Page 84 of The Unknown

That’s one reason I draw the curtains. The other is Molly. If she decides to visit again, even here on the second floor, I don’t want to see her.

After using the bathroom down the hall and changing into my nightgown, I return to the room to catch Julianne kneeling beside the queen bed, her head bowed in prayer. “Sorry,” she says. “It felt appropriate. Even though I haven’t prayed in years.”

“I’ve never prayed,” I say, trying not to think about what that does to my odds of making it off the island. Maybe the fact that I was raised by agnostic parents makes me easy pickings.

“You can join me, if you’d like.”

I kneel next to Julianne, following her lead. Eyes closed, palms pressed together, head lowered.

“Dear Lord,” she says. “Please watch over us in our time of need. Please give us the strength to fight the evil that has come into our midst. Please help us however you can. Thank you. Amen.”

I echo her amen and slide into bed. Julianne does the same on the opposite side, like we’re having a sleepover. Like not a single aspect of this situation is fucked up when, in reality, all of it is. I snuff out the lamp on my nightstand, and we lie in the darkness, silent and still, but both of us wide awake.

“Do you really think it’s not them?” I ask. “Molly, Dean, Violet’s father. Do you really think it’s a—”

I stop, still unable to say the word both of us are thinking.

Demon.

“I want to believe it’s them,” Julianne says. “I like the idea of seeing Dean again. I’d like to tell him that I’m sorry—and that I hope he forgives me. But I don’t think it is.”

“I thought demons just, like, possessed people.”

“And they do, according to certain faiths. But that’s not all they’re capable of. Their primary goal is to torment. That’s what my grandparents believed—that demons roamed this earth, provoking people into sinning. So, yes, they sometimes possess, but they also deceive, toying with people’s thoughts and emotions.”

“So that’s what Azra might be doing?”

“Possibly, yes,” Julianne says.

I can’t decide which scenario is worse—being stalked by the ghosts of our loved ones or being stalked by a demonpretendingto be them. Ilook to the covered windows, wondering if Molly is somehow there on the other side, an actress waiting for the curtain to rise. If so, which Molly is she? The real one or the imposter?

I keep staring at the curtained windows long after Julianne has drifted off to sleep. An astonishing feat I already know I won’t be able to replicate. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t slept an entire night since arriving at New Avalon. Or that what happened to Heather—not to mention talking about Molly, demons, and Azra—has left me utterly drained. I’m in a house I’m barely familiar with, sharing a bed that’s just as uncomfortable as the one in the cottage. Sleep, I fear, isn’t in the cards.

Instead, I lie awake, frightened by what might be beyond those windows. This, I think, is what it must have felt like to live in eras only read about in books. The days of Poe, of Sleepy Hollow, of Salem, Massachusetts. Times when the darkness, barely kept at bay by fireplaces in cramped parlors and drawing rooms, was far preferable to whatever evil lurked outside the door. Witches and devils and horsemen with no heads. All those things that seemed superstitious and naive before I set foot on New Avalon now feel very, very real.

I scan the room’s shadows to see if anything lurks there. The only thing that looks even slightly ghostly is Julianne’s dress, now dangling from a hook on the back of the door. Limp and shapeless, it reminds me of Heather’s and Susie’s clothes still in the oak.

Why they’ve been hung there, both now and a hundred years ago, is impossible to know. Where the women who wore them went is another mystery. They’re simply gone, existing now in some nameless realm between life and death. Limbo, but for the missing. A terrible place to be.

Lying in the darkness, I’m struck by a morbid thought.

That I’m dead.

That we all are.

That New Avalon is the limbo, and those who’ve vanished, both then and now, have simply been allowed to move on while the rest of us areforced to sit here and wait. Maybe that’s why I’ve seen Molly, and Violet and Julianne have sensed their lost loved ones. Maybe they’re not a demon but an emissary sent here to guide us into the land of the dead.

Thatwould be the worst-case scenario, if I thought for even a second that it was true. If I were dead, I assume I wouldn’t be bothered by the heat of the room or how, right next to me, Julianne lightly snores.

At least it’s not scratching or, worse, the dreaded thwump. The fact that I haven’t heard either of them makes me think those noises are exclusive to the cottage, meant only for my ears.

That, ironically, ends up being my last thought before sleep finally sneaks up on me. I sense it coming only a minute before it arrives. A clash of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that doesn’t last nearly as long as it should. I wake an hour or so later to that netherworld of not quite night, not yet day. A gloom I can detect through my closed eyelids. When I do open them, the room is brighter than I expect it to be.

And brighter than itshouldbe.

I sit up, and the first thing I see is an empty patch of bed beside me. My head does a whip-pan around the rest of the room.

To Julianne’s nightgown in a heap on the floor.