket from deep within the shrine and placed it in Thaddeus's lap. Another produced a photograph, which it held up for Abigail to see.

Clara. Unchanged. Standing next to a woman with Abigail's eyes.

The date written on the back: 1947.

Later, when the others had gone and the hollow was quiet, Abigail found Clara in the garden above. She told Clara about the vision, about the woman with the baby. That was her.

Clara didn't deny it. She acknowledged that Abigail had seen more than she was supposed to.

Abigail pressed for answers. Who was the woman? Who was her mother?

A long pause. The wind stirred Clara's hair the same hair, the same face, the same woman from a photograph taken seventy-two years ago.

Clara said only that it was a long time ago, in a place far from here. When Abigail pointed out that wasn't an answer, Clara acknowledged it wasn't. But she turned to face Abigail, something in those ancient eyes that might have been sorrow, and told her that her mother had loved her. She gave up everything to protect her. The ritual she performed the one Abigail saw was designed to hide her from something that wanted to destroy her before she could become what she was meant to be.

Abigail asked what she was meant to be. Clara admitted she didn't know. She wasn't sure Abigail's mother had known either. But when Abigail was ready to find out, she'd find Clara.

Clara walked away, leaving Abigail alone with more questions than answers. But one thing was certain now: whatever Abigail was, whatever her mother had been, Clara had been watching over them both for longer than anyone had lived.

And the photograph in the Pukwudgie shrine the one dated 1947 proved that Clara's vigil was far older than Abigail had ever imagined.