Darwinia

“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 ru

“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?”

“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.”