Diary Entry June 11, 1926
Katrina is gone!
No one knows how it happened or where she went. She’s simply not here anymore, even though there’s no way off the island.
I’m the one who discovered her missing this morning.
I sought her out because it remained unclear if what I experienced during the night was just a bad dream or something that actually occurred.
The dirt on my boots suggested the latter, which made me worry about Katrina.
After changing into my dress, I rushed outside to make sure she was okay.
That’s when I saw her clothes hanging high up in the oak. It was a mystifying sight. I had no idea why they were there or how they came to be snagged in the tree’s branches. It all left me so unsettled that I shrieked. The sound pulled Jonquil from her own cottage, asking me what was the matter.
“That,” I said, pointing to the clothes in the oak. “Those belong to Katrina.”
“Why are they up there?”
I couldn’t begin to guess, and so I said nothing.
Instead, I turned to Katrina’s cottage, noting how it was exactly the same as mine.
All the cottages were. Looking at it, I thought about the vision Katrina claimed was a joke to scare me but that I assumed was real.
She said she had seen a cloaked figure standing outside my cottage.
But at that moment, I started to think she was wrong about what she had seen.
That it wasn’t my cottage in her vision, but her own.
And the figure in the cloak waiting just outside the door was the same one I had followed in my nightmare.
Azra.
“Please look in Katrina’s cottage,” I said to Jonquil. “See if perhaps she’s still inside, fast asleep.”
“Why can’t you do it?” Jonquil said.
Because I was too scared to check for myself. I didn’t want to be the one to discover it empty, which I feared it was.
By this time, Mrs. Minafer had emerged from her own cottage, drawn outside by our talking. One look at the clothes in the tree and she instantly began to fret. “We must tell Mrs. Semple,” she said.
“Let’s first make sure Katrina is indeed gone,” I said while giving Jonquil a cajoling look. She relented and, with a sigh, entered Katrina’s cottage, emerging seconds later.
“She’s not there,” she said.
I told them about my nightmare-that-might-not-have-been-one-at-all and that I had a suspicion where Katrina could be—the large rock in the clearing. In what condition, I shuddered to think.
Jonquil agreed that we needed to look there, despite the protestations of Mrs. Minafer. “Those woods might be dangerous,” she warned. “Perhaps whatever took Katrina is hiding there, waiting to take you.”
“Well, they’ll be waiting a long time,” Jonquil said as she began striding toward the trees. “Because I don’t plan on going anywhere.”
“Me, neither,” I said, reflecting on the horrible voice of Azra I’d heard the other night during the séance.
You will be last.
I’m certain all of it is related, from the voice to Katrina’s vision to my nightmare.
Now Jonquil and I are about to set off into the woods to see if I’m right. I pray I’m wrong about what happened upon that rock last night—and that all of it was just a bad dream that shall never be repeated.