Dust and Decay (Benny Imura 2)

“Not to you or me, no. Not to the people in town. But to a lot of the people out here—people like Charlie and his lot—Tom’s the boogeyman.”

“That’s stupid. They’re the villains.”

“No doubt.” He nodded to the flowers. “Those petals won’t jump into the bowl by themselves.”

Lilah stared at the purple petals for a moment, then picked up the tweezers and began pulling them off. She tore a few before she got the knack. The Greenman watched, nodded, and picked up another walnut. “Who are you?” she asked. “I mean really.”

“Most of the time I’m nobody,” said the Greenman. “When you live alone, you don’t need a name. I don’t need to tell you that.” She said nothing, but she gave a tiny nod. “I used to be Arthur Mensch—Ranger Artie to the tourists in Yosemite. That was before First Night.”

“When the world changed and everything went bad,” she said.

“A lot of folks see it that way,” said the Greenman, “but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don’t know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn’t change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen. Even in Yosemite the air was never this fresh.”

“The dead—,” she began.

“Are part of nature,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because they exist.”

She thought about that. “You don’t think they’re evil?”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “People are evil.”

“Some are,” he admitted. He set the walnut shells aside and began shaving the walnut meat with the cheese grater. “People are all sorts of things. Some people are evil and good at the same time. At least a

ccording to their own view of the world.”

“How can people be good and bad?”

His dark eyes sought hers. “In the same way that people can be very brave and very, very afraid. They can be heroes and cowards from one breath to the next. And heroes again.”

Her eyes slid away. “I did something bad,” she said in a tiny voice. “I ran away.”

“I know.” It was acceptance of information but in no way a judgment.

“I—I haven’t been afraid of …” Lilah swallowed. “I haven’t been afraid of the dead for years. Not since I was little. They just … are. Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Last night, though … there were so many.”

“Was that it? Was it just that there were a lot of them? From what Tom told me, you used to play in the Hungry Forest. What was different about last night?”

The cat came out of the woods, jumped up on the table, and settled down with its legs tucked under its fur. Lilah began plucking more petals. “I left Benny and Nix behind at the way station. I just … ran.”

“Were you running from the dead? Because there were so many?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said gently. “You do.”

Lilah looked at the purple flower petal caught between the iron jaws of the tweezers. “This stuff gives courage?”

“Not really.” The Greenman smiled. “It helps you find where you left the courage you had. Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace.”