Chapter Twenty #3
The idea that I might be the haunted one in this scenario—not a place, not a house, me—doubles me over with fear. Has Molly been with me all this time, following me around like my shadow? If so, why haven’t I seen her again until now?
The only answer I can come up with is that I’ve never been on New Avalon until now.
Maybe the island isn’t haunted so much as it is receptive to hauntings, and everyone who sets foot on it brings their own ghosts.
For Julianne, that’s Dean. Violet’s is her father.
Molly is mine. Maybe Susie and Heather had them as well.
The video of Susie pops into my thoughts as vividly as if I’d just pressed play on her camcorder.
My mind’s eye sees her trudging through the pitch-black woods, in search of something.
She never said what she saw or why she was following it.
But now I’m starting to suspect it was whoever her ghost was.
Heather, too, might have seen someone. A person so unexpected that she dropped her flashlight and chased after them.
I think of Daisy’s diary next. How she wrote about seeing her dead father on the island multiple times.
Whenever she saw him, it ended with her waking up in bed, unsure if she left, how she got back, or if all of it was just a nightmare.
Her confusion is easy to understand. I thought something similar after seeing Molly.
That I had to be dreaming. It was worse for Daisy, though, who mistook her father for Azra.
Which, the more I think about it, might have been intentional on Azra’s part.
“What if it’s not them?”
I’m suddenly restless, my legs itching to move. I begin to circle the oak, unable to stop myself, ducking under its weighty branches as I think about Molly at the window of my cottage. How I was too afraid to check if it was really her. Maybe because, deep down, I suspected that it wasn’t.
“Molly and Dean and Violet’s father. Maybe the people we saw or smelled or sensed weren’t actually them, but something pretending to be them.”
“Azra,” Julianne says.
“What?” Ronan says. “Why?”
“To lure us away from everyone else, into the woods.”
A stricken look comes over Violet, making her appear both spooked and spooky. “Where we’ll disappear.”
“Or be taken,” Julianne says.
Ronan backs away from us like we’re the witches in Macbeth. Toil and trouble. “You’re all sounding crazy.”
Oh, I know, even though it’s technically not us. It’s the situation that’s crazy. We’re just trying to make sense of it.
“It’s not Lindy who’s doing this,” I tell him. “Something else is going on here.”
“I get that,” Ronan says. “But just listen to what you’re saying. You—all of you—honestly think there’s a ghost on this island that’s imitating people we know?”
“I don’t want to be thinking that, but here we are,” I say. “In a place where it’s happened before, with no explanation except that something supernatural occurred. Pete thinks so. He told me everyone around here does. And maybe they all think that because it’s true.”
“But why did it happen?” Ronan says. “And why is it happening again? We’re talking about ghosts here. Why would a ghost lure people? Why would it want to ‘take them,’ whatever the fuck that means?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say it has something to do with the history of New Avalon.
” I resume circling the oak, wary of it and what it holds in its branches, yet also fascinated.
It’s so large, so battered, so old that it might even qualify as ancient.
“Not a hundred years ago, but beyond that. All the way back to the island’s beginnings, when it was allegedly inhabited by witches.
No one knows where they went or what happened to them. ”
“You think that’s when it began?” Julianne says.
“Maybe? Then the island was bought by Roderick Semple, a man who made a fortune off instruments of war. Cannons and cannonballs. God knows how many deaths they caused. He clearly thought something evil lurked here—and tried to protect himself from it. Those daisy wheels are everywhere. We’ve all seen them.
And all of that was done years before Daisy, Mrs. Semple, and the others disappeared, which makes me think Azra isn’t trying to finish what they started a hundred years ago.
Yes, what’s happening is the same, but the details are different.
What we’ve been experiencing here feels personal.
I don’t understand why or how, but Azra knows exactly who we are. ”
Julianne, catching on, says, “‘And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.’”
Ronan scrunches his face in confusion. “Did you just quote the Bible?”
“Second Corinthians,” Julianne says. “What we’re trying to say is that Azra might not be a ghost.”
“Then what are they?”
In her diary, Daisy never specified what, exactly, she thought Azra was. It varied between spirit and tormenter and shapeshifter. She had a name for it, though.
The Darkness.
Which means she thought Azra was something worse than a ghost. And far scarier. So scary that I’m afraid to say it out loud, leaving that task to Julianne.
“A demon,” she says.