— The Others (2001).

That elderly sibyl—chalk whispering across the séance ledger like frost etching a window—outlived the room that rejected her, yes; but only in the arithmetic by which one postpones an eclipse by minutes. She sat at the rim of that dim island of furniture, eyes filmed with the mathematics of absence, and when the door finally unlatched and the daylight made its small, embarrassed apology, she gathered her implements as a nurse gathers the names of the newly deceased. If the house did not swallow her then, chronology did: a later winter, an unremarkable bed, and the same slow breath that once propelled automatic writing dwindling to a pencil-thin hush. I count her as lost, and the ledger—yellowed to transparency—agrees.