Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-Four
The door to the cottage remains open after I leave. I’m too shocked to close it, too shaken to do anything but grab the handle of my suitcase and, with trembling hands, drag it outside. Even that requires too much effort, and I end up dropping it in the grass beside the path.
All I carry now is Mrs. Semple’s journal, gripping it to my chest as tightly as her skeletal hands had done for a hundred years.
Outside, the night is clear and star-filled now that the storm has passed.
Yet I feel blown sideways by what I’ve just read.
It changes everything I—and everyone else—thought we knew about what happened on New Avalon, starting with its purpose.
Thanks to Mrs. Semple’s journal, I know that it wasn’t a commune for mediums but a place where troubled girls with equally troubled minds could get the psychological help they needed.
And one of the most troubled was young Azra Kovacic—a poor girl from Eastern Europe who immigrated to the United States when she was ten.
When she was twenty, she ended up in the care of Ruth Hume Semple.
After intense observation and long therapy sessions, Mrs. Semple concluded that, due to extreme physical and sexual abuse by her alcoholic father, Azra suffered from both paranoid schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder, two afflictions both understudied and misunderstood a century ago.
Including by Mrs. Semple herself.
When she received Azra into her care, only Daisy was present. The real Azra was in hiding, too timid to emerge out from under the more dominant personality. Mrs. Semple assumed Daisy took control when Azra killed her father and had remained in charge ever since.
Even after reading Mrs. Semple’s journal, I find it hard to believe such a thing was possible. Two very different women sharing the same body, same mind, same existence—and never knowing it.
“The two are polar opposites,” Mrs. Semple had written. “Azra is sullen and quiet, her accent almost impenetrable when she does deign to speak. Daisy, quite fascinatingly, speaks with no accent and carries herself like she’s just emerged from finishing school.”
I guess one could argue that Azra would have been better off ceding her entire personality to Daisy.
Mrs. Semple certainly considered it. The only problem with that, beyond the obvious ethical ones, was that Daisy alone suffered from visual and auditory hallucinations that, in hindsight, might also have been additional emerging personalities.
“A nesting doll of psychoses,” as Mrs. Semple put it.
On New Avalon, the hallucinations manifested themselves as three people with distinct identities.
Katrina Fiske, Jonquil Collins, and Phoebe Minafer.
Mrs. Semple concluded that, in order for Azra to eventually live a normal life, all the others had to go, including Daisy.
The first step was a “séance” that ended up being exactly what Mrs. Semple described to Daisy.
A session—a therapy session—during which Azra’s personality first announced itself.
While Daisy remained mostly in charge after that, Azra emerged bit by bit, encouraged by Mrs. Semple.
She spent several hours on New Avalon completely herself, using broken English to talk about her past, her parents, all the horrible ways in which her father had hurt her.
According to Mrs. Semple, Azra quickly understood that Daisy was an alternate personality and that Katrina, Jonquil, and Mrs. Minafer were her hallucinations, but not vice versa.
Whenever Azra did take control, it was while Daisy slept, was in a trance, or experienced lost time that she couldn’t remember.
While that was happening, Mrs. Semple used nightly hypnosis to rid Daisy of her hallucinations.
That she was perceiving this as nightmares in which her new friends were brutally murdered seemed not to bother Mrs. Semple, who got the idea to hang clothes in the oak after each “death.” She even knew what each imaginary woman wore from overhearing Daisy, who based their outfits on clothing in her own suitcase.
As Azra got more assertive and the others began to disappear one by one, Daisy became more frightened—and unstable. Mrs. Semple hoped that when she realized she was an interloper in a body that didn’t belong to her, Daisy would go away.
Instead, she refused to leave peacefully.
The rest is tragedy.
Because Mrs. Semple never got the chance to chronicle that final, fatal encounter, all we have to go on is what Daisy wrote. Most of it in the final pages she ripped out of the diary and hid away inside the cottage wall.
Those pages are now tucked into Mrs. Semple’s journal.
Together, they tell the full story that has eluded people for generations.
One not about missing women and evil forces, but rather a single woman and psychological demons that included an additional personality who didn’t understand that was what she was.
Of all the things Mrs. Semple wrote about in her journal, that’s the one I most struggle to comprehend. How there was no such person as Daisy Rue. At least not on New Avalon. Not in 1926.
Just like there was no Katrina, no Jonquil, no Mrs. Minafer.
Which means five women didn’t vanish from the island.
Only two did.
Ruth Hume Semple and Azra herself.
Mrs. Semple, as I just discovered, had been buried beneath the cottage floorboards. Azra’s end, though, remains a mystery, although I now find it unlikely that she killed herself. I suspect that was Daisy’s fate, based on the last lines of her diary.
Before the Darkness consumes me completely, I will head for the light.
That makes me think Daisy finally understood the reality of her situation—and that she fully gave herself over to Azra.
If that’s the case, then what happened to Azra?
I doubt I’ll ever know.
Right now, the bulk of my thoughts are reserved for Daisy, whose story now seems even more tragic—and relatable.
I know what it’s like to live in another person’s shadow.
I know how much it makes you want to show the world that you exist. Now that I’m leaving the island, it feels like I’m leaving Daisy behind as well.
On my way to the water, I bid a mental farewell similar to what she wrote in her diary.
Good-bye, New Avalon.
Good-bye, Daisy.
I’m sorry you weren’t real.
As the dock comes into view, I’m hit with a realization that should have occurred to me the moment I finished Mrs. Semple’s journal.
I was too overwhelmed then by revelation after revelation and truth after truth to be thinking clearly.
Now that I finally am, I stop walking, my brain spinning to one conclusion.
If Daisy didn’t exist, there’s no way she could have possessed Violet Wright.