Reverend Mitchell, who is silent, can speak to the voice. “What education, daughter? What have you learned?” Ruth smiled, conveying the first genuine emotion Brennan had seen in either of them, though the smile itself was rather strange, too wide, too wide, revealing too many teeth. “How to be human,” she said simply. “We’re not very good yet. We make mistakes. Mom saw our mistakes. So she had to stop teaching us. Dad saw it too. They both saw that we weren’t quite right, that we weren’t quite right, and that terrified them. Fear makes people unpredictable; it makes them dangerous to our work. So we had to help them stay calm. Things that are better teachers than things that move.”
Silence reigned during the verse, broken only by the rustle of Thomas Perry’s pencil as he scratched across the paper, writing words that, he later said, had haunted his dreams for years. Dr. Walsh spoke first, with the precision of someone struggling to maintain composure in the face of something overwhelming. “Ruth, when you say the Harlows had to stop teaching you, do you mean you killed them?” The boy, Raphael, tried to improvise. The sound was like crashing water, and when he spoke, his voice was identical to Ruth’s, as if they were two instruments playing the same note. “We didn’t kill them. Killing is what you do to living things. Mom and Dad never really lived. Not really. When we found them, they were already empty. We simply helped them identify. We gave them a sense.” You should be grateful.
Brennan felt a knot in his stomach. “What do you mean, they were already empty?” Ruth continued, her expression serene, almost blissful. “People are so fragile, Sheriff. Your thoughts, your souls, are connected by the thinnest of threads. Fear, trauma, desperation… these things can break those threads so easily. Mom and Dad came to us already broken, already empty. They lost their children, you know, four of them to scarlet fever, three years before we moved here.”
They were grief-stricken, empty, desperate to fill the void left by their dead children. We simply offered to fill it. We offered to become the children they had lost. And they wanted us so much, so desperately, that they were willing to overlook minor inconsistencies, minor anomalies that suggested we weren’t fully human. Love blinds people, doesn’t it? Or maybe it does. Mom and Dad chose not to see who we truly were because they needed us to be who they created us to be.
“So you’re saying the Harlows knew you weren’t really children?” Brennan asked, forced to understand the mechanics of the horror, even as a part of her yearned to escape. “They knew and they didn’t care,” Rebecca replied, her voice blending with Ruth’s in an eerie harmony that suggested they were speaking of a shared consciousness. “In a way, yes.”
The part of them that was still rational, that could still think clearly, realized something was wrong with us. But that part, overwhelmed by sadness and despair, overcame that rationality. They learned to see us as real children. And we learned by observing them. We learned to behave more humanly, to engage in childhood rituals with greater empathy. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Until suddenly, it vanished.
Mayor Caldwell leaped to his feet, his chair scraping pitifully across the floor. “This is absurd. These children are clearly in trouble, probably because of the abuse they suffered at the hands of the Harlows. We should end this interrogation and take them to a hospital, to a proper psychiatric facility where they can receive treatment.” But Dr. Walsh raised his hand, pale but determined. “Wait, let’s stop. We need to understand something.” He turned back to Ruth. “You said ‘who we really are.’ So who would we be, Ruth? If we weren’t human children, who would we be?”
The question hung in the air like smoke, and for the first time, the seven children looked uncertain, as if trying to comprehend something beyond their strange collective intelligence. Ruth spoke slowly, carefully, as if trying to translate a complex thought into a language lacking the proper vocabulary. “We don’t have a name for what we are, at least not in your language. Where we come from, we were called observers, learners, empty beings who fill themselves. We exist in the spaces between things, in the gaps where reality has no precise location.”
We are drawn to pain, loss, the void that death carves into the fabric of a friend. We slip into these voids and learn. We observe how people communicate, how they love, how they suffer, how they pretend everything is fine even when it isn’t. We are good observers, but not yet perfect. That’s why we need practice, that’s why we need teachers like Mom and Dad. Every family we study brings us closer to perfection, to the point where we become so close that we can move through the world unnoticed, filling the void left by dead children, replacing those who are missing, becoming the sadness we wear in skimpy clothes and claim is still alive.
The horror of what was written slowly became unbearable. These things, whatever they were, were parasites of grief. Creatures that fed on the void left by death in families and learned to imitate children, studying the desperate attempts of grieving parents to restore what was lost. And the Harlows were their next class, their last chance to perfect their imitation of humanity. Reverend Mitchell crossed himself, his lips in silent prayer. Thomasa Perry’s hand was trembling so violently that her handwriting was almost indistinct. Brennan forced herself to ask another logical question, though she dreaded the answer.
“How many families did you do this for? How many times did you practice?” Rachel replied, her voice joining the collective harmony that seemed to come from all seven children at once. “A Maltese family. We don’t remember the exact number.” Time passes differently where we come from, but we’ve been learning for centuries. With each step, we become more aware, understand a little better how to be what people need.
