Kill the Dead(21)

Bats fizzled over the field and dissolved in the darkness. The sky was overcast, and rain fell. The struck tree glowed strangely in the wet with a hard vitreous sheen.

After an hour, Silky came walking softly through the rain toward him.

She was strong. She looked very near mortal this time. Before, she had been mostly transparent. He felt the weird drawing, the drag of energy going out of himself to her. He had wanted her to be there, and the sense that he fed her existence was almost pleasant. But then again, somewhere inside himself, he shied from this pleasure, was revolted by it. When she stood close to him and put her hand on his arm, he grew cold, colder than he had ever been in his life. He could not actually feel any pressure of her fingers.

There was no mark on her of the lightning. There rarely ever was, as he would come to know, evidence of the positive wounds or bodily spasms of death upon a living ghost. Its whole revenance was a masquerade of life; it tended to be amnesiac about the instant of annihilation, even in the degree of camouflage.

They sat together on a flat-topped stone. They talked. Presently he took her hand, and this time her hand felt real.

She had been young and innocent. Perhaps it was her na?veté that made her do what next she did, a frank and honest desire that they should be together as equals. Some would cheat and trick from jealousy and vengeance, out of hatred for those whose lives were genuine, some never slew directly or intentionally, warming themselves at lives as if at fires. Silky had been honourable. What remained of her could not have altered, so cruelly, into a fiend.

She was thirteen. A lovely, generous, desperate child. No, it was her na?veté, her longing not to lose him, that had made her seek his death.

She said that they should go into the school. There was a side door which each knew how to open. The rain was falling still, and she said they must take shelter. He asked her, almost with embarrassment, if the rain could inconvenience her now. She smiled radiantly at him.

“No. See, my hair’s quite dry, and my dress. But you’re wet through.”

He let her take him to the door, and he opened it Not because he cared about the rain, but because she had seemed to want them to go inside.

They wandered about the benches and the chests. The books were piled untidily and the slates more so. A mouse pranced over the tiles. It had been eating the large candle which the tutor used to tell the time. The atmosphere was very dark, yet somehow Parl could see everything well. Even when the girl hurried up the narrow stair to the attic, he was able to follow her with ease.

The floor of the attic, which rested on the beams of the hall below, was mainly rotten from the leaking roof where the rain even now entered, and where the sprays of winter ice would poke through to drip slowly on the pupils’ heads fifty feet below. The joists had long since cracked. The walls bulged. The pupils were forbidden to enter the attic.

Silky ran daintily over the unsafe floor. Old parchment and cobwebs lay about. Where Silky’s feet passed over them they left no imprint.

At his first step after her, a plank groaned. At the second, he heard the wood crack quietly. In that instant, he was aware of how she invited him and where, and it did not matter. There was a savage sweetness in her face, pain that she would cause him pain, happiness, blind and foolish, that called for him to come to her. If she saw anything, it was their life together–their unlife–children and lovers, wedded forever in the shadows.

Then his foot went through the rotten boards as, years later, most of his body would go through the rotted struts of a bridge.

The escaping manoeuvre was complex and almost hopeless, but somehow he achieved it, flinging himself away from the floor, and from her. He landed in the doorway in a shower of splinters. His head rang, and he heard her through the ringing, murmuring to him, coaxing him to return.

When he could look at her again, she was still smiling. She held out her hands, mutely encouraging him. A moment of discomfort, and all would be well. A moment, only a moment.

He staggered down the stair, and back into the school room. He was not certain what he meant to do, but, as if it had been planned, his confused gaze settled instantly on the tall wax time candle, and the flint and tinder that lay beside it.

He did not know–how could he?–that the ultimate act must be performed in their sight. Yet his instinct knew, that seventh sense which would make him what he was to become, that seventh sense which all that frightful day had been forming inside him, brain and soul.

When she drifted down the stair, he already had the candle alight. She glanced at it wonderingly, then took up a slate and a scrap of chalk. He was not amazed that she could hold them in her unreal hands, the shock came when she showed him what she had written. Not that he could read it He would have needed a reflective surface for that. For, in the way of her kind, she had written unhesitatingly from right to left, back to front, in mirror writing. If he had needed any further sign, she had supplied it.