Chapter Twenty-Nine
Present day
The night after Wade tried to shoot his own brother, Helen dreamt of the farmhouse. In her dream, the house was alive with
thoughts and feelings, but it was sick and it was dying. When the house exhaled, it wasn’t breath that flowed from its windows
but smoke. Raccoons and vultures and coyotes circled the house, waiting for it to die so they could pick apart its remains.
The coyote that Helen had seen in the woods eating the rabbit was there. She recognized it because of its bloody mouth. The
raven she had shot was there too, sitting on top of the chimney, engulfed in the home’s smoke. Helen stumbled out the front
door, desperate for fresh air, and saw Isaac standing among the wild animals waiting to scavenge the ruins with them. “Where’s
Wade?” she asked him. “Do you care?” he answered.
Helen woke from the dream with strands of damp hair stuck to her forehead. She often had nightmares, but this one gave her
the overwhelming sense that she had caused some kind of shift in the universe that couldn’t be undone.
She turned toward Wade and realized his side of the bed was empty. The room was dark, with only a glint of moonlight stealing through the window. She looked around the room. The door to the bedroom was slightly ajar.
“Wade?”
There was no answer.
On any other night, she would have gotten out of bed to check on him, but something kept her suspended there. Perhaps the
final remnants of her nightmare.
She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled the loose strands away from her face, and felt a sentence unfold in her blood.
To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.
The words passed through her as if she had perfected them for a recital, except she wasn’t even sure where they came from.
She just knew they were not an original thought. And then in her mind, she saw a wooden coffin, imagined it entombing her,
and she smelled the musky decay of dirt that never sees sunlight. She’d held this exact vision in her mind once before. Weeks
earlier.
Suddenly, she knew.
Those words were from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Premature Burial.” She’d only read the tale of a man being buried
alive that one time, so there was no way she could have memorized the sentence verbatim.
And yet she had.
Her bedroom felt like the coffin now.
She needed to find Wade.
Helen tossed the blankets aside and dangled her stocking feet over the side of the bed, suspended in air momentarily.
On her inhale, she sensed the presence. She felt it in the way that it disturbed the air around her feet, in the way that she went cold all over her body before she even knew what was happening.
As her toes touched the floor, she froze on the edge of the bed, and the only sounds were the night wind whining outside and the rattle of a loose board faintly thumping against the house.
From beneath the bed, something encircled her ankles.
Helen gasped and fell forward to her knees, yanking herself free from its hold. She scrambled to her feet and dashed for the
door. When she reached it, she grabbed the frame and spun around.
No one was there.
The room was silent except for her ragged breathing.
She lowered to her knees and peered under the bed, but all she saw were dark and dusty floorboards.
She stood again. This time she hadn’t just seen something; she’d felt it too. The sensation around her ankles had felt real.
It had yanked her to the floor. The pain in her knees told her it had happened.
Helen stepped into the empty hallway, careful not to touch the walls. They might be complicit in whatever this was.
“Wade?”
She didn’t find him in the bathroom, so she paused outside the guest bedroom. Very quietly, she cracked the door and peeked
inside. Isaac slept peacefully. She gently closed the door and looked toward the living room.
She gasped.
In the shadows of the living room, a figure stood in the corner, indistinct details and edges, but Helen had the sense it
was in a black robe with a sharp hood drawn around its face. It made her think of sacrifices and religious rites, like the
ones W. B. Yeats had performed with his Ghost Club in the early 1900s. She heard a sound, like it was calling to her.
Going back to the bedroom wouldn’t make it go away, and she felt compelled to move toward it, the floor creaking beneath each
step. The fear in her often battled with the curiosity she now had for the darkness, a strange duality that usually emerged
at nighttime. Her hands curled into balls at her sides.
“What do you want?” she whispered as she entered the living room, and in that moment, she clearly saw the way the moonlight played against the window’s curtains and created the impression of folds and curves, but it was all just shadows. There was no dark figure. She was talking to shadows.
Then she saw her Edgar Allan Poe book lying face down in the middle of the room as if someone had deliberately displayed it.
She picked it up and turned it over, expecting to find it open to “The Premature Burial,” but no, it was open to the poem
“The Raven.”
“Helen?”
She jumped as Wade stepped into the room from the kitchen, momentarily blinding her with the lit lantern he held up. He was
in his work pants and an undershirt. After he’d refused being second in line for a bath, he’d apparently found the ability
to remove his own boots but not to put on his pajamas, because she had found him sprawled on top of the comforter that way
when she’d finally gone to bed.
Wade lowered the lantern, and Helen saw that his eyes looked like black saucers.
“Why are you up?” he asked.
She held up the Poe book. “Did you put my book on the floor?”
“No, I was checking the house.”
“For what?”
“I’m just trying to protect us.”
“From Isaac? He’s asleep.”
“He’s pretending to be asleep.”
Wade spoke with such certainty, and she couldn’t meet that certainty with her own, so she fell silent. There was no denying
that something was going awry here in the farmhouse, but Helen thought Wade had it wrong. In fact, as she looked up at his
strained face, she began to wonder if he was the source of it all.
“Let’s go back to bed,” Wade said, as if she was going to be able to sleep now.
She returned the Poe book to the mantel and took down a book of Emily Dickinson poems. As they walked back to the bedroom, she clutched the book tightly in front of her.
Wade nodded at it and whispered, “What are you doing with that?”
“Nothing.”
In the bedroom, Helen didn’t read the Dickinson book. She simply held it to her chest as she lay in bed. Some people ward
off the darkness with a Bible. Helen was going to attempt to do it with poetry.
Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me
Two hours later, still wide awake in bed, Helen got up for a second time. She hesitated for a moment before lowering her feet
to the floor, but no dark hands awaited her, and she felt a spark of anger at herself for hesitating in the first place. She
set the Dickinson book on her bedside table and left the room.
Helen walked down the hall to the bathroom without listening for voices or looking for shadows posing as hooded figures. In
college, she’d had a suitemate in the dorm who was Catholic, and that girl had insisted the devil gets in when you leave doors
open for him. Well, Helen wasn’t going to leave doors open for devils or phantom figures or men with scars across their midsection.
She used the bathroom and was just starting back to her bedroom when a disconcerting feeling came over her again, the same
one she’d had just before the hands had grabbed her from beneath the bed.
The same creeping feeling . . .
And then something dropped straight down in front of her from the ceiling. She let out a strangled noise and fell to the floor,
covering her head with her arms.
Nothing crashed on top of her, but still, she was afraid to pull her arms away and look. She was certain something was still there with her in the hallway. She stiffened her mind, bracing for whatever it was she was about to see, and then she looked up.
A woman hung from the ceiling by a noose, head down as if her neck were broken, swinging slightly from a fresh death. Helen
recognized the dirtied nightgown and the tangled dark brown hair. It was the same woman she’d seen in the flash of light at
the dinner table.
And then the woman lifted her head and opened her eyes wide.
Helen stared into a face that looked exactly like her own. The hair, darker than Helen’s, wasn’t actually a darker shade of
brown after all. Helen realized the hair was slicked with mud when she saw how dirty the face was—her face—on this hanging woman.
Shaking in fear, Helen squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them, the hanging version of her was gone.
She rolled onto her side and pulled her knees to her chest, hugging herself. She stayed coiled that way until the rising sun
came through the living room windows and filtered into the hallway. It was only then that she sat up, cobwebs of the earlier
fright still stuck in her brain.
Helen knew something was terribly wrong, but she told herself she was going to fix it. She wasn’t going to let herself get
pulled down into this madness. She was going to stop it, and she had to start at the source.