There was no banter between them. No smiles. No excitement to bolster their spirits. Not this time.

Ben could see Chloe’s backpack bobbing in the distance, swaying as the wind whipped around her. They had set out before either one of them could speak of the prior night. No pedestal was given to common sense. Ben wondered if she’d drawn parallels to the little girl’s story. It was all superstitious nonsense, of course, probably invented to keep their children indoors after dark. Folk tales were a cruel breed, always relying on fear to hammer home their message. But Ben knew how easily they were believed, even by those who should have known better. People yearned for the impossible. They would sooner trust their lives to magic than face the ennui of reality.

Ben had an aunt once, Patricia. A self-professed clairvoyant with a keen eye for future happenings. Hers was the classic Nostradamus style of premonition – spinning riddles so loose that hindsight could wrap them around any event and say they fit. She was his father’s only sibling and a black leaf on the family tree that always looked out of place. Patricia had cameoed in Ben’s childhood; a handful of encounters, each one tinged with crystals and vague, poetic ramblings. And yet if memories were sand slipping through Ben’s fingers, then Aunt Patricia was the rock that sank into his palm. He could still feel its weight, even after all those years.

Patricia had lived and died in black. Ben recalled those long, floor-sweeping skirts swishing around him like a hundred whispered voices. Whenever he did see her feet, they were always bare, even when it rained, when kids knew to wear shoes. Her lipstick was the darkest he’d ever seen, and her mouth so slender that its colour always bled onto the skin. The woman’s hair had prematurely greyed. It draped down to her waist in lifeless, silver strands, and framed her face like a cowl. She wasn’t old then, and she wasn’t old when she passed away.

Both parents regarded Patricia as a nuisance. Ben remembered hearing his mother refer to “that woman” in the days prior to his aunt’s arrival on their doorstep. He had innocently wondered why they kept on forgetting her name. Whenever she was visiting, every window in the house was left ajar, even in winter. And so Ben learned to relocate his toys to the fireplace, where his fingers didn’t ache from the cold. It was as though instead of washing her clothes, Aunt Patricia simply hung them over some smoking sage to purify the stains. No room escaped her odour and it would hang in the air for days after.