After putting the roses in water, I started up the creaking stairs with the laundry. Normally at first, then my steps quickened. As if speed could help me escape the sensation that someone followed close on my heels.

Reaching the second-floor landing, I swung around the newel and made a beeline for my room. There, I set my angel back on my dresser, where Charlie couldn’t get it. Then I scooted it all the way back.

There.

Lingering for a beat, I frowned at the angel’s featureless face, wishing in that moment that I could have the person who it represented instead.

Mom. The angel had been hers.

Unlike Dad, Mom had harbored a baseline belief in supernatural forces. Though, as a scientist, she could always explain away the weird stuff, too.

I guess I was like her in that way.

I left my room at a brisk walk and headed toward Charlie’s.

Until today, I’d encountered no evidence beyond dreams and stories. Now, though, by working off the suggestions that had been fed to it—that this house was haunted—my ego was doing its job by trying to protect me from a perceived threat.

But it was my rational mind that could protect me from the ego’s predisposition to freak out.

The house was old, the floorboards creaked, causing one of the strings in the piano to vibrate, and Dad moved my angel to keep it safe.

Erik was a dream—an archetype representing both my grief and my growing feelings for Lucas. And while some kids chose to have an imaginary friend, Charlie had decided to conjure an enemy. Which, given that the stories surrounding our house were public knowledge, had probably come from something she’d heard at school.

Zedok was just her way of filling the vacant spot in her life she’d begun to take note of, her mind working off suggestion as well to transform the invisible elephant in the room into an invisible masked man.

I pulled a twin fitted sheet out of the basket in Charlie’s room, wishing all the while that I’d thought to turn on Spotify or something. Anything to drown out my thoughts and other hard-to-explain noises.

Singing to myself, I pushed the piano incident to the back of my mind and got to work making Charlie’s bed.

The music I’d discovered in the attic had contained no lyrics, but I’d still found the melody as haunting as it was unforgettable. I’d pulled the sheet music from my schoolbag while waiting for the laundry to dry, deciphering the notes like runes, humming the refrain to myself and cementing it in my mind. Though sadness threaded the notes that both dipped and climbed, above all, strange beauty underscored the song, which had died uncompleted and mysteriously mid-note on the final page.

Though the music had never been finished, the ballad’s chorus existed in its entirety, and I clung to the memory of it now, repeating it with differing syllables while I hoisted the sheet high over the bed so I could float it down over the mattress. The moment after it settled atop Charlie’s bed, though, the spine-prickling sensation I’d first experienced when I’d opened the front door returned.