Lightning flashes in through the window, lighting up the faceless boy—fourteen or fifteen, now—and I see red caked into the swamp water soaking him. Gore crusted under his nails. Strands of hair in his fingers. My gorge rises. Darkness returns, and he speaks out of it.

“I thought we could be dead together, but I don’t like the way she stares. I put her in the basement,” he says. “With the others.”

Gagging, I reel away as another crash of thunder shakes the house and blares its lightning into the room, making every corner livid, showing me the muddy footprints on the floor and a streak of red, something dragged. I don’t know where he went, but I cannot see him anymore.

We are not evil, I tell myself. The Wakefields are not cursed with madness and murder. Some of us are good. Some of us have to be good.

I find myself in front of the ancient cellar whose door swings inward on aching hinges and opens up to an abyss. What will I find here? Candles, or the others that Julian put in the basement? I gaze like one gone blind and feel myself unable to step into the nothingness that lies beyond the doorway, where an ancient staircase will lead me down into the depths.

A damp, rotten smell emerges from that darkness, as if the swamp is eating away at the house from underneath; I force myself to take one step down, and another, but still I can see nothing, am enveloped in the all-consuming perfume of decay.

Isn’t it strange how familiar spaces become unfamiliar when one loses a sense? I have been in that basement a thousand times, collecting gardening tools, jars, and other sundries; and, knowing where the candles must be, I assume I will be able to find my way to the far shelf in the dark; but now I feel lost—as though the basement has disappeared around me, as though I may reach out for the shelf and feel something else altogether, as though once I step out into the flat expanse I will never be able to find my way back to the stairs again.

Which may be a reasonable fear, after all, as there are several doors in the cellar. Any one of which, if left open, might lead me down one of the strange secret passageways that tunnel below the house, most of them flooded for all time thanks to the swamp, left to rot half-steeped in muck. The tunnels were originally used as part of an elaborate system of hiding escaped slaves, but I can hardly imagine a person wanting to creep down one of those low, narrow, black passageways, wondering where it may lead, if there even is an exit, or if it will only lead them endlessly into the entrails of the damp forbidding earth.

Here at the bottom of the stairs, the smell is stronger, and when I take that last step to the floor, I understand why. Unexpectedly, cold water sloshes over my ankles, shocking me, and I am back up the stairs panting before I recognize the simple fact that the basement has flooded in the storm, as it so often does.