The supernatural battle in Jo Noonan’s studio pits Sara Tidwell’s destructive force against Jo Noonan’s resistance, with Michael Noonan caught between them as the storm rages outside. It is a confrontation fought through the material remains of Jo’s life: crafts and keepsakes become projectiles, her desk is hurled through a wall, and the apparent victory leaves the studio in ruins. The battle’s immediate aftermath also exposes a hidden space beneath the floor, turning a struggle over Jo’s presence into the discovery of a long-concealed archive.

Background and Entry into the Studio

Michael enters the studio in pouring rain, calling on Jo for help and pleading with her to help him. When he strikes the door again, it suddenly gives way; he falls inside, catches his shin on the jamb, and keeps hold of his lantern. A moment of stillness follows. Then the door slams shut and the supernatural violence begins.

At first Michael cannot make sense of what he sees beyond the destruction around him. In the flashlight beam, Jo’s beloved crafts and possessions are being torn apart by an unseen force. The scene unfolds during the same tempest that batters the woods outside, so that the storm’s violence and the studio’s uncanny upheaval seem to run alongside each other without becoming one and the same.

The Studio Becomes a Battleground

Jo’s framed afghan square tears from the wall and crosses the room, its black oak frame breaking apart. The heads on the dolls in the baby collages pop off. The hanging light globe shatters, scattering glass, as two opposing winds—one cold, the other almost hot—combine into a cyclone. Rather than simply setting a frightening atmosphere, the gusts make the room’s objects part of the fight.

A small sculpture of the Sara Laughs head, apparently built from toothpicks and lollipop sticks, explodes into splinters. Jo’s kayak paddle lifts, moves as if rowing at empty air, then launches like a spear toward Michael. He throws himself onto the green rag rug; the paddle misses him and splits against the far wall, while fragments of glass cut his palm. As he lands, he feels a raised ridge beneath the rug, though the immediate danger leaves him no time to investigate it.

Jo’s banjo, which she had never mastered, rises and turns in the air. It produces a recognizable, badly out-of-tune musical phrase before ending with a violent snap that breaks all five strings. It then strikes itself against the floor until its drum shatters and its tuning pegs break off. The destruction makes the studio’s personal objects seem not merely battered by an external force but recruited into a contest whose participants remain unseen.

Sara and Jo’s Confrontation

The sound of moving air gathers into something that resembles voices: furious, panting, and inhuman. Dust swirls through Michael’s flashlight beam in twisting shapes. He hears Sara’s snarling voice order Jo out of the room, then hears an insubstantial impact, as though air has collided with air. A shrieking rush follows. Michael recognizes it as the sound he had heard in the night and understands that Jo is screaming—that Sara is hurting and punishing her for intervening.

Michael shouts for Sara to leave Jo alone and moves into the room, swinging his lantern as if it might protect him. Bottles containing dried flowers, sectioned mushrooms, and woodland herbs fly past and smash against the opposite wall. None hits him; their paths seem to be guided away from him. The violence is selective, but it does not make him a detached observer: Jo’s cry draws him forward, while the objects around him continue to break.

Then Jo’s rolltop desk rises into the air. Loaded with drawers, it would weigh at least four hundred pounds, yet it floats and tips between opposing currents. Jo screams again, now in anger rather than pain, and Michael staggers against the closed door, feeling emptied out. He recognizes that Sara is not the only presence able to draw energy from the living. The supernatural struggle is therefore not simply a one-sided assault: Jo is exerting a force of her own.

White, semen-like material spills from the desk’s pigeonholes as it shoots across the room. Michael sees it move too quickly to follow. A shriek of protest and agony—this time unmistakably Sara’s—comes as the desk crashes through the wall, opening the studio to the rain and wind. Its rolltop hangs loose, its drawers burst outward, and the contents scatter: thread, yarn, small nature guides, thimbles, notebooks, knitting needles, and dried-up markers. The scattered remnants resemble debris pulled from a grave, making the ruin of Jo’s ordinary belongings carry the weight of a violent disturbance of memory and presence.

The Battle’s End and the Hidden Space

Michael tells both opponents to stop, but the order comes after the clash has ended. Apart from the storm, he is alone in the wreckage of his wife’s studio. The ending is emphatically provisional: the battle is over, at least for the time being, rather than conclusively resolved. Jo’s renewed cry of anger, Sara’s cry of pain, and the sudden silence leave the outcome legible as a temporary turn in their confrontation, not proof that either presence has been permanently overcome.

Michael carefully folds the green rug around as much of the shattered glass as he can gather. Beneath it he finds the trapdoor suggested by the ridge he felt when the paddle struck. It opens onto a triangular storage space formed by the slope of the land toward the lake. Michael already knew the space existed and had intended to search it for the owls, but the events in the studio had pushed that plan from his mind. The battle thus redirects his attention from the room’s destruction to a concealed place beneath it.

A recessed ring lets him lift the trapdoor easily. Jo’s favorite perfume, Red, rises from below and lingers briefly before giving way to the smell of rain, roots, and wet earth. Three steep steps lead down to an old toilet that Michael vaguely remembers Bill Dean and Kenny Auster installing around 1990 or 1991. Nearby are plastic-wrapped steel filing-cabinet drawers stacked on pallets, old records and papers, a bagged eight-track player, and a wrapped VCR. The hidden storage area is not part of the battle itself, but its discovery is the concrete consequence of Michael noticing the rug’s hinge after the supernatural violence has forced him to the floor.

Significance

The scene turns the studio into a record of conflict. Its objects are specific to Jo—her afghan work, collages, banjo, herbs, and rolltop desk—so their destruction makes the confrontation intimate rather than abstract. The forces at work remain largely unseen, but the damage is exact and physical: shattered glass cuts Michael’s palm, the paddle splits, the banjo is ruined, and the desk breaks through the wall.

The shifting sounds and movements also make the struggle difficult to separate from its setting. Wind becomes voices; an impact occurs between insubstantial forces; Jo’s scream changes from pain to anger; and Sara’s cry comes as the desk strikes the wall. Michael witnesses enough to identify the antagonists and infer that Jo can fight back, but not enough to render the supernatural conflict fully visible. His final position among the wreckage preserves that uncertainty: the immediate assault has stopped, yet the storm continues and the battle is only over for now.

The trapdoor gives the scene a second consequence. What begins as a plea for help and a violent struggle over Jo’s presence ends with Michael uncovering stored records and equipment hidden under her studio. In that way, physical disorder becomes a route to buried evidence: the rug displaced by the battle conceals the entrance, and the ridge Michael feels under it supplies the clue that the ruined room alone could not provide.