often with Silky that now he seemed to conjure the girl for the old woman. Then the grandmother went to a chest and brought out something mysteriously. Drawing near to him, she showed him a cloth packet and opened it to reveal a clot of shining threads.
“All I’ve got left of her,” she said.
She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.
The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.
Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.
He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.
When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.
As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.
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 naïveté 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 naïveté, 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
“All I’ve got left of her,” she said.
She had trimmed Silky’s silken hair the very morning before she died. The lightning had left nothing much, stripping flesh and sweetness, as it had stripped the tree. But these fringes of hair the grandmother had, by sheer luck, retained. Now, with a supreme effort of sacrifice, she offered the packet to Parl.
The instant he saw the hair, he felt very sick. Truths that he would learn and reason for himself in later years, came to him now merely instinctively. He felt but did not know what the shorn hair represented, and what its power must be. He had not guessed yet what that power signified.
Even so, instinct ordered him. Though he almost cringed with revulsion, he took the packet of hair.
He sat, with the packet lying by him, most of the day, in Silky’s grandmother’s house. All that time they said hardly anything to each other. She did not think to ask him if he should be anywhere else. She had forgotten real life. And Parl, though he understood the world went on, the landowner and his fields and his anger, they were only dimly perceived, dimly remembered, events outside the bubble which enclosed him and the blasted apple tree and the dead girl and her shorn hair.
When the day began to drain away, he rose and politely said good-bye to the old woman.
As he was going to the field, he met three of his former fellow students from the school. They clustered around him, eager to commiserate, or, as it seemed to him then, to enjoy his pain. Finally, one said, “So-and-so told me the priests went to bless the ground where she was killed. So-and-so said she might not lie quiet.” One of the others cuffed him, growing aware of sheer bad taste at last. They went away.
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 naïveté 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 naïveté, 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
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