Guilford said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah, you do. You also know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. So let’s not shovel too much shit, okay?”
“It’s been a quarter century, Tom.”
“It’s not that I don’t understand the urge. Took me ten years, personally speaking, before I broke down and said okay, the world’s fucking up and I been tapped to help fix it. That’s not an easy thing to believe. If it’s true it’s fucking frightening, and if it’s not true, then we all ought to be locked up.”
“We all?”
The frontiersman applied match to bowl. “There are hundreds of us. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
Guilford sat silently for a time in the morning sunlight. He hadn’t had much sleep. His body ached, his eyes ached. Just about twelve hours ago he had been in Fayetteville staring at the ashes of his business. He said, “I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but there’s a lot on my mind.”
“You have to stop this.” The frontiersman’s voice was solemn. “Jesus, Guilford, look at you, living like a mortal man, married, for Christ’s sake, and a kid in there, too. Not that I blame you for wanting it. I might have liked that kind of life myself. But we are what we are. You and Sullivan used to congratulate yourselves for being so fuckin’ open-minded, not like old Finch, making history out of wishes. But here you are — Guilford Law, solid citizen, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, and God help anybody who doesn’t play along.”
“Look, Tom—”
“Look yourself. Your shop burned down. You have enemies. The people inside this house are in danger. Because of you. You, Guilford. Better to face a hard truth than a dead wife and child.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come out here.”
“Well pardon my hairy ass.” He shook his head. “By the way. Lily’s in town. She’s staying at a hotel in Oro Delta. Wants to see you.”
Guilford’s heart did a double beat. “Lily?”
“Your daughter. If you remember that far back.”
Abby didn’t know what the burly backwoodsman said to her husband, but she could read the shock in Guilford’s face when he stepped back through the door.
“Abby,” he said, “I think maybe you and Nick ought to pack a few things and spend a week with your cousin in Palaepolis.”
She came into his arms, composed herself, looked up at him. “Why?”
“Just to be on the safe side. Till we sort out what’s going on.”
You live with a man this long, Abby thought, you learn to listen past the words. There wouldn’t be any debate. Guilford was afraid, deeply afraid.
The fear was contagious, but she kept it tied in a knot just under her breastbone. Nicholas mustn’t see it.
She felt like an actress in a half-remembered play, struggling to recall her lines. For years now she had anticipated — well, not this, certainly, but something, some climax or crisis invading their lives. Because Guilford was not an ordinary man.
It wasn’t only his youthful appearance, though that had become more obvious — strikingly obvious — over the last few years. Not just his past, which he seldom discussed and jealously guarded. More than that. Guilford was set apart from the ordinary run of men, and he knew it, and he didn’t like it.
She’d heard stories. Folktales. People talked about the Old Men, by which they meant the venerable frontiersmen who still wandered through town now and again. (This Tom Compton being a prize example.) Stories told on the long nights between Christmas and Easter: The Old Men knew more than they said. The Old Men kept secrets.
The Old Men weren’t entirely human.
She had never believed these things. She listened to the talk and she smiled.
But two winters ago Guilford had been out back chopping firewood, and his hand had slipped on the haft of the old axe, and the blade had gone deep into the meat of his left leg below the knee.
Abby had been at the frost-rimed window, watching. The pale sun hadn’t set. She had seen it all quite clearly. She had seen the blade cut him — he had wrenched it out of himself, the way he might have wrenched it out of a slab of wet wood — and she had seen the blood on the blade and the blood on the hard ground. It had seemed as though her heart might stop beating. Guilford dropped the axe and fell, his face suddenly white.
Abby ran to the back door, but by the time she crossed the distance to him he had managed, impossibly, to stand up again. The expression on his face was strange, subdued. He looked at her with what might have been shame.
“I’m all right,” he said. Abby was startled. But when he showed her the wound it was already closed — only a faint line of blood where the axe had gone in.
Not possible, Abby thought.
But he wouldn’t talk about it. It was just a scratch, Guilford insisted; if she had seen anything else it must have been a trick of the afternoon light.
And in the morning, when he dressed, there wasn’t even a scar where the blade had cut him.
And Abby had put it out of her mind, because Guilford wanted it that way and because she didn’t understand what she’d seen — maybe he was right, maybe it wasn’t what she had thought, though the blood on the ground had been real enough, and the blood on the axe.
But you don’t see a thing like that, Abby thought, and just forget it. The memory persisted.
It persisted as a subtle knowledge that things were not what they seemed, that Guilford was perhaps more than he had allowed her to know; and that, by implication, their life could never be a wholly normal life. Some morning will come, Abby had told herself, when a reckoning is due.
Was this the morning?
She couldn’t say. But the skin of illusion had been broken. This time the bleeding might not stop.
The two men sat on the grassy slope beyond the elm tree Guilford had planted ten years ago.
Abby packed a bag. Nick packed, too, happy at the prospect of a trip but aware of the change that had overtaken the household. Guilford saw the boy in the doorway, peering at his father and at the bearded apparition with him. Apprehension colored his eyes.
“I didn’t want this either,” Tom Compton said. “Last thing I ever wanted was to have my life fucked up by a ghost. But sooner or later you have to face facts.”
“ ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we wish to be deceived?’ ”
“Wasn’t that one of Sullivan’s sermons?”
“Yes, it was.”
“I miss that son of a bitch.”
Nick brought a baseball and glove out of the house, playing catch with himself while he waited for his mother, tossing the ball high overhead and running to intercept it. His dirty blond hair fell into his eyes. Time for a haircut, Guilford thought, if you want to play center field.
“Didn’t like the look of myself in that ratty army outfit,” the frontiersman said. “Didn’t like this ghost dogging my heels telling me things I didn’t want to hear. You know what I mean.” He looked at Guilford steadily. “All that about the Archive and so-and-so-million-years of this and that. You listen a little while and you’re about ready to kick the fuckin’ gong. But then I talked to Erasmus, you remember that old river rat, and he told me the same damn thing.”
Nick’s baseball traversed the blue sky, transited a pale moon. Abby’s silhouette moved across an upper-story window.
“A whole lot of us died in that World War, Guilford. Not everybody got a knock on the door from a ghost. They came after us because they know us. They know there’s at least a chance we’ll take up the burden, maybe save some lives. That’s all they want to do, is save lives.”
“So they say.”
“And these other assholes, this Enemy of theirs, and the fuckers they recruited, they’re genuinely dangerous. Just as hard to kill as we are, and they’ll kill men, women, children, without thinking twice.”
“You know that for a fact?”
&n
bsp; “Solid fact. I learned a few things — I haven’t had my head in the ground these last twenty years. Who do you think burned down your business?”
“I don’t know.”
“They must have figured you were there. They’re not real tidy people. Scattershot, that’s their method. Too bad if somebody else gets in the way.”
Abby came out into the sunlight to pluck laundry from a line. There was a breeze from the sea, billowing bedsheets like mainsails.
“The people we’re up against, the psions took ’em for the same reason our ghosts came after us — because they’re likely to cooperate. They’re not real moral people. They lack some necessities in the conscience department. Some of ’em are con men, some of ’em are killers.”
“Tell me what Lily’s doing in Oro Delta.”
The frontiersman refilled his pipe. Abby folded sheets into a wicker basket, casting glances toward Guilford.
Sorry, Abby, Guilford thought. This isn’t how I wanted it to go. Sorry, Nick.
“She’s here because of you, Guilford.”
“Then she knows I’m alive.”
“As of a couple years ago. She found your notes in her mother’s things.”
“Caroline’s… dead, then.”
“Afraid so. Lily’s a strong woman. She found out her father maybe didn’t die on the Finch expedition, maybe he’s even alive somewhere, and he left her this weird little story about ghosts, murderers, a ruined city… See, the thing is, she believed it. She started asking questions. Which put the bad guys onto her.”
“For asking questions?”
“For asking questions too publicly. She’s not just smart, she’s a journalist. She wanted to publish your notes, if she could authenticate them. Came to Jeffersonville digging up these old stories.”
Abby retreated to the house. Nick tired of his baseball, dropped his glove on the lawn. He scooted into the shade of the elm, looking at Tom and Guilford, curious, knowing he shouldn’t approach them. Adult business, weighty and strange.
“They tried to hurt her?”
“Tried,” Tom Compton said.
“You stopped them?”
“I got her out of the way. She recognized me from your description. I was like the Holy Grail — proof that it wasn’t all lunacy.”
“And you brought her here?”
“Fayetteville would have been her next stop anyhow. You’re the one she’s really looking for.”
Abby carried a suitcase to the car, hefted it into the trunk, glanced at Guilford, walked back to the house. The wind carried her dark hair behind her. Her skirt danced over the contours of her legs.
“I don’t like this,” Guilford said. “I don’t like her being involved.”
“Hell, Guilford, everybody’s involved. This isn’t about you and me and a few hundred guys talking to spirits: this is about whether your kids or your kids’ kids die forever, or worse, end up slaves to those fuckin’ animals out of the Other World.”
A cloud crossed the sun.
“You been out of the game for a while,” the frontiersman said, “but the game goes on. People have been killed on both sides, even if we’re harder to kill than most. Your name came up and you can’t ignore that. See, they don’t care if you decide to sit out the war, that doesn’t matter, you’re a potential danger to them and they want to cross you off the list. You can’t stay in Fayetteville.”
Guilford looked involuntarily down the long dirt road, scouting for enemies. Nothing to see. Only a dust devil stirring the dry air.
He said, “What choice do I have?”
“No choice, Guilford. That’s the hard part. Stay here, you lose it all. Settle down somewhere else, same thing happens sooner or later. So… we wait.”
“We?”
“All us old soldiers. We know each other now, directly or through our ghosts. The real battle’s not yet. The real battle’s up there some years in the future. So we keep apart from people, mostly. No fixed address, no families, anonymous jobs, maybe out in the bush, maybe in the cities, places you can keep to yourself, paying attention, you know, keeping an eye on the bad guys, but mainly… waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“The big fight. The resurrection of the demons. Waiting until we’re called, basically.”
“How long?”
“Who knows? Ten years, twenty years, thirty years…”
“That’s inhuman.”
“That’s a sober fact. Inhuman is what we are.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He came up the stairs of the Oro Delta hotel and into the dining room with Tom Compton. He was a tall man, plain-faced, not quite homely, by all appearances about her own age, and Lily promptly forgot everything she had planned to say.
Instead she found herself trying to call up a genuine memory of Guilford Law — a memory of her own, that is, not the stories she had heard from her mother or come across in her research. She could summon only a few shadows. A shape at herbed side. The Oz books, the way he used to pronounce “Dorothy” in round, slow syllables. Do-ro-thy.
Clearly he remembered her. He stood at her table, the frontiersman beside him, wearing an expression that combined awe and doubt and — unless she was imagining this — the strictures of an ancient regret. Her heart hammered. She said, idiotically, “Ah, you must be Guilford Law.”
He croaked, “You’re Lily.”
“You two talk,” Tom said. “I need a drink.”
“Watch the door for us,” Lily said.
It didn’t go smoothly, not at first. He seemed to want to know everything and to explain everything: asking questions, interrupting her answers, interrupting himself, beginning reminiscences that trailed into silence. He fumbled a cup of coffee onto the floor, cursed, then blushed and apologized for his language.
She said, “I’m not fragile. And I’m not five. I think I know what you’re going through. This isn’t easy for me, either, but can we start fresh? Two adults?”
“Two adults. Sure thing. It’s just that—”
“What?”
He drew himself up. “I’m just so pleased to see you, Lil.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
This is hard, Lily thought, because I know what he is. He sits there like an ordinary man, fiddling with his cuffs, drumming a finger on the table. But he was no more an ordinary man than Tom Compton was: they had been touched by something so immense it beggared the imagination.
Her half-human father.
She sketched out her life for him. She wondered if he would approve of her work — odd jobs at a Sydney paper, research, some magazine articles, her own byline. She was a thirty-year-old unmarried career girl, not a flattering description. It suggested even in Lily’s mind some hollow-boned spinster, probably with bad makeup and pet cats. Was that what Guilford saw, sitting across the table from him?
He seemed more concerned with her safety. “I’m sorry you had to stumble into this, Lil.”
“I’m not sorry I did. Yes, it’s frightening. But it’s also the answer to a lot of questions. Long before I understood any of this I was fascinated by Darwinia, by the idea of Darwinia, even as a child. I audited some classes at the University — geology, genesis theory, what they call ‘implicit historiography,’ the Darwinian fossil record and such. There’s so much to know about the continent, but always a mystery at the center of it. And nobody has as much as a ghost of an answer, unless you count the theologians. When I came across your notes — and met Tom, later on — well, it meant there was an answer, even if it’s a strange one, even if it’s hard to accept.”
“Maybe you were better off not knowing.”
“Ignorance is not bliss.”
“I’m afraid for your life, Lil.”
“I’m afraid for everybody’s life. I can’t let that stop me.”
He smiled. Lily added, “I’m not joking.”
“No, of course not. It’s just that for a second there you reminded me of someone.”
“O
h? Who?”
“My father. Your grandfather.”
She hesitated. “I’d like to hear about him.”
“I’d like to tell you.”
What he saw in her, truthfully, was a great deal of her mother. Save for her lighter coloring she might have been Caroline — she seemed as willful as Caroline, certainly, but without the hard core of anxiety and doubt. Caroline had always been inclined to turn away from the world. Lily wanted to tackle it head-on.
Tom suggested the hotel dining room was too public for Guilford’s good, especially with the evening crowd heading in. But there was a pebbled beach downhill from the hotel and north of the docks, and Guilford walked there with Lily.
The evening sun made patchwork shadows among the rocks. Ribbons of seaweed clung to a fractured wooden piling. A bright blue salt worm twined its way in pursuit of the ebbing tide.
Lily plucked a wild sandberry from the scrub bushes above the tide line. “The bay is beautiful,” she said.
“The bay’s a mess, Lil. Everything washes up here. Pine tar, sewage, engine oil, diesel fuel. We take Nicholas swimming at the beaches up north of Fayetteville where the water’s still clean.”
“Tom told me about Nicholas. I’d like to meet him sometime.”
“I’d like you to meet him. I just don’t know if it’s wise. If Tom’s right, you’ve put yourself in a dangerous position. So I have to ask, Lil. Why are you here?”
“Maybe I wanted to see you.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not all.”
“No. That’s not all.”
They sat together on a cracked concrete seawall.
“You were right, you know. My mother thought you were crazy — or she was shocked that you were still alive, which made her, I guess, an adulteress or something like that. She didn’t like to talk about you, even after he left.”
“This Colin Watson, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Was he good to you?”
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