Page 49 of The Unknown

“Well, yes. Both of those things. But it felt…strange. The cottage, I mean. Like I wasn’t alone. Like someone else was inside, lurking. I looked around, but nothing was there.”

I think of the scratching in the middle of the night. The mystery of it all. How utterly inexplicable it was. So, too, was the voice I heard at the end of the séance. That chilling hiss in the darkness that only seemed to address me and Susie.

“Did you hear anything during the night?” I say.

“Nothing unusual,” Julianne says. “Just crickets and frogs and whatever else is crawling all over this island.”

The coffee’s done percolating, so I pour a cup for me, Julianne, and Violet, who accepts it gratefully. Before taking a sip, she says, “Did you hear something last night, Marin?”

Heather bursts into the kitchen just then, sparing me from having to choose whether to answer honestly or not.

“Hear what?” she says, making a beeline to the percolator.

“Noises in the night,” Violet says.

Heather shakes her head while pouring out coffee. “I didn’t. I slept like the dead.”

“How?” Julianne says. “After what happened last night, I found it impossible to sleep.”

“You mean with Brad?”

“Yes.” Julianne pauses, looks into her coffee cup, sighs. “And with the séance.”

“That wasn’t real,” I say, although I have no proof other than the fact that it couldn’t have been real. There has to be some logical explanation for everything that happened, from the thumping table to the suddenly extinguished candles to the hissing voice right in my ear. “It was exactly what Brad said it was. Just us unconsciously acting out what we wanted to happen—or thought should happen.”

“I agree with Marin,” Heather says.

“But itfeltreal,” Julianne says, and I can’t argue. It felt as alarmingly real as those nights when I was five, hunched under the covers, whispering to my sister.

You’re not real. You don’t exist. Please be gone.

“And how did it know all those names? None of you—” Julianne stares again into her coffee cup, too embarrassed to face us. “None of you moved the glass on purpose, did you? Not even a tiny bit?”

“I didn’t,” Violet says while Heather and I both shake our heads.

“And the table? That wasn’t—”

She’s cut off by a hiss from Violet, followed by a sharp gasp. Those two sounds let me know she’s burned her hand. It’s confirmed when she holds an index finger to her lips, sucking on the tip.

“It’s better to get it under some cold water,” I say, rushing to the sink and pumping the faucet until a steady stream flows out of it.

Violet thrusts her finger into the water, sighing. “I’m so clumsy.”

“I work at a restaurant,” I say. “You should see the ways in which even the most experienced chefs mangle themselves.”

“That’s why I’m more concerned about being stranded here than the séance,” Heather says. “What if there’s another medical emergency?”

Violet removes her finger from the water, checks it, puts it back in. “My burn isn’t remotely that bad.”

“But what if it was? What if someone else gets sick? Or is injured? Without a boat and our phones, there’s no way to call for help.”

“When is Pete supposed to come back and pick us up?” Julianne says.

“Saturday,” Heather says, feeling no need to add the obvious fact that it’s only Tuesday.

Violet, intuiting what we’re all thinking, says, “Then it’s a good thing Loretta will be back by lunchtime. I’m sure of it.”

She’s probably right. Even in a worst-case scenario, Loretta will either return by then or send word with someone else about Brad’s condition. I’m certain we haven’t been forgotten. Yet the idea of being stuck here for days continues to hang in the air, thick and unpleasant, like smoke from something burning on the stove.