Dead of Light (3 page)

“Benedict. Welcome,” each syllable hard and detached, pebbles dropped individually into silence, hard to imagine anything less welcoming. Hard to hear that from my uncle's fleshy lips, and to see how quickly he pulled his hand back from mine.

Harder still not to do the same thing, in response or in revenge. Harder to be civilised, to say what was right and due and proper, what I owed both to the living and the dead despite all divorces.

“Uncle James. I can't, I can't believe that Marty's gone. He was such a friend to me when we were younger, it'll never be the same world without him...”

You ought to be glad of that
, his eyes accused me,
the things you've said of the family, of men like Marty and me.
And I agreed with him, or some part of me agreed; but that was all he was seeing, my rejection and my walking out. Where I stood there was a wider picture, and it had a great gaping hole torn in it, edges fraying in a bad wind.

“You'll want to view the body,” he said, and now I couldn't agree with him at all, no part of me wanted to view the body. But, “You're the last,” he said, “I'll take you up myself.” And he was already turning towards the stairs, and spineless Benedict Macallan asserted himself exactly as much as he usually did, and followed quietly in his uncle's wide wake.

There would be a wake, I realised suddenly, a wake for Marty from now until the dawn. I hadn't been invited, though, not for that. This was a blood meeting upcoming and I was blood, I had a duty to attend; but the mourning party after would be for true mourners only, not for the likes of me.

Not that there were any others like me. I was renegade, I was outcast, I was alone.

By my own choice, and apparently forever; and
oh Laura, Laura, not fair to send me into this alone, where's your compassion?

o0o

Up the stairs to the first landing, and I turned automatically to the next flight, thinking of Marty's old room in the attic, thinking they would have put him there. But Uncle James was going the other way, along the corridor where I almost was a stranger, where children had never been welcomed when I had the run of this house, when I was a child. That made it easier, a little. I didn't want to see Marty still and dead in the room where I'd seen him so often death's opposite, so full of life, laughing or wrestling or hustling me out with hard hands and hard words and a girl mysteriously half-seen in the shadows behind him, perfume in the air.

And if they'd changed the room, or he had — if there were no posters on the walls now, no sports teams or women posed half-naked and provocative; no broken childhood toys gathering dust in cupboards; no adolescent trophies, this girl's bra and that girl's knickers; no clothes kicked in corners, no reek of sweat and aftershave, no Marty — I didn't want to see that either, like an underlining that there was no Marty in the world.

o0o

I followed Uncle James, hustling a little to catch up; and he took me past half a dozen doors firmly closed, and brought me to one that stood a little open.

He pushed it wider, gestured with his head; and I hardly hesitated, hardly paused for one last breath and a momentary eye-contact,
I don't want to do this
, before I went obediently in to Marty.

o0o

It was dim in there, heavy lace curtains over the windows and no lights on. My stupid hand was already reaching for the switch before I caught it and dragged it down again, feeling Uncle James' eyes still watching me.

This must have been a guest-room ordinarily, there was nothing personal in it. Pale blue wallpaper, a couple of prints, heavy furniture with china doodahs on lace doilies, an ashtray on the window-sill. Only a single spray of flowers, white lilies and orchids on a low table by the bed.

Queen-size, the bed, and in the middle of the room; and on the bed, of course, my cousin Marty.

Naked to the waist, he was; or naked all the way, rather, but there was a sheet drawn neatly up for decency, only its weight to shadow the shape of him from the chest down.

I was surprised, I'd thought to find him in his best clothes like the rest of them, suit and tie and a flower in his buttonhole; and what surprised me more, someone had spilt ink on his shoulder.

No, couldn't be ink.
Get real, Macallan.
But something there was, a black stain on his skin; and I was leaning closer, trying to make it out in this uncertain light — better to look at a little part of him than the whole, better a small puzzle than the big one, who and how and why — when someone did flick that switch on the wall behind me.

Then the light was certain, the light was definite and unambiguous and I didn't want anything to do with it. I turned quickly, half to see and half to protest; but seeing was enough, the protest died somewhere between tongue and teeth.

It was Marty's brother stood there in the doorway. Marty's kid brother, young Jamie. My age, my playmate; often my shield and defender against Hazel, and for a long time my very best-loved friend.

No friend now, we had the whole family between us; and after today I thought we'd have Marty too, the way Jamie looked, the way he was looking at me. Once we used to unite against Marty, two allies under constant threat of war. Now he was going to lie between us, cold and dead and irrecoverable, like so much else.

“Go on,” Jamie said, soft and sibilant and chilling, lean and tense in his tight suit, hard-trained and utterly out of any control but his own. “Have a closer look, you were going to anyway. That's what you're here for, that's why you've come...”

That's why I was brought
, I thought; and,
that's why he's got no clothes on
, I thought that too, suddenly seeing clearly, bright as the light around me now.

And I turned away from Jamie, more for escape than to satisfy my curiosity, because he looked too dangerous to bear. But the one led to the other, not looking at Jamie meant looking at Marty, no other choices in that room that morning; and again I looked at the shoulder more than the face, thought about the skin sooner than think about what that skin contained, cooling bones and heavy flesh already part putrescent.

It wasn't only his shoulder, I saw that now, although his shoulder was worst affected. There were black marks on his arms too, in little patches; and on his knuckles, where his hands lay folded atop the white sheet. I thought of ink again, understanding the pattern of them suddenly.

Marty had made his first tattoo at school, done it himself with a needle set in a wine-cork and Art Department inks. He was maybe fifteen then but already a big lad, already a bruiser, loving his own reputation; when he'd picked the scabs off there was a crude face on his forearm, with a black eye and missing teeth, and
THE OTHER GUY
in wobbly capitals around it. I was staying in the house just then, so I got to witness the row, and the week of cold silences after; and neither of us ever let on that Marty had used my idea and my original sketch to work from.

That early amateur effort had been removed inside the month, and was never mentioned again. But Marty left school the following year and left home temporarily, to establish at least a little independence; and that was when he started paying for his tattoos.

Last time I'd seen him he'd had
LOVE
and
HATE
across his fingers, like any self-respecting thug; and he'd had any number of designs up his arms, flags and football teams, impossible women; but his pride and joy, his new acquisition, what he'd taken his shirt off to show me was a dragon.

No ordinary dragon, this. Brazen and bejewelled, it had clung to his back with all four legs and its wings outstretched, claws dug in and beads of blood dribbling down. Its tail wrapped around his buttock and arrowed into his groin, he said, though he didn't show me that; its head peered over his left shoulder, and its eyes were laughing.

That's how it was, that's what he wore under his clothes last time we met. He carried a dragon on his back, between his skin and him.

No longer. What he carried now — except that he carried nothing, would never carry anything again — what marked his body was a puffy, crusted black blister where the dragon's head had been, and lesser scabs to cover all his other tattoos.

I thought they were burns, perhaps. I thought Uncle James had come after him with a blowtorch, flames to scrub him clean of filthy pictures. Or I didn't, I only wanted to; from first understanding, I knew that this was something entirely other, something entirely worse.

“Don't piss about,” Jamie said behind me, coldly vicious. “Have a proper look, why don't you?”

And his hand reached past me, gripped his brother's chilly shoulder and heaved.

Awkwardly, ungainly in death as he never had been in life even with all the weight he had on him, Marty shifted; Marty stirred under his brother's ungentle hand, fell back and stirred again, finally rolled over with that fine white sheet only a tangle now between his legs.

o0o

Not good, this. Not a kind thing to do to a cousin, an old friend, an adoptive brother. But that was the crux, of course, because I wasn't any more. That's why he was so angry, so set against me; whatever the summons of blood, I was the closest he could find right now to someone from the other world, outside the family. And someone outside family had done this, and I represented them all...

First glance, Marty's back looked like a Mandelbrot in bad colours, black with livid purple edges. It wasn't, of course, the shape was wrong; but it still looked fractal, it had that regularity and the sense of depth, the feeling that however close you got you still wouldn't reach the bottom of it.

Second glance and it just looked foul, it looked like a dreadful way to die.

The hard smooth crust of black scab had fractured under his weight, shattered almost, into a craquelure that showed harsh red in the cracks. Maybe it wasn't his weight that had done that after all, maybe it was his writhing and bucking as he died; because he surely must have done that, he would never have gone easy and this must have hurt.

Whatever this was, that much I was ready to bet on, that it must have hurt. My cousin Marty, whose major ambition in life was to learn how to eat beer-glasses for fun and profit, who'd hold his finger in a lighter-flame for effect and laugh as the blister came up after; I was ready to bet that he'd
screamed
as these blisters came up.

“Jamie?”

“What?”

“How did they, how did they ever
do
this?”

“Don't know,” he said, softening a little suddenly, standing beside me; allowing the question, allowing me to be
us
instead of
them.
“Nobody knows. Allan's on his way, though. He'll find out.”

Yes. Allan was the eldest of the brothers, Allan and then James and then my father Charles. Allan was the intellectual, the sophisticate, the man who had known how to erase Marty's first primitive tattoo that time. He'd sniff out whatever had been done last night, he'd understand. Whether he'd point the finger after, whether
how
would give us
who
— that was another question, and nothing we could do but hope.

And I did find myself hoping, unexpectedly. Standing over Marty's body, I felt a part of this family as I hadn't for years. Beside me, Jamie seemed to have burned his anger out; now his hand was slack on his brother's head and I could hear his breathing catch and harden, carrying too much memory in a room where memory could only equal pain.

“Come on,” I said quietly, “let's get him tidy again, yeah? Before someone comes?”

Jamie nodded mutely, and between us we turned Marty over and straightened him out. It was impossible not to touch those repugnant scabs, though I avoided them as much as I could, and I could see Jamie doing the same, trying to fit his fingers around them. They felt hard and dry, colder somehow than Marty's body was. That had to be illusion or imagination, surely, but I thought Jamie was sharing it. Evil always feels cold. Christ, I should know. I'd shivered enough under my uncle's eyes, some of my cousins', my father's sometimes.

We pulled the sheet up from either side of the bed and folded it tidily, well above his groin to hide the black scar where the dragon's tail had pointed into his pubic hair,
treasure lies here.
I didn't know how many girls had gone looking, but he'd had more than his fair share, had Marty. Taken the best part of my share too, I thought sometimes; but only statistically, and not at all by his intent. It had been my choice earlier, another way to defy family traditions, to frustrate their expectations and mark myself out as different, even more than I was marked already.

And then there was Laura and nothing else applied, no other girl need bother.
Sorry, no vacancies.

o0o

We did that last duty for Marty, we laid him out nicely, and I couldn't remember the last time I felt so brotherly to both of them, so close. Then we left him, pulling the door to behind us but not quite closing it, leaving a little gap for him to hear the party downstairs if he was listening. He wouldn't have wanted to miss a party.

And then we walked down together, side by side; and for the length of that corridor and the staircase I lost my perspective again, lost it utterly. Jamie was only my close relative and my oldest friend, his brother my cousin had died and he was grieving, we were both grieving and that was all.

But Uncle James waited at the foot of the stairs, vengeful and malign, and there it went again. Not possible to keep good hold on such a view, too much evidence stacked against it.

“In the big room,” he said. “Now,” he said, “we won't wait for Allan.”

“Where is Uncle Allan, anyway?” I murmured, following Jamie down the corridor. It felt right, it felt essential to keep my voice low; the house was too tense for normal conversation, it had to be whispers or screams. And I wasn't sure how people would react, if they thought I was asking too many questions.