Home Before Dark

Ewan works on unpacking the study. He thinks the room will help him feel like a real writer. However, it’s where Curtis Carver killed himself. He wonders Carver’s mental health experiences leaked into the space. He finds a Ouija board and two large boxes, which he opens.

One holds a record player and the other holds the records. Most are soundtracks to musicals like The King and I. He puts on the record The Sound of Music and waves at Maggie and Jessica in the backyard. Maggie had promised him that morning that she hadn’t opened the armoire. He finds a camera that has enough film left for two pictures and takes a shot of Jessica and Maggie.

He looks at the other snapshots as he waits for his picture to develop. On top is a self-taken picture of Curtis Carver. Dated July 2, it shows two thirds of his face and the study behind him. In the several pictures of him that follow, Carver’s face gets thinner, and his beard gets longer, as if it were time-lapse photography.

When Ewan looks at the photo he took, there is a shadowy figure behind his wife and daughter, just out of the tree line. He hears Jessica scream. As he runs downstairs, he hears Maggie cry in pain. Jessica says their daughter fell and hit her face on a rock. Ewan finds a bloodstained gravestone nearby, which is what Maggie hit her head on. It says, “WILLIAM GARSON: Beloved father, 1843-1912” (110).

After taking a valium, Maggie gets in bed two hours. She has a nightmare about a figure from the forest. After she wakes, she reads a text from her mother that says she’s disappointed and asks her not to stay there. Maggie dares her to try to stop her. She then looks for the letter opener, which she assumes she misplaced. Dane arrives at eight o’ clock, and she tells him she saw someone the night before. He says it was probably a ghoul and he noticed the gate was open.

They examine the study and realize they have similar intuitions about houses and design. Maggie remembers emptying Ewan’s apartment with Allie the week after he died. She found five fiction manuscripts that he wrote after House of Horrors. She also found a rejection letter from his agent, saying that publishers only wanted ghost stories from him.

The next drawer has a copy of the Book. It’s a hardcover first edition, the one she read when she was a nine-year-old. As she looks at the house on the cover, she remembers being treated differently as a child. A friend had told her that her dad said Ewan had written an “evil book” and that they couldn’t be friends anymore. When she read it, Maggie didn’t like how Ewan depicted her. She was furious and confronted her parents weeks later during a custody argument.

She tells Dane she hates the Book and that its success annoys her, although the critics were harsh. They find the record player and records in their cases. In the closet, she finds a teddy bear that is missing an eye and wears a bowtie. She wonders if it belonged to Katie Carver. She then finds the shoebox filled with pictures of Curtis Carver. In addition, Maggie finds a photo of herself in front of the house, but in the picture, she has no scar. The next photo shows her in front of the armoire with Hannah and Petra. Maggie remembers the sleepover that went wrong. She convinced herself it hadn’t happened, but the photo is proof.

In the next photo, Petra and Jessica are staring at a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Walt and Ewan are also in the photo. Maggie worries again that she was wrong, and that, a few nights earlier, it was Mister Shadow in the room before Elsa scared her. The last photo is of Maggie and her mother going into the woods. She sees the humanlike figure, but it’s hazy. It’s standing where the figure from last night was standing, and she wonders if it could be Mister Shadow. She goes into the woods and reaches the cemetery. Dane follows her. She laughs when she sees a tombstone for a dog. Once again, she believes her father lied.

As she and Dane discuss the possibility of ghosts, he tells her that he saw something unusual when he was 10 years old. On the night his grandmother died, she came in and checked on him. However, she had died hours earlier and he didn’t know it. She wishes she had a sweet story about Ewan’s last hours. Maggie then tells Dane everything and says she’s there to investigate why her family left.

Ewan goes into the woods with Hibbs, who has heard rumors about the headstones. Ewan has found three at this point, and assumes the others belong to William Jr. and William the Third. Hibbs finds Indigo’s stone. He says that the artist who painted Indigo fell in love with her and they were going to run away together. When William forbade her, Indigo killed herself by eating baneberries. The rumor is that William then commissioned the artist to paint his portrait so that he and Indigo could be together.

Ewan thinks Janie June didn’t tell them enough about the house’s history, but Hibbs says he might not want to know more: Many things have happened in the house, and not just the Carver’s story. He says that the house “remembers” and tries to repeat itself and the events that happen inside it. He advises Ewan to love his family so that the house can learn a different lesson.

Ewan tells Jessica they’ve found at least 12 headstones. She’s furious with Junie Jane about neglecting to mention the cemetery. Ewan decides not to tell her about Indigo’s suicide. That night, he wakes to the sound of a man singing. The song is “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music. The record player is playing in the study when he enters. He feels cold and stops the record. By the time he’s back in bed, he has convinced himself that nothing unusual is happening.