She Walks in Darkness Read Online Free PDF

villa. Twice he stumbled on the stairs, and once he stopped and rubbed his hand against the back of his head; it came away bloody. When we reached our room, he sat down heavily on the bed, and I ran for the coffee, but he would not take it. “Let me be, Barb. I’m sleepy.”
    For a moment I don’t think I breathed at all. Somewhere I have heard or read that it is a very bad sign when a person whose head has been hurt says, “I am sleepy.”
    I caught at him. “Richard!”
    “Let me be.” He mumbled the words that time; then he pulled away from me and just lay down and went to sleep.
    My first panicky impulse was to shake him awake; fear of hurting him stopped me. Then I remembered: the telephone! The Harrises had said they had one. It wasn’t up here, so probably it was downstairs in the great, shadowy hall. I made for the stairs again, staggering as I ran, my breath coming in ragged gasps.
    The telephone is there, but it will not ring.
    When I finally accepted its silence, I sat down and cried. But then a comforting thought came: This explained Mattia Rossi’s absence. He had gone into town to report that the telephone was out of order. He would soon be back.
    But he was an old man, and Mrs. Harris had said that he used a cycle. What if he should spend the night in Volterra?
    Again I fought panic, tried to remember more things that Mrs. Harris had said. There is a village somewhere among the hills, not too far from the villa, but when I had asked her if anyone there might speak English, she had laughed. “Child, the people live practically the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago. You couldn’t make a soul understand you.”
    A village I couldn’t possibly find in the dark, and where nobody would know what I was saying if I got there! An old man who might not come back till morning! I began to cry again.
    Stop it, Barbara! Get a hold of yourself. You can’t afford to go to pieces now.
    Something deep inside me said that, and I knew it was right. I went back upstairs; the coffee was still fairly hot, and I drank it all, black. While cold water poured into the tub, I tore off my ruined blouse and undies (trousseau things that I had been proud of ), then plunged into that rose-colored marble pool. The non-voluptuous, stinging coldness shocked me back to life. Then I did what I could for Richard; I could not turn him over or get all his clothes off, but I carefully examined all of him that I could see. There is an ugly wound on the back of his head, but the bone around it feels firm. His skull is not fractured; I am sure of that. If only I knew enough to be sure!
    Concussion. That can keep a man unconscious for hours, perhaps days. Even a doctor can only let the patient lie still and rest. Usually the man wakes of himself; often concussion is not dangerous, I believe. But sometimes it kills.
    Oh, Richard! Richard!
    Well, I had done all I could. His other hurts seem to be only bruises and minor burns, and I washed them with soap and water. I longed to drop my aching, still filthy body (I had not stopped to scrub the mud off) down beside him, to sleep and forget. But something made me stagger back into the anteroom and bolt the heavy door, the only door that connects our quarters with the rest of the house. I don’t know why I did that. Perhaps it was pure childish fear of all those vacant, darkening rooms around us, of the black maze that surrounded us like a twilight jungle.
    At any rate I did bolt the door, and now I thank God that I did.
    I dropped beside Richard, too tired to draw the curtains. The garden was a pit of darkness now, but the white giantess, Eos, towered above it like the very Angel of Death. The fading flame of the clouds behind her gave her a look of wrath, of outraged power. As if she had just been cheated of her prey. The red light soon faded. But as I watched her huge wings darken, I was reminded of a giant bat’s.
    I turned my head away; I didn’t want to see her. That is the