pounding to being listlessly quiet and rather empty feeling. I am not thinking at all any longer. My mind is a black hole from which no thoughts echo. I am so tired. I no longer even want to throw up from my aching bladder, but simply want to give up and put my head down. The only distant thought, like something far, far off in the distant of my brain, is that if I sleep I may lose my whole family.
Will they sleep without me? I wonder sleepily. Have they already? Did they travel without me last night, as they lay in bed where they ought to be, while I was traipsing through this haunted house, looking for ghosts? Are they now hundreds of years in the past, looking for me frantically; Prue a mess of worries, Dad searching for a bottle as frenetically as he looks for his daughter, Israel penetrating the surroundings looking for the tall girl with the light eyes who used to be his friend? Will they grieve for me the way they grieve for Rose? Will they say to each other, their arms around each other, I do hope she found a home with Gladys?
Now my head slips down, down, down. Down to the old smelly mattress beneath me. It’s no longer me who wars with sleep, me who wars with anything, not any longer. I give up. Give in. The comfort of my decision makes the corners of my mouth turn up in a slight smile. And I hear the faintest of all scratching noises. If the room hadn’t been so silent for so very long, perhaps I wouldn’t hear it, but I do. As quickly as it started, it’s gone. I want to spring to my feet, but my feet don’t oblige. My legs buckle under my weight and I am back down on the mattress once more. I try to call out but my throat is parched and my words unvoiced. It takes everything I have for a moment just to stand and wobble like a fawn or a newborn colt to the door.
The knob turns as easily as if it has just been oiled.
Chapter Eighteen
I skim down the dark stairs as though I am a weightless ghost, and I feel as though I may be. Sonnet Gray, dead in this lifeless house, doomed to haunt it for all eternity because she cannot get out. My feet barely skim the floor at the bottom of the stairs as I fling myself at the front door and out into the night air. The first thing I see is the sun coming up over the trees, the second is the Blue Beast sitting quietly where I left it. My foggy brain doesn’t register the fact that the headlights are no longer shining like a symbol of hope and are as an alternative, cold and silent and dark and non-existent. I give a little cry as I realize suddenly what that means: the car is as good as deceased. I have killed the battery and without another car to jump start it, the Blue Beast will stay right here, silent as a tomb.
My fingers which had already grasped the door handle to the car eagerly only seconds before flex and release and I slide my tired body to the ground. I debate just staying there for the rest of my life, for the rest of my life seems quite short and pointless anyway. I am too tired to be scared anymore of whoever locked me in that room and whoever let me out, and my brain is too weary to form any type of plan. Lying in the mud seems a very viable and intriguing option. But if Prue and Dad have managed to stay awake and wait for me, I cannot keep them any longer.
That is the only fuzzy logic that gets me to my feet again. I relieve my aching bladder behind a tree and then rummage in the Blue Beast for nourishment. I find a can of almonds in the console and the bottom inch of a bottle of water that had rolled under the driver’s seat and I make short use of them. Feeling somewhat better, at least somewhat less sick anyway, I begin to walk.
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I walk like a drunken man, I think. I walk like a woman balancing on a tightrope. Lean, correct, stumble, over correct. I weave around the road in aimless patterns and I know I am doing