It was 3:33 a.m. That’s what Helen’s light-up digital watch showed when she pushed the button.

Nate was not beside her in bed.

“Nate?” she called sleepily. The trailer was dark and quiet. “Nate?” she tried again, listening.

All she heard was the dull thud of her own quickening heartbeat.

Her worrying, anxiety, and paranoia were getting the better of her. Whenever she went into town to pick up a box of screws or a new hammer to replace one they’d lost, she was sure everyone was watching, whispering. She told this to Nate, and he laughed it off, said she was imagining things. But she hadn’t imagined it when she heard a woman at the post office say to another, “It’s her. The one from the Breckenridge place.” And the other woman had shaken her head in disgust, very clearly said, “Should never have come, disturbed Hattie like they did,” then scuttled out of the post office like she was frightened of Helen.

“I’m telling you,” she’d said to Nate. “I don’t think they want us here. They think we…stirred up Hattie’s ghost or something.”

“I think you’re taking your own worries, your own dis-ease, and putting it on other people,” he said, setting down his new hammer. They were nailing down the upstairs plywood subfloor. “Sure, folks in Hartsboro may be a little leery of outsiders, but saying they don’t want us here is a bit of a stretch. And don’t even get me started on the ghost stuff.”

Now she reached up on the shelf for the flashlight, fingers groping, spider-crawling along the dusty wood.

It wasn’t there. She swept back and forth with her hand but found nothing. Nate’s glasses were missing, too.

Helen slid her way off the bottom of the bed, her feet hitting the cold linoleum of the floor. It was spongy in places, giving just a little under her bare feet.

Like walking on the bog, she thought. And at any moment, I’ll fall through, down into a deep dark spring, into the place Hattie came from.

She thought of turning on the light but was too frightened. She didn’t want whatever might be out there to know she was up, to see her through the tiny trailer windows.

Nothing’s out there, she told herself.

She tried to steady her breathing, but it still came out in jagged puffs.

She crept quietly down the hall, through the living room to the front door. There was a window just to the left of it. She looked through the dusty glass, past her own dim, frightened reflection. The night seemed impossibly dark. A sliver of a moon. A cloudy sky. Not even the pinprick lights of the stars overhead.