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“I have a sister,” she says. “She sent me a letter two weeks ago today.” Thalia points to the article on the phone she’s still holding up like a flag. “One day later, she was found dead. On Block Island.”
Blake knows she’s in a gothic horror novel the moment she steps off the rain-slicked ferry.
Maybe illogical dreams are what everything in early sobriety feels like.
It is claustrophobia and decay and tragedy too intense for her fragile, newly recovered self to take.
The dreadful wind and rain are keeping her tethered to the earth. Without them, she fears she’ll float out of her skin and up over the island like a discarded balloon.
She’s a storm cloud that wants to rain.
It would be so much easier to deal with this—the uncertainty, the vulnerability, the feeling that the island, that White Hall, is stretching, expanding, like an orb weaver’s web, to accommodate her presence here—if she could take the edge off. But, of course, she cannot. She needs to be strong.
“I need to observe the rules of gothic fiction to get through this.”
She’s already decided that she’s losing it, but could the complete mental collapse wait until after breakfast? Or better yet, tomorrow?
A story. That’s what—in her letter—Blake said she felt like she was trapped in. A horror story of castles and secrecy and supernatural occurrences. Has Thalia unwittingly become another character?
Still, when things happen over which one has no control, it’s convenient, almost comforting, to feel as if you’re a cog in a narrative in medias res.
It’s not stuffy in here, like the other rooms. It feels lived in, breezed through, flayed, or, filleted. Its secrets ripe and ready for the picking.
“Now we’re really in the Twilight Zone, unable to operate under the assumption that someone with a death certificate and a headstone is off the suspect list.”
White Hall itself, its trajectory in a never-ending time loop of destruction and despair—forced me into a story I was incapable of changing.
She looks back to see White Hall looming behind her like a haunted house. Like a nightmare. Like the cover of a horror novel.
The horrible, crazy, and potentially useful knowledge of what exists beneath the surface of White Hall bounces around her head like poisonous pills in a prescription bottle.
The sun doesn’t come out. Not yet. That would be a cliché unworthy of the dark, terrifying story they’ve somehow lived through. But Thalia thinks it will. If not today, or tomorrow, then soon.
