She heard screaming, steady screaming, and the sound of voices in the air, and the pounding of bare feet on the studio's wide porch.

She sat up, clasping a hand over her mouth.

It was she who had been screaming!

All at once Michael burst in. He put his arms around her, holding her close. "Mom," he murmured. "Oh, my God. What happened?"

Speechless, she pointed at the door to the studio, but the light went on inside. She glimpsed Carla's statue. The breeze through the window was blowing the jib cover, moving the shadow to and fro. Carla hurried into the bedroom and closed the studio door.

"Ellen, what is it?"

"A dream. A bad, bad dream." She looked into her eyes. No, Carla would never do a statue of a shark, not after Sean.

"You had a nightmare." Carla smiled. "I thought it was Thea..." She looked around the bedroom. "Where is she?"

In the distance, a pack of dogs were howling at the moon. A cricket was shrilling. She could hear the gentle lap of waves by the dock where the Folly lay.

"Where is who?" asked Mike softly. His eyes were widening with fright.

Carla leapt to her feet and ran to the window. She looked out and swung around. "Thea! I thought she'd come with you! She wasn't in her room!"

Mike dived for the door, and Carla followed. By the time Ellen was out of bed and flying across the porch, she could see Mike sprinting down the trail to Masthead Point.

Carla was already halfway to the castle on the beach, and Ellen could hear her calling into the night.

***

Louisa knew from the moment she parked the VW on the dirt path that led to Clarence's home that Papa Jacques was inside.

Shivering, she glanced at her playing cards. The pack had insufficient power to be a gad—a charm to protect her against the evil she sensed inside.

One could make a gad from an alligator tooth soaked in a mavangou bottle full of migan broth: gunpowder and Shrove Tuesday ashes soaked in a mixture of the water from a forge or a tannery, the blood of a red herring, and the blood of a virgin mouse. She had seen her mother do it and had worn one as a child, until her English teacher, a Catholic nun, had forbidden her to wear it to school anymore.

A charm fed once a year with such a broth, it was said, was protection even against bullets. Men during the "time of the bayonets" on Haiti, a hundred years ago, had proved it so.

Having no such amulet, she clutched her cards, anyway, and crept close to the shack's single window.