The Dark of Summer

by Dean R. Koontz

  She shuddered.

  She opened her eyes, fearfully, but saw only the sea, no ghost of any description.

  Birds swooped low over the waves.

  If the problem were entirely psychological, then, and in no way mystical, if these ghostly visions were merely products of her own badly disturbed mind and not manifestations of the supernatural, she should seek professional help as soon as possible. She could telephone Dr. Recard the first thing tomorrow morning, when he would be in his office. She should tell him what had been happening to her, set up an appointment, and go to see him. That would mean packing and driving home again, leaving Barnaby Manor and the wonderful summer she had expected to have. It would mean postponing the development of the new relationship between her and Uncle Will…

  And, in the final analysis, it was just this which kept her from proceeding as she should have. Now, more than anything else, her newfound family life was what counted. If she lost that, allowed it to be tainted by this new sickness, she knew that she would never have the spirit to fully recover her senses. If she left Barnaby Manor now, she would be leaving, also, all hope for a brighter future.

  She would stay. She could fight this out on her own ground, and she could win. She knew she could. Hadn't Dr. Recard told her that, more important than anything else, even more important than what he could do for her as a professional psychiatrist, was what she tried to do for herself?

  She would stay.

  She would not mention the ghost to anyone — not to Uncle Will, or to Elaine and certainly not to Ben Groves — for she did not want them to pity her; all that she wanted was to be loved and respected; pity was the death of love, the instrument that killed respect. They mustn't know how unstable she was, how frayed were her nerves. Dr. Recard had told her that one should never be ashamed of having suffered through a mental illness and should never hesitate to seek help out of some misplaced embarrassment. She knew he'd spoken the truth. Yet… Yet, she could not help but be ashamed of her lack of control, her need for medical help. Her aunt and uncle knew about her previous sickness, but she loathed to tell them about this much more frightening siege she was now experiencing.

  She stood up, as if she carried a leaden weight across her shoulders, and she dusted off the seat of her shorts.

  It seemed to Gwyn that this was a watershed period of her life, a decisive turning point after which she would never be the same again. Here, she must take a stand, and she was gambling her whole future on the outcome of this confrontation with herself. There was not to be any area for compromise, no dealing, nothing but a win or lose solution. She would either prove capable of exorcising these demons that had recently come to haunt her, or she would slip all the way into madness.

  She was more frightened than she had ever been in her entire life, and she also felt more lonely than ever before.

  The terns cried above. They, too, sounded forlorn and despairing.

  She turned and started up the steps in the cliff.

  Twice, she grew dizzy and had to lean against the stone wall on her right, catching her breath and her balance.

  Often, she looked behind, expecting to see the white-robed girl close on her heels. But the steps were always empty.

  BOOK TWO

  EIGHT

  At dinner that evening, in the smallest dining room, Gwyn had considerable difficulty keeping her mind on the conversation. Her thoughts kept drifting far afield, indeed, down strange avenues of inquiry as she gave serious consideration to ghosts, specters, the living dead, the occult in its countless facets… She thought, often, about the nature of madness, hallucination and even self-hypnosis… All of these were decidedly disturbing and unpleasant, though nonetheless pressing subjects; she could not bring herself to ignore them for very long, because she felt that they must all be faced as part of the solution to her condition. At times, however, she was caught wool-gathering. Having lost track of the table conversation, she would have to ask her aunt or her uncle to repeat a question.

  “I'm sorry, Elaine,” she said, for the sixth time in less than an hour. “What did you say?”

  Her aunt smiled at her indulgently and said, “I asked how you enjoyed your sailing today.”

  “It was a lot of fun,” she said. And it really had been. But right now, the joy seemed to have paled; the only truly vivid memory she had of the day was her encounter with — the ghost.

  “You didn't meet Jack Younger again, did you?” her uncle asked, his brows furrowed.

  “No,” she said.

  “Or any of the other fishermen?”

  “No,” she said.

  He blotted his lips on his napkin and said, “Gwyn, I don't want to pry at all…” He hesitated, then said, “But I do think that something's wrong here.”

  “Wrong?” she asked. She tried to sound bewildered, and she smiled tentatively, though not genuinely. She reminded herself of her earlier decision. This was to be only her problem; only she could solve it.

  “For one thing,” her Uncle Will said, “you're clearly preoccupied.”

  She put down her fork and said, “I'm sorry. I know that I've been terribly rude, but—”

  “Don't worry about that,” he said, waving his hand impatiently, as if to brush away her comment. “I'm not interested in the symptoms — just the source of the symptoms. What's the matter, Gwyn?”

  “Really,” she said, “it's nothing.”

  Elaine said, “Will, she's probably just tired out after all day on the water.”

  “That's right,” Gwyn said, grasping at the offered straw, anxious to avoid any situation where she'd be forced to mention the ghost. “I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  “You're sure that's all it is?” he asked. His eyes seemed to bore right through her, to discover the convenient lie.

  “Yes,” she said. “Don't worry about me, Uncle Will. I'm having a marvelous time, really. What could be bothering me?”

  “Well,” he said reluctantly, “I guess there's nothing. But if something were upsetting you, Gwyn, you would let me know about it right away, wouldn't you?”

  “Of course,” she lied.

  “I want this to be a perfect summer for you,” he said.

  “It will be.”

  “Don't hesitate to come to me for anything.”

  “I won't, Uncle Will.”

  Elaine smiled and said, “He's got a bit of the mother hen in him, doesn't he, Gwyn?”

  Gwyn smiled and said, “Just a bit.”

  Will snorted, picked up his fork again. He said, “Mother hen, is it? Well, I suppose that's not so bad. I'm sure I've been called a lot of other things much worse.”

  At two o'clock in the morning, unable to sleep, Gwyn heard the first soft, almost inaudible squeak of unoiled hinges as her bedroom door was opened. She sat up in bed in time to see the white-robed girl standing on the threshold.

  “Hello, Gwyn.”

  Gwyn lay back down without responding.

  “Gwyn?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Is something the matter?” the ghost asked.

  Gwyn lifted her head once again, for the voice had sounded much closer than before, too close for comfort. She saw that the dead girl had crossed half the open space toward her bed, a strangely lovely vision in the thin moonlight.

  “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 fo
rce 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.”

  Gwyn did remember now, though she hadn't thought of Earl Teckert in a good many years.

  “You do recall!” Ginny said.

  “Yes.”

  “We used to build sandcastles on the beach.”

  “I remember.”

  “Just the three of us,” Ginny said. “And we'd both be trying to get his attention. I think, perhaps, I had half as much of a crush on him as you did.”

  Gwyn nodded, remembering the pleasant summer afternoons and the warm sand between her small fingers. She said, “I kissed him once, square on the mouth.” She laughed as the scene came back to her in full detail. “I startled him so badly, he was speechless when I let him go. And he refused to play with us again for nearly a week. Every time he saw us coming, he ran the other way.”

  “That's him, sure enough!” Ginny said. She shook her head, her bright yellow hair a moonlit wreath that s
himmered about her face, and she said, “He was terribly bashful.”

  Gwyn began to reply — then stopped suddenly, fear flooding back into her like a wave of brackish water. If this ghost were the product of her own sick mind, an hallucination, a delusion, then how could it talk about things which she, herself, had forgotten? Shouldn't the apparition's conversation be strictly limited to those things which Gwyn could remember?

  “Is something the matter, Gwyn?”

  She licked her lips, swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry, and she felt as if she had a fever.

  “Gwyn?”

  It was possible, Gwyn supposed, that the hallucination, the ghost, could tap her subconscious mind for the old memories. Though she might have forgotten Earl Teckert, consciously, the old memories still lay in her subconscious mind, waiting to be re-discovered. The brain, after all, stored every experience; it never forgot anything. All one had to do was dig deep enough, find the right keys to the old doors, and even the most trivial experiences were to be found, far out of sight in the mind but not completely lost. Yes. That was it, must be it. The ghost, her alter-ego, the second half of her splitting personality, was able to tap her subconscious, to dredge up these bits and pieces of the past which she seemed, herself, to have forgotten.

  “Gwyn?”

  “What?”

  “Something's the matter,” the ghost said.

  She turned away from it.

  “Gwyn?”

  “It's nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Really, I'm fine.”

  “Gwyn, I am your sister. You used to share things with me; we used to have no secrets.".

  Gwyn said nothing.

  “I came from the other side, through all that long darkness, to be with you again. You mustn't reject me; you must share with me, accept me.”

  Gwyn had begun to cry. The tears welled up in her eyes, hung in the corners until they became too heavy to stay there any longer, burst out through her tightly closed lashes and ran down her cheeks, warm and swift and salty, catching in the down-turned corners of her mouth, then trickling on down her chin. She wanted to stop crying, felt that it was desperately important for her to stop crying and get herself together again — but she simply could not. She saw now that dispelling the hallucination was going to be far more difficult, a far longer battle than she had at first anticipated. And perhaps she would never be able to get rid of the delusion, to cure herself, regain normality… When she ignored the specter, it still did not vanish as it should have; though it stopped speaking to her, it remained quite close at hand, hovering, waiting, listening, watching… And when she boldly confronted it, unafraid or trying to be unafraid, the thing also remained, undeterred, gaining control of the conversation. Indeed, when she confronted it, the specter proved itself much more substantial than she wanted to believe it was…