Along the way, I pass more visions—there is August, cold and terrible, rearing up to beat Meriday. There is no time to dive around them, so I pass directly through, a strange chill dousing my bones, the sensation of passing through a memory that isn’t mine.

In the library, I slow, feeling momentarily safe amid the towering shelves of books, which I imagine will protect me like a magic shield. If I do not make a sound, if Julian remains quiet, Don will not think to look in here. The clouds must have parted, as a faint white glow comes in the window, moonlight bouncing off snow. It lends a silvery quality to the bookshelves. Somewhere in here is an armchair; I will find it, I will sit, and I will think of what to do.

I am creeping through the library delicately as I can, bouncing Julian in my arms to keep him calm, when drifting through the darkness comes a huffing sound, breathy laughter puffing through someone’s nose.

I am not alone.

The skin of my neck crawls with morbid recognition, but I resist, I resist, until I come around the side of a bookshelf and see the figure sitting in the corner of the room. It is her, the old woman, and she is laughing to herself, though she cannot open her mouth for her lips are glued shut, and she cannot open her eyes for her lids are glued shut, and over those lids someone has drawn in black marker the Xs that denote a cartoon’s death. She cannot see; she cannot talk. She can only sit in her wheelchair and laugh to herself, a horrible knowing laugh I recognize again, but I tell myself that recognition is only because I have seen this ghost before, I have seen her about the house ever since I was a child. She is just as real as Julian.

She cannot even push herself to a different spot in the room, for her fingers are broken, crooked and bent, just as I remember them. She is so familiar.

“Who are you?” I whisper, knowing she cannot answer and thinking, no, why did I ask that, I do not want to know.

The sight of her untethers my nerves, and I back away from her slowly as the clouds roll over the moon and cast her in shadow.

When I try to go up the hidden staircase from the library, I find myself somehow emerging back onto the main level of the house, in a room that looks unfamiliar to me. Can it be there are rooms in this house that I do not know, that I have never set foot in? When I exit the room, I leave behind me a man drowning in a bucket of white paint, struggling against the invisible force holding him down, paint splashing out onto the floor around him.

In the parlor, I finally have to stop, sinking to the floor with a stitch in my side and trying to calm an increasingly agitated Julian. The window reveals again the faint glimmering of starlight; at last the snow has stopped, and the clouds have shuffled off. Across from me, glinting dully in the moonglow, stands a broken mirror with jagged shards still clinging to the frame, reflecting bits and pieces of us. I pry free a dagger of glass, jostling Julian enough to elicit a complaint, just as the approaching footsteps slow and stop at the parlor’s entrance.