to do it.' But only the silence came back at me, and her portrait was just a portrait, and there were no more prayers. I was struggling to remember things that hadn't happened. I was sleepy all over. I had to lie down.
"When I reached my room I was utterly exhausted. I cleaned up the bedspread as best I could with a wet washcloth, and then I flopped down and went into a strange half sleep. I felt myself falling out of consciousness.
"Rebecca was talking to me. The room was her room again, and she explained again that things did not happen in a straight line. Everything was happening all the time. She was always here. I grow no older. I never escape. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but some arbitrary darkness crept in, and I turned over and fell into a deep sweet state somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, in which my body enjoyed its exhaustion and knew it was exhausted from having spent itself sexually, and she and her strange talk were all gone.
"I was deliciously drowsy when suddenly I realized Pops was in this room. Pops was standing at the foot of the bed.
"Pops started to talk to me in his dull, flat voice:
" 'All your life you've talked of ghosts and spirits, of Goblin, and seeing shades down there in the cemetery, and now this thing has come either into our house or into your imagination, I honestly don't know which. But you have got to fight for your mind. You have got to fight for some direction of your brilliance, you, at the age of eighteen, have got to determine some ambition, and that ambition must never be clouded by these ghosts.'
"I sat up out of respect for him, and he went on.
" 'I'm angry,' he said. 'I'm real angry that you nearly burnt down this house. But I don't know what to make of what happened to you, and as angry as I am I'm convinced that something clouded your reason because you love Blackwood Farm as much as I do.'
"I said at once that this was true.
" 'Well, you get your mind in order, you hear me?' he went on. 'And in the meantime, put this woman's cameos back in her trunk. Close that trunk. Shut it up tight. That trunk is Pandora's Box. You let her spirit out when you opened it, so put everything you took out of it back.'
"He paused for a moment, and then he turned and stared at me with his wan expression and his pale face.
" 'I've given you all I can give you,' he said. 'I don't have anything more to teach you. Lynelle taught things that I could never teach you. She was better than school, I don't argue with it. But you're wasting your time now. You're wasting everything. And I know perfectly well that you won't go to any college right now, and maybe even at age eighteen that's not the right thing. But Aunt Queen has got to come home and she's got to find you a new teacher and she's got to take you on.'
"I nodded. Aunt Queen wasn't terribly far away at this time. She was attending a seminar in Barbados, and I knew that Pops would call her and that she'd be coming home. I hated it, hated that he would interrupt her, but after what had happened she'd definitely be called home.
"Pops stared at me for a long time, and then he went out of my room.
"I felt a dull shock because in all the years I had lived with Pops he had never spoken that many words to me at any one time. Also I had seen that he was weak and washed out, and no longer the hale and hearty individual that he had always been.
"That I had caused him worry upset me something fierce.
"I went down to the parlor and I got the cameos out of the display case which I had taken from the trunk. I brought them up to my room, and I resolved that tomorrow by daylight, I'd go up to the attic and put them back. Maybe. Maybe not. After all, the ghost hadn't said anything to me about opening her trunk.
"Again I fell into a doze, and there was a delightful wicked sense of Rebecca being there. Just a thing for pleasure, that's all I ever was, Quinn. That's what I'll be to you, Quinn. This is