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Halloway asked her to clarify. She explained that the Dalhart children weren’t individuals, but extensions of the family. When they needed a child, the family performed a ritual. She didn’t describe it in detail, but she mentioned blood, earth, and what she called “the conversation,” and then a new child would appear, not born of a mother, not as children are normally born. They simply arrived fully formed, integrated into the family consciousness. She said the children shared a single consciousness, a collective mind that allowed them to function as a single organism distributed across multiple bodies. That’s why the separation killed them. It wasn’t trauma or attachment. It was a rupture, like the amputation of a limb. The body could survive, but the limb couldn’t. And when the family consciousness began to fragment in the 1970s, when the children started developing individual identities, it was because the bloodline itself was dying. The rituals had ceased. The connection had been broken. And without it, the children were just bodies, empty shells trying to understand how to be human without ever having learned.
Sarah had told Halloway that she was the last, the final continuation of a lineage that had endured for centuries. She said that sometimes she could still sense the others, even though they were dead: a deep presence in her mind, voices that weren’t voices. She said she had spent most of her life trying to silence them, trying to just be Sarah, a single person, simply human. But it never worked because she wasn’t human, not entirely. She was the last piece of something ancient, something that had remained hidden in the hills for generations, pretending to be a family when it was something else entirely. And now, with no way to continue, no way to perform the ancient rituals, no way to give rise to another generation, she waited. She waited for the lineage to finally end. She waited for the last thread to break. She looked at Halloway across the table in that restaurant and said, “When I die, he will die with me. And perhaps that’s for the best.”
Sarah Dalhart died on January 9, 2018. She was found in her apartment in Bluefield, West Virginia, sitting in a chair by the window, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes open. The coroner estimated she had been dead for three days before anyone noticed. There were no signs of a struggle, illness, or injury. Her heart had simply stopped. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest. However, the coroner noted something unusual in his report. Her body showed no signs of rigor mortis or decomposition. Even after three days, her skin remained smooth and cool to the touch, as if she had died only moments before. When they tried to move her, her body was incredibly heavy, like the children in 1968. It took four people to lift her into the coroner’s van. By the time she arrived at the morgue, she weighed practically nothing.