“Yes.”
There wasn’t a flicker of disbelief in Charlotte’s voice. “Such riveting psychological insight into your character,” she said. “I suddenly understand you better.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I shot back.
She almost smiled. Almost. “Dodie saw water. You have seen lights. Has Violet seen anything?”
The words stopped in my throat. I wasn’t ashamed of Violet, andI didn’t think she was crazy. But her story was hers to tell, not mine. “Violet sees things sometimes,” I settled on saying. “But not in this house.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I frowned, because I wasn’t sure. At all. We had never talked about our nightmares in detail growing up. What had Violet seen that she hadn’t told us? If she’d kept silent, how bad must it have been?
“You’re getting at something, Charlotte,” I said. “You’ve seen everything you need. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”
Charlotte looked pensive. She really was pretty, with her elegant jawline and her tilted-up chin. If you liked that sort of woman. “I am reminded of a case I consulted on some time ago,” she said in her best English lecturer’s voice. “A family bought a house in Tennessee that they came to believe was haunted. The children saw figures in the shadows, and the littlest child—she was only three—claimed that something came in her window at night.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
“The girl’s bedroom was on the ground floor. The window wasn’t tampered with, but the little girl had persistent nightmares about someone coming in the window. She said it was the mailman. That was very odd, to be certain, but the girl always described it the same way, as if she was sure. The mailman was coming through the window.” She shook her head. “It could be written off as a child’s recurring nightmare except that the two other children in the house saw things, too. And the parents heard scrabbling, thumps, something being dragged on the floor. One of my colleagues investigated it. He was baffled, and he called me.”
I waited. Despite my impatience, I could admit that she was a decent storyteller.
“I come across many hoaxes in my line of work,” Charlotte said, with a knowing look at me. “It was possible that this was one of them. But before he called me, my colleague discovered that a murder hadtaken place in that very house, fifty years before the family bought it. The teenage girl sleeping in the main-floor bedroom was murdered one night, her body left on the floor. Whoever did it came through the window. The case was never solved.”
I wanted to make a scathing remark, but the words wouldn’t come.
Charlotte put the spectrometer down on my bed and opened her briefcase again. “The case, alas, had to be left a mystery. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling. Did a mailman commit the murder of the teenage girl? No detective will reopen an old investigation based on the nightmares of a three-year-old child fifty years later, so we will never know. Perhaps the little girl was simply having a recurring dream. Perhaps she had seen the street’s mailman one day and her mind fixed on him. Perhaps she had been coached by her family, or had picked up on a conversation somewhere about the murder. Or perhaps, as she slept at night, she was witnessing the murder that had taken place in her bedroom before she was born. And she was witnessing it over and over again.”
Something moved on the edges of my mind, made a hollow sound like an elongated knuckle tapping on the glass of a skylight. A thought and a memory in one.
“The police wouldn’t look into the family mailman, but you would,” I said to Charlotte. “And you did.”
She nodded. “Of course I did. The mailman whose route included their home was nearing sixty and close to retirement. He lived alone with his wife because their grown children had moved away. He did not seem like a person who would sneak out at night to terrify a child. That’s all I know.”
“There are many possible explanations for what I saw in this room,” I said. “And one of the explanations is that I saw something that happened here. Something that happened to Ben.”
“And yet this isn’t Ben’s bedroom.”
Yes. It was. I was suddenly sure it was.
This had been Ben’s bedroom thefirsttime.
I moved to the bed and sat down. I put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees. I stared at the floor between my feet.
Where did you go, little brother? Where did you go?
It was fucking terrifying, but the first thing I felt was grief. I had spent my childhood in my little brother’s room before he was born. This stupid room, with the slanted ceiling that I banged my head on—thiswas Ben’s room. All these years, and I had never known.
What had he seen before he died the first time? Had he seen lights? Someone standing over his bed? Had he heard those words, “Wake up”? Was that why he wrote them on the wall?
Charlotte broke into my thoughts with her cool, crisp accent. “I recommend an exorcism,” she said.
I lifted my head from my hands. “I’m notexorcisingmy little brother.”
“Not him.” She waved a hand. “Please think clearly, Vail. You need to exorcise the other entity in this house. The one that grabbed you. The one that wrote on the wall downstairs.”
Now I was confused. “Ben wrote on the wall downstairs.”
