She sat in a wheelchair—an old woman, older than my mother, with black Xs where her eyes should be. Her hands were plagued by fingers bent and crooked as if broken and allowed to heal at contorted angles, and though her lips were sealed shut, she was laughing still, that dark chuckle behind closed lips. Gray wisps of hair wilted against her gaunt face. Her feet were bare, wrinkled, callused; she was missing several toes.

A scream rose in my throat, trapped behind my tonsils.

I ran from the room, bumping into walls; a stiff old portrait fell down when I slammed against it, landing sideways in its gilt frame, staring up at me from the floor. Scrambling away, I darted around the corner of the hall, my breath hitching fast—

And I ran right into a warm, solid shape, which wrapped its arms around me.

“Samantha! What has gotten into you?”

It was my mother, and I clutched her house robe, pressed my face into it, inhaled her sharp oaky scent. “There was an old woman,” I moaned into her clothes.

She ripped me away, bent down, saw the guitar string I was still clutching in my fist. “This isn’t a toy,” she snapped, pulling the string from my hand.

From the parlor came a creak like rusty wheels, and the string slipped out of my mother’s grasp.

She sighed. “Throw that away and go to your room,” she told me.

I peel myself away from the past. That was then. I am not a child anymore.

I remember standing there, though, my heart racing, thinking there were things in this house I didn’t understand, things that maybe I didn’t want to understand. I would have to take the long way around to the staircase, too afraid to pass the parlor, too afraid at the moment even to look up from the floor. My eyes were locked on the fallen guitar string, a line that seemed to divide the past from the future, that existed somewhere in between.

Elizabeth never believed me about the old woman. I guess it isn’t a surprise that she doesn’t believe me about Julian, either.

But that old fear comes back to me now, when I think of him. The fear of what might be lurking in the shadows of this house. It is a fear hard to shake with autumn dragging daylight away sooner and sooner, night encroaching on us in the afternoon, and earlier still within the curtained, closed-up house.

Even out of the house, though, the uneasy feeling follows me. It doesn’t help that it has been raining.

A storm has blundered through town, carelessly throwing branches to and fro and driving insistently against the roof of my car. It crashed into existence just as I was making my way home from teaching, stretching the forty-odd minute drive to more than an hour as I crept through the deluge. The rain puts me in mind of myths and legends; of ghosts and witches.