Emma didn't sleep that night either.
She lay in the dark with Vivian's newspaper photograph fixed behind her eyes that same nervous, hopeful smile, the same dark hair, the same age Emma was now and she listened to every creak of the house, every gust of wind against her window, half convinced that if she closed her eyes for even a moment, she'd open them again to find the small pale figure standing at the foot of her bed instead of out in the fog.
By the time gray morning light finally broke over Ravenswood, Emma had made a decision. She was done being told half of a story.
She found Nana Ruth in the kitchen, exactly where she always was at seven in the morning, and set the folded photocopy of the 1961 newspaper article on the table between them without a word.
Nana Ruth looked at it for a long moment. Then she looked up at Emma, and something in her face the careful, guarded thing she'd been holding onto for two days finally gave way.
"Sit down," she said quietly. "I suppose you've earned the rest of it."
The Rest of It
"Vivian and I were close," Nana Ruth began, wrapping both hands around a mug she hadn't drunk from. "Closer than most sisters, growing up. I was fifteen when she went into that house. She never told me exactly why she went some dare, some argument with a boy she liked, I never got the full truth of it. But I remember the week after. I remember her changing."
"Changing how?"
"She got quiet. Distant. She'd stare at nothing for long stretches, like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn't hear. And she started disappearing an hour here, an afternoon there. She always came back before curfew, at first. She always had some explanation. But I could see the mark on her arm getting darker every single time, same as I imagine yours is doing right now."
Emma's hand went instinctively to her sleeve.
"She told me one thing," Nana Ruth continued, her voice dropping lower, "only once, very late at night, when she thought I was already asleep. She said the house wasn't trying to hurt her. She said it was lonely. She said there was a little boy in there who just wanted someone to stay and play with him forever, and that the house would keep asking, gently, patiently, for as long as it took until eventually, the person it asked would say yes."
"And Vivian said no."
"Vivian said no for over a month," Nana Ruth said. "But every day, saying no seemed to cost her something. She grew thinner. Paler. She stopped eating properly, stopped sleeping, started flinching at shadows that weren't there. Whatever that house was taking from her, it wasn't patient in the way people are patient. It was patient in the way a spider is patient. It didn't need to hurry. It just needed her to get tired enough to stop fighting."
Emma thought of Thomas's crib, the small toys arranged with careful, obsessive precision, as if someone or something had spent a hundred years keeping that nursery exactly ready for a playmate who never came.
"On the night she disappeared," Nana Ruth said, "it was exactly one month to the day since she'd gone inside. I know now that must matter, though I never understood why until you showed me that mark yesterday. She kissed me on the forehead while she thought I was sleeping, and she said, 'I'm sorry, Ruthie. I'm just so tired.' And then she was gone. The gate on Hollow Lane was open in the morning, and that was the last anyone in this town ever saw of her."
The kitchen was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator. Emma realized her hands were shaking.
"A month," Emma said. "Nana, I went in three days ago. That means I have less than four weeks before"
"Before it gets easier to say yes than to keep saying no," Nana Ruth finished grimly. "Yes. That's exactly what I'm afraid of."
The Box in the Attic
Nana Ruth rose from the table with the stiff, deliberate movements of someone bracing herself for something unpleasant. "There's something I never showed anyone," she said. "Not your mother, not your grandfather while he was alive. I kept it because I was afraid of what it meant, and because some small, stupid part of me hoped I'd never need it. Come with me."
She led Emma up the narrow attic stairs, into a cramped space thick with the smell of cedar and old paper, and pulled a battered wooden box down from behind a stack of storage bins. She set it on the floor and opened it with hands that trembled slightly.
Inside were Vivian's things. A hairbrush. A folded yellow dress. A small stack of letters tied with ribbon. And, at the very bottom, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, a slim leather journal smaller and more worn than the one Emma had found in the Ashgrove parlor, its cover cracked with age.
"This was hers," Nana Ruth said. "I found it under her mattress after she disappeared. I read it exactly once, the week after, and then I put it away and never opened it again. I couldn't."
Emma took the journal with careful hands, as though it might dissolve at her touch. The first page was dated September 1961, in handwriting that started out neat and grew progressively more erratic as the entries went on.
September 14th Went into the Ashgrove house tonight on a dare from Danny. Should never have gone. There's a boy in there. I heard him laughing upstairs, and then I saw him in the hall mirror, and I don't think he's — I don't think he's like us. I got out but something is wrong with my arm.
September 22nd He talks to me now, even when I'm not there. Not out loud. More like a feeling behind my eyes. He says his name is Thomas and he just wants someone to stay and play. He says everyone always leaves him. He says it so sadly I almost feel bad for him, which scares me more than anything else has.
October 3rd I'm so tired, Ruthie. I don't sleep anymore, not really. Every night I dream I'm standing in that nursery and he's holding my hand and it's warm there, warmer than anywhere else, and it would be so easy to just stay.
October 19th Found something in the town archive today. I'm not the first. There have been others before me, going back decades always around my age, always around this same time of year, right before the anniversary. I think Thomas needs someone new roughly every fifty years. I think that's how it's worked since 1910. I don't know what happens to the ones before. I'm afraid to find out.
Emma's stomach turned to ice. "Fifty years," she whispered. "Nana. Vivian went in 1961. Fifty years after that would be"
"2011," Nana Ruth said quietly. "There should have been another one. Ten years ago."
"Was there?"
Nana Ruth's face had gone very still. "There was a boy. Daniel Whitfield. He went missing that October the papers said he ran away from home, that he'd been having troubles at school. Nobody in town ever connected it to the house, because by then the stories had mostly faded into things parents told children to keep them away from Hollow Lane at night. Nobody was watching for a pattern anymore."
"Except it wasn't fifty years after Vivian," Emma said slowly, working through the arithmetic even as dread built in her chest. "It was only fifty years after Thomas."
She flipped forward through the brittle pages of Vivian's journal until she reached the final entry, dated the day before she vanished.
October 22nd I understand now. It isn't really about Thomas needing a friend. That's just the story he tells so it doesn't feel so much like what it actually is. Something feeds on this house, something old, and Thomas is just I don't know. Bait. A face it wears because a lonely child is easier to say yes to than whatever's actually underneath. I'm going to say no again tonight. I have to believe saying no still means something. If it doesn't if I don't come back please, please keep everyone away from that house. Don't let this happen to anyone else.
Emma closed the journal, her hands cold, the weight of it far heavier than its slim size should have allowed.
"She tried to warn everyone," Emma said. "And it happened anyway. To her. To that boy Daniel. And now it's happening to me."
Nana Ruth knelt down and took both of Emma's hands in hers, her eyes fierce despite the tears standing in them. "Then we are not going to let it write the same ending a third time," she said. "Whatever is underneath that boy's face, Emma we are going to find out exactly what it is, and we are going to find a way to make it let you go for good."
Outside, the October wind picked up, rattling the small attic window, and somewhere far across town, at the end of Hollow Lane, the dark windows of the old house watched the fog roll in patient, unhurried, and already counting down the days.