11
THE CIRCULAR GLOW of the flashlight hovered like a firefly in the rainy night. Phil watched it for a moment from the edge of the grove. Elizabeth stood at the well, her back to the tower. She was bent forward at the waist, and although in the darkness her movements were indefinite, she held the flashlight in the air with one hand and seemed to be reaching for something in the water with the other.
He walked out from among the trees, his footfalls nearly silent on the wet ground. When he drew nearer, he saw that aside from the flashlight Elizabeth held what appeared to be barbecue tongs, which she dipped into the dark water within the circle of yellow light. She was intent on what she was doing, on something she saw beneath the surface, and she didn’t look up even when he reached the opposite side of the well and stood in silence watching her. The rain was a heavy mist, and the wind rustled in the shrubbery, but the surface of the water, protected from the wind by the stone wall, was calm. Phil watched the steel tongs, which shined in the beam of the flashlight as she worked them slowly toward an outcropping of rock, careful not to disturb the surface and lose sight of whatever she was after.
Something glinted there—something small that lay on the smooth granite stone. The wind gusted, lifting dead winter leaves and scattering them across the surface of the well, which was illuminated by the moon again, the clouds overhead torn and scattered, the night sky suddenly full of stars between the parted clouds. The reflected moonlight hid the depths of the pool, and Elizabeth paused for a moment, tilting her head as if she might see more clearly on the periphery of her vision. She plunged her hand into the water, reaching downward until her elbow was submerged, keeping the flashlight near the surface, straining to see past the reflected moon and stars, which danced on the disturbed surface of the water now. After a moment she drew the tongs out, moving them slowly, as if they held some desperately fragile thing, and she held the object up in the glow of the flashlight.
It appeared to Phil to be a piece of silver, perhaps a tiny spoon, small and delicate like a child might use, or like one of the souvenir spoons in the rack on the kitchen wall. Elizabeth brought it closer to her face, staring at it, still holding it with the tongs. Phil stepped toward her, and she looked up, apparently startled at the sudden movement, jerking the tongs upward as if in surprised fear that he would take them from her. In that moment the spoon slipped out of the grasp of the tongs and fell back into the well with a tiny splash. Elizabeth gasped aloud, leaned forward, and plunged the tongs into the water, making a wild, futile effort to retrieve the spoon. Phil watched as it sank away into the depths, still glinting in the moonlight and somehow magnified by the clear, moonlit water.
Ripples spread across the well, casting a hundred shifting shadows, the lines of light and shadow swirling together, crisscrossing in geometric confusion. Phil impulsively stepped back away from the edge, struck with an uncanny and indefinable premonition. He shivered, feeling a mournful presence on the wind, hearing a voice that whispered through the dead winter grass. He glanced at Elizabeth, who stared intently into the depths, her mouth partly open, as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t quite.
And then there was a sudden and inexplicable shift in the motion of the well water, an instant in which the wind died and the water itself stood still. He looked into the moonlit depths, and there came into his mind the idea that for the past few moments he had been watching something in a mirror, but that now he could see through the mirror, and the moonlight shone from out of a starry sky that lay somewhere beneath the water itself. Just then the moon became one with the silver oval of the still-sinking spoon, and until it sank away utterly and disappeared, he was certain that what he saw was not the reflection of the moon at all, but the pale face of a child, its eyes closed in sleep or in death.