The Singing in Tallow Creek

Nadine Prouse, a 63-year-old woman with a lifetime's familiarity with Tallow Creek, begins hearing unexplained singing near a bend where a sycamore deadfall collects. The sound is beautiful but unsettling — not quite recognizable, not quite human. After a second encounter and a fleeting glimpse of a pale, wrong-proportioned figure standing beneath the surface, she pulls back from the creek entirely and starts walking the fence-line instead. When she calls an older neighbor, Lorna Veach, looking for an explanation, Lorna is evasive but tells her the spot has long carried a dark reputation — her own father avoided it without ever explaining why. Lorna eventually connects it to Leanna Prouse, Nadine's late husband's great-great-grandmother, who used to sing along the creek and was found floating dead near that same bend. Nadine follows Lorna's advice through the fall and into winter, convincing herself the ice seals whatever is down there. But the singing finds her anyway, pulling her toward the creek in a kind of trance. She steps onto the soft ground at the bank's edge, falls through the ice, and in the final moments the story shifts — the cold becomes warmth, the terror becomes peace, the thing in the water seems to take her. The ending doesn't announce itself as a death. It just closes, the way the current closes over.