Free Spirit Lost by Nancy Thayer Page B

nothing at the window, although every few moments it shook slightly from the blows of the now forceful wind.
    The noise seemed to be coming from the skylight. John reached out and tugged on the chain hanging over the stairs, switching on the light so that the attic was slightly brightened. He wasn’t brave enough to encounter some kind of rabid bat or pigeon (he thought of Hitchcock’s The Birds ) in the dark.
    He walked across the attic to the wide wooden staircase that led steeply up to the skylight. It was the skylight that was being battered. He began to climb the steps, which ascended so sharply that he was practically lying facedown on them. He had to crane his neck backward to look up.
    He had gone up three steps, so that his face was nearly against the skylight, when he saw her.
    The light from the stairwell was not sufficient to illuminate her clearly, but still he could see without any doubt that she was there.
    John saw quite distinctly a young woman with a pale face leaning down over the skylight, her dark cloak billowing heavily against her, her long black hair streaming upward, backward, all around her face in the wind. Her dark eyes were large and beseeching. Her small white hands were making the sounds he had heard: She was beating her palms against the glass. There was no color to her: Her skin was all white, her eyes and hair and cloak all deep black.
    “Jesus Christ,” John whispered. He clutched the wooden step in front of him. He was dizzy with shock. He had not felt such a deep plunge of fear and dread since he was a child. But he could not seem to look away, and the woman did not disappear. She continued to beat with her small hands on the skylight glass.
    “Who are you?” John whispered. But he spoke more to himself than to the woman at the skylight. In any case, she did not seem to hear him. I’m going mad, John thought. I’m going fucking mad. I think there’s a woman blowing around on the roof.
    “Willy!” John yelled.
    “No!” the ghost-woman called, and raised a hand, palm out to him, as if to forestall him.
    He heard her voice then quite clearly. It was high, light, sweet, enchanting even in its demand. He heard it as clearly as he had ever heard anything.
    John stared hard at the woman. She seemed to be kneeling on the roof, bending over the skylight—that much was realistic about her; a real woman could find purchase on the roof like that. And he could see her so clearly: her long hair blowing in the wind, the heavy cape buffeting against her, the contrast between her pale skin and dark eyes. She did not look like a ghost or skeleton or spirit; she looked like a real woman.
    A very beautiful woman.
    “Who are you?” John asked again, louder now. He had to speak through teeth he had clenched against the shaking that had overtaken his body. “What are you doing out there? How can you be out there?”
    She answered: “Let me in.”
    “I can’t,” he said. “The skylight doesn’t open. Come to a door.”
    But she was gone.
    In an instant she had vanished. Not moved away, not walked, or flew or fell away; she had simply, completely, disappeared. Like a flame going out on a match. He was left lying against the stairs, his hands growing cold from the chill of the glass.
    John knew that either he was going mad or he had seen a ghost. He did not believe in ghosts. But he desperately wanted not to be mad. He rested his head against the step.
    After a while an ache ran down his arms into his shoulders. He backed down the steps from the skylight, looking around him as he did. Now the windows were clattering, but only from the wind. Nothing in the attic moved. John went down the stairs to thesecond floor, switched off the light, and shut the door. He leaned against it and looked around.
    Here was the hall leading to the big bedroom at the back of the house that he and Willy shared, to the middle bedroom, now Willy’s sewing room, to the guest bedroom at the front of the house and the