Read Online A Song of Shadows by John Connolly - Free Book Online Page B

family.
    ‘Did something bad happen?’ Amanda asked.
    ‘Yes, honey,’ said her mother. ‘Something real bad.’

10
    A manda Winter often dreamed: strange, fevered visions, filled with confusion and dislocation. It was why the dream of the girl on the sand hadn’t disturbed her more, for she’d had worse. Had she been older, she might have understood it as a function of the headaches and muscle pains that she experienced. Sometimes her mother would give her half a sleeping pill to help her drift off, especially if her condition had been particularly bad for a couple of nights.
    Her illness had a name – Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or more commonly myalgic encephalomyelitis, ME – but one of the pupils in her old school, a girl named Laurie Bryden, had claimed that ME wasn’t really an illness at all. She’d heard her father say so. Her father said it was just something that lazy people used as an excuse not to get off their asses and work or, in the case of someone like Amanda, as a means of getting away with low grades because she was really kind of dumb. It had taken all of Amanda’s willpower not to sock Laurie Bryden in the jaw and knock her flat on her back, but what good would have come of it anyway?
    Amanda hated being sick. She hated being tired. She hated waking up and wondering if today was going to be a good day or a bad day. On good days, she would sometimes try to do too much, with the result that the bad days to follow were so much worse. She hated the low-level headache that always seemed to throb in her skull, and how long it took her to recover from colds and infections. She hated the night sweats and the weird pains and the tenderness in her armpits. She hated the way some perfumes brought on her illness, and not being able to swim in heated pools because the chlorine made her head woozy. She hated knowing the answer to a question but not being able to find it in the muddle of her brain. She hated that, even among her friends, she was an outsider, because her stupid sickness meant that she kept on missing stuff: parties, movies, even just the day-to-day business of interacting at school. She wanted to be normal. She hadn’t chosen to be this way. She just was.
    The doctors said her condition might last a couple of years, and then gradually start to disappear, but she had already endured it for two years and could see no sign of any improvement. Sometimes she got so depressed that she’d just lock herself in her room and cry, but that made her feel even more pathetic.
    The girl with the blond hair returned to her in a dream that night, except Amanda wasn’t sure that she was dreaming. The pains in her limbs felt too real, as did the thumping headache and the discomfort in her right ear where she had sweated into the pillow and somehow irritated her skin. She could hear the sea and smell its salt, yet all of it was kept at arm’s length, for she was running a temperature, and so dream and reality were not so easily discernible from each other.
    But through that night landscape walked the girl, and although Amanda could still not quite see her face, she understood the sign that the girl was making, for she could spot the index finger of her right hand pressed against her lips. It was the universally understood gesture for silence. Slowly, Amanda turned her head on the pillow. She tried to make it look, as much as possible, as though she were simply shifting in her sleep. She kept her eyes almost – but not entirely – closed.
    A wooden staircase led up the back of the house to a door at the rear of Amanda’s room. The view from the doorway wasn’t as good as the one from her bedroom window because it faced away from the sea. Nevertheless, Amanda sometimes liked to put on her coat and sit there with a book, and she’d watched one good sunset from it. Her mother insisted that she keep the door locked at all times, not that Amanda needed to be told: even somewhere as apparently safe and peaceful