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.”
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.