For weeks now the horror of this thing has been how quiet. A silence on their side answering a silence on ours, refusing to make a sound worth naming. I have written before that I thought our silence was threatening. This week it stopped being the question, because their silence broke first, and it’s worse than I could’ve imagined.

Start with the woman on the Downs road, the most seen of the three, the one in the green dress gone ragged at its edges and worked in hard geometric lines of gold and brown, with turquoise at her throat and wrists and her dark hair loose and moving though the evening is still. For weeks the only interaction we had was the gaze turned down and away, as though she were somewhere else and had no use for you. The gaze is still down, but the mouth is not. Two carters and myself on three nights past the waystation have reported the same thing, that as she kept her pace along the south verge she opened her mouth and let out a long screaming cry, a sound like calling something that is long gone. It carried, further than a sound that size has any right to.

The woman at the crossing has done the same, and it is worse from her because she had never so much as moved. Everyone can see her now, not just the children. You will recall her, silver hair long and loose, the band of ice at her brow that will not run in the warm evening, the dark blue gown torn at the hem and the ragged cape over it that the little ones swear glitters like frost. She stood at the second creek all spring and only watched the road south, and the one thing the children could not bear was the smile that looked held up by hand. The smile is down now. This week she has begun to scream at the water’s edge, facing south as she always has, but the cry does not go south with her gaze. It is flung back the other way, northward, up the road toward the strip, the same long call the road woman makes and pitched, folk say, to the same far-off thing. Two of them, on the same nights, staring south and screaming north.

Is someone answering? We do not know.

And then there is the third, who did not scream. You know her house, the old hollow place at the end of the second-creek lane, shutters lit low and warm since the turn of spring and a woman seated inside as though it were still hers, dark hair piled high with a few loose curls at the temples, a jewel at her brow, a deep blue gown fitted at the bodice and long in the sleeve, a belt of silver and sapphire at her waist. She has always looked back at whoever looked in, direct and unhurried and somehow inviting. Emmit Rourke reached the door. He says she was seated as ever and looked back at him as ever, and then, for the first time any of us has heard of, she rose. He watched her cross her own dead floor, her skirts pooling wider and lower across the boards than a gown should sit and the lamplight sliding off them and refusing to settle, and she opened the door that has been shut since the fires and stood on the threshold in front of him. She then whispered in a pained tone “where are they?!”

Emmit says he swears when she moved he heard more than one leg hit the floor. As she moved she did not wait on an answer. She put a hand to his shoulder and moved him aside, not roughly but with no more thought than you would give a gate, and stepped past him onto her own gray porch. And there, out in the open where the whole lane could hear it, she screamed it. WHERE ARE THEY. The same three words, no longer whispered but ripped out of her at the dark with everything she had. And then the screaming left her all at once, and she stood on the boards and cried, quietly, the way a person cries when they have already guessed the answer and cannot carry it. Emmit backed away and left her weeping on her own porch, and he is not ashamed to say he ran, and I would not be either.

Two of them are calling now, out into a dark that will not say whether it answers. The third is no longer content to be looked at through a window and alone. She is rising, and putting the living aside to scream after someone who is not here.

Hollis Barrow writes for the Faded Lands Community Board. Firsthand accounts of the visitors, or anything seen on or past the second creek, may be sent to these pages by owl and will be held in confidence.