Darwinia

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?”

“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.”