My mother kneels on the floor at the end of the bed, instructing Elizabeth to breathe, propping her up with her knees bent. “Push,” she commands, her voice low and calm against the sounds of pounding as Donovan beats his fists to be let in.

Elizabeth makes a hideous sound through her clenched teeth, her face turning red, and then collapses on her elbows, panting. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You’re doing great, honey,” says my mother, and I do not know how she can sound so calm with Donovan beating his way in and Elizabeth screaming and the baby coming—it’s too much even for me as I crouch beside my sister, letting her hold my hand but unable to do much more than that, staring wide-eyed and frozen as the room seems to close in around us, then stretch as if into a yawning abyss. The air crackles with static. I want to scratch my skin off. I want to get out of here. Were I a spider, I imagine I might crawl up the walls on my eight spindly legs and spin myself a web to watch and wait. The room blurs at the edges, like its veneer is wearing thin.

In the recesses of the room, which seems larger than it did only moments ago, stands the cracked mirror. I try not to look at it, but I cannot help it; the surface is odd, reflecting nothing.

“Let me in!” Don shouts from the other side of the door, which bangs and rattles like a thing alive. “Let me in!”

Elizabeth gives another push, throws back her head, and screams—this time because she sees the man hanging from the ceiling.

“Don’t look up,” Agnes tells her softly. “Don’t look up.” She continues murmuring odd nonsense, telling us that the baby has started to crown. I remind Elizabeth to breathe, but I have to look away, feeling dizzy. I remind myself to breathe. I don’t look up at the dead man swinging from the rope. I don’t want to see my father hanging above us. It’s too horrible to contemplate.

Elizabeth’s cries mingle with the echo of Jonah’s and Meriday’s—cries to escape, to be let out, a rising crescendo of wails.

“Don’t look.”

But it’s not my mother’s voice this time—it is Jonah in chains, on the floor a few feet from the bed, his pupils blown wide as black holes. “Don’t look at it. It’s where she came through. You look, and you’ll see. You don’t want to see.” He is wasted, his clothes worn to rags. He has been here a long time. “That’s where death is. The death of time. Ain’t no time in here.”

He’s told Meriday not to look, but I am not Meriday. I look behind him, into the depths of the room, at the mirror. And I know, with dreadful certainty, that this is where he does not want me to look.

But the more I look, the stranger the mirror appears. I try to focus my eyes on it, and it blurs and gapes open like a wound.