“Gwyn?”
“Yes, something is the matter,” Gwyn said.
“Tell me?”
“You,” Gwyn said.
“I don't understand.”
“Of course you do. You're not real; you don't exist, can't exist, except as a figment of my imagination. I'm not going to lie here and talk to you. I can snuff you out if I want; you're little more than a dream, a fancy daydream.”
“No, Gwyn. I do exist.”
Gwyn lay back and closed her eyes. “No.”
“Yes, Gwyn. Oh, yes.”
The voice was very close now.
Gwyn rolled over onto her stomach, reached out and hugged the feather pillow, trying to force herself to sleep. But that was, of course, quite useless.
She felt the bed sag: the dead girl must have sat down on the edge of it…
The dead girl said, “I told you, on the beach earlier, that I am not transparent, not made of smoke. When I chose to visit this realm of the living, I came cloaked in flesh. To the naked eye, I am as real as you are.”
Gwyn said nothing.
Suddenly, without warning, a soft, warm hand touched the back of Gwyn's neck, delicately, tenderly.
Gwyn leaped, rolled onto her back, terror-stricken, looked up at the dead girl. “You can't touch me! You aren't real, or substantial, not at all. You're a dream, a delusion, an hallucination, and you must be gone when I tell you to go.”
The dead girl smiled.
“Stop it!” Gwyn said.
“Stop what?”
“Stop being here!”
The dead girl reached out to touch Gwyn's cheek.
“No,” Gwyn said, desperately. She got out of bed on the far side, hurried into the bathroom and closed the door behind herself.
“Gwyn?” the dead girl called from beyond the door.
Gwyn looked at her face in the mirror. It was pale under the tan, and lined with fear and fatigue. Yet, it did not look like the face of a madwoman…
She splashed water in her face, took a long drink, then decided the best thing to do was to return to bed. Perhaps the night's fantasies were concluded.
In the main room, the dead girl stood by the window, her hands on the sill, leaning toward the night. She was looking intently out to sea, her back to Gwyn, apparently oblivious of the other girl's return. Ignoring this hallucination, trembling violently, Gwyn returned to the bed, got beneath the covers and pulled them up under her chin. She rolled onto her side, her back to the windows, and she tried not to think about the figure standing there in fluffy white lace…
“I don't want to upset you, Gwyn,” the dead girl said.
Gwyn lay still, waiting.
“I came back because I was lonely.”
Please let me sleep, Gwyn thought.
“I thought we'd get along well together. I thought you'd be glad to be with me again.”
Gwyn put her hands to her ears.
The voice filtered through her fingers: “I should have realized you'd need time to adjust to me. But you will adjust, Gwyn, and then we'll have fun — like we used to.”
Gwyn tried to recall if Dr. Recard had ever said anything about hallucinations. What was one to do in a situation like this? Just play along with the delusions until one had gone utterly mad?
The dead girl said, “I still remember the pain of drowning. It was like a warm, wet blanket I couldn't get out of…”
Gwyn shuddered. Unbidden, the memory of the small explosion, the swift fire, the craft sinking into the sea all came back to her as vividly as if the nightmare had transpired only yesterday.
“My chest ached so badly, Gwyn… as if a fire had been lighted inside of me, hot and sharp…” She paused, as if, even now, that agony welled up anew, as strong as it had originally been. “Oh, I managed to break the surface once or twice, but all I gasped down was seawater. I couldn't seem to get a breath of fresh air, no matter how hard I tried.”
“Please…” Gwyn said.
The ghost ignored her plea.
“I suppose I panicked. Yes, I know that I did. I was beating at the water, like a fool. Every flail of my arms drove me farther from the surface, but I was too scared to understand that. And I was screaming, too. Every time I screamed, I got more water in my lungs…”
“Stop it,” Gwyn said. But she spoke so softly into her pillow that the dead girl could not have heard her.
“Isn't it strange,” the dead girl said, “that all I had in my lungs was a bucketful of cool water— while it felt like a fire raging in there?”
Gwyn detected a change in the voice, more clarity; she thought the ghost must have turned from the window to speak directly at her. She did not turn over and look.
“You can't ever imagine how terrified I was, Gwyn. I knew I was going to die, and I knew there wasn't anything I could do about it. I could see the surface, because it was lighter than the water under me, but I just couldn't reach it. It was so cool looking, green and nice…”
Gwyn tried to get her mind off Ginny, off the past. She thought about Ben Groves, the Salt Joy, their afternoon together, in hopes that she could destroy this delusion, this ghost.
When the next few minutes had passed in silence, Gwyn thought perhaps she had succeeded, that the specter had at last been driven out. However, when she turned to look, she saw that the dead girl was standing by the side of the bed, looking down at her, a sad expression in those large, dark, unearthly eyes. “Don't you believe me, Gwyn?”
She shook her head: no.
“Why should I lie to you?”
Gwyn had no answer.
“I am your sister, Gwyn. Is there any way I can convince you, any way I can bring us together? I'm so lonely, Gwyn. Don't push me away like this. Don't block me out of your life after I've gone to so much trouble to come back to you.”
As she watched the specter, Gwyn wondered if she had been reacting to it in the wrong way. By pretending she didn't see it, by refusing to listen to it — wasn't she just running away from it? If the ghost were a manifestation of her own sick mind, an hallucination produced by her own subconscious, wouldn't it be best to face it, to shatter its illusion of reality? Surely, if it were a figment of her imagination, it would not withstand close scrutiny; to date, she had been running from it; if she confronted it squarely, shouldn't it erode like a formation of mist?
“Do you remember Earl Teckert?” the ghost asked. It had walked back to the window and was staring at the sea.
Gwyn swallowed hard. “Who?”
“Earl Teckert, from Miami.”
“I don't remember him.”
The specter still faced the window, her smooth complexion bathed in the milky radiance of the moon. She said, “You had a terrific crush on him, at one time.”
“On Earl Teckert?” Gwyn asked.
The ghost turned from the window, grinning, as if it sensed Gwyn's decision to confront it — and as if it knew that it would last through any such confrontation. “Yes,” it said. “You vowed that you would never give him up to another girl, no matter what.” She chuckled. “And you said you intended to marry him just as soon as possible — if not sooner. You were really strung out on him.”
Confused, Gwyn shook her head. “No, you're wrong. I don't know any Earl Teckert, and I—”
“You knew him when you were ten years old,” the specter said, still smiling.
“Ten?”
“Remember?”
“I don't think—”
“Earl was a whole year older than we were, a dark-haired little angel of a boy whose folks kept the summer house next door to ours, just outside of
Miami, This great romance of yours developed the year before my — boating accident. You fell in love in June, told me you'd marry him in July, and couldn't stand him by the end of August.”