Oh, I have gone mad, haven’t I?

When the room snaps back and I wake up from my weeks-long reverie, Elizabeth is saying that something is wrong, while Agnes reassures her and tells her to keep pushing. Liz says she can’t, she can’t, and the door rattles madly on its hinges with sharp, deafening bangs like some great beast beating its fists.

Liz pulls my hand closer to her. “No, no, something is wrong,” she pants, her eyes beseeching me to go check, to make sure our mother is not lying to us. I nod, gently pull my hand free, and go to the end of the bed to peer beneath the white sheet.

The child’s bloody head has emerged, but I see a soft wormlike cord wrapped around its neck twice, like a noose—I gasp involuntarily, and Liz begs me to tell her what is wrong.

For a moment, I consider not saying a word. It would be fitting, perhaps, for the child to strangle itself upon exiting the womb, in which case the future the house showed me could not come to pass. Then I start to say, “The umbilical cord—”

My mother hisses at me as she reaches to gently slide the cord up over the infant’s head. “See? No big deal,” she says. “Happens all the time.”

And then the rest of the baby slides out, crying as he waves his tiny fists, and my mother wraps him in a towel and hands him to an exhausted, delirious Elizabeth. Agnes bends down to kiss her daughter on her sweat-slicked forehead and murmurs, “You did it.”

For a moment, Don’s banging and yelling fades into the distance as we all look at what Elizabeth has birthed into the world.

Elizabeth gives something like a cross between a laugh and a sob as she brings the baby’s face up to hers, gazing upon it with wonder.

“Hello, Julian,” she whispers, staring at him as if she cannot believe he is real, and in this moment, something in my own heart breaks.

How can this small helpless child become a monster? It is unthinkable. This tiny creature does not know evil—knows only love and comfort and perhaps that terrifying moment when he was expelled from the womb. But how could he ever be what the house has told me he must be? How could I ever think to harm him—my nephew, only minutes old, not having yet opened his eyes to the world?

My mother discreetly cuts and ties the traitorous umbilical cord that tried to strangle him, and for a moment, in the faint glow of the candles imparting their soft warmth to the chill, dark room, its ghosts having vanished for the moment, it seems to me that everything will be all right, that there is nothing to worry about after all.

Then, its lock giving way under repeated assault, the door finally bangs open and swings away from Donovan Hill, who steps into the room and says, “Give me my son.”