Sweet Romance12 min read
"I Pulled Her from the Stream" — Dead Girls, One Mask, and a Fake Principal
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"I pulled her up and my hands went cold."
"I need the phone," a villager said.
"Give it back," I said, but they took it and walked away.
I stood with a wet sleeve in my hands and a dead girl's hair in my palm. Her red jacket stuck to her like a flag. Her face was swollen white and blue. Her legs were bare. The water had carried her toward me, and she had come against the current, moving like someone walking back toward life.
"She's one of ours?" someone asked.
"No." I didn't know. My voice shook.
They nodded at each other and looked at me like I was a trouble that needed carrying. They did what they always did here: they folded their faces down and decided this was an old thing that would not rise to the town.
"Miss Volkov," the boy who had run to tell me came up the path. "They say more girls are missing."
"How many?" I asked.
"Two. Now three." He swallowed. "They count to seven. I heard a voice say, 'three…' before each one."
"Who said that?" I asked.
"No one. Just a voice."
I left the girl's body wrapped in my jacket and walked back to the school. The children were there, bright and messy. Thirty-four of them, all of them alive and not the missing girl anymore. That was what surprised me most: the roster never changed. One dead, one new, numbers fixed.
"New girl," a small voice said. "We have a new girl, Miss Gemma."
"I didn't tell them about the stream," I told the class. I lied in a soft voice. I didn't want their eyes full of fear.
That night I dreamed a voice. "Four," it said, and I woke up as if someone had slapped me.
Days passed and another girl was found dead. "She came out of the sealed bathroom, Miss," a student told me. "She was... hanging."
I walked into places adults closed. I followed coin tracks, facts, and small openings in people’s faces. The principal, Forbes Barlow, told me I was hysterical. He smoked and smiled when he told me the police were informed. Nobody came.
"People don't go far from home," he said. "You came here to teach. Teach."
I started going earlier, leaving later. A new teacher came the morning after the seventh death.
He arrived like a shadow. Jonas Solovyov had a low voice and narrow eyes and a habit of showing up at dawn. He kept to himself in a small room next to mine. Once he came by the closed girl's toilet; once I saw him kneel at the little creek and place a paper boat on the water.
"Why do you put paper on the stream?" I asked when I finally caught him alone.
Jonas didn't look up. "They liked the boats when they were alive," he said. "Let them float."
"You came to help teach. Why are you waking before dawn to do that?"
"Some things you don't talk about," he said. "You watch, Gemma."
He heard things I couldn't hear. Sometimes in class, his gaze would slide to my collarbone and something would twitch in his face like a name. Once I saw him pull a small silver chain out of his sleeve and clamp it to his wrist and suddenly there was a sense of a man who had been made of quiet for a long time.
"Who told you to do this?" I bit at him the day my shoulder woke with seven little red dots in a row. They were bright and new, like a child's paint. They burned if I breathed too hard.
"Do you have seven?" Jonas asked softly.
"Do you know what they are?" I said.
"Not all yet," he said. "But I know they hurt because they belong to someone else."
I ran to a local self-proclaimed shaman, Enoch Simmons, because my aunt told me he sold charms and would look at anything for a price.
"You're young," Enoch said when he saw me. "You carry city heat. This is not a thing for you."
"Please. My shoulder—" I showed him the seven dots.
He stared and then shoved me out the door. "Not my business," he snapped. "Town trouble is deep. Go."
I found Jonas by the creek, and he looked at my shoulder like I'd slid a secret across a table. "Bone-lock seven," he said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"Bone-lock seven," he repeated like he tasted the words. "They put pieces of dead inside you so the dead won't go."
"Who?"
He looked at the hill where the bottle-bright town boiled. "Forbes," he said. "He is not what he seems."
He told me a scrap of paper he had tucked in his jacket. "Read this," he said, and handed it to me.
A yellowed clipping from 1994 lay folded there. "Principal Forbes Barlow drowned searching for missing students," it read. "Bodies found in the river—four students among them." The name under the photo was not the man who ran the school now. The photo stared back from the paper with a different man’s face and a date that should have made everything stop.
"Forbes is dead," I said.
Jonas looked at the clipping, and then at the sky. "Someone took him," he said. "Someone wears him like a mask."
"You mean—"
"A body that shouldn't move, moved," he said. "He walks after children. He eats their names."
The truth tasted like rot. The village had a ritual every August. "Ghost marriage," an older villager told me when I pushed, when I dared. "Match a dead girl to a town boy. Keep the bad from coming."
They called it protection. For years, the town believed the ritual held the weather and the wells and the cattle. For twenty years the ritual had become a command. Children disappeared, girls were brought in by strangers, and the number of boys in the village seemed to feed the hunger.
"You can't stop a thing the town believes," Enoch had said earlier. "It is not a fact to argue with. It is a law."
"Then we will break it," Jonas said.
"How?" I asked.
"We will show them a face they cannot pretend," he said. "We will show them what they have wrapped in masks and called a man. We will make the roof fall."
When the eighth girl died, I followed Jonas into the school. I wanted to catch him to ask why he had left the paper boat in the creek, why he had saved me twice. Instead I walked into the old White Building and found a child hanging in the bathroom, and a moment later I saw Jonas pacing like a man with his back against a wall.
"You saw him go in," I said.
He shrugged. "He is careful."
"I thought you said he wasn't him," I said.
"He isn't," Jonas said. "But he acts like a man. He takes the place of men."
I watched as the school moved like a hive disturbed. Forbes came to the White Building like a wisp and was more interested in the new burial ground than in the child's face. He spoke like a priest. He touched the child's forehead like a man blessing a calm end. The village followed with spades and blank faces.
Something inside me snapped. I ran back to my room, shoved things into a bag, and tried to leave. A woman who carried firewood saw me.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Anywhere," I said.
Her eyes slid to my back. "He will not let you," she said. "He never lets any who looks."
I tried the back trails. I ran with only ten steps before I was grabbed from behind and dragged into bushes. "You ran," a low voice said.
"Jonas!" I tried to squeal.
He hauled me up and slammed me into a hollow. "I told you not to go," he said.
"You saved me twice," I said. "Why?"
"Because you are not dead yet," he said. "Because I am tired of burying children."
"Who are you?" I demanded.
He looked away. "Someone who once lost his voice," he said. "Someone who will not let this keep happening."
He carried me down into a place under the school where the ground yawned. There was a hidden cave with shelves of masks that were too smooth, too perfect. Faces hung on pegs like fruit; they were painted and thin and human-true.
"What are these?" I whispered.
"Faces for the living and the not living," Jonas said. "The old man who sits in the principal's chair bought these. He pays to hold a face."
"This is madness."
"Yes," Jonas said. "And this is his bargain."
He showed me the clipping again and the list of names the village had passed each year. He told me that someone had gone into the river twenty years ago and never left. Someone came back, but the skin was new and the eyes did not sleep.
"We need to stop the wedding," I said. "On the fifteenth. They will choose the bride that night."
"On the fifteenth, they will marry the dead girl to a boy," Jonas said. "They will pin you as the bride given they plan to, if you cannot hide."
"What can we do?" I asked.
"We will give her back a face," he said. "We will make the mask burn."
He worked in the cave. He tied strips of cloth and made small pouches scented with smoke. He showed me how to hide under a new name. We went to a man who fixed faces with glue and tricks, a man with a cheap shrine to the gods of trickery, and he made my skin look different for a price. My city features were masked. Enoch refused again to help, but he did not stop us from slipping into the place where the fake principal kept his things.
"Why give you a face?" I asked Jonas.
"So you can leave," he said. "So you can be a ghost without being taken as a bride. So the man who wears Forbes will be caught wearing a borrowed man."
On August fifteenth the whole town lit their lamps. There were tables and chairs and a hush like waiting for thunder. They had a list showing "Dragon Little Tiger" as the groom of the night. Tables were set like coffins.
I walked in disguised with a necklace Jonas had given me—green stone, small, heavy with cold. People looked me over and nodded, and no one recognized the girl who had found those first two girls. The bride's coffin sat at the center. The guests circled, chanting in old syllables like someone stirring a bowl.
Forbes rose from his chair and stood like a man who had eaten a hundred dawns. He wore the principal’s badge that wasn't his. He opened his mouth and told them what to do. He called me forward because my new face matched the sign.
"Bring her to the table," Forbes said.
"Not this one," Jonas' voice cut the night. He stepped between us and pulled up a phone. "Watch."
He played a recording he had made at the White Building. It was muffled but the words were clear: voices, a child screaming, a man's hands rough on a girl. Another clip showed a ledger with cash and names. Another showed the yellow clipping he had found taped to a trunk—Forbes' name with a different photo. He held up the masks from the cave like trophies.
"Forbes Barlow, you are not a man of this time," Jonas said. "You are a thing with a borrowed skin. This is your mask. These are your faces."
"Forbes," the villagers said, like they were tasting a new word.
Forbes' mouth moved, but his hands shook for the first time I had seen. "You are making a scene," he said. "These are lies."
"They are on a phone," Jonas said. "They are with me. Want me to play more?"
Someone in the crowd pulled out a small camera. "Record," she said. "Record him."
I watched the color drain from Forbes' face. He reached for the mask at his belt—the thing he had used to change his look. A man cannot always hold the mask in front of him like a shield.
"You stole the man's face," Jonas said. "Who are you? Where did you get it?"
Forbes laughed, and the sound came out wrong. He screamed. "They made me! They saved me! I served them!"
He started naming people in the crowd, naming old debts and passed-down favors. His voice rose into a confession and then into a howl. "I ate the law," he cried. "I ate it and fed on fear!"
"Shut him up!" someone yelled.
But no one moved to stop us. Something in the village broke. The men who had carried the girl's coffin looked at his hands and at their own and did not raise them. The wives who had come with red cloth turned their faces as if water had been poured over them.
"Don't look," Forbes said suddenly. "Don't look at me like I wasn't chosen."
I walked forward because I could not help it. I wanted him to know my eyes were not the child's anymore. I wanted him to be small.
"Why?" I said, perfectly calm. "Why take faces? Why take children?"
He went silent. For a moment I saw him as a man stuck in a play he had long forgotten the script to. He got on his knees then, in the dirt of his own front yard, and put his hands up.
"Please," he said. "Please stop. You don't know what I did for you."
Around him, the crowd moved like weather. Some spat. Some filmed. Someone slapped him hard across the face. His cheeks puffed red. He held his face and started to cry with a child's voice.
"Don't touch him!" Forbes yelled, but the crowd had already seen more than fear could hold.
A woman grabbed the mask from his belt and ripped it away. It came off like wet cloth. The face under it was older and wrong and blinking like a man who had no permission to breathe. Under bright mobile lights, the softness of skin meant nothing. The mask fell, and a hundred phones soaked his fall.
"Forbes Barlow," I said. "This is you now. This is the man who signed for bodies and for paper and for silence."
"He's confessing," Jonas said.
Forbes' allies scrambled. A man called for the sheriff. Jonas moved fast. He had taped another thing to his chest: a list. The list was a ledger showing payments from Forbes to traders who brought girls in. It was proof. A neighbor shouted names, someone else said his bank name. Phones pinged. People streamed to share the video. A young woman pulled the ledger and waved it like a flag.
"Forbes," she spat, "you will beg."
He did beg. He fell on his knees, face streaked with mud and tears. "Spare me," he said. "I will give everything. I'll tell the truth. I'll—"
"You will not give me back what is gone," a farmer snapped, his voice iron.
They filmed him crying. He was a local spectacle, his skin no longer a mask. He lost something worse than pride. He lost the right to hide.
The rest happened quick and ugly and like a wound that cleaned itself. The sheriff—Javier Ferreira—arrived with three men, not from the village but from the county. Jonas had called them earlier that week. He had shown them the clipping and the ledger he'd found hidden in Forbes' trunk. Javier had come, slow and steady, with badges and paper.
Forbes was cuffed. He screamed that the county owed him. He said he had done what had to be done. He said the girls were gifts and the boys were chosen. People held up their phones and streamed it all. The video hit a city number in one hour, then two, and banners popped that showed the school's name and the town and then a wave of tongues and nooses of outrage. Local reporters took the lead.
"He's under arrest for trafficking, for murder, for conspiracy," Javier told Forbes in a low voice. "You will answer in court."
Forbes' wife—if he had one—did not show. A cousin arrived and wiped his hands and walked away. A man who had invested in the school called the journalist and said he was severing ties. The school trust came and said it had no record of the things Forbes said.
"He was always good with papers," someone muttered. "Always liked the ledger."
Men in dark coats came to the house the next day and shut the doors. The town felt more empty. For months the story blew like dust into the county and then into the papers. The ledger went to court. Forbes was stripped of teaching honors and stripped of his house. His bank had quietly closed accounts the day the first video hit broadcast.
They made him sit with the relatives of the girls. He fell on his knees to them and they spat. Someone who had buried a daughter took the shovel and struck his shoulder. He flinched like a dog. He begged me to forgive him in the public square. He cried and shouted until the sheriff put a paper bag over his head and took him into a van.
They pried out the truth step by slow step. The ledger named the men who sent girls to him. One by one they were watched and then taken. The men who had helped him went away and lost their work. The landowners who had been paid to keep silent lost stock and customers. The video's reach made lawyers arrive and an inspector from the city took notes. Forbes' name trended and then trended again with the words "masks" and "ritual" and "ghost marriage." His face, once a mask, was now known where it mattered.
At the same time the children were freed. The girls who had been sold were found in houses outside town and returned. Some were alive and some were not. The ones who survived were taken to the city home. Two were reunited with families who could not be found before. Spring came like a lid lifted.
I felt the dots on my collarbone grow cooler. One night the seven marks faded like candles. A child's voice in the cave thanked me and left.
"You did it," Jonas said. "You kept them from anchoring to this earth."
We buried the masks and the ledger and the list in the river. We placed stones like stitches over the old wound.
"Why did you help?" I asked Jonas the night after Forbes was taken.
He sat by the creek and looked at the boats that I had made and let go. "Because someone had to teach them to float away," he said.
"Who are you?" I asked again.
He shrugged. "A man with old debts," he said. "A man trying to pay them. I knew Forbes because he had been a familiar to my family long ago. We owed him nothing but truth."
"Why the chain?" I touched the silver band on his wrist.
"It keeps me honest," he said. "It keeps me from becoming what he was."
Later, when the cameras had left and the county courthouse hummed with slow justice, people came back to school. They helped fix desks. They brought flowers and left them by the stream. The village was quieter in a new way.
"Will you stay?" the deputy asked me when the city left.
"I will," I said. "There are children here."
"You know you'll have watchers," he said.
"I do," I said.
Jonas and I walked past the creek one evening. The paper boats we made bobbed like small fires in the dark. He reached and wrapped his hand around mine.
"You can go," he said. "You can leave with a new face now. Or you can stay and teach, and keep them safe."
"I thought you wanted me out," I said.
"I wanted them safe," he said. "And you are the only one who ever held their faces."
We kissed then like two people closing a wound. His mouth was careful. It was small and warm and steady. When I pulled back I touched the place where his chain knotted.
"Promise me one thing," I said.
"What?"
"If the world gets strange again, call me before you go to fight alone."
He smiled. "I promise."
We did not end everything that night. We learned there are other men who wear faces and other kinds of trades. But justice had been brought to their door. The bad men were shown and stripped. They cried and were filmed and shamed until they had nothing left to beg with. The children from the town went home or to safe houses. The school reopened with new leaders and county inspection and a sign that read "Locke Town Qianxi Elementary"—we kept the name because you cannot erase a place by erasing its past.
On the first winter after, I stood at the creek where I had found that first girl. I set seven paper boats in the water. They were small and crude. I lit little pinprick candles and let the wax drip. The boats bobbed and went. The water took them.
"Will they ever stop singing?" I asked Jonas.
"They will sing less," he said. "But listening doesn't mean you have to answer every song."
I watched the boats float away. The green stone Jonas had given me warmed on my chest. The scars on my shoulder were only thin lines now. The village moved its face toward the sun, as if remembering how to warm itself without a borrowed mask.
"Keep your face," he said, almost laughing. "You look better in it."
"I kept it for you," I said.
He looked at me like he had seen me fall into a river and come out with a different song. He took my hand and we walked back up the hill toward the school, toward work, toward the life we had carved out between raids of light and small boats.
The End
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