Home Before Dark

Maggie finds the ivy at the back of the house, probes at the wall until she finds a door buried beneath the overgrowth, and moves through a short corridor to the bottom of a wooden staircase. She knows her father would have included this in the Book if he’d known about it. Inside, on a second landing, she sees a pair of doors. She pushes them and steps into her own bedroom. She has exited through the armoire, which explains why Ewan nailed it shut. Now she knows it wasn’t Mister Shadow who crept into her room, although the fact that it was a real person might be worse.

The first bell rings that afternoon. Ewan has filled two bottles with urine, unwilling to leave the kitchen and miss a message. He has now sat there for 21 hours, and the cacophony of sounds has reminded him that there is something wrong with the house—not him. The bells repeat the pattern of five tones: HELLO. EWAN. When Ewan says he needs help to stop Garson, Curtis says NO. He also says that Garson didn’t kill his daughter. LOOK.

Then, it spells the word PORTRAIT—not Garson’s portrait but HER PORTRAIT.