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rose from the ground and drifted. She wailed in fear.

"My hand," he said. "Take my hand."

"I'm not here, Don! I'm not real, I can't - "

"You are real," he said. "You're Sylvie Delaney and you live in the old Bellamy house. In that new room, you've touched the walls of that room. You hid in the closet that I built and..."

And he felt her hand in his. He didn't look. He simply led her up the tunnel. He didn't want to see if she was walking or floating or if there was anything of her but that hand. That living hand.

They came out into the rubble-strewn basement and now he could hear her footsteps. He turned around and faced her. "You're all right," he said.

"I'm inside the house again."

"It sustains you."

"The stronger the house is," she said, "the realer I am."

"So if you know that," he said, "how could you not have known it was your body down there? That you were - Sylvie, you're dead. How could you not know?"

"I was still here, that's why I didn't know. The house held on to me." She walked toward the stairs. "But there were times when I felt... soft. Unreal. Puncturable." She walked up the stairs. Her hand was so solid on the two-by-four banister. He couldn't help it, he had to reach out and touch her again. She stopped walking. Stopped and waited, his hand touching hers.

"Sorry," he said, thinking she was offended.

"Oh, no, please," she said. "Oh, please, you're so warm. Don't let go." She burst into tears again and turned to face him, almost fell into his arms. He gathered her into an embrace; she wept against his shoulder. Her tears soaked through his shirt. How could she not be real? He got one arm under her legs, lifted her, carried her carefully up the stairs.

"Take me to the nook under the stairs," she said. "The heart of the house."

So once again they sat on the bench, with the portrait of the Bellamys looking down at them. She would not let go of his hand. "She left me there, Don."

"It explains why you never had any inquiries about her death."

"But what about my death?"

"She must have told them something. That you left. Went home. Went on to that job in Providence."

"When I thought I killed her, it destroyed me."

"Maybe it destroyed her, too," said Don.

"Now I know why I couldn't leave the house," she said. "I tried, early on. When they were closing it all down. I hid from them but then when they left I tried to leave. I'd get out onto the porch. Or out in back. And I'd get so faint."

"Faint?"

"I mean like I was going to faint. Light-headed. It frightened me. I thought it was my guilt holding me. I couldn't face the world. I had no right to be out there if Lissy couldn't go too. But she did go. So I did have the right."

"But the house held you."

"Held me, but it also kept me alive. Without the house I'd just be... gone. I think I was going anyway. All those years when the house was weakening. I was weakening too. Till you came. The sound of you walking through the house. As if it woke me from a long sleep. I was in the attic, listening to you talking to that guy and that woman. And she left because the dust was getting to her. Talking about how strong the house was. And how you could fix it up again. You don't know how that... it filled the house with hope. Me with hope."

"So you were there," he said.

"But maybe I wasn't even... visible? Maybe I was... sometimes I felt like I was the house. Like the timbers and beams, they were my bones, and the outside walls were my skin, and this place, this invisible place was my heart, beating, beating. Can't you feel the pulse here?"

He reached over and laid his fingers against her throat. The pulse was pounding there. "A ghost can't pump blood like that."

"Imitation of life," she said. "Mimesis. That's all I am. Plato said we were all shadows. Me more than most."

"Not as long as you stay here."

"Now when you sell the house, do I have to leave?" She laughed, but it quickly turned to crying again. Again he held her, his arm around her shoulders, her face turned in to his chest. "I've really screwed things up now. You can't sell a haunted house,