Eventually they decided it best, when they were lucid enough to discuss their options, to stay in an assisted facility. Agnes was still young at the time and had only just met the man she would soon marry. She was an obstetrician, living in a cramped little apartment across town.

When they had Elizabeth, they decided to move into Agnes’s family home, where they would have plenty of space to raise children. What did he think when they first crept down the long drive through the broken iron gate? You come up past the ugly cherubic statues shaggy with undergrowth and moss, past the Virginia creeper and wisteria, and you see, emerging from the earth, the sprawling Gothic eyesore where terrible angles meet at sharp and angry glances like an unhappy jigsaw. You see the house, crumbling and perverse, with its brooding walls and secretive windows, grown over with vines as if the earth should reclaim it.

But even beyond that, I wonder what my father’s reaction was the first time he saw the ghost of a former resident facing him in the hallway or the light of a candle as someone centuries ago lit their nightly way.

When I was six and Elizabeth eight, he killed himself.

Elizabeth has shut herself up in her childhood room. A teenager stands in the hallway outside the closed door.

Though he is older now, of a stature that signifies a recent growth spurt that he hasn’t yet filled out, he retains the aquiline nose, the spectral moon-washed features overcast by thick dark hair, his face still somehow indistinct, unformed.

Who is this faceless boy? I can make out the dark pockets for eyes and the protruding nose, but that is it, and it makes for a disturbing image, like a photograph that was blurred in the taking, turning your once-familiar friend into a smudged ghoul with a jagged black scar for a mouth and impenetrable holes for eyes. But reality is not a photograph. Is it that the house cannot remember his face? Is this the way we imagine people whose features we can’t quite recall? Like my father—if I think very hard, I can vaguely remember his looks, but would my memory reconstructed into life be accurate, or would it contain gaping holes, ghostly blurs where there ought to be defined lines? No, that is impossible; I have seen memories here that are too old for me to remember, older even than my mother and my grandmother, and these are arranged with precise detail.

He faces the closed door as if looking in or waiting for it to open. Inside my sister might be sitting in front of the mirror, unaware of the young man who hovers just outside. I think I ought to warn her, then chide myself for being foolish. Of course it is an echo. Why should I be afraid of an echo? Yet I get an awful feeling from him, this young man so happy to stomp birds to death, and perhaps I am right to have this feeling, for I notice that he is holding a kitchen knife. What would he be doing with that knife up here on the second floor?