What a fool was I, wasting a pebble on entirely the wrong window.

But then, of all things—the curtain moved.

At first I thought it must be a trick of the moonlight, the swamplight, that strange eerie glow that inhabits the darklands of the country, a glow that’s likely just the eye trying frantically to see in such nonlight where there is nothing to refract against the pupil, where everything looks grainy and strange no matter how desperately you squint, as things fuzz and fray and disappear, pursued relentlessly by the failing eye. But it was no mistake. The curtain’s dark sensual curves fluttered and began to draw back to one side.

The heart-stopping sight flooded me with terrible anticipation—there was someone in the locked room.

It could not be my mother or Elizabeth, I reasoned, since neither of them had the key, the lost key, the long-gone key.

There was someone else in the locked room.

Thrilled with this new fear, I suddenly lost the old one; being locked out was not so awful after all, even out here in the darkness, for at least I was out here, at least there lay a solid windowpane between me and whoever, whatever, was drawing back that black curtain with its bony fingers, whereas my sleeping mother and sister were inside, locked in there with it.

I wish I could describe to you the face that loomed out of the empty dark within, but I could not make it out from below, and the moonlight was too afraid to touch whatever lingered in that lonely room, leaving me with only the vague impression of a face with pits for eyes, like a demon.

In a moment, the curtain swished back into place and went still.

And then I was at the front door. I was pounding desperately, madly, to be let in. I was hesitating with my fist an inch from the wood, abruptly terrified to be let in, wanting in that sick moment to remain out in the familiar confusing dark, perhaps to go live in the swamp now, away from the house, when the door opened, and my mother ushered me inside with a mixture of irritability and fondness, assumed my panic was at being locked out. She made me an indifferent cup of tea and went back to bed.

I don’t know how long I sat in that kitchen, clutching the mug of cold dregs, trying to convince myself to move, to ascend the stairs, to get to my room where I could cower beneath the covers like a child.

Eventually I did.

I never liked to see the memories at night—something in their ghostly appearance has always unsettled me during the moonlit hours—but then I saw, inexplicably, my father, just standing there cleaning his glasses. Seeing him gave me a warm rush of relief, enough so that when he vanished, I had the courage to run upstairs.

By the next morning, in the light of day, it all felt like a dream, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I had imagined the figure. But perhaps it did not matter whether I had imagined it, for the room was locked and no matter how many times I pressed my ear against the door, I never heard a thing.