In the hall closet I find rain boots, and in the kitchen, rummaging blindly through the drawers, I come upon a flashlight. All is eerily quiet in the house, as if the darkness has turned off all sound but for the creaking of floorboards under my feet, and I switch on the flashlight to guide me back down and assess the damage.

I feel the cards following after me as I go, like bad omens. I see the Moon in the ethereal circle of the flashlight’s beam against the stairs as I descend again into the black ocean the basement has become. And in the middle of that ocean, perhaps, there is an ancient faceless man sitting on a throne, the swampy waves crashing around him—the King of Cups, brooding over his cruel domain.

I shine the flashlight over the opaque water. As I slosh through it, I decide it must be at least three inches deep, but I feel with every step I take that I might slip into quicksand, or a bottomless pit, and never emerge. Gratefully I find that the doors leading to the underground tunnels are all closed.

The far shelf is made of old wood that I fear may collapse in the damp, moldy air. For now it holds, and I find the candles collecting cobwebs. I ignore whatever appears to be floating in the water below; it is merely old junk that the water has swallowed up off the floor and carried along with it. It is not a body from the future. It is not a head with hair floating around it.

When I turn back for the stairs, my flashlight catches a figure standing in the middle of the room.

It is not the faceless boy but a girl, perhaps eleven years old, dark skinned and wearing a beige dress.

“It’s her,” she says, her whispery voice ripe with the silken strains of fear. “She’s coming.”

Framing her with gold light, the flashlight begins to flicker; I whack the side of it with my hand, regretting that I did not check the batteries. She wavers in and out of existence, the light shining on the terror in her eyes until it dies completely, leaving us in darkness.

I recognize this girl, and before I know it I am sloshing my way out of the basement to follow her, wondering if I will finally see the Swamp Witch—if I will find an answer to the evil that plagues this house. The same evil, perhaps, that plagues Julian.

Let me explain.

There is more to the story of Jonah, Clementine, and Meriday that I haven’t told you; pieces of the story I’ve heard secondhand from the echoes of the house, the timeline scrambled; things too strange and frightening to be real. But now that I know what I’ve seen here is real—now that I know Julian is real—anything seems possible.

I am afraid what I’m about to see when I follow the girl up through the main hall and out to the backyard won’t make a lick of sense to you unless you know the whole story leading up to that moment, so I am going to tell it as best I can, hoping you will understand this is just my own re-creation of what I have heard.