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Mercy’s fingers tightened around the covers. For a moment, I thought she might throw it at me. Instead, she answered in a voice too dry to betray irritation. “I’m keeping a record. In case someone else needs it.”

“Like a recipe book?” I tried to make it a joke, but the words landed heavily.

“More like a roadmap.” Her mouth twitched again, less a smile and more a muscle spasm. “We’re all so lost, aren’t we?” She looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time again. “What did you say your name was?”

I tried to keep my voice even. “Alice.” The delirium was clearly worse than I’d imagined.

“Then you’re lucky,” Mercy said, opening her diary, flipping to a page near the middle. “I have nothing but the cold.”

I stared at the page. Written in Mercy’s delicate, looping hand were words in Latin I recognized from scripture, but intermixed were words I didn’t know. There was a diagram of a skeleton with a flower blooming in its ribcage, petals inked in red.

I tried again. “What happened, Mercy? You used to sing in the choir. You knew the Psalms better than I did.”

She didn’t look up from the page. “I learned new songs.” She traced a line along the spine of the skeleton. “Did you know the Witch of Endor brought the ghost of Samuel back from the dead to talk to Saul? The Bible says so.”

“I know the story,” I said. “But that was a sin. Saul was punished for it.”

“Maybe he was just curious,” Mercy said, so softly I almost missed it. “Maybe he wanted closure. Maybe God punishes people for wanting too much.”

The silence between us grew thick, clotted with the sounds of the sanatorium: a distant cough, a footstep in the corridor, the faint clink of keys.

“Do you ever pray?” I asked.

Mercy laughed again, this time with genuine amusement. “Only when I want something I can’t have.”

I wished I could argue. But I’d prayed so many times for my mother’s suffering to end, and each time the only answer was more pain. My own faith felt like a wound that had healed over, leaving a numb scar behind.

Mercy’s head drooped, her breathing shallow.

I watched her for a long time, afraid that if I blinked she’d vanish, or worse.

When she finally drifted into sleep, I crossed to her bed and tucked the blanket around her.

Her body was so light I thought it might float away if not for the weight of the disease inside her.

On her nightstand, she’d placed a small bouquet of dried flowers—lavender, thistle, and something else I didn’t recognize.

The stems were bound with a strip of cloth torn from her gown.

I wondered if it was another spell, or just a memory of a world with color in it.

I returned to my bed, knelt, and prayed again. I prayed for Mercy, for her brother Edwin, for all the broken girls locked away in this blasted place. I prayed with everything I had left, which wasn’t much, but had to be enough.

“Lord,” I whispered, “make me a vessel of your mercy. Let me bring light to this darkness. Let me be more than I am.”

The room did not answer. The crucifix above my bed stared down with the same carved agony as ever.

Outside, the wind moaned. The air inside grew heavy with the smell of blood and old flowers.

I lay in bed fully clothed, too cold and too afraid to do otherwise.

I lay awake for a long time, listening to Mercy breathe.

Now and then she muttered words I could not understand, sometimes in English, sometimes not.

I wondered if she was speaking to the dead, or if the dead were speaking through her.

Sleep came at last, but it was no comfort.

It came on as a fever—waves of heat and cold, shivering fits, the taste of rust at the back of my throat.

I dreamed of black rivers and burning fields, of voices chanting in a language I did not know but half-recognized.

Sometimes I heard my mother, sometimes Mercy, sometimes my own voice echoing back at me in a tone I did not trust.

At some hour deep in the night, I awoke with a start.

It was well into the night, and I was shivering in my sheets, trying to sleep through the moaning and screaming of the other patients.

I must have been sleeping, because I jolted awake when Mercy stood beside my bed.

“Sorry,” she whispered, her voice raspy.

“Just trying to figure out how you manage to sleep through all this ruckus.”

I rolled my eyes, then reached to my ears and pulled out two wads of cotton.

Mercy smirked. “I have to say, that’s pretty smart.”

“Doesn’t work that well,” I said. “But it muffles the noise enough that I can sleep… a little…”

She looked at me, a girl only a year or two older than me, and asked, “Aren’t you afraid to die?” Her eyes, in the dim light, seemed to hold a flicker of recognition, but it was quickly lost in the haze of her illness.

“What’s there to be afraid of?” I asked.

“You know, death. It’s so… final.”

“I have my faith,” I said. “Don’t you believe?”

“I have my beliefs,” Mercy replied.

“Then why are you afraid?” I asked.

She shrugged through her shivers. “I mean, you can have faith. That’s all well and good. But how can you be certain of it—absolutely certain? Isn’t there any doubt at all?”

“Everyone has doubts,” I said. “But why dwell on the part of you that doubts? If I’m going to die, I’d rather die believing.”

“But what if your faith is wrong? What if your belief is misplaced?” Mercy asked.

I smiled. “Then at least I didn’t spend my last days in the world miserable and terrified.”

Mercy huffed. “Maybe that’s all I have left,” she said. “Maybe it’s my fear of dying that keeps me fighting, that keeps me alive.”

“You think fear will keep you alive? How many people die with fear?”

“Most people, I suppose.” She scratched the back of her head, a few loose hairs caught in her fingers.

I nodded. “I don’t need fear to fight for my life. Why do you?”

Mercy bit her lip. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But it’s there, my fear. I don’t know how I can just up and decide not to be afraid.”

“Don’t pay attention to your fear,” I said. “That’s how it binds you, how it controls you.”

“How’d you get such a strong faith? You can’t be older than sixteen,” Mercy asked, as if genuinely curious about a stranger.

“My daddy’s a preacher,” I said. “I guess I just grew up believing. Isn’t that when you need faith the most, when otherwise all you’d have is fear?”

Mercy nodded. “Thanks for the tip. Have any more of those cotton balls, by chance?”

I smiled, reached into a little bag hanging from my bed, and handed her two of them.

“Thanks.” She forced a smile.

“Sleep well.”

“Yeah, you too,” Mercy replied. She returned to her bed, shoved the cotton in her ears, and within moments, I heard her even breathing.

The darkness was absolute, except for the silver blade of moonlight that sliced through the barred window, spilling across the floor like spilled milk. The sanatorium was silent now, all the distant voices snuffed out. Even the wind had stopped.

Something woke me up. Maybe it was a chill, or some kind of survival instinct.

I tried to turn over, but my body would not move.

A pressure that was not heavy but infinitely persistent pinned me to the mattress.

My eyes were open, but only just. Through the slit of my lashes, I watched as the room seemed to breathe—shadows swelling and receding with each halting breath I managed.

That’s when I heard the scratching. At first, I thought it was a rat, or perhaps a bird that got trapped in the chimney.

But the sound was wrong—too regular, too insistent.

It scraped at the window bars, slow at first, then faster, as if testing for weakness.

My mind raced with scripture: “He prowls about like a lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

I tried to speak, but my tongue was leaden, stuck to the roof of my mouth.

A low whisper, just above the threshold of hearing, threaded its way into the room.

It was Latin, but not the kind I knew. It was guttural, broken.

I heard Mercy reply in a voice not quite her own, a voice that quavered and shrieked with equal force.

The window swung open without a sound. A figure slipped through the bars, impossibly thin, impossibly tall.

I saw only its outline, backlit by the moon: a coat that fluttered like crow’s wings, a cap pulled low over a face I could not see.

It moved through the room but without the sound of footsteps, as if hovering across the space.

It moved to Mercy’s bed and knelt beside her.

She did not scream, did not even flinch.

She just opened her eyes, pale and blind as a dead fish.

The figure leaned in, and for a moment I thought it would kiss her.

Instead, it pressed its lips to her throat.

I wanted to shout. I wanted to call for help, to invoke God’s name, to recite the Lord’s Prayer or a Psalm.

But my voice was gone. All I could do was watch as the thing—no, the man, for in the shifting light I saw he was at least partly a man—drank from Mercy with slow, reverent hunger.

Her face changed as it happened. The lines of pain smoothed away.

Her lips parted in a smile, or maybe a grimace, but for the first time since I’d seen her in the sanatorium she looked alive, truly alive.

The blood ran down her neck in a thin black line, pooling in the hollow of her clavicle.

The man straightened, wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, and looked directly at me.

His eyes glowed red, but not the garish red of theatrical devils or masquerade masks.

It was the red of a sunset glimpsed through closed eyelids, the red of spilled wine.

He tilted his head, as if acknowledging my presence.

Then, in a single fluid motion, he turned and slipped back out the window, vanishing completely.