Monster Planet(50)

Somewhere in the twelve year gap between their meetings she had lost him, he had turned a corner in her memory and disappeared from view. Now she had made another right, and another, and in the labyrinth their paths had crossed again. Her age'his condition'none of it was particularly important. They were just a father and a daughter, he was still the man who had taken her to meet the Bedouins and let her pet their camels, she was still the child who loved butter pecan ice cream and Arabic-language cartoons from Egypt on Saturday morning.

The scuttling bug-like skull crawled up the wall behind her father, into her field of view, but she just shut her eyes and went back to the place where they were family, a family again, and all the walls between them shifted and rearranged to make paths and routes for them to reach each other.

There was someone else in that maze, someone neither of them could see, and of course it was Helen. Her mother, his wife. Helen who had turned and who was maybe still locked in a bathroom in Nairobi, beating against the door, trying to get out to find something to eat. She was a wispy kind of ghost, a distant presence even in memory, however, and it was easy enough to ignore her rattling her chains somewhere in Sarah's peripheral vision.

'Sarah,' he breathed, his voice a rustling of old mildew-spotted paper. 'You weren't supposed to see me like this. Ever.' His body convulsed against hers. He was trying to push her away. She let him go, let him slip out from her hug like a piece of ratty cloth falling away. 'This is my spider hole. You weren't supposed to see me this weak.' His eyes flicked away from her for a split second, just as long as it takes the sun to hide behind a cloud. She saw where he looked and shook her head. His shame had made him look at the dead slack on the platform. The one he'd been feeding from when she came in. 'I held out for so long. I just went hungry'I thought I could do it.'

The skull moved behind him but they both ignored it. He stared at her. She could hear the word in his mind, as clearly as if she had a telepathic link to him, though she didn't. The word was 'cannibal,' and it made her shake her head again. 'He was already dead, and''

'And I didn't so much eat him as drain him,' he agreed, a little too quickly. Dekalb lifted one hand creakily and put it against his cheek as if to hide a blush. The color of his face, which was the color of a white concrete sidewalk after a summer rain, did not change. 'You can... you can just take their darkness. You can absorb their energy and they fall down. I think they want it, that peace.' He shook his head and she saw his neck was as thin as a length of pipe. 'It makes you strong again but it doesn't diminish the hunger. Nothing ever does. I'm so hungry, pumpkin, you can't know.'

He kept looking at the corpse. She wanted to tell him it didn't matter, that she didn't care. She remembered the lich in Cyprus, and how Osman had needed more than words. She needed to show him. With all her strength she grabbed the corpse's thin ankles and pulled it, shoved it, heaved it over the edge of the platform. It fell into the dark shaft below with a long-lived series of clanks and bangs and thrumming impacts. Dekalb moved his hand to cover his mouth. He had grown so weak, so thin since she'd last seen him. So used up. Death wasn't all of it, though, it wasn't just undeath that made him so pale and attenuated. She heard a narrow scuttling sound behind her and spun on her heel.

The insectile skull with the blue eyes looked up at her from the platform. It sprang into the air, rising a few inches off the floor, and fell back. It wanted her attention.

'Is that Gary?' she said, just a hunch. She couldn't imagine who else it might be. The two of them were linked so tightly in the story, at least the way Ayaan always told it'Dekalb and Gary, good and evil locked in epic struggle, and Dekalb had only won that battle by sacrificing his own life. Of course in the story Dekalb didn't come back as a lich and Gary was an enormous and deadly monster who burned away to nothing but ashes. This creature, this human skull was like nothing she'd ever seen before and it worried her. She knew Ayaan would have had a million questions. You never turned your back on the new or unusual, that was one of her rules. As much as Sarah wanted to talk to her father she knew this mystery had to be cleared up first. Sarah turned the crawling skull over with one boot and saw the segmented limbs underneath, hidden like the legs of a horseshoe crab. The legs pedaled madly and she drew her foot back squeamishly, wondering if she should kick the evil thing into the darkness of the shaft. It pistoned on its tiny jointed feet and skittered away from her. She looked back at her father.