She flicked the switch multiple times, as though she might breathe life back into it through sheer force of will. The bulb above was unresponsive. She only had her phone and her phone’s flashlight to light the space.

She left the axe next to the head of her bed, then turned. The wardrobe door hung open. She couldn’t remember if she’d left it that way. The mirror on the door faced her, showing her face lit unnaturally by the light in her hand, throwing long shadows across her eyes and forehead. The image, blurred, felt unreal. Her skin looked too ashen. Like the blood had been let from the veins, and now she stared at an empty husk, an upright corpse.

She turned her head, but the image was still there in her peripheral vision, degrading with each passing second, the skin withering and the lids drooping away from her eyes, and Margot launched herself toward it in three quick steps and slammed the door closed, her breathing rough.

She didn’t want to spend the night in this room. But there were precious few alternatives. The kitchen had no guarantee of being any safer. She could still risk leaving the home and running for the employee quarters, but she wasn’t certain she could find her way in the dark. Besides that, what was happening on the estate likely wasn’t restricted to her home. She’d seen the figure in the shed, and she couldn’t discount how unsettled Nora and Ray had been at the store.

Is the poison inside more deadly than the poison that must be out there?

Slowly, her fingertips numb and unsteady, Margot eased the wardrobe door back open. Her reflection was normal. A little desaturated in the artificial light and her features drawn from the late hour and the unrelenting stress, but unmistakably her.

“Damn.” She shut the door with a solid click, sealing the reflection away again, and leaned her head against the cool wood. “Damn this whole…thing.”

She didn’t know how much she could trust her own eyes or her own ears. She’d spent hours in the kitchen, undisturbed, while she was absorbed in the journal. It was only once she put the book down and began to focus on the house that things started to turn bad.

Does that mean my mind, too stressed to cope, is conjuring these images?

Or does the house only come alive once I turn my attention to it?

“Just get through to dawn,” Margot whispered.

Her bedroom door didn’t have a lock. She cleared the lamp and books from the bedside table and pushed it in front of the door. It wasn’t as heavy or as sturdy as she would have liked, but it was something.