She searched along the surf for some kind of indentation in the land which would be sufficiently deep to conceal a young woman who was approximately the size of the — the dead girl. She found nothing. Moving slowly in toward the cliff wall, each step rapidly becoming a major effort as her unusual weariness increased, she eventually discovered, to her own great surprise, the well-concealed series of small caves, all large enough to accommodate a man, which lay there…
Even half a dozen steps away from them, one could barely see the tops of these caves. Here, the beach was hove up like the back of an angry cat and was, for the most of its width, higher than the entrances to the caves, providing a natural blind. Within two yards of the cliff wall, however, the beach sloped drastically, giving way to the subterranean chambers at the bottom of a seven- or eight-foot incline.
Gwyn stood at the top of this slope, looking down, not sure if she should risk a moment of optimism or not. Previously, in scouring the beach, she had seen no footprints besides her own; two days of wind and shifting tides had wiped the open sand clean of any trace of the dead girl's ghostly passage. At the bottom of this slope, on the other hand, in the dimly lighted entrance to one of the caves, other footprints marked the sand where the wind and the waves could not get in to erase them.
Careful not to lose her balance and fall, Gwyn went down the steep hill, and braced herself against the cliff wall at the bottom. She crabbed sideways until she reached the cave in question.
Her heart was thudding, more from excitement than exertion, but this was the only sign that she felt close to some strange truth…
In the deeper, looser sand of the slope, the other set of prints was little more than a staggered series of formless depressions, not at all sufficiently well defined for identification. But at the bottom, in the cave entrance where the sand was level and not so deep or dry as on the slope, the prints had taken well and remained clear: slender and feminine, the tracks of a woman in her bare feet — as the ghost had been…
Gwyn would not permit herself the elation that bubbled within her, because she realized that the footprints might have been made by anyone, a curious explorer from somewhere farther south along the beachfront, and not by a ghost. Moving cautiously, so as not to disturb the tell-tale tracks, she slipped to the mouth of the cave and then inside, walking only so far as she could see, though the subterranean system seemed rather large and complex. She saw, when she turned to face out toward the daylight, that the bare-footed woman who had been here before her had not gone deep into the cave either, but had stood just inside the entrance, looking out. Though this seemed to prove the woman had been waiting there, looking up the slope, expecting to see someone at the top, it was not proof of a ghost — or of a hoaxer.
Gwyn stood there, near where the woman had stood, trying to see what value this discovery had.
None.
Even if she showed Uncle Will these tracks, what would they prove? That someone had been in the cave before her? So what?
She looked down at the footprints again, shivered.
Wasn't it possible that — yes, even likely that — if she did go to fetch her Uncle Will for him to take a look at the footprints, that they would be gone when the two of them returned from the manor house, that where prints were now, only clean sand would be then? Or perhaps, if she still saw the prints — might he be unable to see them, just as he had been unable to see the broom marks on the sand, yesterday? That would be conclusive proof that she was not the victim of a hoax, but was indeed losing her mind.
And that would be intolerable, that abrupt closing off of all alternatives. Instead of confirming the slim possibility of a hoax — for whatever reasons — it would amount to nothing more than another carefully positioned brick in the rapidly growing edifice of her madness.
For a moment, she considered going deeper into the cave to see if it might lead anywhere in particular, but she finally decided against any further explorations. Clearly, the barefoot woman had not gone any farther than this; therefore, nothing beyond this point could interest Gwyn or help her solve the overall puzzle of the ghost. Besides, she had no flashlight and no way of marking her route so that she could retrace her steps in the event that she became lost in the twisting corridors of stone.
Dejected, she started out of the cave and almost overlooked the flash of white near the cavern mouth. Catching sight of it out of the corner of her eye, she turned and, her breath held at the back of her throat, recognized a scrap of flimsy, white cloth. It was the same fluffy fabric from which the dead girl's gown had been made. This scrap had caught on the jagged edge of a rock and been torn loose, apparently without the dead girl being aware of it. The breeze caught it and stirred it like a tuft of white hair on an old man's head.
Gwyn touched it, reverently, as if it were a sacred relic, pried it free of the jagged stone and held it in the palm of her hand.
This was real. She could touch it, feel it, run the flimsy stuff through her fingers. With this to show Uncle Will, she could get some help in discovering who was…
Then again, how did she know that the scrap was real? Hadn't she felt the dead girl touch her, and hadn't she actually wrestled with the ghost? If she could hallucinate something as seemingly real as that, couldn't she hallucinate this piece of cloth?
And even if it were genuine, what did it prove? That someone had been in this cave, had lost a piece of garment on a jagged rock? That didn't mean the “someone” was a ghost, a hoaxer pretending to be her dead sister. The cloth might have come to be here two days ago, or it might have hung on the rock for a week, a month. Indeed, it might have been here so long that the sun had bleached it white, though it had once been a different color. In short, it was proof of nothing.
She looked around for something more, anything more, but she found only sand and stone — and possibly footprints.
Sighing, she jammed the white scrap into the pocket of her shorts. The climb up the steep slope outside of the cave was exceedingly difficult and required every last bit of her strength, though she would normally have made it in a few seconds, with little effort. She kept falling to her knees and sliding back, the treacherous sand shifting like a liquid beneath her. In the end, she was forced to go up on her hands and knees, clawing frantically for each foot she gained. By the time she had reached the surface of the beach, she was gasping for breath, shaking like a storm-blown leaf, and coated with perspiration which dripped from her brow and streaked across her face.
She toddled across the beach, to the water's edge, and sat there where she felt it would be cooler. Her head ached and seemed to spin around and around, as if it were coming loose. In a while, the sensation of movement ceased, though the headache remained.
When she felt rested enough, she got up and started back toward Barnaby Manor, her rubbery legs twisting and bending but somehow managing to support her. Each step increased her weariness, brought a deep yearning for sleep more intense than that which she had suffered in her previous illness, so intense, in fact, that she could not understand it. She didn't know, of course, that she had been drugged heavily, twice, in the last twenty-four hours, and that a residue of those drugs still worked within her, like a quiet little fist.