Perhaps, however, I only shift the silence from one basket to another—I have grown used to the creeping silence within the house—but in town, the silence seems more strange, and it frightens me a little. It is as Dr. Bates has said: My eye has too long focused on the strangeness in this house. And now the very world seems altered when I lift my eyes and look about.

1 January 1878

The wind commenced this morning—early, I heard it as a whisper sifting between the trees, and when I rose, I saw the spare branches cast about as if thrown by childish hands, though the sky remains sharp and clear. The woods are entombed in their snow casing.

I am a quiet thing. I do not think of him. And how should I? He has not written.

2 January

Just as I fell to sleep, in the state when I still imagined I saw the contours of the room with my day-lit eyes, an orange cat advanced on me from the darkness at the door, and the closer it came, the faster it went, so that when it leapt onto the bed, it seemed to hurtle into me. And then just as I thought it would land on my face, its head split into two, the two faces surrounding my own in the instant before it vanished. When I awoke, I was panting as if I had been chased from one world into the next.

From Mother’s end of the house, I heard a call. My heart pounding, I lifted to my elbow in the dark of our room, unsure whether or not I had heard my name called into the night. But then it came again, her call, and I stood and wrapped my coverlet about me, then softly turned the knob so as to leave Susannah where she slept.

All down the long passage, I stepped toward Mother’s voice. It seemed she, too, called from a dream, for now I heard what I had thought was my name brokenly sent out, repeated into some other word I could not fathom.

“Hush, Mother, I am coming,” I whispered, my hand upon her door, and pushed it open.

Lord, there stood my poor mother facing the mirror, her hair all about her, her long arms reaching toward her own figure standing in the glass. The candle burned brightly by her bedside, casting shadows across the ceiling of her room, making the very air seem lively. I stood stock-still on the threshold.

“Mother,” she implored, while her hands clasped either side of the oak frame and she leaned in close—so close, her lips touched upon the mirror’s cold surface—and then she started whispering directly into the mouth of that wide-eyed figure in the glass.

“Nay, nay, Mother. Let me hold him now.” There was a little pause, and then Mother replied to her own self, “You canna. Save yourself.”

“I must take him with me.” Mother’s voice was unswept and broken.