From the Journal of Caleb Dooley, January 16

[not_a_haint]

January 16, 2026

When I left Baker's Gap in 1927, I have a vague memory of a faint hope that I'd be able to return. The hope of a child, perhaps. The optimistic conviction that somehow everything would be okay. That the grownups would fix it. But I don't think I ever really believed it. Or maybe that's hindsight talking.

I know for certain that the goal was to take whatever it was that SHE put inside me, out. To break the curse, cure me, something. Miss Boggs, may the Green keep her, was able to ease my burden at least. Miss Ellie took me to every practitioner and witch she knew about, even summoning Mr. Bartholomew. No one had seen anything like me, but they all agreed on one thing; I might be able to learn to control it. But nothing could get rid of it.

Miss Ellie believed she could protect me, and with Mr. Bartholomew's help, teach me to call off the abominations that rose whenever I was threatened. I was already getting the hang of not looking at the world and seeing death.

I stayed with her for almost a year, but then what she'd feared from the beginning almost happened. You see it wasn't bad enough that a creature from our darkest folk tales had cursed me, that curse had made me a target.

She told me over and over how much it broke her heart that she couldn't protect me, that she had to send me away. But I think maybe...

Had I somehow known that I wouldn't be able to stay? Did losing my second family inure me to the pain of having to say goodbye again? Or maybe I tried so hard to put on a brave face for her that I believed it.

In any case she took me to Granny Amburgey's holler herself which apparently set me up as an outlier from the get go. That makes me sound like an outcast but that wasn't the case. It just meant that when we compared hard luck stories I tended to lose.

Once again I don't think I ever expected to see her again, though I got regular letters from her and Miss Marcie. That also set me apart from some of the kids. Not all of them but Granny encouraged us to keep it to ourselves. She was afraid it'd make the kids who had NO ONE feel worse.

And then when I was sixteen Miss Ellie came to see me. She told me that she reckoned I was old enough to learn the truth about who was after me. She told me about Barrow and Locke, two powerful families who served the Dark, about the black stag, who's name "sounds like Hornet Head but isn't", an avatar of the Dark itself. But those were folks who only MIGHT be after me.

Her real concern was Good Mother Ministries. They worship the Dead Queen, and had not only discovered my existence, they were the reason she'd had to give me up. They'd found me while I was living with her, claiming they were my kin. If she hadn't caught wind in time, and gotten me hidden, they could have gotten the law on their side and taken me.

And I'd rather not contemplate what would have happened then.