Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
All of us spend what’s left of the night in the main house.
Under the circumstances, there’s no other sane option.
And even then, it doesn’t feel entirely safe.
Outside the house, darkness presses against the windows, walls, and doors.
It makes me think how weak these barriers really are.
Just wood and glass. Unnervingly thin and easily shattered.
In the second-floor bedroom I share with Julianne, I go straight to the windows, which provide an elevated view of the green, the cottages, and the giant oak in the center of it all.
From this height, eye level with the bulk of its gnarled, grasping branches, the tree seems even bigger.
A literal monster intent on consuming the entire island, us included.
That’s one reason I draw the curtains. The other is Molly. If she decides to visit again, even here on the second floor, I don’t want to see her.
After using the bathroom down the hall and changing into my nightgown, I return to the room to catch Julianne kneeling beside the queen bed, her head bowed in prayer. “Sorry,” she says. “It felt appropriate. Even though I haven’t prayed in years.”
“I’ve never prayed,” I say, trying not to think about what that does to my odds of making it off the island. Maybe the fact that I was raised by agnostic parents makes me easy pickings.
“You can join me, if you’d like.”
I kneel next to Julianne, following her lead. Eyes closed, palms pressed together, head lowered.
“Dear Lord,” she says. “Please watch over us in our time of need. Please give us the strength to fight the evil that has come into our midst. Please help us however you can. Thank you. Amen.”
I echo her amen and slide into bed. Julianne does the same on the opposite side, like we’re having a sleepover.
Like not a single aspect of this situation is fucked up when, in reality, all of it is.
I snuff out the lamp on my nightstand, and we lie in the darkness, silent and still, but both of us wide awake.
“Do you really think it’s not them?” I ask. “Molly, Dean, Violet’s father. Do you really think it’s a—”
I stop, still unable to say the word both of us are thinking.
Demon.
“I want to believe it’s them,” Julianne says. “I like the idea of seeing Dean again. I’d like to tell him that I’m sorry—and that I hope he forgives me. But I don’t think it is.”
“I thought demons just, like, possessed people.”
“And they do, according to certain faiths. But that’s not all they’re capable of.
Their primary goal is to torment. That’s what my grandparents believed—that demons roamed this earth, provoking people into sinning.
So, yes, they sometimes possess, but they also deceive, toying with people’s thoughts and emotions. ”
“So that’s what Azra might be doing?”
“Possibly, yes,” Julianne says.
I can’t decide which scenario is worse—being stalked by the ghosts of our loved ones or being stalked by a demon pretending to be them.
I look to the covered windows, wondering if Molly is somehow there on the other side, an actress waiting for the curtain to rise.
If so, which Molly is she? The real one or the imposter?
I keep staring at the curtained windows long after Julianne has drifted off to sleep.
An astonishing feat I already know I won’t be able to replicate.
It doesn’t matter that I haven’t slept an entire night since arriving at New Avalon.
Or that what happened to Heather—not to mention talking about Molly, demons, and Azra—has left me utterly drained.
I’m in a house I’m barely familiar with, sharing a bed that’s just as uncomfortable as the one in the cottage. Sleep, I fear, isn’t in the cards.
Instead, I lie awake, frightened by what might be beyond those windows.
This, I think, is what it must have felt like to live in eras only read about in books.
The days of Poe, of Sleepy Hollow, of Salem, Massachusetts.
Times when the darkness, barely kept at bay by fireplaces in cramped parlors and drawing rooms, was far preferable to whatever evil lurked outside the door.
Witches and devils and horsemen with no heads.
All those things that seemed superstitious and naive before I set foot on New Avalon now feel very, very real.
I scan the room’s shadows to see if anything lurks there. The only thing that looks even slightly ghostly is Julianne’s dress, now dangling from a hook on the back of the door. Limp and shapeless, it reminds me of Heather’s and Susie’s clothes still in the oak.
Why they’ve been hung there, both now and a hundred years ago, is impossible to know. Where the women who wore them went is another mystery. They’re simply gone, existing now in some nameless realm between life and death. Limbo, but for the missing. A terrible place to be.
Lying in the darkness, I’m struck by a morbid thought.
That I’m dead.
That we all are.
That New Avalon is the limbo, and those who’ve vanished, both then and now, have simply been allowed to move on while the rest of us are forced to sit here and wait.
Maybe that’s why I’ve seen Molly, and Violet and Julianne have sensed their lost loved ones.
Maybe they’re not a demon but an emissary sent here to guide us into the land of the dead.
That would be the worst-case scenario, if I thought for even a second that it was true. If I were dead, I assume I wouldn’t be bothered by the heat of the room or how, right next to me, Julianne lightly snores.
At least it’s not scratching or, worse, the dreaded thwump. The fact that I haven’t heard either of them makes me think those noises are exclusive to the cottage, meant only for my ears.
That, ironically, ends up being my last thought before sleep finally sneaks up on me.
I sense it coming only a minute before it arrives.
A clash of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that doesn’t last nearly as long as it should.
I wake an hour or so later to that netherworld of not quite night, not yet day.
A gloom I can detect through my closed eyelids.
When I do open them, the room is brighter than I expect it to be.
And brighter than it should be.
I sit up, and the first thing I see is an empty patch of bed beside me. My head does a whip-pan around the rest of the room.
To Julianne’s nightgown in a heap on the floor.
To the bare hook on the door that once held her dress.
To the windows, the curtains of which have been thrown open, letting in that flood of predawn gray. Standing in front of them is Julianne, back in her dress, gripping one of the curtains as she stares outside.
“He’s there,” she says.
“Who?”
“Dean.” Julianne whispers the name, as if saying it any louder might summon him inside.
I slide out of bed.
Carefully.
Cautiously.
Fear slowing my movements.
Because the thought of Julianne’s dead first husband standing outside is eminently terrifying.
Especially when it might not be him but a demon in disguise.
Yet even more scary is Julianne herself.
She’s strangely not frightened. Standing at the window in complete calm, her voice takes on a hypnotized quality as she says, “I think he wants me to come outside.”
Hearing that shifts me into another level of fear. Overdrive. I speed up, flying to the window. Outside, everything is painted in various hues of gray. Slate sky. Pewter light. Ground the same shade as woodsmoke, its color accented by the low mist rolling over the grass.
What I don’t see is a person, human or demon or in between.
“There’s no one there,” I say.
“There is,” Julianne insists. “He’s right there. In front of the oak.”
She backs away from the window, giving me an unobstructed view of the ground below, which remains empty. Behind me, I hear the bedroom door open as Julianne says, “I need to see him.”
I streak across the room, blocking her path and slamming the door shut. In an instant, Julianne switches from hypnotized to hysterical. “I have to talk to him!” she cries. “Don’t you see? That’s why he’s here!”
“No,” I say gripping her shoulders, trying to shake some sense into her. “No one is out there.”
“Dean’s right there!” Julianne wrests herself from my grasp and returns to the window, using an index finger to jab at the glass. “Don’t you see him?”
I return to the window. There’s still nothing.
“I don’t,” I say, which doesn’t mean he’s not there.
If Azra is impersonating our loved ones, it makes twisted sense that only we can see them.
I don’t know what Dean looks like. Just like Julianne has never seen Molly.
To effectively lure us, Azra must pretend to be someone each of us individually recognizes.
Julianne again starts to drift to the door. I latch onto her, frantic. “Whatever you see out there, it’s not Dean. You know that. You said so yourself. The people we love aren’t out there.”
“But what if they are?” she says, tears springing from her eyes. “What if it’s really him and this is my only chance to tell him I’m sorry!”
“It’s not,” I insist. “On both counts.”
Julianne turns her face to the window again and takes a despairing glance outside.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, making me think she’s addressing Dean, when in truth it’s me she’s talking to.
I know because the whisper is followed by a violent shove in which Julianne knocks me against the wall while she speeds to the door.
This time, I’m too slow to stop her. By the time I reach the hallway, she’s already down the stairs and running outside.
A streak of ivory disappearing into the gray.
I run after her, my bare feet slapping against the hallway floor, then the steps, then the stretch of hardwood leading to the front door. Julianne left it open behind her, allowing me to ramp up my pace as I burst through it.
Outside, I try to trace Julianne’s path through the gray while calling her name. I search the mist as I continue to run.
Under the oak.
Past the cottages.
Through the archway.
Down the stone steps cutting through the trees, where night still lingers, thick and disconcerting. I make it all the way to the zigzagging path leading down the sloped meadow to the dock.
Julianne isn’t there.
She’s nowhere.
I turn around and head back to the main house, hoping against hope that Julianne did the same, somehow bypassing me in the fog.
When I reach the oak, I let out a gasp so loud it sends birds shooting from the trees and wheeling in the air above the island.
I do the opposite, freezing, not daring to move.
Julianne’s dress is already in the upper reaches of the tree.
An impossibility I can’t begin to understand.
All I know—without a single doubt—is that it means she, too, is gone.