Dead of Light (10 page)

He skipped off out, came back more cautiously with six mugs clutched in his two small hands. I emptied a mound of wet teabags out of our giant brown teapot, put in another handful from the box; Carol rinsed the mugs under the tap, and fetched milk from the fridge.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, I got back to working out the rice. Carol watched, asked, “What's that for?”

“Tea,” I said. “You lot get started, you're not going home to eat. I mean, are you?”

“Well, no. We don't get many chances, all of us together like this; shame to waste them when they come. But isn't it a bit early?” Checking her watch with one eyebrow already raised to underline what she knew she'd see, big hand on the six and little hand just past the four, not even Nicky's tea-time yet.

“Yeah, but I'm driving tonight. Have to be there at six. It's silly for both of us to cook, and Jacko won't want to stop anyway; so I'll leave him a mound of rice and other stuff all ready, and when you're hungry he can just chuck it in the wok and that's that.”

“Time and motion,” she said, nodding. “Neat.”

“Yeah.”

“So what are you driving? Van, taxi? Choo-choo train?”

That brought me up short, briefly: just a quick reminder that not everyone I counted as a friend was familiar with the intimate details of my life. I only knew Carol through Jacko, through casual encounters like this; and I really only knew Jacko through his music. We shared a flat amiably enough, but we didn't talk much. I tended to forget, family history doesn't pass itself around by osmosis, even though it seems that way sometimes. People have to be interested enough to gossip.

I shook my head. “Dangerous doctors.”

“I'm sorry?”

“The Doctors' Deputising Service. DDS. Dangerous Doctors for short,” only the joke was too tired, sometimes too accurate even to smile at now. “Basically, if GPs are too lazy to do their own night calls, they pay the service to provide a locum. The service pays the company I work for to provide a car, a radio, and a driver; and that's me. I do a couple of shifts a week, sometimes a double shift at weekends.”

Carol nodded. She lived a student life, even though she was ten years past being a student; she was used to seeing her friends take any short-term, part-time work they could to eke out an uncertain income. “What's the money like?”

“Not brilliant.” Essential, though. It was more or less all I had now. No State benefits for students, and no grant for Benedict Macallan. Uncle James had seen to that, with my father nodding support somewhere in the background. I'd had life easy up to then, I'd been told flatly; if I wanted to go through with this ridiculous rebellion thing, then I could have it the other way. No middle course, ever, with Uncle James. If I wasn't with them then I was utterly and irrevocably against them, and he'd see that I suffered for it.

At the time, that had suited me perfectly. I'd wanted to make a martyr of myself. I had too much guilt and muddle on my back; poverty was a relief, an atonement almost.

Now, it was just a bore. I'd taken all the loans I was entitled to, and as much more as I could screw from my bank manager before Uncle James got to him too; but some weeks I could barely feed myself, and the rent was a major crisis every month.

o0o

Garlic, onion, courgette and tomato, and a little red pepper for a treat: fry 'em all up in the wok, add the rice, break an egg in and there you go. Eat with chopsticks and chilli sauce, to make it taste of something.

Vegetarian by necessity, sometimes I longed for meat. I wanted to set up self-help groups for people with the same desperate cravings: ‘Hullo, my name's Ben, I'm a carnivore'. Like any self-confessed addict, I didn't dare allow myself the slightest taste of what I so desired; like many, I found in symbolism what bare strength I needed. It wasn't just the cost that kept me a meat-free zone. Walking away from my family, I'd walked away too from the habits and traditions that bound us together, at least as far as I was able; and diet was one of the easiest to change. All my life I'd lived with bacon for breakfast and a roast at dinner, plenty of cold meat in the fridge for sandwiches between, and the constant impression that a meal wasn't a meal unless some animal had died to provide it. It had been no hardship at first, to reject that along with other, more significant family values.

Now, though — ah, now I hungered for the taste of blood in my mouth sometimes, and wouldn't take it even when it was offered. Perverse or essential, it was one of the rules I'd lived by ever since I'd started writing my own rule-book, and not subject to change, even if I'd had the means to change it.

Which at the moment I most emphatically did not; and I'd better hurry, if I wanted to cling on to the most basic means to live. They had a waiting-list of willing drivers for Medicall, despite the antisocial hours, so they could afford to be unpleasant if you turned up late.

o0o

A run for the bus at one end, a run from the stop at the other: I made it with three minutes to spare, before my six o'clock shift. Cutting it so fine brought its own punishments. No choice of cars, for a start. We drove white Fiestas with no markings, not to draw attention to the highly-marketable drugs we were carrying around in the boot; unfortunately, a fair few policemen also drove anonymous white Fiestas with whip aerials, just like ours. The local lads used to hot around the area in their stolen Sierras looking for cops to ram, and once a month or so they'd ram one of us by mistake. It didn't do the cars too much good. They got serviced, of course, they got patched up as well as the garage could manage, but there were always one or two rogues in the pool, with erratic problems no one had sorted out yet.

There were rogue doctors too, inevitably: that ‘dangerous' tag wasn't too off-target, in some cases. Others were terrific, working Medicall shifts on top of a day-job for the very best of reasons, but drivers couldn't pick and choose. Turn up good and early and you might strike lucky, as I did on good days, having a favourite doctor ask for me specially. Turn up in the very nick of time, like tonight, and luck just wasn't a feature.

I was last in, and there was just the one doctor waiting for me, in a bad mood already with a hefty list of calls to make down the dodgy end of town. I'd driven this guy before, and spending six hours cooped up with him in the closest of quarters was some considerable distance from my definition of a good time. I sighed inwardly, as I collected keys from the desk controller. It was going to be a long night.

His name was Devereux,
Doctor
Devereux to me and my kind, we common drivers; and if we existed on a lower social level than his own good self, then his patients for the night were so far beneath him he could barely be bothered to feel contempt for them.

“Scum of the earth,” he said, as we headed downhill towards the first of the night's calls. “You can chart it, demographically. The closer you come to the river, the more inbred they are. And the more stupid, the more ugly, the more vicious...”

I nodded vaguely, concentrated on driving. I'd heard it all before. And besides, I had my own experience of inbreeding, and of stupidity and ugliness and viciousness. There wasn't much he could tell me about it, but neither was I on any safe ground to start an argument.

o0o

We'd been four hours on the road, we'd worked our way through that first list we'd started out with — the good doctor spending an average of three minutes and fifty-five seconds in each house, I was passing the time by counting — and we'd had as many calls again come in on the radio. Normally I brought sandwiches and a can of coke to tide me over, but I'd been too much rushed tonight; and while some doctors were amenable to refreshment breaks — one even bullying me back to his house a couple of times for a chicken curry if we were on top of the work — I wasn't going to broach the subject with Devereux.

Instead, I decided that the car was going to break down. Not badly, just enough that I'd need to pull into a garage and fiddle under the bonnet, and buy myself a pint of milk and a stottie while I fiddled.

Not yet, though. I'd wait a little longer, and hope that things quieted down a bit.

On the way from one call to the next, trying to find one small cul-de-sac in a dead-end estate that was all dirty concrete and no street-lights, every other window boarded up and not a street-name to be seen, I heard something that was neither the radio nor Devereux's endless, grumbling voice.

Instantly, automatically, I had the car stopped and my door open, to hear better.

“What?” Devereux demanded. “What is it, why've you stopped? This isn't what we're looking for...”

No more it was; but suddenly here it came again, somewhere close, a man's voice screaming in high agony.

That time Devereux heard it too, and was still for a moment; then, “Not our responsibility,” he said, as I should have expected. “Leave it alone, for God's sake, we're not the police.”

Ignoring him, I got out of the car — and then I could see, as well as hear. Then I knew. Not my responsibility, no, I'd disinvested; but not well enough, seemingly. At any rate, there was no question of my leaving it alone.

Through an archway under a run of flats, through a short square tunnel came that wailing scream again, and a light that failed as the scream failed: a cold, pale, flickering light, the nightfire that marked all my family but me.

Somewhere through that archway there was a Macallan in desperate trouble, his strength no succour now; and me, I was already moving.

Through the tunnel at a run, heedless and stupid, and what was that Devereux had been saying about inbreeding? ‘Vicious' I might have argued with, back then at least, but the rest was plain to be seen.

Through the tunnel and into a mugger's paradise, one of those Sixties housing experiments that went so dreadfully wrong. It was an enclosed court, with blocks of flats three or four storeys high and no grass, only paving underfoot. Just the one way in and out for cars, but several more of those tunnel passageways; and balconies and stair-wells all around, any route you fancied to go under or over or through, and hardly a light to see it by except for the car burning like a torch, like a lantern, like a sign.

No noise, no heat. Nightfire's no true flame, unless it's the opposite of that: unless it's the truest expression of flame and mortal fire is only a clumsy imitation.

Nightfire doesn't feed on what it burns. Destruction isn't incidental. Where it touches, damage is cold and slow; the light it throws is blue and thin and telling. Seen once, there's no mistaking it.

Here was a car burning that way, the metal of it writhing as I watched; and someone of my kin had set it to burn there. That was a given, didn't need debating.

No one in sight, though, no one at all. There should at least have been faces lining the balconies, peering down. Not all those flats were empty. A fire, and a man's screams: they should have been irresistible.

But maybe these riverine families weren't so stupid after all, however inbred they might be. I guessed that the people who lived around here would know nightfire as well as I did and were being as wise as they knew how, keeping behind closed doors and shuttered blinds. If a Macallan was screaming, they truly didn't want to know.

That's what it was, no question: the man who set that fire to burn was the same man who'd been tearing the night apart with his howls. This was Jacko's universal rhythm in action, and inarguable. The light had flared with the scream, searingly bright, striking out through that passageway to find me; and now in the scream's silence it flickered and guttered, bright enough in here where no light was but no beacon now.

I might have no fire of my own but at least I wasn't vulnerable here, my blood was worth that much to me. I could walk up to the flaming car, and did; I could and did walk around it, looking to see inside, seeing nothing but fire and distortion; being that close I could and did stumble over the body lying dark on dark paving, lying where no one would see him because they'd all be looking into the light.

It was only logic now, told me that this was a Macallan. All his skin was moving.

o0o

I knelt beside him when kneeling was the last thing I wanted to do, or close to the last. Kissing him would have been bottom, maybe, but any form of getting closer was bad. Kneeling was quite bad enough. It took me near enough to see and to smell what was happening to him, without doing what it was meant for. My eyes searched him desperately, clothes and skin, looking for any giveaway, any clue as to who this was; but seemingly I didn't know my family well enough. Take their faces away, and I couldn't tell one cousin from another.

This one, this cousin wasn't dead yet, and neither was his body dead, though I thought perhaps the two of them were independent now. I thought his body might go on containing life for a while, only that it wouldn't be his own. I thought giant maggots infested his flesh, because I could see them writhing.

Even in that cold light he looked hot, and when I touched him his skin was baking dry, baking from the inside out and scurvy with salt, where all his moisture was leaving him. Touching him, I felt something buck and swell beneath my fingers, hardening like an egg in a hurry as it grew, as I saw it distend on his arm.

I snatched my hand away, too late ever to forget how that had felt.

Watching, surely doing no more than wait for an inevitable death in the family, it never occurred to me to call for the doctor somewhere in the night behind me. Even if I'd liked the man, if I'd wanted to let him anywhere near any cousin of mine, there was no work for him here. This was talent at work, and way beyond any talent there might be in the medical profession. We might inhabit the same world, but Jacko would say that even the molecules in our bodies marched to a different beat.