By the time she reached the bottom of the stone steps that lead up the cliffside to the Barnaby estate, Gwyn was drawing her breath in long, shuddering sobs, bone weary, fuzzy-eyed. She sat down, letting her head fall forward, her arms folded across her knees. She didn't see how she could manage to climb clear to the top.
However, the sun was setting, bringing a shadowed twilight to the empty beach, and night would soon lay its black glove over everything. She didn't want to be down here when darkness fell, no matter whether her ghost was a real ghost, an hallucination or a hoaxer. When she had steadied her heartbeat and regained her breath, she got up and began the dangerous ascent.
The first few steps weren't bad.
The sixth seemed twice as high as it should be.
The seventh was a major obstacle.
After that, her strength fell away, and the steps rose before her like a series of mountains.
Darkness was falling more rapidly than she'd anticipated — or she was taking an inordinately long time to make the climb — leaving pools of shadow on the steps, so that she sometimes misjudged where the edge of one of them lay. A chill draught moved down through the natural flue, bringing goose pimples to her flesh and giving her the odd sensation that a giant lay above, breathing down on her.
The twentieth step seemed to slip away from her, like the moving riser on an escalator; she lost her balance, felt herself tilting backward, a long hard fall behind her…
Desperately, she flung herself forward, trying to regain her precarious but precious balance. She over-compensated for the backward tilt, and went painfully to her knees, clutching at the steps as if she thought they would shift out from under her.
Darkness pressed in.
The draught grew chillier.
In a while, she started up again, staying on her knees this time, moving ahead as she had on that slope of sand by the caves. This, in the end, proved the wisest course, for she finally reached the lawn above without further injury and no more close calls.
She lay on the grass, catching her breath, then got up and, crying slightly at her own weakness, walked toward the welcome lights of Barnaby Manor…
“I told you a walk wasn't what you needed,” Elaine said, helping her into bed.
Gwyn slid down under the sheets and lay back against the pillows, thankful for the smell of clean linen and the enveloping softness. “I see, now, you were right,” Gwyn said.
“Dr. Cotter said you should rest.”
“I'm awfully tired.”
“What would you like for supper?” Elaine asked.
“Nothing.”
“You've got to eat.”
“I'm not hungry, Aunt Elaine.”
The older woman made a face and said, “But you've hardly had anything to eat all day!”
“Breakfast.”
“One meal isn't—”
Gwyn said, “But it was an enormous breakfast; it filled me up; I've not been hungry since, really.” She wanted to stretch, but didn't have the strength to lift her arms. She yawned instead and said, “All I want to do is sleep, get my strength back.”
“If you're sure you're not hungry.”
“I'm sure.”
Elaine picked up a bottle of tablets by the side of the bed and emptied one out into the palm of her hand. “I'll get you a glass of water to take this with.”
“Take what?”
“A sleeping pill.”
“I don't want a sleeping pill,” Gwyn said.
“Dr. Cotter prescribed them.”
“I don't need one,” Gwyn said, adamantly. “I feel like I've been kicked around by a herd of horses. I'll sleep without help.”
“Dear—”
“I won't take one.”
Elaine sighed and put the tablet back into the bottle, capped the bottle and put it on the night-stand again. “If you won't, you won't.” She turned off all the lights except the reading lamp by her chair, sat down and picked up her book.
“What are you doing?” Gwyn asked. She raised her head from her pillows and looked at the older woman.
“Reading, dear,” Elaine said.
“You're not going to sit up with me, are you?” Gwyn asked. She felt almost like a helpless little girl, a child so afraid of the dark that she needed a chaperone to help her get to sleep.
“Of course I am,” Elaine said. She was dressed in a brown stretch sweater, brown bellbottoms and stylish boots. She did not look at all like the sort of woman who would insist on mothering anyone, yet here she was, insisting just the same. “If you won't take a sleeping tablet, as Dr. Cotter said you should, then I ought to be here to watch out for you, in case you need or want something.”
“I don't want to be such a burden on you,” Gwyn said.
“This isn't a burden. I've been wanting to read this novel for several months.”
“You'll be more comfortable in the library,” Gwyn said. “I insist you don't ruin your evening worrying about me.” When she saw that Elaine was not affected by any of this, she said, “Besides, the light bothers me; it keeps me awake.”
Elaine closed her book on a flap of the dust jacket, to mark her place, rose to her feet. “Promise you will sleep?”
“I'm in no shape to do anything else,” she said.
And she wasn't.
Elaine bent and kissed her forehead, pulled the sheets closer around her, picked up the book, turned out the reading light, and left the room.
The darkness was heavy but not oppressive, a welcome preliminary to sleep.
Gwyn thought, briefly, how fortunate she was to have both Elaine and Uncle Will to look after her, especially at a time like this when everything seemed to be falling apart for her. Without them, she would have been so terribly alone, so much more vulnerable to this sickness, so helpless. But with them, she felt, she had a good chance of recovery, a better chance than she would have had if she'd no one to turn to…
Sleep reached up.
It was not threatening, but gentle.
She let it touch her and pull her down.
“Gwyn?”
She opened her eyes and found that she had rolled onto her stomach in her sleep. She was peering out through a cocoon of sheets at a fragment of the wall behind the bed, and she could see that the reading light — which was dimmer than any other light in the room — had been turned on again. She hoped Aunt Elaine had not returned to keep a vigil.
“Gwyn?”
She froze.
A small hand touched her shoulder, shook her gently, then more and more insistently.
“Gwyn?”
She rolled over, pushed the sheets away from her and looked up into the pale face of the dead girl, Ginny, her long-gone sister.
“How are you feeling, Gwyn?”
She was beyond screaming for help, beyond fighting with the ghost, far beyond any reaction at all — except a dull and unemotional acceptance of the impossible.
“You've been sleeping so much,” the dead girl said, “that I haven't had a chance to talk to you. I didn't want to wake you, because I knew how much you needed your sleep.”
Gwyn said nothing.
“You've been so overwrought, and it's mostly my fault.”
Gwyn closed her eyes.
She opened them again.
It didn't work: the ghost was still there.
“Are you listening to me, Gwyn?”
Against her will, she nodded.
“You looked so far away,” the apparition said. “I didn't even know if you could hear me.”
“I can hear you.”
The ghost sat down on the edge of the bed. She said, “Have you thought over what I talked about?”
Gwyn was actually unable to understand the specter's meaning; her mind was disjointed, scattered with the fragments of thought, smashed by her weariness and by her fear which, by now, was a common part of her.