Chapter Text
“Tell me more about the Bellows,” Ramon says. They’re sitting in the empty theater lot, surrounded by pale dust on all sides. They’d taken a detour after Stella had gotten out of school, wandering the streets and fields and back roads, thinking about the stories in the book, the disappearance of Timmy Milner, and what it meant that the scarecrow in the corner field was wearing Tommy’s jacket. Ramon settles himself on one of the cinder block grills at the edge of the lot, while Stella worries at her sleeves and paces a small distance back and forth.
“There’s not much more to tell,” she says honestly, pausing for a moment to lift her hands a short distance in the air and bring them down on her legs. “Although…” She paces again, differently this time, thinking, swinging her arms with a growing smirk on her face. “There’s one part of the myth we didn’t tell you.”
Ramon shuffles himself around as Stella sits beside him. “What part?”
“The part about Verna,” she says. “The Seventh Bellows.”
There are multiple versions of the Seventh Bellows myth, just like there are multiple versions of the Sarah Bellows myth. The two are closely connected—Verna Bellows was Sarah’s aunt, Deodat’s sister, well-liked by the town, and the Bellows children, even if they felt there was something off about her—though no one could specify what it was—and was particularly close to Sarah herself.
Everyone in town often listened to Verna sing praises about her niece, the niece no one around town ever saw, the one with no pictures left behind—though not even Verna herself had a single picture hanging in the Bellows house. The only clue to her identity was painted over by one of the family in a blind rage, they say, and the damaged painting the kids had found in the dining room was the only real look at who Verna Bellows was. Her appearance was lost to time, but everyone knew one thing about her: she loved Sarah more than life itself.
(There were a few other rumors, too, rumors that Verna and Delanie had been overly fond of each other, to a degree that had the women in the other prominent families concerned for Delanie’s reputation and wellbeing, but neither of them nor Deodat ever commented.)
So it was a shock to everyone when, just a few months before children started dying, Verna Bellows disappeared.
One night she was there, and the next, she was gone.
Some sources said the night Verna disappeared there was a horrible commotion in the Bellows house. A horrid, ear-piercing wailing that could be heard across the valley. Some said they could hear Verna screaming Sarah’s name, pleading for mercy, and others said all they heard was wailing before the sound was cut short, and no one heard from or saw Verna Bellows ever again.
And this was where things diverged.
Some say Verna herself listened to Sarah’s scary stories, sat on the grass with the children who had later died by Sarah’s hand, and listened to her through the wall. And it was that very action that condemned Verna to a horrible fate.
Some say she had her own story written, and that somewhere in Sarah’s book, Verna’s name was scrawled in blood, penned by Sarah in a fit of rage, and the wailing they had heard in the night were Verna’s last breaths before she died.
No one knows what drove Sarah to kill the aunt that had loved her so dearly. Some say Verna had gotten too close to Sarah. She’d discovered what Sarah was planning to do, to poison the town’s children, and when she’d tried to stop her, she’d been killed. Others say Verna had been murdered in cold blood, a trial run before Sarah unleashed her wrath on the town’s children.
Whatever the case, everyone could agree on one thing: in the long line of Sarah’s bloodshed, Verna Bellows died first.