The Hallow’s Eve Disappearance

By dusk on All Hallows’ Eve, Hiram Craven had set two places at the supper table and checked the apothecary clock eleven times.

Edith had promised to be home before the lamps were lit.

Outside, dead leaves scraped along Main Street. The shop sign swung on its iron hooks, its painted stork carrying a bundled infant through a sky worn pale by weather. Usually, Edith complained about the squeaking. Tonight, Hiram would have given anything to hear her complain.

He stepped onto the pavement. Raven’s Peak had shuttered itself early. Beyond the last houses, a wolf called from the ridge.

Sheriff Griswold had come by an hour earlier, bringing mud into the shop and very little comfort.

“Your wife knows those woods,” he had said. “She’s likely lost track of the light.”

“She took no basket. No shawl.”

The sheriff had glanced at the clock. “We’ll get some men together if she isn’t back by morning.”

Morning. As though the hours between were an inconvenience Hiram might sleep through.

He returned to the counter and lifted Edith’s shawl from its peg. A sprig of dried lavender caught in the fringe. She tucked it into drawers, coat pockets, anywhere she thought the world could stand to smell a little kinder.

Hiram folded the shawl over his arm, took a lantern, and locked the shop.

The woodland path began behind the mill. He had walked it beside Edith often enough to know where she would pause: the fallen beech, the patch of wild mint, the flat stone where she emptied pebbles from her shoes.

Tonight he stopped at each place and called her name.

Nothing answered until he passed the stone.

Then a whisper moved between the trees.

He turned so sharply that oil splashed inside the lantern. The path behind him lay empty.

“Edith?”

The whisper came again, farther ahead. He could not make out the words, but something in its rhythm was familiar. Edith used to speak softly to herself when she counted drops at the dispensary.

He followed.

The path narrowed. Brambles caught his coat. By the time he noticed that the wind had stopped, he could no longer hear the millstream.

A clearing opened before him.

At its center stood an ancient tree split from root to crown. Pale light seeped from the cleft. Around it, symbols had been cut into the bark: hooked lines, a broken circle, three small marks beneath it.

Hiram knew them.

As an apprentice, he had found the same shapes drawn in the margin of an old remedies book. Beneath them, in a different hand, someone had written: Do not answer after the second calling.

He had assumed it was a joke between dead men.

“Hiram.”

His name came from the tree.

He raised the lantern. Something glinted inside the split trunk, just above the reach of his light.

A gold ring.

Edith’s wedding band had a tiny notch along its edge. Years earlier, she had caught it against the iron pump in the yard. He had offered to have it repaired.

“Leave it,” she had said. “Now I’ll know mine from all the others.”

The notch faced him.

He pushed his fingers into the cleft. The bark was bitterly cold, but the ring slipped free, warm enough to have just left her hand.

“Edith. Where are you?”

Behind him, leaves shifted under a slow, deliberate step.

A figure stood at the edge of the clearing. Tall and gaunt, it wore robes that hung in strips. Its hood concealed its face. One bare hand reached toward him, palm upward.

Hiram closed his fist around the ring.

The figure waited.

Then, from within the tree, Edith spoke again.

“Hiram.”

The second calling.

He drew breath to answer. Beneath the hood, something lifted its head.

Hiram pressed his lips together.

The outstretched fingers curled.

His lantern went out.

He stumbled backward, clutching Edith’s shawl. A branch struck his cheek. Another tore his sleeve. He kept one hand ahead of him and ran until the ground dropped beneath his feet and he fell hard beside the millstream.

When he looked back, there was only the narrow path.

Griswold found him on the apothecary steps near midnight. This time, the sheriff listened.

At dawn, six men searched the woods. Hiram led them past the fallen beech and the flat stone, but beyond it they found brambles too thick to cross. They searched until evening. There was no clearing. No marked tree.

Edith did not come home.

Hiram kept her ring in a drawer beneath the counter. Through winter, then spring, he asked travelers about the symbols. He wrote to scholars and searched the margins of every old book he could buy. The remedies book from his apprenticeship had been lost years before.

By the following October, Raven’s Peak had made a legend of his grief. Children dared one another to pass the mill after dark. Their parents called them home before sunset.

Hiram kept the shop open.

On All Hallows’ Eve, he set two places at the supper table. He could not explain why. Habit, he told himself, as he laid Edith’s spoon beside her plate.

At dusk, the shop sign began to squeak.

He opened the drawer.

The ring was gone.

Three quiet knocks sounded at the door.

Through the frosted glass, he could see the outline of a woman. Her hand rested against the pane. A gold band caught the lamplight.

“Hiram,” Edith said.

He gripped the edge of the counter.

“I’ve come for my shawl.”

He reached for the key.

Behind him, from the darkened room where he had set their supper, Edith whispered, “Don’t let her in.”