She looked at the conch again, and the sun struck mother-of-pearl from its iridescent rim. ‘It isn’t pretty?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s ugly. Do you see that tiny hole toward the pointed end?’
She nodded.
‘That’s what killed it. Another snail, smaller but deadly
– deadly to it – bored into it and sucked out its life. A vampire, yes. There are millions of us.’ And she saw him give a shudder.
She put the shell aside. That’s a horrid story, Harry!’
‘It’s also a true one.’
‘How can you know that?’
His voice was harsher now. ‘Because I’m the Necroscope! Because dead things talk to me. All dead things. And if they haven’t the mind for it, then they . . . convey to me. And your “pretty” bloody shell? It conveys the slow grind of its killer eating into its whorl, the penetration of its probe, and the dully burning seep of its fluids being drained off. Pretty? It’s a corpse, Penny, a cadaver!’
He stood up and scuffed listlessly at the sand, and she said, ‘Has it always been like that? For you, I mean?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘But it is now. My vampire is growing. As he grows sharper, so he hones my talents. There was a time when I could only talk to dead people; or rather to creatures I could understand. Dogs go on after death just like we do, did you know that? But now – ‘ Again his shrug. ‘If they were alive once but now are dead, I can feel them. And I feel more and more of them all the time.’ He kicked at the sand again. ‘You see this beach? The very sand sighs and whispers and moans. A million billion corpses broken up by time and the tides. All of that life, wasted, and none of it ready or willing to lie quiet and still. And every dead thing wanting to know, “Why did I die? Why did I die?”‘
‘But it has to be that way,’ she gasped, frightened by his tone. ‘It always has been. Without death, what would be the point of life? If we had forever, we wouldn’t strive to do anything – because everything would be possible!’
‘In this world – ‘ he took her shoulders, ‘ – there’s life and there’s death. But I know another world where there’s a state between the two . . .’ And as it grew dark he told her all about Starside.
When he was done she shivered to the inevitability of it and asked, ‘When shall we go there?’
‘Soon,’ he told her.
‘We can’t stay here? I know that place is bound to frighten me.’
‘Do my eyes frighten you?’ They were like small lamps in his face.
She smiled. ‘No, because I know they’re your eyes.’
‘But they frighten others.’
‘Because they don’t know you.’
‘On Starside I’ll build an aerie,’ Harry told her, ‘where your eyes will be as red as mine.’
‘Will they?’ She seemed almost eager.
‘Oh, yes!’ Harry told her. And to himself: You may be sure of it, you poor darling child. For even here and now, as early and unanticipated as this, he could detect the faintest scarlet flush in them . . .
While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren’t much, just something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny’s imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.
For it was inevitable – as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they’d be safe here for … oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he’d been wrong. They were espers.
The Branch,’ he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Möbius equations in his mind.
‘What, even here?’ she mumbled, as he shifted her across the continent to a clothing store in Sydney.
‘Even here . . . there . . . yes,’ he said. ‘Indeed, anywhere. Their locators will find me no matter where I go; they’ll alert their contacts worldwide; espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can’t fight a whole world. And even if I could, I don’t want to. Because to fight is to surrender – to the thing inside me. And I’d prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we’ll lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.’