The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [46]
“I’m not going to give up,” Sara said. “If I leave my window open long enough, one’s bound to pick up the scent eventually, even if the perfume has to drift as far as the outskirts of Blackburn. Sometimes, I wish my parents hadn’t decided that a rural environment was best for child-rearing.”
“You’ll have to visit me here before the summer’s over,” Gennifer said. “By August the twelfth we’ll both by fourteen, and it’s high time we met in the flesh. Isn’t it too late now, though? I mean, evening’s when people want their living jewelry about their person. You might do better to open the window tomorrow morning, if it weren’t for school. Maybe you’d do better to wait for the weekend, or the holiday—we’ll be out of school for a whole month after the end of next week.”
Sara didn’t want to wait for the weekend, although she could see the logic in what Gennifer had said about the evening not being the best time to expect other people’s finest feathered frippery to be flying free. She had said that she wasn’t going to give up, and she had meant it. She decided that instead of closing the window when she went to bed she would leave it open all night. The most likely time of all for costume jewelry to be left to its own devices, she figured, was when its owners had gone to sleep. Unlike roses, hummingbirds couldn’t just flatten themselves out; they would presumably have to be detached. How far might they fly when they were? They must have some sort of programming to restrict their range, but how far would they be allowed to roam? On the other hand, anyone who had a flock of hummingbirds had make her own provision for their nourishment, If so, there must be more than one garden in Blackburn where colibri-scented roses were blooming in their hundreds—in which case, far-flying birds might find more abundant supplies of nectar much closer to home than her bedroom....
A further flaw in her plan, Sara realized soon enough, was that if she were actually going to witness any crucial moment that did arrive, she would have to stay awake herself—which might not be easy. She had to remind herself that she didn’t have to stay awake all night, but only long enough for the first questing hummingbird to appear. Nor did she have to stay fully awake, so long as she dozed lightly enough to become alert at the first flutter of tiny wings.
It was with this thought uppermost in her mind that she finally laid her head on her pillow—having refrained from dimming her nightlight, on the grounds that it would be no use hearing the flutter of tiny wings if she couldn’t see them beating.
CHAPTER XIII
It was the repeated momentary eclipse of the nightlight that eventually brought Sara out of a light doze with a sudden start. She hadn’t heard wings because the flyers that were zooming around her room weren’t making any noise.
As she emerged from sleep Sara’s heart leapt with anticipatory joy—but it only took two fleeting moments for her delight to turn to confusion, and then to disappointment.
The flyers weren’t birds at all. They weren’t even solid. They were like dark clouds seen in a speeded-up videotape, moving with impossible rapidity—except that real clouds were chaotic, never holding the merest semblance of shape for more than a moment. These clouds were very precisely shaped, sculpted into the image of living beings by some mysterious internal force.
They were, she realized, bats—not real bats, but shadowbats. They were astral tattoos.
She had seen astral tattoos on people’s costumes at least a hundred times by now. From the relative safety of the virtual schoolyard, she had clicked on Davy Bennett’s tag in order to watch his ghostly spiders quit their spectral webs to flow across the floor of his bedroom-which was, it appeared, the only place save for the contours of his body where they were currently allowed to flow. Flowing across flat surfaces was what all shadows did, though, and the astral tattoos she’d seen—including Davy’s spiders—hadn’t seemed particularly remarkable even in the absence of real objects