I am not a person who writes to the paper. I want that understood before anything else, because I would not have you think I went looking to be in the pages. The Board asked, at the end of that piece a fortnight back, for anyone who had seen a thing to send it in. I respect the Board and read this paper every day, which is the only reason I am writing down what I have seen.

I saw her on the low road past our fence, the evening before last, at that hour when the light goes the color of a bruise and you cannot yet say you need a lantern (but you secretly want one). A woman, grey shawl, walking. I took her at first for Sela’s girl coming back late from the well, and I lifted my hand and called out did she want walking home, because you do not let a woman walk the strip alone at dusk. But she did not turn and she did not slow. She kept on at that same even pace, and I stood at my own gate with my hand still up like a fool greeting the empty road, and the cold that went through me then was not the chill of the evening. I have felt cold evenings and this cold went straight to my soul.

Initially, I thought the cold was just a feeling, and the strange behavior only Sela’s girl not seeing me. I brought up the funny story to my family at the dining room table. They were all more confused than I was. “She was going the wrong way,” my husband said. “Our low road meets the Downs road, and the Downs road runs north. Are you sure she was not walking north?”

The next day I saw the same thing, and I raised my hand again and called out much louder this time. I needed to be sure. The same thing happened. I couldn’t believe it, so I ran after her (she was walking painfully slow). I got within five feet before I realized I was not looking at Sela’s girl. I stopped dead in my tracks and watched the woman walk south. I triple checked.

When I saw this, I didn’t tell anyone. That is my confession in this, and I think it is the confession of the whole strip. I was raised Evernal enough to believe that you keep your eyes on your own door and let what passes pass in silence, and I told myself that naming it would only feed it, and I said nothing for two days. Then at supper my father, who is not a fanciful man, who has buried more people than he has ever wept in front of, went quiet over his plate and said he had seen a light in the Hallorans’ old place three nights running. The Hallorans have been gone since the fires. He said the light was not staying put. It had been in the north window the first night and the middle window the next and last night it was in the low south room, as if someone were walking through the dead house from one end to the other, slow, and would be out the far side and gone before the week was done.

And then my sister set down her cup and said she had not wanted to worry me, but the children would not take the crossing anymore, because of the pale woman who stands there at the blue hour watching the road, and my sister had gone to see for herself and had seen her, and had stood a while trying to work out what the woman was waiting for, and had come away certain of only one thing, which was that the woman was not watching the road north. She was facing the other way. She was looking down it, south, the way you look at a thing you have decided to do and have not yet found the nerve for.

Three of the four of us at one table. Three different nights, three different figures, and not one of us had said a word until the silence broke all at once. And when we laid them side by side, the light moving south through the dead house, my woman on the low road going south past the fence, the pale one at the crossing facing south and gathering herself, the thing that emptied the warmth out of that kitchen was not that we had each seen a ghost. It was that we had each seen a ghost going the same way. They are not wandering, for wandering has no direction. These have a direction, and they are headed the way we were all of us raised never to ask about. I will tell you the last of it and then I will stop, because it is the part I have not said aloud even to my father. I am not sure the woman on my road was a stranger. There was something in the set of her shoulders under that shawl. When she walked she was confident, like she knew where she was going and had seen it before. I have not let myself ask what that means, and I am certainly not going to do that here. But I will tell you what frightened me worst, standing at my gate with my hand in the air. It was not that she would not turn to me. It was watching her walk out of town in the direction no one dares go.

So this is my account, since you asked for accounts. If you have seen your own, I am telling you that you are not the only one. I am not going to offer warnings because everyone in the Faded Lands knows better than to follow or interact with ghosts. Instead, I am going to suggest something that no one in the Faded Lands has done. I think it’s time we discuss what lies south of our town. These ghosts arrived for a reason and they are all heading south for a reason. I know someone has answers and I think it’s time they come forward.

Nettie Combe farms with her family on the outer strip past the low road. This account was sent to the Faded Lands pages in answer to the Community Board’s request. Anyone who has seen the like is asked to write to the desk by owl.