Chapter 5: Session Notes

Mara did not run until the reflection smiled.

It was not her smile. Her own mouth had gone slack with cold terror, breath snagging somewhere high in her chest. The woman in the mirror corridor—Mara’s height, Mara’s dark hair damp against her cheeks, Mara’s gray sweater hanging from familiar shoulders—kept coming with that small, private curl of amusement, each footfall half a heartbeat out of sync with the living world. Behind Mara, the glass panes lining the corridor shivered with silver light. Ahead of her, the actual hallway stretched empty and narrow, its wallpaper blistered from decades of salt damp, its ceiling bowed as if from the weight of a sea pressing down from above.

In the mirrored wall, the other Mara lifted one hand.

Mara’s hand remained clenched around the flashlight.

The reflected fingers spread. Wet. Dripping. Black water threaded down the knuckles, disappeared beneath the cuff of the sweater, and fell upward in the mirror toward the ceiling.

Mara’s body decided before her mind did. She bolted.

The corridor pitched beneath her boots. Light thrashed across tarnished frames, cracked plaster, the long parade of mirrors the owner had told her never to remove. The beam caught fragments of herself—her cheekbone, one frantic eye, a flash of teeth as she gasped—and in every sliver she seemed a fraction too late to herself, an echo trying to become the voice. Something tapped behind her. Not footsteps. Fingernails, perhaps, against the inside of glass.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

She took the corner too sharply and slammed her shoulder into the wall hard enough to send a bolt of pain down her arm. The flashlight spun from her hand. Its beam rolled over the floorboards, throwing the hallway into a nauseous carousel of shadow. Mara lunged after it, fingers scraping grit and loose flakes of paint. Somewhere behind her, a hinge gave a sigh.

A door opened.

There were no doors on that stretch of corridor. She knew there were no doors. She had cataloged the second floor on her first day with a clipboard and a performative competence she no longer possessed: twelve patient rooms, two linen closets, one bath with a claw-foot tub stained orange beneath the faucets, no door between the mirror hall and the west stair except the one at the end.

But the sound was undeniable—the soft, moist yawn of wood unsticking from a swollen frame.

Mara snatched the flashlight and ran again.

At the west stairwell, the air changed. The corridor’s metallic cold gave way to the fungal damp of the lower floors. She grabbed the banister and nearly fell, boots skidding on the narrow steps. The house bucked around her in the storm. Wind worried at the windows with a living patience. Far below, the Atlantic struck the island cliffs again and again, and Blackdove House answered in old bones: groans through beams, ticks in pipes, the low flex of something settling or stretching beneath the foundation.

Halfway down, Mara made the mistake of looking back.

The landing above was empty.

Then the mirror mounted there—oval, foxed, framed in blackened brass—clouded over from within as if someone had breathed on the far side.

A handprint appeared in the fog.

Small. Not hers.

Mara stumbled the rest of the way down, caught herself against the newel post, and shoved through the door into the first-floor service passage. The kitchen lay to her left, dark except for the pilot light’s blue tooth. To her right, the corridor led toward the administrative wing, where filing cabinets hunched under drop cloths and the old offices still smelled faintly of carbon paper and disinfectant. She had avoided that wing since the first night, when she’d heard two men arguing behind a locked door and found, upon forcing it open, only a dead moth trembling in a porcelain sink.

Now avoidance felt like a luxury owned by people in houses that obeyed geometry.

She ducked into the kitchen and slammed the door. For three heartbeats she leaned against it, tasting iron, shoulder throbbing, listening for pursuit.

Nothing.

No tapping. No wet footsteps. No voice calling her name in her own tone.

Only the wind, the pipes, and the faint click of the refrigerator trying to keep dead food cold.

Mara pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum. “You are having a stress response,” she whispered.

The words landed in the kitchen with all the authority of a paper umbrella in a hurricane.

She tried again, because some old professional part of her still believed in naming things. “Visual hallucination. Sleep deprivation. Environmental stressors. Possible carbon monoxide exposure.”

The CO detector she had bought on the mainland sat on the counter beside a bowl of hard green apples. Its little screen glowed placidly: 0 PPM.

“Fine,” she said to it. “Be smug.”

Her voice cracked. The absurdity of that almost broke her. She laughed once, a sharp sound that immediately turned into something wetter. She swallowed it down. Panic was a room; she knew that. She had spent years teaching clients to locate the exits: breath, body, evidence, present moment. But Blackdove House had too many rooms, too many doors appearing where none belonged, and every exit seemed to lead deeper inside.

She crossed to the sink and turned the faucet. It coughed, spat rust, then produced a thin stream cold enough to ache. She splashed her face. In the black window above the sink, her reflection bent over the basin.

Mara froze.

The reflected Mara froze too.

No delay. No smile. No dripping hand.

Just her own exhausted face staring back from the night: hollow-eyed, lips colorless, hair coming loose from its knot. Behind her reflection, the kitchen stood empty. Copper pans. Yellowed tiles. The dumb, mute refrigerator.

She turned away anyway and covered the window with a dish towel.

“Rule one,” she muttered. “Never remove the mirrors. Nothing about windows.”

The comment sounded like something Julian would have made, had he been there—dry, slightly cruel, amused at her fear because fear in someone else was easier than sincerity in himself. The thought of him arrived with the cold intimacy of an unwanted hand at the back of her neck. Julian and his neat beard and his expensive grief. Julian saying, You wanted to save everyone because you couldn’t save her. Julian saying it in the hearing, under oath, while Mara sat with her hands folded so tight her nails left crescents in her palms.

She reached for an apple, then realized she had no appetite and set it down too hard. It rolled, knocked against a stack of old maintenance logs she had dragged from the pantry earlier that afternoon. The topmost ledger slid sideways, exposing a manila folder underneath.

Mara stared at it.

She had not put a manila folder there.

At least, she did not remember doing it.

That qualification had become the parasite attached to every certainty in Blackdove House. She did not remember writing in her journal about the blue mittens she lost at age six, but the entry was there in her handwriting. She did not remember leaving muddy boots beside the nursery hearth, but they had stood there with seaweed tangled in the laces. She did not remember unlocking the solarium at 3:12 a.m., but the security tablet had recorded her code.

The folder lay between the ledger and a cracked ceramic sugar jar, ordinary enough to be obscene. Its tab bore a typed label browned at the edges:

SESSION NOTES / GROUP C / FEBRUARY–MARCH 1979

The kitchen seemed to shrink around it.

Mara wiped her wet hands on her jeans. Her training, her fear, and the raw animal urge to burn the folder immediately all collided beneath her ribs. In the end, training won by a narrow margin. Paper was evidence. Evidence belonged in the light.

She picked up the folder.

It was damp at the corners, not with the dry brittleness of age but with a recent clammy moisture that kissed her fingertips and left them smelling faintly of brine. Inside were photocopied transcripts, each page stamped with the crest of St. Oran’s Institute for Restorative Psychiatry—the old name for Blackdove House before it was decommissioned, sold, abandoned, and eventually dressed up in the real estate language of “historic coastal property.” The crest showed a dove in flight, though mildew had darkened its wings until it looked more like a crow.

Mara carried the folder to the table beneath the hanging lamp. The bulb flickered when she pulled the chain, then steadied into a jaundiced cone. Rain worried the windows. Somewhere above, the house clicked its tongue.

The first transcript began with a block of formal header text.

ST. ORAN’S INSTITUTE FOR RESTORATIVE PSYCHIATRY
Blackdove Island, Maine
Group C Reflective Exposure Session
Date: February 6, 1979
Attending Physician: Dr. Elias Vale
Assistant Observer: N. Pruitt
Patients Present: C-02, C-05, C-09, C-11
Note: Mirrored apparatus uncovered at 19:00 hours. Audio transcription follows.

Mara read the phrase twice.

Mirrored apparatus.

Her gaze lifted instinctively to the kitchen’s only visible mirror: a narrow shaving glass hung beside the pantry door, too high for practical use, its silver backing eaten into cloudy islands. She had noticed it before and resented it. Every room in Blackdove House had at least one mirror. Bedrooms, bathrooms, corridors, closets, even the scullery where no sane person needed to examine themselves while rinsing mop buckets. Some were ornate, some plain, some so old they gave back more shadow than face.

The shaving glass reflected the edge of the table, the lamp chain, and the pale wedge of Mara’s hand holding the page.

She turned her chair so her back faced it.

The transcript was uneven, typed by someone fast and increasingly careless. Words were crossed out. Parentheticals intruded. A coffee ring stained one corner the color of old blood.

DR. VALE: You understand the purpose of the exercise?

C-05: To look.

DR. VALE: To observe without retreating. There is a distinction.

C-11: It’s already looking back.

DR. VALE: That is an anticipated projection.

C-11: No. It knows about the girl in the well.

Mara’s thumb tightened on the page.

DR. VALE: We have discussed confabulation in prior sessions.

C-11: I never said it out loud. I never told my mother. I never told God. But she told me from the glass.

C-02: Mine told me where my teeth went.

C-09: Doctor, I want the cloth back on.

DR. VALE: You are safe in this room.

C-09: Then why is she behind me?

N. PRUITT: Patient C-09 became agitated at this point and attempted to turn his chair away from the apparatus. Dr. Vale instructed orderlies to maintain position.

C-09: She’s wearing my wife’s face wrong.

The line settled into Mara like a fishhook.

Wearing my wife’s face wrong.

In the walls, the plumbing gave a long, descending moan.

Mara forced herself to breathe through her nose. This was an asylum transcript. Patients in 1979. Group therapy. Suggestion, shared delusion, authority abuse. She could build a scaffold of explanations if she had to. She had built sturdier things out of less. The phrase “reflective exposure” alone suggested some spectacularly unethical therapeutic modality—mirrors used to provoke trauma responses, perhaps. St. Oran’s would not have been the first institution to dress cruelty in clinical language.

She turned the page.

DR. VALE: C-02, please describe what you see.

C-02: Me.

DR. VALE: And what does “me” look like?

C-02: Better rested.

DR. VALE: Elaborate.

C-02: Like he sleeps after. Like I did it and he got the peace.

DR. VALE: Did what?

C-02: You know.

DR. VALE: I’m asking you to name it.

C-02: No. If I name it, he’ll know I remember.

DR. VALE: Who?

C-02: The one in there.

C-05: He already knows. They all know. That’s why they smile.

The bulb above the table flickered.

Mara did not look at the shaving mirror. She felt it behind her like a draft.

A gust hit the house hard enough to rattle the window sash beneath the dish towel. The towel billowed inward, then settled. For an instant its damp cloth took the shape of a face pressing from outside—brow, nose, open mouth—before collapsing flat.

“No,” Mara said sharply.

The kitchen did not answer.

She gathered the pages into a neater stack, more for the excuse to occupy her hands than from any need for order. The next transcript was dated February 14, 1979. Valentine’s Day. Someone had drawn a small heart in blue pen beside the header, then scribbled it out so violently the paper had torn.

Patients Present: C-01, C-03, C-07, C-12
Note: Third session utilizing full-length mirrors in radial arrangement. Patients seated inward. Staff advised not to stand between patients and reflective surfaces.

Mara frowned.

Staff advised by whom?

She scanned down. The exchange began mundanely enough: resistance, complaint, Dr. Vale’s cool insistence. Then a patient identified as C-07 began to cry.

C-07: She says I put sugar in his bottle.

DR. VALE: Who says?

C-07: Me. The other me. The dry one.

DR. VALE: And did you?

C-07: It wasn’t sugar.

DR. VALE: What was it?

C-07: I thought it would only make him sleep.

C-12: Don’t answer. They take what you give them.

DR. VALE: Who are “they,” C-12?

C-12: The house.

DR. VALE: A house does not possess agency.

C-12: This one does.

Mara stopped there.

Outside the kitchen, somewhere in the service passage, a floorboard creaked.

She lifted her head.

The house held itself very still, the way a person did when caught listening.

“Mr. Havel?” she called.

The caretaker who had ferried her to the island, handed her keys with fingers stained by nicotine and cold, and left before the first squall trapped the dock under ice, was not in the house. She knew he was not. Havel had taken the skiff back to the mainland four days ago with a parting warning not to trust the radiators and not to go below the north cellar after dark. Since the storm rolled in, the radio had given her only static and clipped Coast Guard weather alerts. There was no one on Blackdove Island but Mara.

The floorboard creaked again.

Closer.

Mara rose silently, page still in hand. Her shoulder pulsed. Her scalp prickled with the animal certainty of being approached from behind, though the only thing behind her was the table, the lamp, and the shaving mirror she refused to think about.

She reached for the heaviest object nearby: a cast-iron skillet hanging from a hook beside the stove. Its weight steadied her wrist. She moved to the kitchen door, every step placed between the ancient complaints of the floor.

Another creak.

Just beyond the door.

Mara tightened her grip and pulled it open.

The service passage gaped empty.

The wallpaper, once cream striped with green, had blackened near the baseboards where damp climbed like moldy lace. The bare bulb at the far end swung slightly, though there was no wind. Beyond it lay the administrative wing, its double doors closed. On the floorboards between the kitchen and those doors were footprints.

Wet footprints.

They were small. Bare. A child’s, perhaps. Or a woman with narrow feet. Each print shone in the dim light, water beading on the old wood. They led from the passage wall opposite the kitchen—where a rectangular mirror hung in a gilt frame—toward the administrative wing.

The mirror’s surface was dry.

Mara stared at the first footprint. Five toes. A high arch. A smear at the heel where the foot had twisted slightly, as if the walker had turned to look back.

“Absolutely not,” she whispered.

But denial did not evaporate the water. It pooled in the grain of the floor. It smelled of the sea at low tide: salt, kelp, a faint sweetness like rot under stones.

From behind the administrative doors came a muffled sound.

A voice.

Not speaking. Laughing.

The laugh was low and intimate, a woman trying not to wake someone sleeping in the next room.

Mara’s entire body recoiled from it. Her mind, treacherous and precise, supplied another detail: her mother had laughed like that when Mara’s father told jokes in church, head bowed, one hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking with secret delight. Mara had not thought of that laugh in years. Had avoided thinking of it with the same disciplined cowardice with which she avoided the smell of lilacs, old swimming pools, and the song “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

The laugh came again.

It was behind the doors.

The wet footprints led there.

Mara looked down at the transcript page still clutched in her left hand. C-12’s line stared back.

This one does.

The proper thing would have been to retreat, barricade herself in the kitchen until morning, and stop reading documents provided by a house with demonstrably malicious intent. The proper thing would also have been to leave Blackdove Island at the first sign of impossible activity, before the dock vanished under ice and the radio became a throat full of bees.

Mara had never been as good at the proper thing as her résumé implied.

She set the transcript on the kitchen counter, kept the skillet, and followed the footprints.

The administrative wing doors stuck. She nudged one open with her boot, wincing at the groan of hinges. The smell beyond was paper rot and old medicine, with something else under it: wet wool, extinguished candles, the sour breath of people held too long in rooms that locked from outside.

Her flashlight beam cut through dust.

The wing had once housed intake offices, records storage, staff rooms. Filing cabinets lined the walls in ranks, their labels curled and illegible. A reception desk slumped under a sheet of plastic that had gone opaque with age. On the wall behind it hung a mirror the size of a coffin lid, its wooden frame painted institutional white. Someone had scratched words into the paint near the bottom, but the letters had filled with grime.

Mara angled the flashlight.

DONT LET THEM PRACTICE YOUR FACE

She swallowed.

The footprints crossed the room to a door marked RECORDS. Its frosted glass panel was cracked in a spiderweb pattern. Water had collected beneath it in a dark crescent.

“If you want me to find something,” Mara said, and hated how unsteady her voice sounded, “you can stop with the theatrics.”

The laugh came from inside the records room.

This time it broke off into a cough.

Mara’s grip shifted on the skillet. “Hello?”

A woman’s voice answered, thin through the door. “Mara?”

The skillet nearly slipped from her hand.

No. No, she knew that voice. Knew the soft New England flattening of the vowels, the way her name was spoken as if it were two syllables instead of one and a half: Mah-ra, come here, Mah-ra, don’t touch that, Mah-ra, look at me.

Her mother had been dead for twenty-six years.

Mara backed away until her spine hit the reception desk. Plastic crackled beneath her weight.

“That’s not funny,” she said.

The voice behind the door gave a small, sad exhale. “I wasn’t trying to be.”

Mara’s throat closed. The flashlight beam trembled over the cracked glass. Behind it, something moved—only a shadow, head-shaped, shoulder-shaped, the suggestion of someone standing too close to the other side.

“Who are you?” Mara demanded.

“You know who I am.”

“My mother is dead.”

“Yes,” the voice said. “I remember.”

The simplicity of it struck harder than a denial would have. Mara’s knees went loose. She saw, with the sudden vicious clarity of trauma, blue water under July sun. A white sandal floating upside down. Her own hand slippery around a pool ladder. Blood from where she had bitten her tongue. Her mother’s hair spread like dark pondweed.

No. Not now. Not here.

Mara forced herself upright. “You’re using recordings.”

“Am I?”

“The house has old equipment. Wires. Speakers. Intercoms.”

“Does that make it easier?”

The voice was gentle. That was the worst of it. Not accusing. Not pleading. Gentle, in precisely the way her mother had been when Mara woke from nightmares and couldn’t remember why she was afraid.

Mara stepped toward the door despite herself. “Say something only she would know.”

Silence.

Then, softly: “You buried the robin under the hydrangeas and used my good spoon.”

Mara’s breath left her.

“You cried because you thought God would be angry that you didn’t know the prayer for birds,” the voice continued. “I told you God was busy with cats and little girls that day, and robins had their own arrangements.”

The skillet sagged at Mara’s side.

She had never told anyone that. Not Julian. Not her father. It was one of those tiny childhood griefs that had dissolved into the compost of the self, leaving no visible scar until someone pressed a thumb exactly there.

Behind the cracked glass, the shadow lifted a hand.

“Open the door, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart.

Mara’s eyes stung so suddenly she hated herself for it. She raised one hand toward the knob.

Then something on the reception desk clicked.

She flinched. The flashlight beam jerked downward.