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My heart pounds as I mop up the last of the water. A floorboard creaks, and I flinch and look toward the stairs, terrified that someone has seen me.

There’s no one there. I take a hesitant step forward and hear another creak. It’s my own footsteps making that noise.

I press my lips together and hiss, “Damn it. Damn it all to hell.”

I can almost hear Sean laughing at my vulgarity. Although I’m not sure he would laugh if he knew that I had an episode just now and decided to walk into a thunderstorm in my nightgown and slippers and pull a cursed musical number from a garbage bag so I could put it back on a piano.

I don’t dwell on that. If I think about it too much, I’ll panic, and I can’t panic right now. I’m clearly in a great deal more mental distress than I realized, but there are practical considerations to deal with before I can address that.

I take the mop back to the cleaning closet, then head to the kitchen. I'm going to destroy that blasted manuscript. Philippa was right. I should have done away with it a long time ago. I'm the only one who can destroy it because, for reasons I can't comprehend, my own damaged psyche is the reason it's still here.

I will destroy that manuscript, and then I’ll leave this house. I’m the one who’s put this family through so much. I don’t know what happened to push me so far over the edge, but for the sake of the children, I need to leave this house. I probably need to leave this city and return home. My search for Annie has once again…

Later. I’ll figure all of this out later. Right now, I need to right the wrong I’ve committed, then shower, dress, pack my things, and leave. I’ll email Josephine and Etienne later and have them give my apologies to the children.

God damn it! Just when I thought I was doing some real good here!

I grab the kitchen shears and stock to the parlor, my jaw set firmly. I half expect to be struck by lightning when I grab the composition and start cutting it, so when the scissors bite easily into the paper, I hesitate a second.

Then I cut again. Then again. Then again.

With each shred of paper that falls to the floor, I feel myself grow bolder. I grin and even start to chuckle as the cursed composition falls to pieces under my hands. It's just a few sheets of paper, after all. Nothing to be afraid of.

When I’m finished, I gather the pieces and step to the front porch. The rain is pouring, and the wind has picked up, driving it into my face. I’ll have to grab a towel from the linen closet to dry off and mop some more water off of the floor, but that’s all right. It’ll be over soon.

I toss the fragments of paper into the air, and the wind carries them away until the rain drives them to the ground. A few fragments get caught in the bushes around the property, but most of them flutter over the fence and are gone.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. My shoulders slump, and with that all-important task done, I finally feel weary.

I trudge inside and clean up the new mess I’ve made. It’s after midnight by the time I head upstairs, shivering and still soaking but dry enough that I don’t track wet footprints behind me.

When the warm water of the shower hits me, I sigh with relief. Why can’t my fugues lead me to relaxing showers or comfortable nights in front of the fire?

That thought opens the can of worms I’ve kept tightly closed up until now. I am in serious mental distress. There can be no doubt now that I’ve been sleepwalking, and evidently it’s my subconscious desire to torture this family and myself because I bring back the symbol of all of the tragedy this family has suffered. Part of me fears that I’m imagining things now, and I’ll wake to find myself on my knees worshipping the piece while chanting something demonic.

It's never been this bad. Not since Annie leaves. Not since I was hospitalized for a psychotic break.

This place. This city. This house . It’s put more of a strain on me than anywhere else I’ve been. In the past, I’ve had episodes of sleepwalking or fugue states, but I’ve never endangered anyone under my care before. I’m endangering these children.

Tears come to my eyes. Those poor kids. I’m so glad I didn’t hurt them. If I had…

But I can stop here. Things didn’t get that bad, so there’s no need to imagine it. I’ll get home. That’s the most important thing. I’ll leave this environment, and if I still have trouble, then I might need to consider professional help, much as I hate it.

I finish showering and dress in clean clothes. That makes me feel somewhat better, but losing the fear only makes the grief worse. I don’t know how Amelia and Gabriel will do without me. I only know that they’ll be worse with me, and that hurts.

I open my closet to retrieve my suitcase, but I stop when I see a book on top of it. It’s an unnamed leatherbound book with a clasp on the front. How on Earth did it get there? Was someone in my room? Did I have another dissociative episode and steal this somehow?

Leave it, Mary. That’s enough. Just take your things and leave.

I am so disturbed by tonight’s episode that I nearly do. But my curiosity gets the better of me. It killed the cat, and it will almost certainly kill me eventually.

I pick the book up and head to the small table. When I undo the clasp and open the book, the spine creaks softly, showing the book’s age.

The notebook's age. It's not a novel or a treatise, I find, but a journal. The first entry confirms that this is the personal journal of Marcel Lacroix.

I wrestle for a moment longer, but the answers to all of the mysteries surrounding this family may have just fallen into my lap, and I can’t resist.

Once more, the parallel between this family in New Orleans and the painter I work for in Monterey is stunning. In Monterey, I also come across a journal, and that journal lays bare the angst and brilliance of its author but also the fragility of his mind. The painter’s journal also talks of a fairy, who I later confirm to be Annie.

This journal references no fairy, but it demonstrates an almost identical mind in every other case. Marcel was a brilliant but tortured composer. This journal begins about seven years before his death. It starts fairly tame, but as I skim through the entries, the decline of his emotional state becomes clear.

He starts by expressing melancholy at achieving the peak of his musical journey at such a young age. Where am I to go when I’ve already reached the summit?

As the entries progress, he offers increasingly fantastic suggestions to himself. Composing freeform music influenced by his emotional state at any given moment. Creating pieces to mimic the cries of children, the moans of women in ecstasy (I roll my eyes at that one), the calls of animals and the sounds of storms and tides. Studying the effects of music on human behavior and creating pieces to influence certain behaviors. Studying the effects of music on the inanimate world and creating pieces to influence that.

As the suggestions become more fantastic, the rest of the writing follows suit, gradually growing disjointed and less coherent. Even the handwriting loses its clarity, becoming little more than a scrawl near the end of the journal.

I feel guilty for reading this, and at the same time, I feel terrible for Marcel. I’m observing his descent into madness.

That madness takes a dark turn when Marcel decides that his ultimate accomplishment will be to create a piece that will open the gate between the world of the living and the world of the dead. He raves about how he will write a piece that will close the gap between the spiritual and the physical and allow—in his words—“life and afterlife to understand each other as intimately as two lovers understand each other in the throes of passion.”

The final entry is on the day of his death. The handwriting is back to its original clarity here, and the message is no longer disjointed or incoherent.

It is still every bit as sobering.

June 27

I fear that I’ve gone too far. I allowed my frustration with the process to lead me to seek shortcuts. Rather than allow the music to guide me and put to paper the energy the Universe wished to send through me as its conduit, I have tried to force the music to adapt to my own incomplete understanding.

It began last week when I finally despaired of the original piece I’ve been slaving over for five years. In a rage at my inability to capture the essence of the soul’s travels when it leaves this world, I returned to my own feeble initial attempt, the piece I wrote to lay to rest once and for all the question of my superiority compared to M. Poitier.

I took this vanity piece and layered over its framework all of my passion, all of my anger, all of my frustration and all of my vindictive rage at being denied the secret I felt I deserved.

And I succeeded. I will never forget the moment when the last notes escaped my fingers, and I stared in awe at the sheet, knowing that I had finally discovered the true door to the afterlife. Great was my joy in that moment, but greater still was my terror. Like a child who reaches for a hot stove only to understand how frail the human form is compared to the heat of a fire, I understood how utterly unprepared we are to know what lies beyond.

But my arrogance overcame that fear. I presumed myself great enough to handle the terror that comes with this knowledge.

I was wrong. I was so wrong. The Universe has indeed made me a conduit, but not of joy, not of life. I am become an unwilling angel of death. I have tried thrice to burn this composition, but each time I only stand in front of the fire, sweating and trembling, my fingers clutching the papers as though their life depended on it. Perhaps it does. Perhaps the price I will pay when this is over will be my own death. I don’t know.

But even as I write this, I do know. I can feel death coming for me. I can see her empty, hollow eyes, her seductive and yet terrible form, her mocking, sinister smile. Perhaps for some her smile is tender and her embrace sweet, but for me, it won’t be, that I know. I have committed a great sin. My eternity will not be spent in Paradise.

I will play this piece tonight. I will pour every ounce of my soul into it as I always have. And when death comes to take me, I will see her coming, and I will do nothing to stop her. I can do nothing.

I am doomed.

I close the journal and set it on the table, staring ahead at the wall. The storm has passed, and sunlight streams through the window. Dawn has arrived. I’ve spent yet another night without sleep.

I don’t believe in superstitions. I can’t accept that Marcel could have written a song with the terrible power he ascribes to it.

Yet tragedy continues to strike despite my disbelief. Perhaps, I, like he, am fated to act as a conduit until death finally takes me to whatever punishment awaits for me beyond.