“Let’s finish this in the morning,” says my mother with a hand on my shoulder, pulling me up.

“But what about Julian?”

Her eyes are sharp as the shards of glass scattering the ground. “What about him?”

I gape at her, wondering how my mother can just tuck away the thought of her grandson murdering children—tuck it away with whatever else lives under the blanket of wine she used to pull over her brain, the way she had to learn to tuck away the sight of her husband hanging himself.

“Don’t you care?” I snap, thinking of all those times she ignored us as children, turning away from my nightmares of the old woman with Xs for eyes, becoming a ghost of herself while Elizabeth and I got lost in the swamp. My heart feels laden with rot.

“There are more important things,” she says. “Lizzie is in the hospital right now.”

“Yeah, because of him!”

“It’s no use making yourself sick over it now.” She turns to go back into the house. “We will deal with Julian when the time comes. We will make everything right.” Wind whistles through the gaping, jagged hole in the window, and she pauses beside it. “Put some tarp over this, will you? Best keep out the chill.”

She disappears into the house and, presumably, up to bed. I do as she asks—what else can I do?—but even when I return to my own room, sleep eludes me. I gaze wide awake through the dark, imagining Julian creeping up the stairs, Julian twisting the handle of my bedroom door, Julian hovering somewhere in the shadowy corners of my room, watching me sleep, and I find I can hardly close my eyes. The welt on my shoulder stings when I remember where it came from.

I go to the bathroom to splash water on my face, and when I raise my head, I think I see him, or some dark shape, behind my own reflection.

My father said something was following him through the mirrors. I rub my arms, my skin prickling over with goose bumps. I back out of the bathroom, unable to turn from the mirror until I can safely step out of its grasp.

Perhaps there is more in his journal that will help me understand. I go back to my room for it, but before I grab it, my eyes alight on the old brass key hanging on a small hook. Maybe instead of telling me, he can show me.

Do I want to see what my mother saw?

I take the key and let my feet carry me up the creaking stairs, around the soft sagging spots where the floorboards have rotted, to that narrowing of the third floor hall that gives one a sense of the walls closing in.

I have already placed the key in the lock when I notice a piece of paper on the floor, stuck partially under the door. It is a child’s drawing, filled with trees, and frogs leaping out of the swamp—leaping, in motion, but dead, their eyes covered over with Xs, closing them forever from what they cannot see.