When she came out of the bath, Ben Groves had not come back yet — though the dead girl was there.
“Hello, Gwyn.”
She stepped around the apparition, went to the bed and got under the sheets, as if it had not spoken.
“That's not a nice way to be.”
She said nothing.
She prayed for Ben to return.
The ghost came and stood at the foot of her bed, raised its arms in her direction. “The longer you ignore me, the more you try to shove me out of your life, Gwyn, the harder it is for me to stay here.”
“Then, go away.”
“You don't mean that.”
“I do.”
“Without you?”
“Yes.”
“But don't you love me?”
Gwyn said, “No.”
“I'm your sister, your blood!”
“You aren't.”
The dead girl made a face, disgusted, and she said. “Don't persist in these foolish denials.”
“They aren't foolish at all. My sister died when she was a little girl, when she was only twelve. You're a grown woman, someone else altogether or a figment of my imagination. No matter that you look like me, that you look like Ginny. You're not.”
“I've explained this all before, Gwyn.”
“Not to my satisfaction.”
“Gwyn, I do need you. The other side keeps tugging at me, wanting me back. If you won't accept me, I can't stay here. But I need you, more than I've ever needed anyone or anything, to make things more pleasant on the other side, to have someone to talk to.”
“I'm imagining you,” Gwyn said.
“You aren't.”
“I may be going mad, but I know it. That's something, anyway.” She was trembling badly.
The ghost climbed onto the bed, making the mattress sink at the bottom, and she crawled up toward Gwyn. She touched Gwyn's bare arm with her fingertips, and she said, “There, now, does that feel like a figment of your imagination?”
Gwyn said nothing.
“I've told you that, temporarily, I'm as real as you are, as fleshy as you, and not to be ignored.”
“Then you'd better get out of here before Ben gets back,” Gwyn said. “If he sees you—”
“Oh, he won't.”
“I thought you said you were as real as me, temporarily?”
“I am,” the dead girl said. “But a ghost has certain abilities that come in handy. I can keep him from seeing me, if I wish.”
Gwyn said nothing.
“Please speak to me, Gwyn.”
“I'd be talking to myself, then,” Gwyn said. “And I really don't need that. So why not go away.”
The dead girl studied her closely for a moment, then crawled even closer on the bed. She said, “Gwyn, I'm your sister, and I love you, and whatever I do is for your own good.”
Gwyn was quiet.
“It's better for you on the other side, with me, in death. Here, you have no one, no one at all; you're alone and afraid, and you're clearly quite ill. I'm going to take you with me, for your own good.”
Gwyn did not realize the full import of what the dead girl had said, for she was still operating under the assumption that she could best handle the situation by ignoring it Then, a moment later, it was too late for her to puzzle out the specter's meaning, for the creature unexpectedly leapt on top of her, bearing down onto the mattress, locking her there with its knees and its weight, clamping two white, dry hands around her neck and feeling for a strangler's grip.
Gwyn frantically grabbed those ghostly wrists.
They felt solid.
She tried to push them away, to break the specter's hold on her throat, but she could not manage that.
“It'll only hurt for a minute,” the dead girl promised her, smiling sweetly down in her face.
Gwyn reared up.
The ghost held her tight.
The pale hands increased the pressure on her throat, like the two halves of a soft but capable vise.
Gwyn gagged, tried to draw breath, found it difficult and almost impossible to do even that small thing.
Terror, then, returned tenfold.
She let go of the wrist and struck out for the dead girl's face, dragged nails along the pale face and brought one thin line of bright blood to the surface.
The ghost cried out and let her go.
Gwyn heaved up again, with all of her might, holding back nothing, her system flooded with adrenalin, and she shoved the specter out of the way. She leaped out of bed, stumbled on a trailing end of the sheet and fell to the floor.
The specter grabbed the back of her pajamas.
“Ben!” she cried.
The word came out in a croak.
Gwyn squealed, rolled forward, freeing herself., scrambled to her feet. Even a couple of minutes ago, she would not have thought she had so much energy left, but now her strength seemed boundless, her endurance without limits.
“You can't run,” the specter said.
She started for the door.
It stepped in front of her.
“You can't run anywhere that I won't follow you, Gwyn.”
The dead girl started forward, holding her hands out, just far enough apart to allow Gwyn's neck to fit between the wriggling fingers…
“Ben!”
The name was louder this time, but would probably still not carry all the way downstairs.
The ghost was much too close.
Gwyn put her head down and ran forward, toward the door, struck the dead girl a glancing blow and dashed into the upstairs corridor. She was disoriented for a moment, not having expected to escape, but located the stairs in short order and ran for them.
“Gwyn, come back to me!”
At the head of the steps, she collided with Ben Groves, who was on his way up, and nearly succeeded in knocking them both down the whole long flight in what would surely have been a deadly fall.
TWENTY-ONE
“Gwyn, what on earth's the matter with you? You were screaming so loudly I could hear you downstairs.”
He held her by her shoulders, tenderly and yet firmly, and he shook her until she stopped sobbing and was able to speak coherently again. She held onto his arms, glad to have him here, feeling protected by him as she had felt on the Salt Joy and on their walk around the grounds. She said, “I'm not losing my mind, Ben.”
He looked perplexed, then smiled tentatively. He said, “Well, of course you're not.”
“But I thought that I was.”
“You've lost me.”
She said, “It was the sickness, that you didn't understand… I was seeing ghosts, my dead sister, hallucinations—” It sounded foolish, like the babblings of a madwoman, as if she had already gone over the edge. She went on, nonetheless: “Now I know I wasn't having hallucinations at all, because she just tried to kill me, to strangle me.”
“She?”
“The — ghost. The woman pretending to be a ghost. I can still feel where her hands were on my throat.”
“You mean there's someone else in this house?” he asked.
“She was just in my room.”
“Let's go have a look,” he said.
“No.”
“Why not? Gwyn, if there's someone in the manor who doesn't belong here, we've got to see who she is.”