Chapter 46
Sara
Independence Day
The midnight trips to town have grown more difficult.
My eyesight is failing. My bones and joints ache all the time.
The other day, I caught sight of my own reflection in the stream and did not recognize the thin old woman who looked back at me.
When did my hair become so gray? My face so heavily lined with wrinkles?
It pains me to think of what will happen to my beloved Gertie when I am gone. She will go on living forever. My time in this world is limited.
And, as old as she may get in years, she is still only a child and makes a child’s plans and choices.
Who will be here to keep her company, to help her control her impulses, once I am gone?
“Are there others?” she wrote into my hand one night not long ago. “Others like me?”
I was not sure how to answer. I had reflected on the question before, and decided that surely, in all the years people had been making sleepers, she could not have been the only one to spill blood. “There might be,” I told her. “But if there are, they are well hidden.”
Secretly, I pray she is the only one.
It seems that she needs to feed every few months.
She grows angry and withdrawn, then weak, and we must venture out in search of food.
I have brought her squirrels, fish, even a deer on occasion.
(How ironic that the hunting and trapping skills taught to me so long ago by Auntie are the very skills that have enabled us to survive.) I leave the offerings outside the cave and go take a long walk while she feeds.
She does not wish me to watch (nor am I able to stomach it).
The truth of it is, the animals I bring do not satiate her.
What she longs for most (how I shudder to write it!) is human blood.
I have brought her this, too.
I shall not share the details of my crimes here—they are too horrific to mention. Suffice it to say that if there is a Hell, the Hell Reverend Ayers always warned us of in his sermons, that is where I belong, where they will find me in the end.
It shames me to say it, to confess all that I have done, but Gertie is, after all, my creation.
My child by birth, and my sleeper awakened.