But Ruth was not ready, not old enough, only eleven. She would have to wait for consummation. And Adamus had lost interest in her, vanished back into his dark tower to play the piano alone. And that was when Ruth, disappointed, turned on them with her needles.

The Scarabae were vampires. Or they thought they were. She killed them the proper way. And when she saw Adamus on the rope, she burned the house.

Ruth was a demon. Rachaela had always known. The black and white ugly beauty. The powers of silence.

Probably Rachaela was only too glad to see Ruth disappear into the darkness beyond the fire.

When the fire finished, there was only the darkness. And the Scarabae, all that were left of them, Eric, Sasha, Miranda and Miriam, Michael and Cheta, they stood there in it.

The Scarabae never went out in the daylight. Only Michael and Cheta, that was, muffled up and masked in sunglasses.

And darkness was on the land like mourning, but after that the sun would rise. What then?

The sun rose.

They gazed up into the lightening sky, not fearfully but with a bitter sadness. They had seen it all before, through their two hundred or three hundred years of life. Violence and destitution. Exile. The tyranny of the sun.

She heard Miranda say firmly, "We must go to the village."

Then Michael came over to Rachaela, and his black dusty eyes seemed diluted by the light.

"Miss Rachaela. We must go to the village."

She rose, wearily. There were tiny burns all over her, she could have screamed as if viciously nipped by a hundred miniature beasts.

"All right. How will they—"

But he had turned away.

Like survivors of a plane crash in the desert, they moved out over the heath.

They went the habitual way. The way Ruth had gone?

Skirting the stone like a lightning, going through the gorse and flowers, the dragon places, inland. Stands of pine. Gulls wheeling overhead. Birds loud in thickets, flying off at their approach.

It seemed to take hours before they reached the road. The Scarabae moved out onto it, as onto some desert trail. Rachaela recalled the cars which employed the road, now, but there were no cars.

On the road, she began to see them better.

They moved gaunt and upright. Their faces had been blackened and through the grime, like their bodies through the burned clothes, gaped pale old spaces of flesh. None of them seemed to have received actual burns. Yet material and even hair was singed away. They looked impossible, comic, and this was somehow dreadful. Rachaela felt vaguely frightened. She did not really know why. Was she the child and they the adults, and at their faltering she too lost her grip? That was absurd. She had been away from them twelve years. With Ruth.