The rain in Mississippi does not fall. It hangs, a suspended curtain of gray, between the sky and the earth, as though the world has forgotten whether it wants to weep or simply endure. Beatrice Beauregard stood on the porch of Harlowe House and felt that curtain seep into her bones.

Harlowe House had stood for a hundred and forty years, since before the war, when her great-great-grandfather Jefferson Beauregard had cleared the land and raised the columns and planted the magnolias that now, in the autumn of 1934, were dropping their pink petals into mud and rot. The house was white, or had been once. Now it was the color of old teeth, stained by humidity and time and things that Beatrice did not wish to name.

Julian was buried on Tuesday. She had not slept since Friday.

The funeral had been small. The Beauregard name had once meant something in this county, but names, like houses, decay. The men who carried the casket were neighbors, not friends. They set it down in the ground with the careful indifference of people who have carried too many coffins and are counting the ones still to come.

Beatrice stood at the grave in a black dress that had belonged to her mother and a veil that scratched her face. She did not adjust it. She did not cry. She had run out of tears somewhere between the wake and the interment, in the small hours of the morning, sitting alone in the parlor with a glass of bourbon that she did not remember pouring.

Now she stood. She watched the dirt fall. She thought about nothing.

After the last neighbor had driven away, down the driveway that was more ruts than road, Beatrice went inside. The house was quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of a house at rest, but the held-breath quiet of a house that is waiting for something.

Cecilia met her in the kitchen.

Cecilia was a woman of indeterminate age, with skin the color of strong tea and hands that had done fifty years of work and showed none of it in her face. She had been a servant in the Beauregard kitchen before Beatrice was born and was still here now, when most of the other staff had long since left for work in the towns or work in the fields or work in the ground.

"Cecilia," Beatrice said. "I need tea."

Cecilia poured. She put a spoon of sugar in the cup. She put the cup in Beatrice's hands. Her fingers were warm.

"You should rest, Miss Beatrice," she said.

"I will rest when the house lets me."

Cecilia paused. The teapot hovered over the sink. "The house?"

Beatrice looked around the kitchen. It was the same kitchen she had known since childhood, with its brick fireplace and its wide wooden tables and its windows that looked out over the garden. But something was different. Something she could not name.

"This house," she said, "does not like to let go."

Cecilia set the teapot down. She looked at Beatrice with eyes that had seen too much to be surprised by anything. "Some houses don't, Miss Beatrice. Some houses hold on tight as a grave."

She turned and left the kitchen. Beatrice sat at the table and drank her tea and listened to the house.

It made sounds. Not creaks or groans, not the ordinary sounds of old wood settling. These were different. A footstep on the stairs. The murmur of a voice. The soft turning of a page.

She sat very still.

The footstep stopped. The voice stopped. The page stopped.

Beatrice told herself it was the wind. It was always the wind in Mississippi. It moved through the live oaks and the magnolias and the broken windows of broken houses and it sounded like everything and nothing.

But she knew, even as she told herself this, that it was not the wind.

The first night, she dreamed of a woman in a mirror.

The woman had Beatrice's face, but older. Much older. Her hair was white. Her eyes were black. She stood behind the mirror, pressed against the glass from the other side, and she was speaking. But her lips made no sound.

Beatrice woke with a start. The room was dark. The fan above her head was not turning. The windows were closed.

She lay in bed and listened.

Silence.

She closed her eyes. She did not sleep again.

The first thing she found was the piano sound.

It came at three in the morning. Beatrice was awake, sitting in bed, staring at the ceiling. The sound came through the floor, up through the bedframe, into her bones.

It was a piano. Playing something slow and sad, in a key she almost recognized. She listened. The notes were wrong, or nearly wrong, as though someone were playing by ear without knowing the tune. A wrong note here. A missed key there. But the melody was there, underneath, like a body underneath a shroud.

She got out of bed. She put on her robe. She opened the door and went into the hallway.

The sound was coming from the parlor.

She walked down the hall. The floorboards were cold beneath her bare feet. The house was dark, the darkness thick as water. She reached the parlor door and put her hand on the knob.

The piano stopped.

She opened the door.

The parlor was empty. The piano was there, a grand thing that had belonged to her great-grandmother, its lid closed, its keys yellowed with age. It had not been played in thirty years. Beatrice had not known how to play even if it had been tuned.

She stood in the doorway and looked at the piano.

The keys were not moving. But the air above them was rippling, like heat rising from asphalt.

She closed the door and went back to bed. She did not sleep.

The second thing she found was the crack in the wall.

It appeared in the upstairs hallway, on the landing between Beatrice's room and the guest room. She saw it on the third morning, when she was walking to the bathroom and noticed a thin dark line running vertically up the plaster.

She stopped and looked at it.

It was shaped like a face. Not a human face, exactly, but the suggestion of one. Two hollows for eyes. A narrow line for a mouth. A ridge for a nose. It was small, maybe six inches tall, and it was embedded in the wall as though the wall had grown around it.

Beatrice reached out and touched it. The plaster was cold. Colder than it should have been. Colder than the rest of the wall. Colder than the air.

She pulled her hand back.

That afternoon, she went to the garden and found Cecilia weeding the magnolia bed.

"Cecilia," she said. "There is a face in the wall."

Cecilia did not look up. She kept weeding. "What kind of face?"

"I do not know. It was small. In the hallway."

Cecilia stopped weeding. She stood up. She wiped her hands on her apron. She looked at Beatrice with an expression that Beatrice could not read.

"How many faces have you seen, Miss Beatrice?"

"One."

"How many have you seen before that?"

"I have only just arrived."

Cecilia was silent for a long time. Then she said, "Every generation, a woman has to answer a question."

"What question?"

"I do not know."

"Then what are you talking about?"

Cecilia looked at the house. Harlowe House rose behind her, white columns and dark windows, the magnolias at its feet like witnesses at a funeral.

"I'm talking about a house that remembers," she said. "And a house that demands."

She turned back to the garden and knelt down and resumed weeding.

Beatrice stood there for a moment. Then she went back inside.

The third thing she found was the locked room.

It was in the cellar. Beatrice went down on the fifth day, carrying a kerosene lamp, looking for the coal bin. The cellar was large, with stone walls and a dirt floor and shelves that held things Beatrice did not recognize: bottles of dark liquid, jars of pickled things that had long since turned to mush, a stack of leather-bound books with no titles.

At the back of the cellar, behind a shelf of bottles, she saw a door.

It was small, maybe three feet wide, made of dark wood that had been stained by damp. There was a lock on it, an old iron lock that had rusted to the color of dried blood.

Beatrice stood in front of the door and held her lamp high. The light flickered. The shadows moved.

She reached out and touched the door.

It was cold. The same cold as the crack in the wall. The same cold as the piano keys.

She pulled her hand back. She went upstairs.

She came back that night.

The house was quiet. Cecilia had gone to her room in the carriage house. The servants' quarters were silent. Beatrice was alone.

She took a candle from the kitchen and went back to the cellar.

The door was still there. The lock was still rusted. Beatrice stood in front of it and held the candle high and looked at the lock.

It was old. Old locks can be picked. Julian had taught her, when she was a girl, how to pick simple locks. "In case you are ever trapped somewhere," he had said, smiling. Beatrice had laughed. She was laughing now.

She found a hairpin in her hair. She took it down. She knelt in front of the door and inserted the pin into the lock.

It took her twenty minutes. Her hands were shaking. The candle burned low. But eventually, with a sound like a bone breaking, the lock gave.

She pushed the door open.

The room beyond was small, maybe six feet by six feet. There was nothing in it but a mirror.

It was a full-length mirror, standing against the far wall, its frame carved with names. Beatrice raised the candle and looked.

The names were women's names. Carved in different hands, different styles, different eras. Some were elegant and flowing. Some were crude and hurried. Some were barely legible, worn smooth by time.

She read them aloud.

"Margaret. 1803." "Elizabeth. 1827." "Catherine. 1841." "Juliet. 1858." "Beatrice. 1889."

Her own grandmother.

She continued.

"Rose. 1902." "Beatrice. 1928."

Her mother.

She reached the bottom of the frame. There was one more name, carved recently, the letters still sharp and clean.

"Beatrice. 1934."

Her.

She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself. The candlelight made her face look hollow. Her eyes were dark. Her lips were thin. She looked old. She was thirty-four.

She touched the glass. It was cold.

That night, she dreamed again.

The woman in the mirror was there. Older. Whiter. Blacker-eyed. She was pressed against the glass from the other side, and she was speaking, and her lips were moving, and Beatrice could not hear her but she could see the shapes of the words.

They were the same words every night. The same shape. The same rhythm.

Beatrice woke speaking them.

She was on her knees beside the bed, her mouth open, her voice low and steady, saying words in a language she did not know. The words were old. They were older than English. Older than the house. Older than the names in the cellar.

She stopped. She did not know how she had stopped. The silence that followed was louder than the words.

She sat on the floor and trembled.

The next morning, she went to see the pastor.

Rev. White was a small man with a small church and a small parsonage and a face that had been worn smooth by seventy years of listening to people's problems. He listened to Beatrice now with the patient attention of a man who has heard every story there is to hear and is not easily surprised by any of them.

"The house," Beatrice said, when she had finished telling him about the piano and the face and the door and the mirror and the dreaming, "is haunted."

Rev. White set down his teacup. He looked at Beatrice for a long time.

"Mrs. Beauregard," he said, "what makes you say that?"

"Because I know what grief sounds like. And this is not grief. This is something else."

He was silent. The fan above his head turned slowly, pushing hot air around the small room.

"My grandmother told me about this house," he said finally. "When I was a boy, she told me stories. About the women. About what the house demands."

"What does it demand?"

"She did not say. She said that some things are not meant to be spoken aloud. She said that the women who live in this house know, in their bones, what is expected of them."

"Expected to do what?"

"To answer the question."

"What question?"

Rev. White shook his head. "I do not know. Your grandmother would not say. She said that the question is different for every woman. That the house asks each one something different. And that the answer... the answer is always the same."

"What is the answer?"

He looked at her with eyes that were very old.

"Staying."

Beatrice left the parsonage and walked home in the heat. The road was empty. The fields were empty. Even the sharecroppers' cabins were quiet. Everything was empty except the house.

She went straight to the cellar.

The door was unlocked. She pushed it open and went inside.

The mirror was there. The names were there. The cold was there.

She stood in front of it and looked at herself.

She looked at the names. Margaret. Elizabeth. Catherine. Juliet. Beatrice. Rose. Beatrice. Beatrice.

Four Beatrices. Four women who had stood in this room and looked in this mirror and heard this house asking them their question.

She knew, suddenly, what the question was.

It was not a word. It was not a sentence. It was a feeling. A weight. A pressure in the chest that said: can you stay? Can you stay in this house, in this body, in this life, when everything you love is gone and everything you know is decaying and the only thing that remains is the house and the mirror and the cold?

Can you stay?

She looked at her reflection. Her reflection looked back.

And she answered.

Yes.

The mirror did not change. The room did not change. The house did not change.

But Beatrice changed.

She felt it immediately, like a door opening in her chest that had been closed since Julian's funeral. Something released. Something settled. Something that had been hovering, unresolved, found its shape.

She was not happy. She was not sad. She was something in between. Something that had a name but no word.

She went upstairs. She sat at the kitchen table. She drank a cup of tea. Cecilia brought it and set it down and said nothing. Beatrice said nothing. She drank her tea and watched the light change through the window.

That night, she dreamed of the mirror. But the woman in the mirror was not older this time. She was younger. She was Beatrice, as she had been at nineteen, standing in a ballroom in Natchez, dancing with a man who would become her husband. The man was Julian. He was smiling. Beatrice was smiling.

The younger Beatrice turned and looked at the older Beatrice, through the glass, and she smiled again. And then she turned away, back into the dream, back into the life that had led here, to this room, to this mirror, to this answer.

Beatrice woke at dawn. The house was quiet. The piano was silent. The crack in the wall was just a crack.

She got out of bed. She put on her dress. She went downstairs. She made coffee. She sat at the table and waited for the day to begin.

It began.

It would begin again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Beatrice Beauregard would stay in Harlowe House. She would tend the garden and drink the tea and talk to the walls and answer the question that the house asked every night in the silence between one heartbeat and the next.

She would stay.

Because the house had asked. And she had answered. And the answer was the same one that Margaret had given in 1803 and Elizabeth had given in 1827 and Catherine had given in 1841 and Juliet had given in 1858 and her grandmother had given in 1889 and her mother had given in 1928 and she was giving now, in 1934, in the small hours of the morning, in the room with the mirror and the names and the cold.

She would stay.

And when she was gone, as she knew she would be one day, another woman would stand in that room and look in that mirror and see her name carved in the frame, alongside the others, a line of women stretching back through the centuries, each one having answered the question, each one having stayed, each one having become part of the house in a way that had nothing to do with bricks and mortar and everything to do with the quiet, stubborn will of a woman who refuses to leave.

Harlowe House would stand.

The magnolias would bloom. The columns would crack. The windows would darken.

And the mirror would wait.

The Haunting of Harlowe House