CHAPTER 10 — REBECCA
Mara waited until George had gone downstairs before opening Rebecca Kant's diary again.
The small blue-covered book felt strangely heavy in her hands, despite being little more than a child's notebook.
She sat at the desk inside the locked bedroom, beneath the faded photographs that had survived when almost every other photograph in Blackwood House had been removed.
The first pages were innocent enough. Rebecca wrote about school, books, birthdays, rainy afternoons, and small arguments with her parents.
She complained about mathematics homework and described her mother's cooking in affectionate detail.
There were drawings of flowers, trees, birds, and the house itself.
Reading them, Mara could almost imagine the ordinary life that had once existed inside the room.
Rebecca had been a normal child living in what appeared to be a normal family.
Nothing in the early entries suggested the darkness that would eventually surround her.
But as Mara turned the pages, the handwriting slowly changed.
The sentences became shorter. The spaces between entries grew longer. The childish drawings disappeared.
The first disturbing entry appeared several months before Rebecca's final year in the house.
She wrote about waking late at night because she heard voices downstairs.
At first she assumed her parents were arguing, something she described as unusual because her father rarely raised his voice.
She mentioned another man's voice, one she did not recognize.
Rebecca wrote that she had tried to listen from the top of the staircase but her mother had suddenly appeared and ordered her back to her bedroom.
She had asked who the man was. Her mother had told her not to ask questions.
A few days later, Rebecca wrote about another visitor arriving after midnight.
She described hearing a car stop outside, followed by footsteps crossing the porch.
She never gave the visitor a name. Instead, she wrote that her father had told her to stay upstairs until the person left.
Mara paused at the entry and looked toward the bedroom door.
The diary didn't describe anything supernatural.
There were simply people coming to the house at night, adults arguing behind closed doors, and a child being deliberately kept away from conversations she was too young to understand.
The entries became more troubling as Mara continued.
Rebecca began writing about names she was forbidden to mention.
She never explained who the names belonged to, only that her parents became angry whenever she repeated them.
One entry described Rebecca asking her father why a particular man was never allowed to come through the front door.
Her father reportedly became furious and told her never to say the man's name again.
Another entry mentioned a woman Rebecca had seen standing outside the house near the trees.
Her mother had pulled the curtains closed and told her that the woman was not there.
Rebecca seemed confused by the response.
“But I saw her,” she had written. “Mom said sometimes people see things they shouldn't.”
Mara read that sentence twice. The language was unmistakably that of a child trying to understand adults who were refusing to explain themselves.
The more she read, the more she realized that Rebecca's fear had not begun with the night she disappeared.
It had been building slowly, quietly, over months and perhaps years.
One entry from 1997 described a gathering at the house.
Rebecca wrote that there had been six adults downstairs that evening.
She counted them because her father had told her to stay in her room, but she had looked through the gap beneath the door when they walked past the hallway.
She remembered six pairs of shoes. Six voices.
Six people. She wrote that one of them had been arguing with her father and that her mother had been crying in the kitchen.
Later, she heard something break. Then everything became silent.
Rebecca wrote that she had wanted to leave her room, but her father had warned her not to open the door no matter what she heard.
The next morning, the house looked completely normal.
Breakfast was prepared. The broken object had disappeared.
Her parents refused to discuss what had happened.
At the bottom of the page, Rebecca had written a single sentence: “Dad says grown-up problems disappear if nobody talks about them.”
Mara closed her eyes for a moment. She was beginning to understand that silence itself had become part of the family's survival.
Several pages later, Rebecca wrote about the three knocks.
The entry was dated October 1998, only days before the final entries in the diary.
She described waking at night and hearing three slow knocks from downstairs.
Her father entered her room almost immediately and locked the door behind him.
He told her that if she heard the knocks again, she was not to answer them.
Rebecca asked who was knocking. Her father refused to say.
She asked whether it was one of the people who had visited before.
Again, he said nothing. Then she wrote something that made Mara stop reading: “Dad looked scared.”
Rebecca had apparently never seen her father frightened before.
According to the diary, Daniel Kant checked the hallway several times that night before returning to her room.
He told her to keep the curtains closed and never look outside if she heard a vehicle arrive after midnight.
Mara looked toward the window of the locked bedroom.
The curtains were still there, faded and stiff with age.
For a moment, she imagined a little girl standing behind them, listening to the same sounds Mara and George had heard decades later.
The final pages were the most difficult to read.
Rebecca's handwriting had become hurried and uneven, and several pages had been torn from the diary.
She wrote that her parents were arguing more frequently.
Her mother wanted to leave. Her father kept insisting that they needed to wait.
Rebecca mentioned boxes being packed and then unpacked again.
She wrote about documents being hidden, photographs disappearing from the walls, and her father spending long periods in the basement.
One entry contained a sentence that Mara immediately recognized from everything they had discovered: “Daddy says they know about the room.”
Rebecca never explained who “they” were.
She wrote that her mother had told her not to trust anyone outside the family, while her father kept saying that someone was watching the house.
Then came the final entry. The date was October 17, 1998.
Rebecca wrote that her father had told her they were leaving that night.
Her mother had packed a small bag for her.
Rebecca asked where they were going, but neither parent gave her a clear answer.
Then, near the bottom of the page, the handwriting suddenly became darker and more hurried.
“Tonight Dad says we're leaving. But I don't think everyone is going with us.”
Mara stared at the sentence for a long time.
She read it again, hoping she had misunderstood.
But there was no ambiguity. Rebecca had believed that the family was leaving, yet something had made her suspect that they would not all leave together.
Mara looked around the room. The child's clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe.
The schoolbooks remained on the desk. The photographs were still on the wall.
The stuffed rabbit sat exactly where someone had left it decades earlier.
If Rebecca had left with her parents, why had everything remained behind?
Why had her existence disappeared from the property records?
Why had no newspaper article mentioned her?
Mara slowly closed the diary and held it against her chest.
For the first time, she felt something more powerful than curiosity.
She felt grief for a child she had never met.
George appeared in the doorway. “Mara?” She looked up.
He immediately noticed her expression. “What happened?”
She handed him the diary. “Read the last entry.”
George opened it and read silently. When he reached the final sentence, his eyes stopped.
He looked at Mara. “She knew something was wrong.”
Mara nodded. “And she was right.” George looked around the room.
“Then where did she go?” Neither of them had an answer.
He turned toward the hallway, thinking about the basement, the repaired floor, the brass key, and the three knocks.
Mara looked once more at Rebecca's final words.
The house had preserved everything the outside world had forgotten—the photographs, the schoolbooks, the diary, the child's room.
Somewhere within those walls was the answer to what happened on October 17, 1998.
And if Rebecca had been telling the truth, then the Kant family had not simply disappeared.
They had been separated. And someone had made sure the world would never know.