Meriday was able to break free. She fell in the mud and scrambled for purchase as Jonah grabbed her around the waist and hauled her up to him.

Pieces of Clementine’s clothing caught fire, but otherwise she was too wet and only smoldered in the flame, releasing a heavy black smoke while her eyes burned in their sockets.

“It is a blessed thing she ended up in the swamp,” said Clementine through her mouth of mud, her flaming eyes laughing at the dropped torch, which the water quickly consumed and made impotent. “If she lived on dry land, she would burn a hole right through the world wherever she walks.”

She seized Wind Walker’s throat with her clawed fingers. For a moment he was enveloped in the putrid stench of mold and rotting vegetation, and his mouth filled with hot swampy liquid, but he managed to break free from her grasp, shove her away, where she fell into the water. Spitting out a mouthful of sludge, he turned to meet Jonah and Meriday, and all three of them took off into the forest without a look back.

Soon it became clear that in their mad blind dash through the midnight swamp, they had lost their way. Spectral pine and sweet-gum oak towered above them, shrouding the sky and the land beyond, barred with an endless vista of trunks emerging from marshy soil. They turned and turned, knowing with dread deep in their hearts that the swamp was vast and eternal, and they were lost.

They walked all night and into the next morning, when the mystery of the dark gave way to the thick heat of day, and finally the trees began to thin; and Jonah recognized this place and knew which way to turn; and they found themselves heading out of the swamp and toward the looming shape of Wakefield Manor.

6

All of this was told to the rapt Wakefields in the course of one sitting, but as for my telling of it, I have had to reconstruct the story from the bits and pieces I have heard whenever the memory shows itself to me. This house does not care for the nuances of storytelling; it spits things up here and there and tells you go on, tie up the threads yourself.

They tell it by candlelight, having taken refuge in the basement, where the flickering light etches lines of horror on their faces, fear gleaming afresh in their eyes. Most of the story is told by Jonah, but occasionally Meriday chimes in to add some detail, and when those two are overcome, Wind Walker steps in to fill in the gaps. All told, it is a wild puzzle of a tale fit together by several competing voices and perspectives, and I was never sure whether I believed it at all.

But now I think I do.

What happened next, I can’t really say. For a long while, this part of the story remained unfinished, like unraveled yarn, but I think that now I will have the rest.