“Ah… ahhh…”
The infant turned her body in the banshee’s arms, gazing longingly toward the stone platform, waving her arms as if wanting to go over.
Getting the sea banshee to understand her intention was no easy task.
After trying three different positions in succession, each time being misunderstood as a sign of hunger and receiving several rounds of milk, on the fourth attempt, Everly added “mama” before the interjection she was using and shifted her gaze repeatedly between the banshee and the stone platform. This time, she finally succeeded in conveying that the little baby wanted to go to the stone platform.
“%#￥…”
The sea banshee lowered her head and rubbed Everly’s forehead. With a flick of her long tail, she swept aside the scattered bones on the ground, carried the infant to the stone platform, and—hesitating slightly under the baby’s eager gestures—placed her down.
The moment Everly’s hands left her, the empty feeling in the banshee’s arms made her anxious. She called out, “Ah ah!” her features twisting in distress, instinctively reaching to scoop Everly back into her embrace.
Having witnessed the banshee’s fury the previous day, Everly dared not resist too obviously. When the banshee’s clawed hand reached for her, she did not flinch. Instead, she wriggled her now stronger arms and legs, crawled forward a couple of steps, and deliberately launched herself toward the banshee’s arms—just as the banshee’s hand arrived behind her, she leaned forward, and in one smooth motion, was securely cradled in the banshee’s embrace.
“Gigg-giggle…” Everly looped her arms around the banshee’s neck, summoning all her acting skill, and let out a burst of joyful laughter.
The carefree laughter affected the banshee. She parted her lips, sharp teeth bared, saliva stretching into long threads, and displayed a fearsome grin.
Everly lay in the banshee’s arms laughing for a while, sensing that the creature’s emotions had calmed. Once more, she stretched out her arms, signaling her desire to play on the stone platform.
This time, the banshee hesitated only briefly before letting go.
She somewhat enjoyed the process of the child tumbling into her arms and laughing.
But separation still made her anxious. As Everly crawled two steps across the stone platform, she felt a prickling sensation on her back, like tiny thorns pressing into her skin. She turned her head and saw the banshee crouched low over the platform, staring at her without blinking. Her crimson eyes radiated hostility, and her flicking serpent tail betrayed her irritation.
If too much time passed, she became impatient.
Everly acted immediately, spinning around and crawling quickly back into the banshee’s embrace.
After repeating this seven or eight times, through deliberate “training,” Everly finally desensitized the banshee to the act of “letting go.” The creature could now release her briefly, allowing her to play on her own for a short while. Still, the banshee’s gaze never wavered—she would not allow the infant to leave her line of sight.
Everly yawned.
Interacting with the banshee was unexpectedly exhausting. Countless repetitions of crawling, lunging forward, and silly laughter had drained all her energy. After sucking milk the banshee offered and filling her stomach, Everly closed her eyes peacefully, deciding to wait until she woke up to continue.
…
While Everly, far away in the sea chamber, was using all her wits to teach the banshee to “let go” so she could explore the stone platform, in the town of Pukati, Shelly was engaged in a grueling battle of his own.
His opponents were two police officers.
After Everly had been taken by the banshee, Shelly, in his panic, made a decision that most ordinary parents would likely make—he called the police. In hindsight, this decision turned out to be catastrophically wrong.
The town police stationed in Pukati had been transferred from other cities. They hadn’t grown up here and had never been immersed in the local culture, so naturally, they didn’t believe that some banshee could exist that would steal and eat children. When Shelly told them that his daughter had been taken by a monster, their first reaction was that he must be high on drugs.
After conducting a toxicology test on the furious father and confirming that he was sober and had no mental disorders, the officers then began to suspect that Everly might have been accidentally—or even intentionally—killed by Shelly. They worried that he was reporting her “kidnapping” as a cover story to wash himself of suspicion.
After all—come on—a daughter being snatched by a sea banshee? That was too far-fetched. Making up a story like that? Shelly really seemed suspicious!
To confirm their doubts, the police searched the house thoroughly, checking all knives and sharp objects, even not sparing the palette knives in the art studio. They turned the place upside down, naturally finding nothing—but still, they kept looking at Shelly with suspicion, treating him like a walking suspect.
Shelly was furious to the point of feeling sick. He wanted to chase the officers away and go find Everly himself, but to the police, that sounded like he intended to dispose of a body. They didn’t leave; instead, they clung to him like a stubborn adhesive, impossible to shake off.
The so-called “golden 24 hours” for recovering a missing child passed quickly, ruined by the police’s unintended interference. The longer the time dragged on, the lower Everly’s chance of survival became. Just thinking that his daughter might be suffering somewhere—or worse, already dead—cut Shelly to the core.
He wasn’t a particularly competent father, but she was the only bloodline he had left from his late wife. How could he do nothing and just sit back as she died?
Recalling the stories he had seen at the museum, Shelly decided to go all-in and seek the help of an exorcist.
The only exorcist he knew of was Wester, the one who had performed an exorcism at the Mayflower Apartment. Getting Wester’s contact information wasn’t difficult—he just had to ask the apartment’s landlord. The hard part was coming up with the fee.
“…You’re talking about a banshee? This kind of mythical creature is different from ordinary evil spirits. She’s extremely difficult to deal with. Even I can’t guarantee I’d be able to kill her… Of course, I can try, but the price will definitely be higher than a normal job.”
“How much higher?”
“50,000 US dollars.”
At the mention of that number, Shelly’s vision went black.
Forget 50,000—he didn’t even have 5,000 US dollars combined from all his assets! And exorcists weren’t stupid; they required half the payment upfront as a deposit. That meant 25,000 US dollars. He couldn’t pay the deposit, and there was no way he could trick Wester into doing the work first and paying later.
Yet giving up was out of the question.
Even though he often felt annoyance toward Everly and had on occasion thought about giving her away, that night, tossing and turning in bed, all he could see was her face. He saw her clear, innocent blue eyes silently asking: Dad, are you going to give up on me? Dad, are you going to watch me die? Dad… Dad… Dad?
After a night of moral torment, on the third morning, Shelly mustered the courage to call his father-in-law.
Old John had been a detective in the Dwight State Police Department for many years, experienced and skilled in his work. Even after retirement, he still received a sizable pension every year. Although he spent a lot to maintain his ridiculous “doomsday survivalist” lifestyle, Shelly figured that 50,000 US dollars might not be beyond his means.
He won the gamble.
Half an hour after hanging up, 50,000 US dollars were deposited into his bank account. Shelly paid the money to Wester, and that very afternoon, the exorcist, clad in a long coat, appeared at the entrance to Pukati town.
“First, take me to the museum you mentioned… I already have some theories about the banshee’s identity, but there are still a few things I need to investigate and verify.”
Wester adjusted his hat and said this to Shelly, whose face was drawn and weary.
…
Everly lay on the stone platform, running her hands over the relief carvings beneath her, leaning closer to examine every inch.
Perhaps because she had grown accustomed to the darkness, her vision was now much clearer than at first, allowing her to notice details she had previously missed.
Carefully studying each panel—part guesswork, part observation—she finally reached the last relief and exhaled deeply.
Over this period—though, as usual, without a clock, Everly couldn’t say exactly how long—she had spent a considerable amount of time climbing up and down the platform, all while constantly soothing the banshee’s unstable moods. Through this arduous effort, she finally viewed every relief carving and pieced together the complete story.
The central figure of the reliefs was the sea banshee herself. She had apparently once been a queen of an ancient kingdom, wearing a crown and astonishingly beautiful. Later, a bearded man with a laurel crown and a scepter encountered the queen, fell in love at first sight, and began to court her. The man appeared to be of very high status.
Everly noticed that the first time the queen saw him, she was kneeling, and her posture was full of reverence despite her royal status.
In the next relief, the queen and the man were together, and they had several children. But the man already had a wife—she was hidden behind the clouds in the upper right corner of the carving, watching the couple with pure malice. Everly immediately sensed trouble, and sure enough, in the subsequent reliefs, the wicked wife began her schemes.
To exact revenge on the queen, she cruelly captured all the queen’s children and killed them before her eyes. In the next panel, she did not spare the queen herself—cursing her, she transformed the queen into a serpentine banshee, part human, part snake.
The queen, now a banshee, was driven mad by grief over her lost children. She roamed the world, becoming a monster who hunted and devoured children.
It was not until the final relief that the true source of all this evil—the fickle, cowardly man—reappeared. Fearing his wife, he did not dare to lift her curse. Filled with guilt toward the queen, he secretly granted her a blessing: a pair of eyes capable of seeing the future.
Everly: “Ugh! That’s it? …What a scumbag! Go die, jerk!”
The information in the reliefs acted like a rope, tying together seemingly unrelated clues: the banshee with precognitive abilities, the prophets who warned of disasters in advance, the suddenly discovered gold mine, the children who kept disappearing… The hints were so obvious that, after a moment’s thought, Everly had already guessed the truth buried deep in history.
It turned out that it wasn’t that the town itself had a banshee. Rather, someone had first used the banshee’s precognitive powers to locate the gold mine, which then led to the creation of Pukati town around it. This stone chamber had likely been the place where the Sokdis family secretly kept and fed the banshee all along. Everly had discovered some nearly rotted ropes among the oldest pile of corpses—if the banshee had actually captured the children, there would have been no need to tie them with ropes.
Using the townspeople’s children to feed the banshee, and then exploiting its borrowed prophetic powers to gain respect, status, and money… what a disgusting family. Luckily, the Plos family eventually suffered retribution, their bloodline extinguished—a case of evil being punished.
However, the fact that the banshee’s powers could be used by others meant she was capable of communication. So why was the banshee in front of her now so stubborn, acting as if there was an invisible wall between them? Why was she so difficult to deal with?
Thinking this, Everly’s mind filled with question marks.