“To what end?”

“Maybe doing so will put an end to what Celeste feels she started. Maybe she’ll be able to go back home again. I believe she truly loves that house on the island. I think this woman was tending to Celeste and her sister and that haunted island. Maybe it was Mother who first bound that chaotic spirit in the family vault, but the spirit began to tempt Celeste, preying on her childish curiosity, urging her to free it from the vault. Perhaps if we right this error, Celeste will find the peace and happiness she knew on that island.”

“Perhaps, but wouldn’t it be better to urge her on? To send her to the realm of the dead?”

“Ordinarily I’d say yes, but in this case, I think Celeste has found her paradise on that island. It’s a soft place; she can probably partake of the spirit realm and the material world in equal measure there. It was abandoned, except when Mother and Father made the trip to feed and communicate with them.”

For a long span the only soundtrack was the ticking of the clock on the living room mantle. At last Charles spoke.

“Okay. We’ll do it. We’ll start the search. But right now sleep is what we both need.”

*

They searched; first through maps and websites and history books, then later upon rural highways and back roads. Every spare day they had, the pair would be traversing. They parked at countless beachfronts and fields so that August could stand and Sense. He carried the spirit bottle with him and would call out to Celeste, and then wander like a dowser in search of occulted waters.

In the springtime they came upon a thread of great promise: a cluster of tiny islands on a lake in a southwest corner of a peninsula. They booked a room at a grimy inn and rented an outboard motorboat, and at daybreak they struck out onto the water. The two of them sat under blankets, shivering against the frigid winds that pressed across the vacant lake. Charles steered the vessel while August did his utmost to activate his Sensing abilities.

At first the presence that August felt moving alongside their boat did not seem to fit their quest. The presence was arresting in its gruesomeness: the sight of a gaunt young woman floating upon a boat made of human remains. But August was well accustomed to the occasionally shocking and repulsive forms the spirits took in order to penetrate the chatter of the human mind, therefore he knew that this appearance likely had some underlying meaning.

That meaning came in the form of navigation. The ghostly woman was conveying to August images of an island, one with a great stone house and a family vault, even a dock for their boat. He urged Charles to follow the spectral guide.