Bakis’s Annie recounts an anomalous adventure of her own, “the strangest week of my life.” In November 1918, her husband receives a mysterious invitation from the reclusive tycoon Claude Arkel, to spend the winter at his remote mansion in the Thousand Islands of upstate New York. Charles can finish “The Book of the Damned” while Annie keeps him company.
Waiting on the dock to catch their boat, the couple learn that, months ago, three girls went missing from the island’s Arkel School for Domestic Service, founded by the tycoon’s late wife. Arkel and the local police have made no efforts to find them.
Charles shrugs off this information, but Annie is disturbed. In the novel’s most affecting chapters, she recalls her years in service to Charles’s violent and abusive father, where her only friend was another housemaid, Mary, “a lost girl” who ran away after several months. Annie remains haunted by thoughts of Mary, who reinvokes childhood daydreams of King Nyx, a “benevolent spirit” conflated with Annie’s favorite toy, a tin windup bird that, like Mary, disappeared long ago from the Forts’ house.
On the island, Annie and Charles are met by a factotum wearing a gas mask. Their germophobe host insists they quarantine in a cabin for two weeks. And they’re not Arkel’s only guests: The neighboring cabin houses another couple. Stella Bixby greets Annie by announcing, “Welcome to hell, by the way.”
Stella’s psychologist husband is also here to finish a book, a monograph on recurring nightmares. He’s invented an apparatus that delivers electrical shocks to cure people of bad dreams, and has been treating Arkel, whose wife died in a hunting accident. Soon, Annie glimpses famished-looking girls in the woods, one nursing a baby, and enlists Stella to help her save them.
