Darwinia

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.”