Chapter One

ONE

The walls of the house were bleeding again.

This sort of thing could be expected; it was, after all, September.

The bleeding wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been accompanied by nightly moaning that escalated into screaming by the end of the month like clockwork. The moaning started around midnight and didn’t let up until nearly six in the morning, which made it challenging to get a good night’s sleep. Since it was early in the month, I could still sleep through the racket, but the sleep was disjointed and not particularly restful.

Before Hal absconded to wherever it was he went, he used to stretch and crack what sounded like the entirety of his skeleton. Margaret, he would say, we’re getting old.

Speak for yourself,I would reply, but he was right. I was starting to feel a bit like the house itself sometimes—grand but withering, shifting in the wind and making questionable noises when the foundation settled. All the moaning-and-screaming business in September certainly didn’t help me feel any younger.

That is to say, I was not looking forward to late September and the nightly screaming. It was going to be a long month. But that’s just the way of things.

As for the bleeding, it always started at the top floor of the house—the master bedroom. If I wasn’t mistaken, it started above our very bed itself. There was something disconcerting about opening your eyes first thing in the morning and seeing a thick trail of red oozing down your nice wallpaper, pointing straight at your head. It really set a mood for the remainder of the day. Then you walked out into the hallway and there was more of it dripping from in between the cracks in the wallpaper, leaking honey-slow to the floor. It was a lot to take in before breakfast.

As early as it was in September, the blood hadn’t yet made it to the baseboards. Give it a week, however, and it would start pooling on the floor, cascading down the stairs in clotting red waterfalls. By the end of the month, deft footwork would be required to walk down the hallway or descend the stairs without leaving a trail of prints throughout the house. I had grown practiced in dodging blood over the past few years, but even I had slipped up on occasion, especially once the screaming was in full effect. Sleep deprivation really takes a toll on your motor functioning.

I used to worry over the walls, getting a bucket and soap and scrubbing until my arms were sore, only to see my work undone the very next day. By the end of the month, it got so bad that I could rub the sponge over a crack in the wallpaper and watch a fresh blob of red leak out of the open wound that was the wall over and over again. The wallpaper is ruined, I fretted, but it never was. It all went away in October. So now I just allowed the walls to bleed and waited patiently.

The first year we were in the house, Hal tried to convince me that the bleeding was just a leak. An oozing red leak. He carried on with that line of reasoning much longer than was logical. By the time the blood had poured down the stairs and Hal was almost ready to admit that maybe it wasn’t a simple leak, October hit and the blood vanished. Hal considered it a problem solved. I suppose he thought it was an isolated event and never considered that these things might be cyclical. He seemed surprised when the blood returned that second September. There’s that leak again, he mused, fooling nobody. Everything, of course, changed after the third September, and Hal’s opinions about the bleeding during this fourth September could be best summed up by his abrupt absence. I supposed I ought to feel trepidatious about facing September alone. However, I was never quite alone in this house, now, was I?

---

—I couldn’t tell you why the walls bled. I couldn’t tell you why there was screaming at night. I couldn’t tell you why a lot of things happened in this house. Over the years, I had developed a few working theories about the goings-on and why September made everything so much more difficult, but each was half-formed at best. Eventually, one has to give up asking questions, just accept that things are the way they are, and act accordingly. So when I woke up to a wall dripping with blood and to a foggy head from not-quite sleeping through hours of moaning, I simply nodded and got on with my morning.

My only plan for the day was to try to get some painting done. I had learned from past experience that it became difficult to focus on painting or really much of anything as the month progressed, what with the sleep deprivation and the blood and the loud noises and the wounded children running everywhere. As such, I wanted to front-load my pleasures in the hopes that they could carry me through the remainder of the month. Planning is important. So I set myself up in my sunroom studio with a blank canvas, hoping for inspiration. However, I soon found myself staring at a canvas painted entirely in red, which seemed a bit derivative, given the circumstances.

I tapped my paintbrush against my lips and stared at the red canvas, plotting out what to paint. It might have been nice to do a nature scene—some peaceful flowers, waving trees—but all I saw in my mind’s eye was a child’s face, mutilated and screaming. Perhaps painting was not in the cards for today.

A dull headache poked its way behind my eyes—a foreshadowing of the near-incessant headache I would have by the end of the month—and I sighed, giving up. I plopped my paintbrush, dry and useless, down on my easel and stood. Tea. It was time for tea.

As I walked from my studio into the living room, I could hear Fredricka moving around upstairs, doing something or other in the second-floor bedrooms. I knew all the doors were closed along that hallway (What will we ever do with a five-bedroom house, Margaret? Hal had asked me when we reviewed the listing. We’ll have guests, I had responded, a rare moment of prescience for me), but I could still hear noises from within, different from the usual disturbances that arose from behind those closed doors. Jostling and rustling, the changing of linens. The scraping of furniture across the floor in one room, then a light crash coming from another. Fredricka was lively today.

September had an effect on Fredricka. She became busier, more chaotic. She was nervous. She didn’t like September, she told me once. She had seen more than a hundred Septembers, so she ought to know.

For her part, Fredricka expelled her September energy through cleaning, stacking things, and rearranging furniture in nonsensical ways. None of these chores were necessary, but I understood her intentions. One has to control something in the face of the great uncontrollable. I left her alone.

Fredricka usually made the tea, but it seemed like it would be my responsibility today. A frown crept onto my face, and I reminded myself a bit of a spoiled child. I chastised myself for my entitlement. Making tea, after all, wasn’t particularly burdensome, and it was a bit of good fortune to have Fredricka around at all, considering we hadn’t hired her. She had come with the house, in a manner of speaking. Still, one gets used to routines. As I rounded the corner out of the living room and into the foyer, I tried to remember where we kept the tea bags. Fredricka might have moved them. She liked to move things in September, and not because she wanted to be helpful. For all I knew, they had been shoved behind the toilet.

Lost in my thoughts, I was startled to hear a voice behind me.

“Tea, ma’am?” Fredricka asked. Apparently, she hadn’t been too distracted to make it, after all.

Despite my surprise upon learning that Fredricka was a nonnegotiable fixture of the house, I had come to realize that I enjoyed her presence. She was reasonably benevolent, or at least as benevolent as anything in the house could be. Still, the sight of her was always a shock to the system. Fredricka was a tall woman, and grand, in a way, as the house itself, with so much of her walled off and expressionless, unwilling to open and allow a peek of what lay inside. And of course, there was that gash on her head, gaping open like a split pumpkin, where the axe had sunk in over a hundred years ago. The wound began at the top of her forehead and stretched down through her right eyebrow. Her eye was sunken in as a result, pupil drifting, not quite right anymore. That took a while to get used to looking at.

I smiled at her. “I can handle it if you’re busy.”

“No trouble at all, ma’am.” Fredricka drifted down the hallway that ran parallel to the stairs and led into the kitchen, her long smock fluttering behind her. I followed.

The kitchen was the brightest room in the house, surrounded with windows displaying the greenery outside, which was just now yielding leaves tinged with yellows and reds. It had been one of the biggest draws of the house for me, with two large ovens, a glimmering white sink, and rows of ornate cabinetry (original wood, mind you). It turned out to be comparatively peaceful in here, and I usually ate my meals at the kitchen table instead of in the grand dining room just a few feet away. For some reason, the blood never made it into the kitchen, so this room would be a particular haven as September raged on. A true blessing, that was; seeing blood staining those pristine surfaces, however temporarily, would have broken my heart. I’d grown used to seeing carnage inches from my food (Fredricka prepared most of the meals, after all), but one must draw a line somewhere.

Fredricka busied herself with the kettle, filling it with water and placing it on the stove. Not wanting to stand like a statue waiting for Fredricka to serve me, I walked over to the basement door just off the kitchen to check the wooden boards nailed into the doorframe. I had replaced them recently, but I tugged on each beam all the same, testing the strength. Four of them were firm, but one wiggled a little. I inspected the nails—just as I thought, coming loose. In the year since the boards had gone up, I found that the nails did that from time to time. Checking the boards was essential. I made a mental note that the beam would need to be replaced soon. Not urgent, but best to act on these things sooner rather than later. I gripped the doorknob and gave it a tug. The door remained closed, held tight by the boards. I traced my finger over the small crack—a recent addition—that snaked down from the top of the door nearly midway to the doorknob, sharp but not large enough to threaten the integrity of the wood. Everything, for the most part, was as it should have been.

Turning back into the kitchen, I noticed that Elias had materialized next to the stove. I sighed. Elias could be a bit of a bother.

Elias was nine or ten. I could never remember. Whatever his age was, he was scrawny, with a smattering of unruly dark hair on his head. He always looked the same—gaunt and empty, his dirty white cotton shirt draping over dark shorts, and one sad knee sock dangling by his ankle. He stared at me with milky eyes and a sullen face. He didn’t have any visible wounds like Fredricka, but could somehow be just as eerie, if not more. I couldn’t interact with Elias the way I could with Fredricka, although God knows I’d tried: I tried asking him questions, telling him to tap his foot once for yes and twice for no; I tried asking him to move the planchette on a Ouija board; I even tried making outlandish statements about World War II just to get a rise out of him. Nothing. So I hate to say it, but I started treating him like a plant, narrating my life out loud to him with no expectation of him responding or even hearing. It looks like rain today, Elias. Oh, Elias, seems like the mail is running late. Not that we’re expecting anything but bills, anyway. For his part, Elias just stared.

“Can I make you something to eat, ma’am?” Fredricka asked, busying herself around Elias as if he were not there. Elias and Fredricka had nothing to do with each other and I had never seen them interact. I had started to assume Fredricka didn’t even see Elias until one day she referred to him as “that boy.” No clues regarding Elias’ perceptions of Fredricka were ever available, seeing as he never spoke, only howled periodically.

“Some toast, perhaps?” I responded. I moved to the pantry to retrieve the bread before Fredricka could get to it. We had an electric toaster, but Fredricka’s ability to use technology popularized after her death was sporadic at best. I tried to teach her about the toaster and even had her successfully use it once, but her preference was to roast the bread on a toasting fork over a fire, like she used to do. It was muscle memory for her; she just did what she was always used to doing. I understood and even empathized (aren’t we all creatures of habit in the end?) but the process took forever and I was hungry.

“I think we still have some strawberry jam.” I motioned to the fridge. This would give Fredricka something to do. After months and months of trying to convince Fredricka that she had no obligation to be our housekeeper and was free to do whatever she wanted on this earth, I learned that all Fredricka seemed to be capable of doing was work, and all she wanted from me was to be given things to do. All right, then.

Elias watched me with those unblinking eyes as I retrieved the bread from the pantry and a plate from the cupboard. He was like the Mona Lisa, eyes following me about the room, expression unreadable. It had initially been unsettling, but one grows used to unsettling things.

Fredricka rummaged around in the fridge. “We do have strawberry jam, ma’am,” Fredricka said. “Or, if ma’am prefers, we also have blackberry.”

“Blackberry sounds good, actually.” I turned with my bread and walked towards the toaster. Elias was standing directly in front of it, empty eyes leering into mine. This was going to be a problem.

“Excuse me, Elias,” I said. Elias didn’t reply or move, but I wasn’t expecting him to. I reached past him towards the toaster. As my arm drew near, the white of Elias’ face turned black, as if it had been on fire for a long, long time. His milky eyes boiled into embers and his mouth stretched into a gaping maw, fangs gleaming as he shrieked, diving for the flesh of my arm. Elias did not like his personal space invaded. However, I was practiced in this game, deftly dropping my bread in the toaster, pushing the lever, and retracting my arm in a matter of seconds, receiving only the lightest of grazes from Elias’ fangs. Just a scratch, not even bleeding. No need to even apply hydrogen peroxide. This wasn’t my first time trying to prepare a meal while dodging the fangs of a dead child who wished me bodily harm.

Upon being denied the chance to remove a section of my flesh with his teeth, Elias let out another shriek, which sounded like a dying jet engine. He vanished inside of himself, and the kitchen was again quiet, save for the sounds of Fredricka arranging jams on the counter behind me.

Most of the things in this house had left Hal alone, choosing to bother me instead of him for reasons I never quite understood or found fair. Elias had been the lone exception, taking his own version of a liking to Hal, which was a bit more violent than most people’s version of a liking. I wasn’t sure what the connection was, but Elias certainly enjoyed frequenting the room Hal had claimed as his office. I wondered if that room used to be Elias’ playroom, or possibly the room in which he died. Regardless, Hal had not cared for Elias. I certainly understood his perspective, but I couldn’t see the point of expending all that energy on hating something that, in the grand scheme of things, mostly just stared and occasionally tried to bite. Just stay out of range of his teeth—a fairly easy solution, all things considered.

Fredricka retrieved my toast from the toaster and spread the blackberry jam liberally. She handed me the plate and tended to the tea while I sat at the kitchen table, chewing pensively. When Hal and I had first moved here, the sight of Fredricka’s wound was a bit challenging around mealtimes, and I found myself needing to look away from her while I ate. However, one gets used to horrible things, and today I could watch her with ease while I ate, licking jam off my fingers and thinking about the remainder of the day. Despite how little I had to do, I liked mentally arranging my schedule. The days had a habit of blurring together, especially now that Hal was gone. It was helpful to plan tasks, to accomplish things.

“I was hoping to go for a walk later today,” I said to Fredricka in between bites of toast, “but it looks like it might rain. Disappointing. I don’t want to sit like a lump in here all day.”

“Needs must when the devil drives,” said Fredricka.

“Indeed,” I said. “Maybe I’ll do some yoga.” I was unlikely to do yoga, but saying it out loud made me feel productive, and Fredricka wasn’t going to argue with me. “I don’t think I’ll get much painting done for the rest of the month. All I can think of is children’s faces and the color red. I’ve done that a hundred times over.” I was also thinking of Hal, but I didn’t say so out loud. There didn’t seem to be very much of a point to thinking about Hal with any sort of frequency.

Fredricka made no comment about my questionable inspiration. She set a cup of tea in front of me. “That sounds excellent, ma’am.”

I thanked her and sipped at my tea, trying to think of other activities for the day. The days had been growing dull. Fuzzy.

Fredricka shifted, antsy. “If it is acceptable to ma’am, I would like to get back to my work upstairs. I have many beds to freshen.”

“You know you don’t have to change out those linens,” I said, fully aware of the futility of my argument. Fredricka didn’t have to change out the linens, but in some ways she did. She was driven to by a force I likely wouldn’t understand until after I died myself. Muscle memory, and all that. “Nobody is using those beds.”

“One must change out the bedclothes, lest they start smelling stale.”

No use in arguing. I waved her away. “Go right ahead, then,” I said. “Thank you for the tea.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.” Fredricka turned and began drifting out of the kitchen. On her way out, she paused as she passed my phone, which was charging quietly on the counter. She turned her head to look back at me. “I believe ma’am will find”—she nodded in the direction of the phone—“she has received a message from her daughter.”

If Fredricka had difficulties using a toaster, you had better believe she had no concept of how to use a smartphone. She never touched the thing, even when rearranging everything in September. It was completely outside of her realm of technological mastery, and she spent most of the time acting as if it didn’t exist, much like she did with Elias. Still, she possessed an understanding of the ways in which my phone connected me to the world, and she had an uncanny ability to sense when I missed a communication, clueing me in to messages and voicemails of which I was unaware.

Shit.“Thanks, Fredricka,” I said, moving to the counter to get my phone. I glanced at the screen. One missed call, one voicemail, and a series of text messages, all from Katherine.

Call me back, she texted. Then, As soon as you can. Then, I really need to talk to you about Dad.

Shit shit shit. She was getting more and more insistent. She used to just text, which was so much easier to ignore. Then she started calling, which was harder to avoid. She was calling almost daily now, and the text message follow-up pointed only at an increase in urgency. I’m not giving up, it said. I can outlast you. I would have to call her back, appease her.

The phone chimed in my hand. Another text message from Katherine, whose ears must have been burning. You’re ignoring me.

I sighed.

My finger was hovering over the screen, about to press call, when I looked up and caught sight of a small, slim figure hovering wordlessly near the basement door, not really there but not not there either. A little girl, sallow skin, chunks of dirty hair hanging over her face. She wore a dress that might’ve once been blue, with little white flowers dotting the fabric, but was now more of a slate, approaching black. At one point, something terrible had happened to her skull. One of her eyeballs, not quite solid anymore, drooped from its socket as she stared at me.

Everything in this house stared at me. Little pranksters playing a staring contest, seeing who would be the first to blink.

Angelica. This one was Angelica. She was the first of many who would arrive, a Paul Revere of sorts. They are coming. I didn’t know all their names, but I knew Angelica.

“Hi, Angelica,” I said, resting my phone back on the counter. It was September all right. The children arrived, one by one, in September.

Angelica didn’t say anything. She never did. She lifted an arm, as thin and knotted as a tree branch, and pointed a grimy finger at the basement door.

Oh, I had fallen for that one before. That first September, when I thought all these apparitions were problems for me to solve, I had fancied myself a regular Nancy Drew and thrown myself into whatever wild-goose chase these pranksters wanted to send me on. I’d since learned better. Some mysteries don’t need to be solved, only coped with. That was one of the reasons for the boards nailed over the basement door. One of the many reasons, that is.

“You know I’m not doing that, Angelica,” I said.

Angelica, of course, said nothing. Her pointing finger never wavered.

“It’s nice to see you again,” I said, changing the subject. I didn’t expect a response but wanted to be polite nonetheless.

Nothing. Pointing.

“Well”—I lifted my phone off the counter, making plans to call Katherine from my studio—“I had better get going. Things to do today.”

I had turned and was nearly out of the kitchen when I heard a tiny voice behind me. “He’s down there.”

Well. That was new.

I pivoted and looked at Angelica. “Oh?” I asked.

“He’s down there,” she repeated, her voice like rusty wind chimes.

Angelica usually didn’t speak—none of the pranksters did, aside from Fredricka. Sure, they made little sounds—like sobbing or wailing or howling or shrieking or that dying-jet-engine noise like Elias—but never words, never full sentences. I wondered what had brought this about. Very probably, this was due to me ignoring her pointing finger, walking away from the basement instead of down into it, like the travesty that had been last September. When Katherine was little and I told her she couldn’t have a cookie before dinner, she would whine and cry and stomp her feet, knowing that sometimes, if I was tired, I would give in. She could outlast me even then. If this was Angelica’s version of a temper tantrum, I would take it. She couldn’t outlast me like Katherine. I had grown stronger, and the stakes were higher.

But of course, Angelica was right. He was down there, in the basement. He had been down there since Hal and I moved in. The basement, it seemed, was where he lived. Hence the boards.

I wondered if the others would also talk when they arrived. A part of me was interested in having someone else to talk to, but it was unlikely they would be good conversationalists.

“I know, Angelica,” I said. “Thanks.” I turned and walked towards my studio. Behind me, I heard a sound like gasping for air that grew into a high-pitched scream before an abrupt silence. Angelica was gone, at least for the moment.

---

—Katherine answered the phone on the first ring.

“What the hell?” she said instead of Hello. “I’ve been trying to call you for weeks.”

“Hello,” I said. “How have you been, dear?”

“Fucking worried,” she spat. “Mom, I can’t get ahold of Dad.”

“Language,” I said. Shit.

I lowered myself into an old chair in the far corner of my studio. Aside from the kitchen, this was my favorite part of the house, and I figured it was a decent place for what was likely to be an unpleasant conversation. I had painted these walls yellow, a happy color that shone when the sunlight hit it. However, today the sky was a wall of gray and the yellow seemed out of place, mocking me with its cheer when everything else was dark. Insult to injury, really.

“Mom, I’m serious,” Katherine said. “I’ve been calling him for weeks now and his phone just goes to voicemail. And now I can’t even record a message because his voicemail is full. I know he doesn’t like talking on the phone, but this seems wrong. What’s going on?”

I had been putting this conversation off as long as I could. I had hoped, fruitlessly, that I could put it off until October, but I knew that was a long shot. It was difficult. Prior to Hal’s being gone, Katherine called at least weekly, and even though it was typically only she and I who conversed, she usually asked to say a quick hello to her father. Katherine and Hal had never been particularly close, but Katherine maintained a begrudging obligation to attempt at least a superficial relationship with her father. Hellos when she called, vague assurances that her career was going well, general inquiries about Hal’s opinions of the weather. Enough conversation to last at least three minutes and preferably no longer. It had a checklist sort of feel to it: spoke to my father, chuckled at his jokes, didn’t mention any lingering grudges. Minimum due diligence as a daughter. The trouble was, now I couldn’t give her even those three minutes with Hal, and it seemed unlikely that Hal would reach out on his own.

“Mom.” Her voice was insistent. “You need to tell me what’s going on.”

Maintaining the facade these past few weeks had grown increasingly difficult. For the first couple of weeks after Hal vanished, I had been able to dodge her requests to speak to her father by claiming he wasn’t at home or was busy working on his new novel and couldn’t be disturbed. Once I even pretended to go get him for her and walked up to his office, phone in hand.

“Hal,” I had chirped at no one, “Katherine wants to say hi.” I clutched the phone to my stomach, hoping it would muffle my voice enough for Katherine not to expect to hear Hal’s reply.

I had stood in silence, staring into his empty office, estimating how long his response—were there one—would have taken, before putting the phone back to my ear. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. He can’t talk right now. But he says hello and that he loves you.”

After Katherine and I had said our goodbyes that day, I lingered in Hal’s office, as if he had been there the whole time. I saw a thin film of dust on his desk. Fredricka usually avoided this room—she preferred to stay out of Hal’s sight, as did most of the pranksters—but I could tell her that she could tend to it now if she wished. I turned to leave and there was Elias, standing directly in front of me and staring with those milky eyes, his face starting to blacken with my nearness.

“Don’t judge me,” I’d said.

He gnashed his teeth in reply.

There was only so much dodging I could do before Katherine became concerned. During our last phone call, she had commented that she hadn’t spoken to Hal in a little while. “I know he’s busy,” she had said, “but maybe you could put him on for a second just to say hello?”

“He’s away,” I said quickly. “I would love to, but—”

“I thought you said he was working on his novel,” Katherine said.

Shit.I had. “Did I? Oh. I thought he was,” I said, “but it turns out, he’s away. My mistake.”

Katherine sounded suspicious, but not enough to cause a scene, not yet. “Well, can you have him call me when he gets in? I’d love to hear his voice.” That last bit was a lie, and an obvious one.

“Oh, sure, dear. I will do just that.”

I didn’t. I could lie too.

That had been over a week ago, and Katherine’s level of suspicion had officially risen to scene-causing levels.

“Mom.”Her voice was shrill. “Where is Dad?”

I took a deep breath and let myself sink into the chair, as if this could prepare me for the onslaught that was a few seconds away. “He’s gone, dear.”

“Gone? What do you mean—gone?” The honesty that Katherine had insisted upon had not, in fact, made her feel any better. I could have told her it wouldn’t, but she wouldn’t have listened.

“I mean, he’s not here anymore.”

A large bird flew past the windows, so close that its feathers nearly grazed the glass. Another sign that it was September. Hal and I had hung bird feeders when we first moved here, only to find our yard littered with avian corpses, their necks broken from crashing into our windows. We tried moving the feeders and applying painter’s tape to the windows to keep them away, but soon learned that they weren’t mistaking windows for open space but instead were intentionally careening into the hard outer walls of the house. Suicidal. Hal tried to tell me that it was normal, that birds just sort of did that sometimes, but even he had to admit that the frequency of the suicides was a bit much. So we took the feeders down. We still had our share of dead birds in September, but having fewer birds around during the year meant fewer corpses to clean up overall, which wasn’t nothing.

“Did he leave?”

“I’m afraid he did, dear,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm for both of us.

“Jesus Christ, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? How long ago did he leave?”

An interesting question, one whose answer depended on one’s definition of “leave.” One might think that leaving is an all-or-nothing activity: one is here; then one is not here. However, experience would suggest that leaving occurs on a continuum, happening in stages. Had Hal left when he stopped sleeping in the master bedroom with me, choosing to sleep slumped over his desk instead? Had he left when he told me that he didn’t want to live in this house anymore, that he didn’t care if we took a huge loss in selling it or even if we didn’t sell it at all, that he just needed to get out? Had he left when I put my foot down for once and told him that, no, we weren’t selling, that I wasn’t going anywhere, that this was our home? Had he left on one of those days when we didn’t say a word to each other, just floated through the house on our own paths, apparitions following our own muscle memory? Or had he left the day he was gone, the day he decided he couldn’t take it anymore, the door closing slowly after him but the tires of the taxi speeding quickly over the gravel in the driveway? (Drive, he must have commanded.)

Another deep breath. Katherine was not going to like this. “About a month ago.”

“A month?” Katherine was yelling now. I moved the phone away from my ear. “He’s been gone a whole month? And you didn’t tell me? What the fuck, Mom?”

“Language.”

“Where did he go? Where is he?”

“I’m not sure exactly.” Hal didn’t have any family left, and he had no friends in the area. He hadn’t even seemed to have a fully formed plan when he walked out the door. He might as well be in the same space that Elias occupied after he vanished inside himself. He was simply gone. “He might have gone to a hotel, I think.”

“You think? For a whole month?”

“I’m not sure, dear.”

“This doesn’t explain why he isn’t answering my phone calls. Why is he ignoring me?” For a second, Katherine sounded like a child again, asking why she couldn’t have a cookie before dinner. “I’m his fucking daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

“Language.”

“Has he been in touch with you? Have you heard from him at all?”

“No,” I said. “Not a peep.” This was the truth. He went silent. I let him.

“So it doesn’t sound like he just left,” Katherine said, her voice high and panicked. “It sounds like he’s missing.”

I made a little hum of mild agreement. I supposed that was one way of looking at it.

“Do you think something happened to him, Mom?”

Semantics again. This depended on one’s definition of “happened.” Certainly, things happened to him—to both of us—all the time while we lived here. Terrible things, in fact. Especially last September. However, it was likely that fewer things were happening to Hal now that he was gone. I certainly couldn’t imagine that there could be more. “What do you mean?”

“Like”—Katherine was choosing her words carefully—“do you think he got himself in some sort of trouble? You know, like?.?.?. before?” She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t appreciate my disinclination to discuss the past but abided by it nonetheless, albeit reluctantly.

“Oh. No, I don’t think so,” I said. “But it’s not impossible.”

“And you haven’t heard from him at all.”

This wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “No, dear.” I lifted a paintbrush out of an old cup and started chipping away at the dry paint on the handle with my fingernail. I wondered how much of this conversation would be circular.

“Jesus, Mom, you sound like you don’t even care,” Katherine said. “Doesn’t this bother you at all? He’s missing.”

“Of course it bothers me.” I watched a large chunk of paint fly off the brush after a satisfying flick of my fingernail. “I suppose I’ve had some time to adjust.” This was also true to an extent. With Hal so withdrawn in the months before he left, it was hard to even notice a difference in the house without him. It was as if he had always been gone. Besides, there was little point in concerning myself with an individual who was no longer in the house when there were many more concerning individuals who were actually in the house. And with September ramping up, the number of individuals in the house who warranted concern was about to increase.

But Katherine—who had never put up much of a fight about our various half-formed excuses regarding our being unable to host her for a visit over the years—didn’t know anything about the number of concerning individuals in the house, so I wasn’t going to tell her about any of that. There would be questions raised. Worries. Demands that I leave the house. Or, worse, demands that Katherine travel down here to view the horrors herself. No, none of that would do.

Katherine sighed. There was a silence, and for a pleasant second I thought I could end the conversation. “Why did he leave in the first place?” she asked.

He couldn’t go through another September.“Oh, we don’t really need to get into that, dear. He had his reasons. You know how he could get.” I heard the dismissiveness in my voice and knew how ineffective this response would be even as I spoke.

“Yeah, I do know how he could get,” Katherine snapped. “Which is exactly why you should be more freaked out than you are. Which is exactly why I am as freaked out as I am. Seriously, a whole month with no contact? With you or me? Something is fucking wrong.”

I opened my mouth to admonish Katherine for her language yet again, but before my thoughts became sound, Katherine blurted, “I’m coming down there.”

No no no.

“No no no,” I said, a little too quickly. “You really don’t need to worry about this. I’m sure he is just blowing off some steam. And before we both know it, he’ll be back. And when he comes back, I promise you that you’ll be the first—”

“I’m coming,” Katherine said. “Someone needs to figure out what’s going on, figure out where he is, and clearly you don’t give a shit, so that leaves me. And I’ve got plenty of vacation time to burn.”

I shook my head, not that Katherine could see me doing it. Katherine coming for an extended stay at the house—coming to stay at the house for the first time, in fact—in September, of all months, was a real worst-case scenario. I knew how to navigate Septembers. I knew who to avoid and how to avoid them. Katherine didn’t. And for a novice, September would be a nightmare. So much of a nightmare that Hal—who had lived through two successful Septembers and a third, less successful September—had fled rather than face a fourth.

“Katherine, I?.?.?. I can call the police about it. File a missing person report.” I heard the desperation in my voice and hoped that she couldn’t. “Let the police handle it. They’ll do a much better job than you or I ever could.”

“And the fact that you didn’t file a missing person report weeks ago is exactly why I’m coming down.” I heard a clicking sound in the background. Typing. Katherine was on a computer, likely on a travel website. The train was leaving the station. Shit.

When Katherine learned about the pranksters—or, worse, witnessed them firsthand—she would have opinions. She wouldn’t be happy. She would want me to leave. And Katherine’s insistence was just the kind of crowbar that might actually prove successful in that endeavor, which was exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want. This was my home.

“Katherine, right now isn’t a very good time for visitors around here,” I said, grasping for any rationale more credible than the truth. Would sympathy work? “The house is in utter disarray. I haven’t done much cleaning since your father left.” Would logistics work? “None of the guest rooms are in any order and there is no food in the house.” Would inconvenience work? “We have a leak in the roof that I’ve been meaning to get fixed for a while now.”

None of it worked. “I’m coming.” More typing in the background. “There is a flight out on the tenth. I’m booking it.”

I was at a loss. Events would be noticeably increasing in severity by the tenth and only getting worse with each passing day. Angelica would have at least one friend (maybe more), Fredricka would be moving things about constantly, the blood would be everywhere, and the screaming—oh, the screaming. Elias would be pretty much the same, though. An upside.

“If you’ll just give me until October”—I was nearly pleading now—“I think I could get the house in order.” In October, everything would be calmer. There wouldn’t be blood everywhere. Fredricka would be still. Angelica and all her little friends would be gone. The nights would be silent again. Sure, there would still be pranksters running around here and there, but it would be much easier to keep Katherine safely oblivious by then.

“Mom, I don’t give a shit about the house,” Katherine said, although she really, really should have.

“Katherine?.?.?.”

More typing. “It’s booked,” she said. “I get in pretty late on the tenth, so I’ll just stay in a hotel by the airport that night. I’ll be heading your way on the eleventh.”

So that was that. The one outcome of this conversation I wanted desperately to avoid. I pressed my eyes closed, searching for something to say. My mouth accomplished little aside from hanging open.

“I’ll keep in touch,” Katherine said. Now that she had gotten what she wanted, she no longer needed to keep talking. “Don’t worry, Mom—we’ll find him.” She added this as an afterthought, as if to convince both of us that she was doing this for me instead of for herself.

I didn’t even listen to the words I said in response, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting with my silent phone in my lap, dead eyes staring at nothing in particular. I couldn’t be sure, but I had the sense that Angelica was in front of the basement door again, pointing. I gazed listlessly out the window, barely registering the large bird that slammed into the glass, snapping its neck and falling into the grass, a cloud of blood and feathers.