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I’m pretty sure I just ruined any chance of getting my phone back, so I speak my mind, even though I’m shaking all over. “I’m not a child. You can’t treat me like this—it’s not right. I want to leave Wicklow. I want my phone and my purse.”

“And where will you go?”

“I’ll get an Uber. Go to a shelter until I can get a job. If you care about me at all, you’ll let me leave. Let me do this.”

“Pastor says you’re our responsibility,” Aunt Nellie says quietly, soft ice in her tone. “It would be wrong to inflict you and your curse upon anyone else. If you’re feeling this way, maybe you shouldn’t work at the store anymore. We’ll discuss other options.”

The two men who saw me slap her come jogging up, and they’re joined by a third man and a couple of women, all forming a jagged circle around me.

I kick myself inwardly for thinking I could reason with her, for not running when I had the chance.

I should have shut the hell up and taken off down the road.

But without my phone and card, I’d have even less chance of making it anywhere else.

Aunt Nellie turns deliberately away from me and nods to one of the men. “Put her downstairs.”

The two men don’t touch me, but there’s a clear threat of force if I don’t obey. I could try a scream, but it wouldn’t knock all of them down, and if I ran, that would incite a full-on chase. They might shoot me with more than a taser this time.

If I let them take me downstairs into the children’s hall, maybe I can find a phone and make a call while they’re all upstairs for Bible study. I think I remember there being a pale blue phone at the end of the downstairs hallway—the old-fashioned kind of wall phone with a loopy cord.

I relax my stance and let the two men escort me into the church, then down the steps to the children’s hall.

“No kids down here tonight?” I ask.

“They’re all upstairs. Joining us for the Bible study,” replies Mr. Berg. He’s on my left. On my right is Mr. Dawson. Mr. Berg’s stomach growls loudly as they walk me down the hall.

“Hungry?” I ask sweetly.

He clears his throat. “Deprivation of the body brings strength to the soul. Like Jesus fasting in the desert.”

“Except you’re not Jesus, so in your case deprivation brings irritability, dizziness, fatigue, tension, and nausea.

” We’re entering the hallway and I spot the phone at the end, like a blue beacon of hope.

I keep talking in what I hope is a casual tone.

“Eventually your metabolism will slow down, and you’ll have trouble regulating your body temperature.

Your heart, lungs, and testicles will shrink—”

Mr. Dawson makes a choked sound.

“It’s true. I saw it in a documentary. After that you have to worry about organ damage, brain damage—”

“Enough.” Mr. Berg opens a green door plastered with images of animals, rainbows, and the Ark. “We’ll come get you after the meeting.”

I walk inside and flip on the light. The place looks like a storage room.

There’s a stack of three small desks, their yellow surfaces covered in crayon scrawls.

The shelves lining the walls are crowded with paper towels, jugs of finger paint, bottles of cleaning supplies, stacks of colored construction paper, and bins containing glue sticks and crayon boxes.

“Can I color while I wait?” I ask with a saucy smile.

But they’re already closing the door. Then a key scrapes and clicks .

Oh my god, there’s a lock. On the outside of the door.

Who puts locks on the doors in a children’s Sunday School wing? Maybe that’s why they put me in the storage room instead of a classroom—it has a lock on it. Fuck.

There goes my plan to use the phone.

Part of me wants to try smashing through the drywall into the next room so I can escape that way. But they’d hear the noise and come down to investigate.

Another part of me wants to scream at the top of my lungs, over and over, to ruin their little Bible study. But I really don’t want to be tased again or tied up.

I sit down cross-legged and try to breathe slowly, to think.

They’re not actually hurting me. They just want me quiet so they can deal with the Cernunnos situation in whatever fucked-up way Edgar prescribes.

Is it really that fucked up, though? Maybe I’m the one not taking this situation seriously enough.

Seven people died—nine counting the first couple of deaths.

Maybe I should be supporting what Edgar is trying to do, instead of resenting their treatment of me.

Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I should apologize and confess…

No. Fuck! I’m gaslighting myself , doubting everything I know and everything I want. There must be some kind of guilt-inducing aura about this place.

Somewhere above my head, the congregation joins together in a song. I hate to admit it, but the blended voices actually sound kind of pretty.

I’ve always been othered by these people. They’re just not hiding it anymore. They’ve put me in my place…confined me down below, while they, the Chosen, sing hymns up above. As if I’m the demon in Hell, longing for the mystical beauty of heaven.

Except I’m no demon. I’m a woman with an identity they fear, a power they don’t understand. Sometimes I confuse myself, and sometimes I wish my life were like theirs… It would be easier. Smoother sailing.

And yet I don’t want to be like them. I don’t. I wouldn’t change places with a single one of them.

That realization soars through my heart, and I smile. They can humiliate me, lock me in, take away my connection to the world, but they can’t really touch me or change me.

With that settled, I pace the storage closet, scanning the shelves. The doorknob is smooth on the inside, no way to pick the lock even if I knew how. But if I can find a screwdriver, I can take off the whole doorknob. Or maybe I can take the door off its hinges.

I rifle through the bins and stacks of storage supplies.

Not a single tool, nothing sturdy enough to give me leverage with the hinges or traction with the screws.

Restlessness coils inside me, sending ripples of unease through my body.

Right under my skin there’s a squirming sensation, and then I gasp and jerk, because it felt as if something slithered up my spine, coiling around the column of my vertebrae.

Oh god.

The name bursts into my mind—Annie-Mae Madden.

She’s old, mideighties. Fragile. Lying in bed at home while her relatives are at the Bible study upstairs.

They think she’s sleeping safely, but she’s going to get out of bed to use the bathroom in a few minutes—she’ll get confused and try to descend the steps alone.

I can see it—her frail body bouncing down the stairs like a rag doll, bones snapping like twigs.

This isn’t like most of my other episodes.

This death is preventable, if only someone gets there in time…

within the next half hour. They can still make it; they can save her.

Why, why didn’t someone stay with her? They must have made the decision to leave her alone just ten minutes or so before the Bible study began, which is why this episode is coming on so suddenly, so powerfully.

I can’t stop it. I’m moaning aloud already, wracked by the pain of the visions in my head—snatches of her oncoming death.

The people upstairs are singing louder, stamping their feet.

It’s a repetitive song, a militant song, meant to stir them into a frenzy, and they’re all susceptible right now, carried along on this tide of panic together.

Little food, barely any sleep, plus the torment of loss, and they have to feel all that grief because I couldn’t carry any part of it for them.

They’re going mad together above, while I go mad below—mad with grief, with the wretched injustice of it all.

As above, so below.

A wail breaks from my throat, blending with the thundering chorus above, with the drumbeat of their marching feet. Onward Christian soldiers … I scream, and I howl, a wild warning. “Your grandmother, your mother, she is going to die, and you can save her, you can stop it, hear me, hear me…”

But no one hears. They sing for half an hour.

They sing while I drag my nails along the walls and rake the contents of the shelves to the floor, while I claw my face and pull my hair and scream, while I fling my body against the door in a frenzy of desperation because I have to go , I have to run, I can’t be in here, let me out, let me out !

They sing louder while she stumbles shakily from her room and ricochets down the stairs.

I shriek at that final crack of her spine, and I crumble, bowed over on the floor, tears glazing my cheeks.

Her life’s scenes flutter through my mind—school, services, a wedding, lost babies, tarnished dreams—he cheated but she stayed, thought it was her duty and besides she had nothing else, no skills or training, and she stayed, she fucking stayed while he did it again and again.

He’s gone now, and her children and grandchildren are her pride when she can remember their names, but they’re upstairs screaming in a religious fervor under the prophetic guidance of one Edgar Linton while she dies alone.

I curl up in the fetal position, hoarse screams tearing from my throat, interspersed with dry, gagging sobs.

It’s over, and they won’t grieve her terribly.

She had become a burden, a chore. The grandchildren will miss her because they don’t understand how her lingering existence weighed on their parents.

The parents will claim to miss her, and sometimes they will, when something reminds them of her—they’ll grow misty-eyed and nod and speak a memory of her, but they’ll be glad not to have that extra burden.

I can’t go where I’m supposed to be. I can’t wander through the woods and perform the slow, methodical mourning for this woman.

What would usually take hours is condensed into a violent, unbearable cataclysm in my head, a shrieking, howling tempest, a building pressure so intense that I’m convinced I’m going to die.

The strain is too great—I’m going to have an aneurysm—something will break inside me, liquefy my brain, leave me oozing and mindless on the floor.

The grief cleaves deeper into the red flesh of my heart, blood oozing around the blade. The old woman is me, and I am her—a burden, a concern, a thing of dread to everyone in my life. Even if Heathcliff and I were together, I would eventually become that to him—a heavy weight for him to carry.

Maybe it’s better if I never see him again.

I can feel something happening in my head, the grief burning through my brain cells like acid. I’m losing pieces that used to be me, and I can only hope they will heal when this is over. Even if I survive, I don’t think I’ll be myself for a long time.

The urge to escape vaults up my throat like searing bile, and I drag myself up again, a puppet hauled by the strings of a lethal compulsion.

I throw myself at the door, shoulders and skull smashing against the unyielding wood over and over.

I can’t stop it. My voice is gone, but I keep screaming, a wretched rasp from my tortured throat, until my body collapses, battered and quaking.

Never in my life have I needed a savior so badly. And yet he does not come.