Harriet remains too still after too much movement. Her mouth gapes and her eyes are infinity.

Agnes sighs. “Well, I do hate having a corpse on the couch.”

“What is … wrong with you people?”

I laugh, then, pleased with it all, and with my mother especially. Perhaps having fun at this stranger’s expense is cruel, but it is a delicious kind of cruelty, isn’t it?

Finally, Harriet’s paper-pale corpse flickers like a badly tuned television and disappears. Phantom laughter from another room drifts our way, unprovoked.

“What?” Nathaniel shouts, whirling around at the noise, and I find this reaction so comical that I laugh again.

“Are you quite sure, Nathaniel, that you do not believe in ghosts?” asks an amused Agnes as she sips her tea. “Why, didn’t you know when you came here that this is a haunted house?”

At once, before he can make any attempt at a reply, a scream rends the air, and I think for a moment of the poor soul—Nathaniel’s nerves must be frayed as far as they will go, and I almost want to tell the house to give it a rest now, we are done with the theatrics.

But I am on my feet just as fast as Nathaniel is stumbling toward the foyer, the forgotten brochure flying away in a flap of paper only to slide across the hardwood floor, scattering tumbleweeds of dust.

“You people,” he keeps saying, like he can’t believe us, like we have pulled some sort of mean-spirited prank on him. “You people!”

The scream, I realize, sounds familiar. Maybe it isn’t an echo. Maybe it is happening right now.

Elizabeth.

Pushing him out of my way, I bound up the stairs to see about the scream, my feet taking me toward Elizabeth’s room. My heart beats a frantic tattoo even as I tell myself it is merely an echo of some prior time, when someone screamed in obvious pain, the screaming like needles in my ears.

When I burst into Elizabeth’s room, there she is, clutching her pregnant belly, blood soaking through her gray leggings. She has a sickly sheen to her skin and her hair sticks in sweaty tangles, her eyes embraced by dark rings.

Julian is trying to kill her from the inside out, I think wildly. He will tear his way out of her flesh, and he will keep tearing through flesh until I put a stop to him.

The ride to the hospital is a blur, even though I am the one driving.

Funny how that happens, isn’t it? All those miles eaten up and forgotten in the whirlwind of thoughts, as if our brains can contain only so much at once and have to filter out the everyday motions of driving, signaling a turn, braking at red lights and stop signs.

All along I am wondering what happened.

Mother sits in the back seat with Elizabeth’s head on her lap, and I cannot be bothered to worry about her, too, though she looks drawn and red-eyed in the rearview mirror, her left hand a clenched fist around the handle above the door.