Page 51 of Some Kind of Haunted

I stay up far too late writing out all the dreams I can ever remember having. About clock towers, slurping, demons, darkness. I try to dive into the details. I want something in my psyche to be the magical key that unlocks a two-century-old nightmare.

Admittedly, I want all these new people in my life to be impressed. I want everything I’ve seen to be for a reason.

But the act of writing it all out, diving into details, reminds me I had a therapist in my freshman year of high school who wanted me to write down everything. The memory is kind of fuzzy, because the act of putting all my deepest terrors into words actually made me worse. I don’t remember much of those months, except waking up to Logan tossing the notebook I’d written everything down in straight into the fireplace—the flames eating up all those terrified words, even though it had been a particularly warm fall and it had made our apartment sweltering hot.

You’re done with that, he’d told me. Firm and sure. A glimpse into the lawyer he’d be. The man he’d be. Even though he’d been a scrawny thing at the time, not yet hitting that pubescent growth spurt.

He’d known it was killing me from the inside out, and he’d stopped it. For me.

Afterward, I remember feeling like I could breathe for the first time in all those months. I found knitting through an art class not that much later and that was my introduction into textiles. Into expressing myself that way. The new therapist Dad found me had been a better fit. The dreams had persisted, the way they always did, but it had been different. They were more bearable when I wasn’t dealing with them twice—once while they were happening and then again on the page, sinking into the horrors in my mind in too much detail.

Like I’m doing right now.

It’s a strange memory to come up, because tonight I don’t feel anything like I did back then. The words flow out of me, quickly and easily. I should have grabbed Logan’s laptop to type it all out, but I’m on a roll, even as my hand starts to cramp.

I shake it out and write more.

Something about Midas makes putting my nightmares to paper feel cathartic now. Pages and pages of clock tower crumblings and black smudges in the night. Waking up in unknown places. Eyes reflected in windows.

I shudder a little at some of the memories, but it doesn’t stop me. Because I have a job, and it feels sacred.

Jack asked me to do this thing, and that feels . . . weightier than it should.

When I think I’ve got it all down—at least for now, though I’m sure I’m forgetting things, too—I go to sleep, and I don’t dream. I wake feeling almost . . . refreshed. For a moment I just lie in the strange bed, staring at the ceiling, taking stock of a body that doesn’t feel battered by another rough night of sleep.

I turn over and look at the notebook I spent hours writing in. Everything that ever labeled me as off in my life before coming to Midas. Right there in black-and-white. In my own handwriting.

Am I really going to hand that over to a man I barely know? Who I didn’t know existed a week ago?

I think of how Jack told me to do this, with all of that green intensity. I remember how sure I was that our hearts were beating the same rhythm. And writing it all out felt completely different than it had the last time I tried it.

It wasn’t like I was reliving it this time. It was more like I was . . . drawing a map.

For Jack.

And also for Nora and Cleo and that grandmother of hers, my grandmother’s twin. For Harrison and the knitting shop and this place where I don’t actually belong—though it feels like I do. Like it or not, I’m connected to these people and to this town.

Yet, that connection fills me with a purpose I don’t think I’ve ever had before, so I get up even though it’s early. Even though I could no doubt lounge about all morning, dozing on and off, reveling in not dreaming and daylight sleeping.

But I get dressed and do my hair and makeup instead, listening to my favorite playlist full of songs of women learning to trust themselves and fighting the world around them.

When I walk out into the living room, my notebook full of written-out dreams lodged under my arm, Logan is pacing, the old-fashioned wall phone to his ear.

“Doug, you’re not hearing me,” Logan says into the receiver, sounding deceptively patient. He rolls his eyes at me, then waves me on.

I take it he’ll meet me at the diner when he’s off the phone with poor Doug. No doubt some first-year associate who hasn’t learned that when Logan Darling says jump, you damn well better ask how high.

I try to check the weather on my phone, but we still haven’t figured out the Wi-Fi situation, and nothing loads. I decide layers are the way to go for Midwest fall and grab the cardigan Nora lent me yesterday. Maybe I’ll remember to return it.

I step out into another beautiful fall day. Crisp without being frigid, bright blue sky. I hear the sound of dry leaves skittering across pavement in the light breeze, but with the sun it feels relaxing rather than creepy. I take a deep breath and smell something faintly like fire—but again, in a pleasant way.

I decide to take all this as some kind of positive omen that people believing me is some kind of turning point. For everything.

I walk through the alley and across the street. The knitting shop isn’t open yet. Nothing really is on this section of the street, except the diner. Cars are clustered out front.

A hard gust of wind blows, and I almost drop the notebook. I grip it more firmly as I cross the street. My gaze drifts up. There’s a second story above the antique shop that I haven’t ventured up to yet, but something winks in the window. Reflected light.

I try to figure out what it is, but someone grunts and I realize I’ve come to a stop right in front of the diner’s front door. An older man, stooped over a cane with a dirty trucker hat slammed down over his ears, is glaring at me.