A Knock at the Door

Here the record takes its gothic turn. Ethel flattens Willoughby into an idealized white knight, both fists up, afraid of nothing, not even the knock she can already hear coming, while she stays the one who flinches. Everything she has ever loved, she confesses, she has loved straight to death, so the knock is not a fear of strangers but a fear of herself, of what her loving tends to cost.

The dread running under the song is the same dread that opens Preacher’s Daughter. This is the hinge where the prequel begins to fit the story the listener already knows. By the outro even his fearlessness has gone uncertain, you’re not scared of no knock on the door, or maybe you are, and the door, when it comes, is the one the debut answers.