Darwinia

You cannot die, Sullivan had said. Perhaps not. He had been lucky. But he could certainly force his body beyond all tolerable limits.

He turned to face Tom, who sat with his spine against the cold rock, knees drawn. His hand groped periodically for the pipe he had lost months ago. “In the city,” Guilford said, “did you dream?”

The frontiersman’s response was glacial. “You don’t want to know.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Dreams are nothing. Dreams are shit.”

“Even so.”

“Dreamed one dream,” Tom said. “Dreamed I died in some field of mud. Dreamed I was a soldier.” He hesitated. “Dreamed I was my own ghost, if that makes any sense.”

Too much sense, Guilford thought.

Well, not sense, exactly, but it implied… dear God, what?

He shivered and turned away.

“We need food,” Tom said. “I’ll hunt tomorrow if the weather allows.” He gazed at Preston Finch, sleeping like a corpse, the skin of his face tattooed against his skull. “If I can’t hunt, we’ll have to slaughter one of the snakes.”

“We’d be cutting our own throat.”

“We can reach the Rhine with two snakes.”

For once, he didn’t sound confident.

Morning was clear but very cold. “Stoke the fire,” the frontiersman told Guilford. “Don’t let it go out. If I’m not back in three days, head north without me. Do what you can for Finch.”

Guilford watched him amble into the raw blue light of the day, his rifle slung on his shoulder, his motion cadenced, conserving his energy. The fur snakes turned their wide black eyes on him and mewed.

“I never wanted this,” Finch said.

The fire had burned low. Guilford crouched over it, feeding damp twigs into huddled flame. The moisture burned off quickly, more steam than smoke. “What’s that, Dr. Finch?”

Finch stood up, stepped cautiously out of the cave and into the frigid daylight, fragile as old paper. Guilford kept an eye on him. Last night he had been raving in his sleep.

But Finch only stood against a rock, loosened his fly, and urinated at length.

He hobbled back, still talking. “Never wanted this, Mr. Law. I wanted a sane world, d’you understand that?”

Finch was hard to understand in general, when he spoke at all. Two of his front teeth had loosened; he whistled like a kettle. Guilford nodded abstractedly as he fed the fire.

“Don’t patronize me. Listen. It made sense, Mr. Law, the Conversion of Europe, it made sense in the context of the Biblical Flood, Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah, and if it was not the act of a jealous but comprehensible God then it could only be chaos, horror.”

“Maybe it only looks that way because we’re ignorant,” Guilford said. “Maybe we’re like monkeys staring in a mirror. There’s a monkey in the mirror, but no monkey behind the mirror. Does that make it a miracle, Dr. Finch?”

“You didn’t see that man’s body give up its wounds.”

“Dr. Sullivan once said ‘miracle’ is a name we give our ignorance.”

“Only one of the names. There are others.”

“Oh?”

“Spirits. Demons.”

“Superstition,” Guilford said, though his hackles rose.

“Superstition,” Finch said tonelessly, “is what we call the miracles we don’t approve of.”

Not much paper left, nor ink. I’ll be brief (Except to say I miss you, Caroline, and have not abandoned hope of seeing you again, holding you in my arms.)

Tom Compton gone now four days, one past his limit. I should move on, but it will be difficult without his help. I still hope to see his hairy shape come ambling our of the forest.

Dr. Finch is dead, Caroline. When I woke up he was not in the shelter. I stepped out into the crisp morning to discover he had hanged himself with our rope from the branch of a sage-pine tree.

Last night’s rain had frozen to him, Caroline, and his body glistened like a perverse Christmas ornament in the sunlight. I shall cut him down when I feel stronger, make this little stone cavern his monument grave.

Poor Dr. Finch. He was tired, and sick, and I suspect he didn’t want to go on living in what he came to believe is a demon-haunted world. And maybe there is some wisdom in that.

But I shall carry on. My love to you Lily.