I imagine the maroons telling each other these tales by the fireside in the olden days. The house has whispered things to me—about Jonah and Clementine and Meriday’s experiences in the swamp. And a Cherokee man they met, whom they called Wind Walker. He must have told them about the Swamp Witch.

Though there were real and present dangers in the swamp, I imagine it was the witch that haunted their dreams; that made the shadows twist crookedly in the firelight of a warm summer dusk.

Perhaps Wind Walker also told them of a mysterious tribe of Cherokee that lived in an even more remote part of the swamp—a place that has never been found by anyone, a place so isolated he wasn’t even sure it was real. It was said that the cult there had broken off from the rest of the tribe long ago, had gone to the center of the swamp not in fear of the witch, but to try to conjure her. They believed she had come to return their land to them, to kill and drive out the white man; to rupture the movement of time and begin a new world for them, one that exists outside time itself.

I wonder if those children sit around with flashlights telling stories about the Witch of Wakefield Manor. What would my mother think of that? Of having herself immortalized in legend?

Though I can barely see past the wipers swishing rain from the windshield, out of the misty distance the looming outline of the house appears. It is no wonder children tell ghost stories about this place.

I may be living in one.

Once I arrive home, I am stuck inside while the rain pounds the roof. And though my mother and sister are also trapped here by the storm, we have hardly seen one another. It is such a very large house for three people that we might spend all our time in separate rooms, blocked off from one another by a labyrinth of walls, and never even know the others are there. All the doors are closed, as my mother likes to keep them; all the many doorways, in a house with too many doors, fastened tight against the dismal halls.

I fear that one day I will open a door and what I am expecting to see beyond it will be something else entirely, somewhere else, a place that isn’t in this house at all—that I will open a door and fall into the abyss of outer space. And while these are fears, they are also fantasies, for wouldn’t it be perfectly adventurous to step through a doorway and go somewhere else, somewhere wild and strange and beautiful, and never return?

In any case, it is easy for us to avoid each other, in the way family members who live together find ways to do. And when you live in a house of twenty-seven rooms and numerous winding corridors, of hidden staircases and secret circuitous halls, it is almost easier not to see each other.