
Transcribed from the pages of a leatherbound journal recovered by emergency crews at 73 Sands Edge Road, Eastham, MA.
10/21—
Running out of gas soon. I hope that I won’t have to stop again before I reach the Cape. The roads have been quiet, I’ve only seen a handful of other cars over the last few hours. I’ve driven with the windows down most of the way here and the air is getting that first chill that rolls in with mid-October. It makes things feel fresh and new—the sky is clear and beautiful and I’m free.
The gauge says 1/16 of a tank, but the beach house is only a few more miles at most. It's been so many years, but I can still remember the way the road bends on the way into Eastham. It's a town of about 700 people, tucked away into a windswept corner of the Cape. I wish that I could pull over and ask for directions or a paper map. It was a strange lost sort of feeling, watching the gas station drift by in the driver’s side window and then shrink back in the rearview mirror until it was just a splotchy red dot.
It feels so strange to be finally headed home.
10/22—
I couldn’t tell you the first time I saw him—he was gone six weeks ago, before the leaves started to turn. But he’s back now, I know it. He’s just the slightest flicker of movement, just a shadow somewhere in the corner of my vision, a whisper in a reflection somewhere.
I’ve never liked reflections. Whenever we first came here in the summers, I’d avoid the downstairs bathroom of the beach house. The olive green of the walls and Victorian molding worked their way around a dusty oval-faced mirror that stared back at me. I don’t know how old it really is, but it has that air about it. I would try my best to not turn my head in that direction, convinced that someone was in there, looking back out at me.
Sometimes I’d imagine them, ghosts from a past that didn’t exist watching me from those jade walls and that old glass. I felt their eyes sometimes but never saw them—I thought that maybe they’d be the cure to being alone. When I was older, I would wait for them sometimes, patient and afraid and curious, but they would never come—as far as I could tell, the house was empty. My parents would usually be out until at least 2 or 3 a.m., and that gave me time. Time to keep waiting, to keep watching that mirror and listening to the walls, to see if maybe they’d come out and talk to me. But every time I would pull myself together just enough to try, I would find myself completely alone. My reflection would stare back at me from the mirrors and from that twisted glass and it just wasn’t fair at all. I could have left. I could have walked down to the beach but I stayed right there, watching my reflection while it watched me.
I didn’t want to be afraid of ghosts.
The doors would swing open downstairs a few hours later and the house would creak beneath me, and they would be echoing through the hallway laughing and so perfect for each other and my room would be dark. There was a mirror there, too. Not as old as the one in the olive bathroom but much larger. When it was a new moon earlier that month the whole bedroom had been mired in shadows, but later on when the moon was full it would creep inside and I would see myself. Pale arms and dark hair and a face that was blank parchment that had been smoothed down with sandpaper by some man making a doll for his daughter.
I remember giving my sister Bethany her first doll.

10/26—
I think I remember the first time I saw him now. It was just after I’d pulled into the driveway the other day. The neighborhood was empty, cars in the driveways but not a soul outside. I thought of the Don Henley song Boys of Summer that mom used to play on the radio.
Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach. The shutters of the house next door were slamming open and shut in the wind.
I can feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach. He was waiting here for me--a silhouette in the upstairs window that was there and then gone in a breath of wind.
Don Henley faded from my mind underneath the crunch of the gravel driveway—I’d always loved that noise-- it was the sound of the car ride being over and the sound of the summer starting. This time is different, of course. Mom and Dad are thousands of miles away and aging, Jonathan is gone. I remember the first time I saw him, sitting there across from me in literature class. It was Fall, but such a different kind of Fall than today. I don’t even know if that makes sense, does it? A bright autumn where things were crisp and fresh, and now here I am back at the beach house, so far from the university and from that feeling. This is a different kind of Fall, the washed-out empty kind that feels a bit more like a dagger than a balloon.
I can see candlesticks burning in the windows across the street. I still don’t know who lives there, after all these summers here I don’t think I know a single person on the entire street. It’s starting to get too cold for the beach, I haven’t walked down to the water.
He's the only one that I’ve seen—just a shadow, just a whisper. The town is empty, I can feel it.
It's almost Halloween, only another few nights.
I don’t want to be afraid of ghosts.

To be continued in Where Darkness Walked, releasing this October.
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