Cora was long gone, outside now, calling to me in her too-loud quiet voice. We were pretty close to Miss Candy’s cabin; it was only a matter of time before someone woke up and knew we were out of bed. “Shut up,” I called out of the side of my mouth, but I don’t think she heard me. I took a step back and my tailbone met the hard porcelain of the sink. I reached back, gripped the edge, and squeezed.

The very white thing stopped playing with the door and began to come towards me. It might have been only following the sound of Cora’s voice, but it was going to have to go past me or through me to get to her. Either way, it was getting closer.

I was glued to the spot by sweat and fear. I wasn’t sure how to move out of its way if I tried, and I didn’t think for a moment that a mangled nursery rhyme was going to help me any.

“Eden,” she called, sharpening the letters on her fright. “Eden, run!”

That was as good a plan as any, but my feet wouldn’t hear it. I couldn’t lift them, not with all my strength, and my arms weren’t moving either. Maybe it did something to me or maybe I was only petrified by my own terror, but I froze up when it pressed against me. I turned my head and closed my eyes, and the side of my face the thing pushed against went numb. It went prickly and painful, like when you accidentally sleep on your arm—you wake up, and you can’t feel it for a second, but then the blood flows back and it hurts all over like someone’s jabbing at it with pushpins. The awful sensation spread down my neck, and shoulder, and clipped one of my knees before it faded.

“Sing a song of breath mints,” I heard, and it was an insistent line, said with all the force of the Latinate chants of an exorcism. Cora’s hand wrapped around my wrist and pried it loose from the sink.

“Banana cream pie. Four and twenty blackbirds take to the sky.”

I opened my eyes and she was looking back at me, teeth locked together. “When the sky is filled up, with all the feathered wings . . .” She drew me forward, dragging me out of my horrified haze.

“The birds will come protect us, from all those other things. Come on, Eden.”

I wrenched my other hand from the sink and let her lead me stumbling away, back into the darkness, away from the fluorescent buzz and the white thing in the bathroom. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but the big pale rectangle of light where we’d left the main door ajar.

“You can’t stop for it,” Cora breathed as we tripped and hopped back to our cabin. “You can’t ever stop for it. You can chase it away with words, if you mean them when you say them, but you can’t ever stop for it.”