“What about you?” he said.
“I didn’t ask him for anything,” she said. “I didn’t like the terms.”
He looked down at her and she smiled. He found himself smiling back, remembering her as she was when they were kids—oblivious to her own beauty, brave, funny, smart. She was still all of those things.
“The terms,” he repeated.
“Yeah. You know, tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. You just have to do something for me, maybe now, maybe later, who knows what. It sounded like a scam. My mom always told me, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Anyway, I didn’t want anything then. Not really. I was just a kid.”
“Do you want something now?”
“Now?” She looked up at the sky. A hawk made ever-widening circles overhead, hunting. “Now I just want to be free.”
“Free?”
“Free from fear, from darkness.”
“You’ve seen him again,” guessed Ian.
She nodded, her eyes filling. He took her hand.
“Me too. Let’s go,” he said. “I feel like the only way out might be through.”
She nodded, gave him a weak smile. “That’s what I tell my patients.”
They climbed the creaking stairs and went inside.
9.
Young Matthew shouldn’t have gone back to Havenwood. After the cop, the talk with Grandpa Merle, everything that he’d learned, any smart kid would have stayed far away.
But he did go back.
He dug through the detritus of his dad’s childhood closet. It was filled with junk, ratty sports equipment, an old box of faded baseball cards, team jerseys, a suit. He’d even unearthed once, way in the back, a cracked old bong and a couple of Playboy magazines that must have escaped Penny’s notice. Among the board games, he found what he was looking for, the dusty old Ouija board. He took the flashlight from the drawer in the bedside table. When he heard the old man start to snore, he crept down the hall, down the stairs, and slipped out the back door in the kitchen.
The moon was high and full, lighting his way. He wasn’t afraid; he’d made the journey many times before, long before what Mason had thought was his big reveal. This was Matthew’s property, after all, his family’s land—but maybe in some sense it was Mason’s too. Or had been. Matthew made this trip through the woods to visit the Dark Man, who told him things and showed him things—like a corrupting older sibling who took you to scary movies, or gave you your first cigarette.
It seemed to Matthew that he’d never not known the Dark Man. He’d always been there.
Matthew entered unafraid through the front door of Havenwood, using the flashlight to shine the way down the hall, through the wreck of an institutional kitchen and then down the stairs to the basement.
“Are you here?” he called.
With the lighter in his pocket, he started lighting the candles.
But Havenwood was quiet, just the wind blowing through open doors and cracked windows, making the candlelight flicker. He set up the board. He wanted to talk to the Dark Man.
No one but the Dark Man knew that Matthew had been there the night Mason had followed Amelia. Matthew had heard Amelia’s wish. He, like Mason, had been hiding in the shadows away from the others. And that wasn’t even the first time he had watched a gathering like that, kids yelling their stupid hopes and dreams into the musty air.
Matthew’s parents had dropped him off early that year; they’d been having problems, trying to work it out, needed some space. Matthew finished up his school year remotely at Merle House, doing the work his teachers assigned, sending in papers via email, taking tests with Penny as proctor. Matthew had been there at Merle House for a long time before he’d let anyone know.
Matthew waited in the woods for Amelia to head home that night after she made her wish. He waited because the Dark Man asked him to. And when she came out of Havenwood alone, without her creepy new boyfriend, Matthew followed.
He hadn’t forgotten any of this; it just lived in the same place where nightmares lived. When he was away from Merle House, he was awake. When he was here, he disappeared into its dream.
Nothing happened that final night as he waited.
The Dark Man never came. Matthew felt abandoned. And after a while, he returned to Merle House feeling like he’d lost something that he wouldn’t get back.
Now, Matthew followed Samantha as she moved frantically through the building, down the same hallway he’d walked as a kid, through the same ruined kitchen, the big empty assembly room.
“Why is this place even here?” asked Samantha in distress. “Why wasn’t it torn down?”
“It should have been,” he said.
Samantha froze, looked around, above, down. “I hear her. Do you hear her calling us?”
Matthew strained, but he heard only the clumsy passage of the others, their voices talking.
“I don’t hear anything.”
She ran distressed hands through her wild, dark hair. “Oh my God. Where is she?”
“Jewel,” Matthew called, using his sternest voice. “This isn’t cool. Come out right now. It’s time to go home.”
When he looked at his wife again, she was staring at him in a way that was unfamiliar. He’d never seen her look at him that way before.
“This is your fault,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper.
There it was. The anger, the recrimination she’d been bottling up. He’d known it was there, bubbling beneath her steady exterior. It took this extreme moment to bring it to the surface.
“Sam,” he said, lifting his palms.
“I followed you that night,” she said, moving in close. “I’m not proud of it. But I did.”
“What night?” he asked, his stomach bottoming out.
“The night I told the police you were with me. The night Sylvia disappeared. I have that tracking app on my phone? You were with her. With Sylvia.”
He stood frozen, the memories he’d buried deep rushing
