The gravel gave way beneath her boots with a sound like teeth grinding together, each step releasing the particular musk of a decade's worth of neglect. Maren Halloway paused at the crest of the lane where the drive curved toward Ashenmere, and the house found her before she was ready to find it.
It loomed against a sky the color of a bruise: deep violet at the zenith bleeding down to a sickly amber where the sun had bled out behind the hills. The windows were boarded over with planks the gray of old bone, except for the attic dormer where a single shutter dangled by a single hinge, tapping a slow rhythm against the frame in the wind. The front door hung a quarter inch ajar. Not thrown wide. Not obviously breached. Just open, in the way a mouth goes slack when the jaw relaxes past caring.
She stood there longer than she meant to. The wind carried the smell of wet ash and rotting wood, and beneath that, something older and sweeter, like dried elderflower left in a dead woman's drawer. Somewhere behind the house, a crow screamed once and went silent.
Maren counted her breaths. She had promised herself she would count them, the way her father had taught her to count when the panic came roosting in the sternum. Four in. Hold. Six out. The numbers did not help. The numbers never had, but she kept using them anyway, a small private ritual against the dark.
"Steady," she said aloud, and the word sounded small against the house's mass.
Her hand found the iron gate latch without looking. Rust flaked under her fingers and came away orange against her palm. She wiped it on her coat and stepped through.
The lane was overgrown with nettle and dead thistle, and the gravel beneath them was mostly memory. Here and there a stone poked through the green like a knuckle. The drive was longer than she remembered, or she had been walking for longer than she thought, because the house did not grow larger as she approached so much as it grew clearer, each detail sharpening into focus as if the dusk were a lens being turned.
She saw the weathervane first. The heron had lost its head sometime in the intervening years, and the spike stood bare against the sky like a crooked finger. The gutters sagged with a weight that was not quite water. The porch steps had rotted through at the second tread, and a length of honeysuckle had crawled up the railing and pulled it half off its moorings. The whole thing leaned, just slightly, to the left as if listening.
Maren stopped at the foot of the steps.
The door opened a little wider in a breath of wind. The hinges did not creak. They had been oiled, recently enough that the smell reached her where she stood, faint beneath the elderflower rot. Someone had been here. Someone had been here recently, and had wanted her to know it without wanting to be caught at it.
She thought of the letter. The lawyer's precise hand. The postmark. The way the paper had felt heavier than two sheets had any right to feel, as if the words themselves had mass. Estate of Arthur Halloway, deceased. You are named as sole beneficiary and executor. Keys enclosed. Cordially.
She reached into her coat pocket and felt them there, the two keys on their loop of twine. One for the front door. One for the study. She had spent the train journey turning them over in her palm until the metal had warmed to her blood heat and she could not tell where the keys ended and she began.
She climbed the steps. The second one held. The third groaned but bore her weight. She stood before the door with her hand an inch from the wood, and the wood was a deep stained oak, almost black with age, and carved at the threshold with the Halloway crest. A heron in a marsh. A circle of three keys.
The carving was wrong.
She had not seen it in years, but she remembered: the heron's beak had been closed. Now it gaped open, the upper mandible lifted as if caught mid-call. The keys in the circle had been crossed at the stems. They lay now parallel, pointing east, toward the woods.
She did not touch them.
Her hand found the door instead, and the wood was cool under her fingers, cooler than the dusk air warranted. She pushed, and the door swung inward with a hush of air that smelled of candle tallow and something underneath, something mineral and cold, like wet stone at the bottom of a well.
The hallway of Ashenmere opened before her.
She had forgotten how long it was. Twelve strides from the front door to the foot of the stairs, the boards a deep umber that drank the failing light, the walls papered in a pattern of herons and reeds that had faded to ghosts of themselves. A console table stood against the left wall, the vase upon it long since emptied of whatever flowers had once softened the gloom. The mirror above it had been taken down, leaving a pale rectangle on the wallpaper like a scar.
Her own face looked back at her from the dimness. Younger than she felt. Older than her years. Her hair, the same dark ash as her sister's had been, was coming loose from its knot. Her mouth was a thin line. Her eyes were her father's.
She stepped inside. The door drifted shut behind her without help, the latch catching with a small clean click, and the house sealed itself around her.
Maren set her bag down on the console table. The leather thudded softly. She had brought three changes of clothes, a notebook, a torch, a candle and matches, a tin of tea, a tin of biscuits her landlady had pressed upon her, and the small leather journal she had carried since she was seventeen. She had not brought her father's pistol. She had thought about it. She had decided that bringing a weapon into the house her sister had vanished from felt like the wrong kind of answer.
The grandfather clock against the far wall had stopped at quarter past three. The hands pointed accusingly at the dial, and the glass over the face was cracked in a single starburst at the center. Through it she could see the pendulum still hung at the center of its arc, as if it had been stopped mid-swing and had never been released.
She stood in the hall and listened.
The house was not silent. Silence would have been bearable. This was something else: the soft settling of old timbers, a tick of cooling metal somewhere in the walls, a faint papery whisper that might have been mice in the wainscoting or might have been the wallpaper itself, breathing. Beneath all of it, so low it was almost imagined, a hum. Not mechanical. Not electrical. A vibration that lived in the bones of the place and reached her through the soles of her boots.
Maren unwound the scarf from her throat. The air inside was cooler than outside, and damper, with a weight to it that made each breath feel like she was drawing water through a cloth. The candle tallow smell was stronger here, and beneath it the same dried elderflower sweetness, and beneath that, again, the mineral cold.
She took the first door on the left. The morning room. Her father had called it the morning room even though it faced west and caught nothing but the last of the day's light. It had been Lidia's favorite. The piano sat against the far wall, the fallboard closed and a layer of dust thick enough to take a fingerprint. Sheet music was still propped on the rack, a Mazeppa she had been learning, the pages foxed and yellowed.
Maren crossed the room and lifted the fallboard. The keys were ivory and ebony, the ebony cracked in places, the ivory yellowed. She pressed middle C.
The note came out wrong. Not sour exactly. Just lonely, as if the string had forgotten the company of its neighbors and was unused to being asked to speak alone. The sound hung in the air and was swallowed by the room.
She left the fallboard up. She left the room.
The dining room was across the hall. The table was still set for a meal no one had come to eat: two places, two napkins folded into points, two glasses upright, a single dead spider curled in the bowl of one of them. She pulled out a chair and sat down anyway, because her legs had begun to feel uncertain and she wanted to think before she went further into the house.
She thought about the lawyer's letter. She thought about the train. She thought about the way the carriage had emptied at the small station at the end of the line, and the only other passenger had been a woman with a face she almost recognized, who had looked at Maren, and then looked away, and then had not been there at all when Maren had turned back from buying her ticket. She thought about the lane from the station, three miles of it, walked in a dusk that had seemed to thicken around her as she went, as if the air itself were reluctant to let her arrive.
She thought about her sister.
Ten years. Lidia would be thirty-two now if she were still alive. Thirty-two, and perhaps changed past all recognition, or perhaps not changed at all, as the drowned sometimes are not. Maren had carried her face in her memory the way one carries a key one is afraid to use. The high cheekbones. The mouth that always looked about to laugh at something the rest of the room had missed. The habit of tilting her head when she listened, as if the interesting part of any conversation arrived from an angle.
Maren had not come to Ashenmere to settle the estate. She had come because the estate was a door, and behind it might be the first real answer to the question that had lived in her chest for ten years like a coal that would not go out.
She stood up. The chair scraped against the boards. The sound was much too loud.
She went back into the hall and took the stairs. They curved up to the first landing in a tight half-turn, the banister polished to a dark gleam by a hundred years of palms. Halfway up she paused and looked down, and the hallway below seemed farther away than it should have been, the front door a small dark mouth at the end of a long throat.
Her father's study was on the first floor, second door on the right. She took the key from her pocket and fitted it to the lock. It turned with a smoothness that surprised her. She pushed the door open and let the room breathe out at her.
It smelled of him. Pipe tobacco and the particular must of old books and the sharper note of the linseed oil he had rubbed into his reading chair. The chair still sat behind the desk, turned slightly toward the door, as if he had just stepped out and might return at any moment. The desk was bare except for a single sheet of paper weighted down by a stone the size of a fist.
Maren crossed the room and read it.
The handwriting was her father's. She would have known it anywhere: the particular lean of the letters, the way the t's were crossed with a single impatient stroke, the way the ink had feathered where the nib had caught on a rough fiber of the paper.
Maren. If you are reading this I am dead and you are here, which is what I hoped would not happen and what I feared would. There is a key to the cellar in the desk drawer. There are things in the cellar I should have destroyed before they destroyed us. The diary is in the false bottom of the wardrobe in Lidia's room. Read it. Then decide whether you wish to leave. I am sorry. I am sorry. Your father.
Below the signature he had drawn the heron. Beak open. Beak calling.
Maren set the paper down. She opened the desk drawer. The key lay inside, smaller than the others, black with age, and when she lifted it she felt the weight of it tug at her wrist as if it wished to be elsewhere.
She did not go to the cellar. Not yet.
She stood very still in the middle of her father's study and let the house settle around her, and the house settled closer, and the hum in the bones of it grew fractionally louder, and the dusk outside pressed its bruise-colored face against the boards of the windows, and waited.
The staircase exhaled dust as Maren climbed.
Each step released a faint breath of grey into the fading light, and the grit of it caught in her throat, tasted of chalk and foxglove and the ghost of pipe smoke her father had carried for thirty years. She counted the stairs out of habit, the way her mother had taught her when she was small and afraid of the dark between the landings. Seven to the first floor. Five to the second. The carpet runner, once a deep wine red, had faded to the color of dried blood in old bandages, and beneath her boots the weave was soft with rot.
At the top, a corridor stretched away from her, narrow and crooked, following the shape of the house rather than any sensible plan. Portraits lined the walls, and the eyes of the ancestors, oil and varnish, seemed to follow her as she passed. She did not look at them closely. She had decided, somewhere between the study and the landing, that she was not going to be afraid of the dead tonight. She had been afraid of them long enough.
Lidia's room was the last door on the right.
Maren stood before it with her hand on the knob and felt, absurdly, as though she were about to knock. She had not knocked on her sister's door in ten years. She did not knock now. She turned the handle and the door swung inward on hinges that gave no sound, and the smell of the room rose up to meet her: paper and cold linens and something sweeter underneath, almost like apples left too long in a bowl.
The wardrobe stood against the far wall.
It was taller than she remembered, or perhaps she had been shorter. Black wood, carved at the top with a pattern of leaves and small birds that she had traced with her fingertip a thousand times as a child, while Lidia sat on the bed and read aloud from some book of poems she had borrowed from the school library. The handle was brass, green with verdigris. When Maren touched it, the metal was cold enough to sting.
She opened the wardrobe.
Clothes hung inside, lavender and grey and the deep green of a winter coat Lidia had been given for her sixteenth birthday. The linings were spotted with mildew. At the bottom, beneath a shelf that looked solid but gave slightly when she pressed the back corner, there was a space, and in the space there was a notebook bound in pale cloth the color of bone.
Maren lifted it out.
The cover was unmarked. The spine cracked softly as she opened it, and the first page was dated in Lidia's careful, sloping hand: the twenty-third of September, ten years ago, almost to the day.
She carried the diary to the window seat and sat.
The light was nearly gone. The lake below the glass had become a sheet of beaten pewter, and the woods behind it had thickened into a single dark mass. Maren lit the small lamp she had brought upstairs and set it on the sill, and the yellow circle of it pushed the shadows back just far enough to read by.
She turned the page.
Dear room, dear walls, dear terrible house. I am beginning this because I cannot speak to anyone and I am afraid that if I do not set the words down somewhere I will lose them, the way one loses the tune of a song after sleep. I have decided that something is happening at Ashenmere and that I am going to find out what it is.
Maren smiled, despite herself. Even in handwriting, her sister had sounded like someone about to step off a cliff and wave at the drop.
I have been reading the books in the library that Father keeps locked. I stole the key from his drawer the night of the storm, the one that took the roof from the west wing. He was so busy with the insurance and the men that he never noticed the key was gone, or perhaps he did notice and he was too tired to chase me for it. I have been taking the books down one at a time and putting them back in the wrong order so he will not know which I have read. They are full of family, our family, going back further than I thought anyone in this place could have traced. There are names in there I have never heard spoken aloud. There are pictures.
She turned several pages. The handwriting remained steady. The lamp threw a small warm circle around her hands and the book, and the rest of the room lay in a blue-grey softness that felt almost kind. She could hear the faint tick of the radiator cooling somewhere downstairs, and the wind pushing at the eaves in long, slow gusts.
I asked Mother about the names. She told me not to ask again. She said it in that voice she uses when she wants me to know that what she is saying is not a request. I asked Father and he sat for a long time without answering and then he said that there were things in our family that we did not talk about because talking about them made them closer. I told him that did not make sense and he said that was because I was still young.
Maren's thumb marked the place. She read on.
There is a word that keeps appearing in the books. It is written in a way I do not recognize, and Father has crossed it out in two of the volumes, but I read it anyway because it is shaped like a person with their arms folded inward, and underneath one of the crossings he has written, in a hand I do not think is his, "she is not ready." I have copied the word here. I do not know what it means. I am going to find out.
Beneath this entry, drawn in careful ink, was a small symbol. A figure with no face and arms folded inward across its chest, like a body wrapped in its own ribs.
Maren stared at it for longer than she meant to. The lamp flickered once, very slightly, as if the flame had considered going out and thought better of it.
She turned the page.
October 12. I have spoken to Cora Whitfield.
Maren felt her breath catch. She made herself read on.
I walked down to the village this morning because I wanted milk for tea and because I wanted to be out of the house for an hour. The shop was empty except for the woman behind the counter, who is not Mrs. Penhallow as it usually is on a Tuesday. Mrs. Penhallow is away, she said. Her sister has been taken poorly. The woman behind the counter is tall and thin and her hair is the color of iron and she watches me the way the portraits in the hall watch me, as if she knows something I have not yet said. Her name, she told me, is Cora Whitfield. She has come up from the south to help her sister with the shop for a few weeks.
She poured my milk for me and while she was pouring it she said, "You are one of the Halloways." Not a question. I told her I was. She nodded once, the way people do when they have been waiting to be told something they already knew.
"Your family has been in that house for a long time," she said.
I said yes.
"Longer than is usual," she said.
I asked her what she meant.
She smiled, then. It was not a kind smile but it was not unkind either. It was the smile of someone who has seen a small animal step into the road and is waiting to see whether it will cross.
She said, "There are things about the house that are not in any of the books in your library, Miss Halloway. There are things that are only spoken, and only to certain people, and only when the speaking of them cannot be put off any longer."
I asked her what things.
She said, "Ask your father about the Hollowing. And then come back to me. I will be here for as long as I am needed, which may be longer than I would like."
She gave me the milk and refused my money. I walked home with the bottle cold against my wrist and the feeling that I had been measured.
The lamp guttered. Maren looked up. The room had grown colder while she read, and the shadows at the edges of the wardrobe had thickened into something almost solid. She drew her coat tighter around her shoulders and turned the page.
October 19. I asked Father.
He did not answer me at first. He was standing at the window in his study, the one that faces the lake, and he did not turn around when I came in. He said, "Lidia. What have you been told." Not a question. A demand. I told him I had heard the word and I wanted to know what it meant.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "It is a thing we do not do anymore. It is a thing I made sure we would not do anymore. It is a thing I will not discuss with you. Not now. Not ever."
I said, "Father, what is it."
He turned then. His face was not angry. It was tired. He looked, for a moment, like a man who has been standing in a doorway for a very long time, holding it shut with his shoulder.
He said, "It is a ritual. It is a way of making a person into something the house can use. It was done, once, long ago, to a girl who was not well, and the house was satisfied for a generation. It is not done now. It will not be done again. You are to forget that you heard the word."
I asked him what happened to the girl.
He did not answer. He walked past me and out of the room and closed the door and I heard him lock it from the other side.
Maren closed the diary.
Her hands were steady, but only just. She held them out in front of her and watched them for a moment, as if to confirm that they were still her own and still attached to her in the way she expected. The lamp had steadied again. The wind had dropped. The lake beyond the window had become so dark that it was no longer distinguishable from the woods behind it.
She opened the diary again. There were pages yet to read, and she read them.
October 26. I went back to the village.
Cora Whitfield was in the shop. She saw me come in and she nodded, once, as if she had been expecting me, which I am beginning to think she had.
She said, "He told you not to ask."
I said he had.
She said, "He would. He has been trying to put the door back in its frame for thirty years. It does not want to stay shut."
I asked her what she meant.
She came around the counter then, which surprised me, because the shop was open and a woman might come in at any moment, and she took my arm above the elbow, gently, the way a nurse takes the arm of someone who has fainted, and she led me to the back room and closed the door and poured us each a cup of tea from a pot that was already made, which meant she had been expecting me, which meant she had been waiting.
She told me what the Hollowing is.
Maren turned the page.
There were several pages missing.
Not torn, not quite. Cut, with a blade, very close to the spine, so that what remained on either side was the merest strip of paper, and the words had been taken with surgical care. The cuts were old, the edges browned to the same color as the rest of the paper, but the intention was clear. Someone had removed what Cora had said. Someone had done it before the diary was hidden.
Maren sat very still.
The lamp flame leaned, very slightly, toward the diary, as if it were trying to see what had been taken away.
She turned past the missing pages. The next intact entry was dated the second of November, and Lidia's handwriting, which had been careful and sloping, was looser now, the letters leaning forward as if they were trying to outrun the hand that made them.
November 2. I have been down to the lake.
I went at night. I do not know why I went at night except that the day felt too small to hold what I was feeling, and the house felt too close, and I needed to be outside in a place that was not the inside of our family. I took a torch. I took a coat. I walked down through the bracken to the water's edge and I stood there and listened.
The lake was very still.
There was something in the middle of it. I do not know how to describe it except to say that it was darker than the dark around it, and that it did not move, and that when I looked at it the torch flame in my hand leaned toward it the way a compass needle leans toward the north.
I stood there for a long time.
Then I heard her.
Maren stopped reading.
The next line was not Lidia's hand. It was a different slant, a different pressure of ink, and it was written in a script she did not recognize at all, and yet, reading it, she heard it in her sister's voice, as if Lidia had whispered it into her ear from the other side of a door.
I am here, it said. I am still here. The house is keeping me. Find me. Find me before the next one.
Find me. Find me before the next one.
The ink smelled of something Maren could not place. It was not the iron-and-oak gall of old writing. It was darker, wetter, and underneath it ran a thin metallic sweetness, like the first breath before a thunderstorm, like the air over a wound. She brought the page close to her face and breathed it in, and for a moment she was not in the upstairs room of the house at all. She was standing at the edge of a black lake with a torch in her hand, and the torch flame was bending sideways, and there was something out in the water that was darker than the dark, and it knew she was there.
She set the book down on the floor. She pressed both palms flat against her thighs and breathed.
The house, in its patient way, waited.
Downstairs, the grandfather clock chimed the half-hour, a single low note that traveled up through the bones of the building and arrived in the room as a faint vibration under her knees. Outside, a wind had picked up. She had not noticed it beginning. It pressed against the window now, and the glass gave a little in its frame, and somewhere along the corridor a door she had closed stood open by an inch, and the faint grey line of the hallway showed through the gap like a thread of breath.
Then she heard it.
It was not the wind. It was not the clock. It was a sound like wind threading through a dozen throats, low and broken and edged, a sound that began in one part of the house and ended in another, a sound that had the rhythm of breathing but not the shape of it. It moved through the walls. It moved through the floor. It came up the stairwell and into the corridor and stopped, or seemed to stop, just outside the door.
Maren did not move. She sat with her hands flat on her thighs and her eyes on the door and listened.
The sound came again. This time she could hear the spaces between the breaths, the way a singer can hear the rests in a song, and in those spaces there was nothing, not even the hum of the house, only a held silence, the kind of silence that waits to be filled.
Then a shadow moved along the wall outside.
It was not the shadow of a person. It was too long for that, and too thin, and it did not move the way a person's shadow moves, with the body. It moved the way smoke moves, or the way a stain moves across wet paper, in a slow, deliberate flow, as if it had been waiting behind the wall and had finally been given permission to come out. It slid along the corridor. It reached the doorway. It paused there, as if considering the threshold. Then, very slowly, it began to slide up the staircase ahead of her, lifting itself step by step into the higher dark.
Maren stood.
She did not think about it. She did not give herself time to be afraid. She took the diary from the floor and put it inside her coat, against her ribs, where the leather was warm and the pages pressed into her chest like a second heartbeat. She picked up her phone from the windowsill. The screen was cracked across one corner. She turned the torch on and pointed it at the doorway.
The beam reached into the corridor and found the ordinary things there: the runner of dark carpet, the closed doors on either side, the painting of a man in a stiff collar whose eyes had followed her since she was a child. The shadow was gone. The stairs, where the beam now pointed, were empty.
She walked out of the room.
The house, in its patient way, did not resist her. It let her cross the corridor and reach the top of the stairs. It let her put her foot on the first step. The wood was warm under her boot, warmer than it ought to have been, as if something had just passed over it. She pointed the torch down into the stairwell and saw only the dust motes turning in the light.
She went down.
On the landing, she paused and listened. The sound had stopped. The wind outside had dropped. The clock had finished its single note, and the silence that followed was the silence of a held breath, the silence of a room that has been recently occupied.
She could have gone back. She could have taken the diary and her phone and her father's letter and walked out the front door and down the drive and never come back. She had a car. She had a key. She had a life outside, the shape of which she could almost remember if she tried, a flat in another city, a desk, a row of books waiting for her to come back to them. She could leave.
She went down.
The ground floor was colder than the upper storeys. The torch beam reached out across the hall and found the long table and the chairs drawn up around it and the open door to the back of the house. The grandfather clock ticked in its corner, steady and indifferent. The smell of old wood and damp plaster and something else, something sweeter, hung in the air.
The diary was warm against her chest.
She crossed the hall. She passed the table where she had eaten her father's toast that morning, when he had still been her father, when he had still been alive and whole and sitting in his chair with his cup in his hand. She did not let herself look at the chair. She went past it and out into the back corridor and toward the door that opened onto the yard and the path that led down through the bracken to the lake.
The door was already open.
She had shut it when she came in. She was certain she had shut it. The latch was a heavy brass thing that caught when you pulled it to, and she had pulled it to, she had heard it click. Now it stood ajar by a hand's breadth, and a thin line of grey evening light came through the gap and lay along the flagstones like a pointing finger.
She pushed the door open with the flat of her hand. The yard was empty. The sky above the house was the colour of a bruise, purple at the edges and black at the centre, and the first star had not yet come out. The path down to the lake was a dark line in the darker grass, and she could not see where it ended.
She stepped off the threshold.
The grass was wet under her boots. She felt the cold of it come up through the leather and into the bones of her feet, and she walked. The bracken brushed against her legs as she went down the slope, and the smell of the lake rose to meet her, mineral and cold and faintly alive. She kept the torch pointed ahead, and the beam moved over the stones and the tufts of coarse grass and the low, twisted bushes that grew at the water's edge.
The lake opened in front of her.
It was very still. The surface of it was not glass, because glass reflects, and this did not. It drank the light from the torch and gave nothing back. It was black, and the black was not the black of sky or shadow, but the black of depth, the black of something that had been closed a long time and had forgotten how to be open.
She stopped at the edge.
The wind had dropped entirely. There was no sound but the small lap of water against the stones at her feet, and under that, lower, the creak of the house behind her on the hill. She held the diary against her chest with one hand and the torch with the other and looked out at the water.
There was something in the middle of it.
She did not see it so much as feel it, the way you feel a presence in a room before you turn and see who is there. It was darker than the dark around it, and it did not move, and when she looked at it the torch flame in her hand leaned toward it the way a compass needle leans toward the north.
She stood there for a long time.
The lake waited. The house waited. The thing in the middle of the lake waited, patient as a held breath.
Maren opened the diary. She turned back to the page where Lidia's voice had been replaced by the unknown script, and she held the book out over the water, and she read the words aloud into the dark.
"I am here. I am still here. The house is keeping me. Find me. Find me before the next one."
Her voice went out over the lake and did not come back.
For a long moment nothing happened. The water lay still. The torch flame leaned. The thing in the middle of the lake did not move.
Then, very slowly, the water began to move.
It began at the centre, where the darkness was deepest, and it spread outward in a long, slow ripple, the kind of ripple that a stone makes when it is dropped from a great height. The ripple reached the stones at Maren's feet and broke softly against them. The sound of it was almost a voice.
The diary in her hand grew warm.
She looked down at it. The page she had been holding had changed. The ink of the unknown script was moving on the paper, rearranging itself under her eyes, and new words were appearing in Lidia's hand, sloping and careful, as if her sister were writing now, in this moment, from somewhere very close.
The words said: You came.
Maren closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the page was the same. The ink was dry. The words did not move.
She closed the diary. She put it back inside her coat, against her ribs. She took one step back from the water's edge, and then another. The lake lay behind her, very still, very dark, holding whatever it held. The house on the hill above her was a black shape against a darker sky, and every window in it was lit, though she had not lit them.
She turned and began to walk back up the path.
Behind her, the water moved once, softly, against the stones, and then was still.