They Thought She Just Wanted Food — Until She Took Them to the Woods (2 of 3)

The next morning, the tapping came again. And the morning after that.

They began to call her Brindle. In the beginning, they laughed it off — left her bits of bread, seeds, the occasional walnut. But as the years went by, Brindle’s visits grew… precise. Always at dawn, always three sharp knocks, never a moment later or earlier.

Local folklore whispered that animals sometimes carried messages from the other side — omens, tokens, debts owed by the unseen. An elderly neighbor swore that a squirrel had been knocking on her own parents’ door decades ago, just before a flood swallowed half the town.

The McAllisters brushed it off — until the eighth year.

That March, the weather turned strange. Warm winds at midnight, frost by noon. On the first of the month, Brindle didn’t just knock; she refused to leave. She chattered, ran to the edge of the yard, then back again.

Finally, Mr. McAllister followed. She led him beyond the fence line, through the birches, to a part of the woods he didn’t recognize — a hollow older than the road itself.

At the center stood a stone well, crumbling with age, half-swallowed by ivy. It shouldn’t have been there. They’d walked these woods countless times; they would have seen it. But there it was, the air around it colder than the rest of the forest.

Brindle sat at the rim, still as a carved figure.

When Mr. McAllister approached, he saw it: tucked just inside the lip of the well was a small bundle, wrapped in oilcloth and bound with twine. The cloth was brittle, the twine damp, but inside was a tin locket no bigger than a coin — and a folded scrap of yellowed paper.

The note was short, scrawled in an uneven hand: “Paid in full.”

He looked up, heart pounding, but Brindle was already gone.