“You know what I’m going to say.” Vera peered at her aunt, who busied herself with chopped vegetables and hunks of meat.

“I know no such thing.” Aunt Tilda swept her long silver hair behind her ear and poured chicken stock into a Crock-Pot.

“The hurricane.”

Vera let the words hang.

She and her aunt rarely talked about it, as if giving what happened that day mental energy was giving it power. But there was nothing to give power to, right? They’d stopped it.

When Vera was ten years old, when she heard that object shatter behind the old barnwood door, she thought her life shattered with it. She had been told repeatedly to never touch that door, enter that room, or brush against a single object. Vera and her aunt gave those same instructions to Maxwell and his sister today. But they didn’t tell them that years ago, something broke.

After the crash sounded, Aunt Tilda tucked her ten-year-old niece under the dining room table, the lace cloth Vera’s only protection, and opened the basement door. She was gone for five minutes, exactly three hundred seconds. Vera counted. When Aunt Tilda returned, she said she’d recited the “prayers of protection.” Everything was fine now. But when her parents got home, and Aunt Tilda informed them of the prayers she’d said, they realized she’d only completed two parts of a four-part ritual. That wasn’t enough.

So they completed the rest themselves—seven days after the hurricane had wreaked its havoc.

Of course, they worried that something had been unleashed, but there were no reports of possession, no increased calls to the church. Seven years passed. They believed they’d contained it.

They could have been wrong. What if all the eerie coincidences, all the accidents, all the deaths, even the gas explosion, traced back to that one horrible moment?

“The hurricane has nothing to do with it.” Aunt Tilda stirred the contents of her pot, her wooden spoon sloshing.

“You can’t know that,” Vera countered.

“I do. I said the prayers. I was there when your parents said them. It worked.”

“But what if it didn’t?” Vera shook her head. “Aunt Tilda, the town changed after the gas explosion.”

“Yes, because the explosion was horrific, but that had nothing to do with the hurricane.”

“I’m not so sure. I think there’s a connection.” Vera stared at her hands twisting on the kitchen table. “I’m having dreams.”

Her aunt stopped stirring. “What kind of dreams?” Her voice betrayed a touch of fear.

“About the past. I’ve dreamt about the hurricane,” Vera admitted; the rush of that memory was so real she could practically feel the rain on her face. “And I’ve dreamt about things I couldn’t possibly know. I dreamt about the man who caused the gas explosion. I dreamt about him going down to the basement of the community center and messing with the meter. Aunt Tilda, I could see the gas gauge—it looked like a little clock or a speedometer, with a needle that moves. I’ve never seen one in real life, but in my dream, it was so clear. I could draw it for you now. How is that possible?”