He and his partner, who appeared a moment later, picked us up and carried us home. We slept the rest of that day, bowls of soup appearing at our bedsides, Mother watching over us with a darkness that wouldn’t leave her eyes.

I didn’t really sleep, though. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the figure emerging from the darkness, still out there, somewhere, in the swamp. And I cursed the day I’d found that rotten canoe.

I leave the canoe in the annals of history, and the crib in the loneliness of the nursery, and return to my room.

It is only when I am inside with the door closed that I feel I can safely open the journal again and lose myself in its pages, filled with dread but unable to stop reading. I wish I were back with Elizabeth laughing over the crib instructions, but instead I am sitting on my childhood bed with cloudy light peering in through the curtains behind me, watching the words scrawled across the page by a tremulous hand, in a handwriting that is almost familiar, somehow.

Woke up in the middle of the night but I don’t know why.

How many times has this happened? How many times, waking up, and wondering, and feeling that there is something nearby that woke me but seeing nothing. I’ll never get used to it.

I remember the first time it happened, years ago, that I really paid attention to it, in the way you only pay attention to ordinary things when they suddenly become unordinary.

Everything was dark and it must have been quiet because Aggie lay asleep and undisturbed beside me.

Whatever woke me, it was more a feeling in the air. An uneasiness that pulled me from sleep. This house, I’d guess. There’s something in it that’s wrong, but you can’t tell it’s wrong, you only feel it. I see things, sometimes. Agnes has always told me it’s normal here, to see things, but Agnes has always believed in ghosts. We’ve been living here for years and I still can’t understand what it is about this house. What it is, really.

The time when I woke up in the dark to the strange, crackling uneasiness, like a feeling of illness trapped in the air, I got up to check on the girls thinking I was having some sort of parental second sight which you hear about sometimes—parents who sense something is wrong with their children without any real-world indication.

I went to check on Sammy, all fine there, and Lizzie, sleeping with her arms akimbo and her hair in wild tangles over her face, her chest rising and falling in only that gentle, fragile way a child’s chest does when they are sleeping.

Everyone was fine, so why that feeling? Why that static in the air? Why that sense that there was a presence, that there was someONE or someTHING else in the house, just out of sight? Lurking in all the mirrors, behind our reflections.

Since I was up, and could not, I think, go back to sleep anyway just then, I decided to check the other rooms. There are so many, in this house, and sometimes I forget what room I am in, and I find myself in a panic, thinking I’ve slipped through to another room, and another, and there are actually an infinite number of rooms in this house, and each time I open a door I will find myself in a room I have never visited before, and I will be lost forever.

In this way I found myself in the old nursery, where there should have been nothing; the furniture had been removed years ago, leaving a mostly barren space with that faded wallpaper, marked brown in places where furniture had once stood against it, an indented rectangle on the floor where the echo of a long-gone crib had sat, etc. But that night when I wandered into the nursery and turned on a small, dim lamp that was all we had left to light the useless room, I beheld a crib that should not have been there, with a gently turning mobile of strange creatures—an elephant with wings, a lion with horns, something like a cross between a moth and a katydid—and fearfully I approached this scene, thinking I might be hallucinating or dreaming awake.

And there, within the crib, lay a baby whose origin I could not claim to know, and the baby had its tiny fists curled up grasping its blanket, and its face was scrunched in dismay, its tiny mouth open and wailing silently into the void.

I wondered, briefly, if it was this baby’s cries that had somehow awoken me. But that was nonsense, for I am completely deaf.

Yet it unnerved me to watch this baby screaming, and I had the urge to silence it even though I could not hear it, had that terrible urge that comes when you are contemplating the worst—what if I did the worst thing I could possibly do right now—and it makes you sick to think it, but you think it anyway. I thought, what would happen if I lay my hands around its throat and throttled the strange baby that should not be there until it vanished back to whatever abyss it had come from?

Instead I turned off the light and backed out of the room, unable to take my eyes from the dim hulking shape of the crib until I had turned the corner in the hallway. I went back to bed and crawled in beside Aggie, still asleep, and lay there imagining, and wondering.

The next morning I got up early and crept to the nursery to view it in broad daylight, but the room was just as empty as a tomb.

Maybe that was when I started going crazy?