Dead of Light (30 page)

No.
“I'm fine,” I said, fighting to keep my voice from trembling.

“Fucking hero,” with no heat in the allegation, almost nothing of my hot cousin. “Since when?”

I didn't know the answer to that. Since my sister died, and life turned cheaper? Or since I cheapened life myself, to kill a cop? Maybe only since this afternoon, since I found a little unexpected value in myself. Or someone else found that value, rather, and showed it to me.
Unless it was the buzz that drew Carol, just that Macallan buzz working for me finally, eight or ten years late but coming good at last...

“We should go back,” I said, and that was true; and my voice was also telling truth quite independently, saying that I didn't want to. Pleading, almost, for a reason not to. Some hero, me...

“Yeah.” And now he did turn, now he looked me in the face, searching for something though I didn't know what. Didn't know if he found it, either, but he put his arm around my shoulder like he needed me for balance, he was going to fall over without. And of course I wsn't going to let him fall, so I slipped my arm round his waist, and that's how we walked back into the dark and stumblingly, awkwardly up the ruined alley, like two brothers inextricably linked.

o0o

Jamie's globe of light had gone, of course, extinguished by his absence; but Carol had stayed, Carol was kneeling in the road there with her shoulders bowed and her hands cupped over her mouth, which made every kind of sense except the big one. Quite why she'd stayed at all, I couldn't imagine; but having made that choice, of course she'd want to duck and cover as much as she could. I could still remember the stink of Tommy's dying, and even from here I was catching whiffs of Steve's, though we weren't half as close to him as she was. Not the same at all — Tommy's had been swamp waters and foul decay, Steve's was bad acid and burning chemicals, biting my throat and lungs — but equally awful to breathe. I was coughing already, and I could hear Jamie's wheezing at my side. He'd been asthmatic as a kid, though not for many years so far as I knew, not since they'd moved into the country.

I glanced at him, to see how bad he was; and saw instead that his hand was busy drawing light out of nothing, making another shining globe. He'd barely built it to a tennis ball, though, before Carol was snapping at him, waving a peremptory hand.

“Don't! Don't do that...”

“What?” It was probably just the shock of being challenged, but the nightfire flickered and died above his palm. “Why not?”

“He doesn't need it,” she said; and that was sure enough, no arguments there.

But, “I do,” Jamie said.

“No.”

Actually, I agreed with her. The dark was light enough. Too well adjusted, my eyes were already showing me more of Steve's death than I really wanted to see or know.

My memory is at least as ill-regulated as most people's, maybe more so. It's both unreliable and unkind, letting me down when I need it, stirring me up when that's the last thing I need. It has a clear and recognisable system, though, there's method behind its meanness: I can remember very little of my childhood, when I was pretty happy on the whole, if utterly subservient to my sister; and I can remember almost every moment of my adolescence, when I was miserable at best pretty much all the time.

Blinking in the darkness there and wanting only to close my eyes altogether against what I was seeing, I remembered one time more than ten years earlier, when Hazel had been trying to bleach a pair of jeans. She'd left them in the bathroom, soaking in a dilute solution; and as an act of petty vengeance for some offence long since forgotten, I'd slipped in and emptied the bottle of Domestos into the sink to enrich the mixture.

And then I'd stood and watched, rapt with glee and terror both, as the denim unravelled itself before my eyes: as it frayed and rotted gently into nothing like some smart stop-motion video effect and nothing like real life at all.

Until Hazel came back and caught me standing there with the evidence in my hands and the wonder still on my face; and this was why the terror, of course, because then it was very much real life again, and for all my twelve-year-old innocence I knew one fact well, that real life
hurts...

No Hazel to catch us this time, and my guilt was more abstruse, though I still felt guilty; but Steve's clothes, his T-shirt and jeans under an open leather jacket had dissolved into rags and slime and his riches had rolled onto the tarmac, coins and keys scattered about him like the rivets from Hazel's Levis falling to the bottom of the bathroom sink.

Rags and slime his flesh was too, my cousin Steve, and half his bones were showing. They were glistening wet in what light caught them, pale and dark in patches, and even some of them seemed to be crumbling; hair and skin had slithered off from the dome of his skull, and something claggy was oozing out of it. Revolted but still drawn, I bent to look closer and saw a tracery of dark lines against white bone, etched in, I thought, as if with a hot point.

Like a map
, I thought,
all the pathways of pain marked out by its marching...

Actually, my more rational side insisted, it was more like a map of the veins that feed the scalp; but rationality couldn't hold a candle to the crawling horror of that wet mess. Better to sing and soar a little, to give poetry its head against science; facts screw you down.

Screw you up, sometimes.

Jamie was with me there, I guess, with us both. He didn't after all make any light against Carol's veto. I could feel him trembling, unless it was my own trembling echoing back from his solidity; but I didn't think so.

He pulled away from me, though, which freed me to drop to my knees beside Carol, to put an arm around her and draw her up against my body, to offer her what thin comfort she could find there. Some at least, I guessed, from the way that she clung. She was gasping and choking on the acrid stench that rose from Steve's trickling flesh; she buried her face against my shirt, to use that as a substitute for the mask of her hands. Me, I hid my mouth in her hair, tasting salt sweat laid over sweet-scented shampoo.

Looking for something, anything to turn her mind away from what lay in the road, I mumbled, “What happened to Gino?”

“Who?”

“The waiter.”

“Oh. I don't know. He went...”

Went where, I didn't ask; and then didn't need to, because he came back, true young hero that he was. I heard footsteps crunching through shards of glass, and looked up to see him coming nervously towards us with a tablecloth trailing from his hands.

Nice. I lifted my head for a second, just long enough to give him a nod of encouragement and croak, “Good thinking, Gino.” Actually it wasn't really, linen wouldn't last long against the strength of such corrosion, but at least he was trying. He smiled at me vaguely, advanced a little with the cloth held out before him like a screen — and then he checked, looking confused and uncertain.

I turned my eyes reluctantly, to see what was bothering him; and saw Jamie in the road, bending over Steve's body.

Saw him reach down and almost shouted, wanted to shout but only managed a grunt, half disgust and half warning,
don't touch that, don't dabble your fingers in corruption, it might do the same to you. It just might dabble in return...

Too late. He reached and fumbled, gripped and straightened with something in his hand and a strange retching sound in his throat. Then he stumbled back, almost dropping whatever it was that he carried as he fumbled a handkerchief from his pocket. I watched him awkwardly trying to wipe both the object and his fingers where they'd touched it; then in the eerie silence of that alley I heard a crackling voice cut through what sounds there were, Carol's breathing and my own and Jamie's asthmatic wheezing.

More good thinking. He'd salvaged Steve's walkie-talkie, and it seemed like everyone was doing better than me just now. Nothing new there, then. Not so transformed after all, this life of mine; no miracles, at any rate. I was still a follower by nature.

Jamie touched a button uncertainly, and hiss replaced crackle. Working the words hard through his own wrack and the spoiled air, I heard him say, “Hullo? Who's there, who's out there?”

“Who's that?” came back, the voice thinned by electronics and disguised by static.

“Jamie, this is Jamie. Jamie Macallan.”

“About bloody time. It's Lamartine, Jamie. Where are you?”

He looked at me, with a helpless shrug; I told him, and he relayed it. “Mason Chare. Apparently.”

“I know it. Little back alley, right? Who are you with, then, Steve? That's Steve's patch...”

“Jesus, Marty,” starting to crack now, “Steve... Get someone down here, will you? Steve's...”

“Steve's what?”

“He's dead.”

“What? How?”

“I don't know, I don't
know
how. He was fine, and then... Just get someone to come, will you? And hurry...?”

o0o

Not just someone, but a lot of cousins came. Lamartine himself, and Donny and Travers and half a dozen more. Too many for me, too many by far for Carol and for Laura, though she left Mario with his family in order to come and stand with her friends. I shepherded them back against a wall, as far as possible from all those fierce auras; then I read all the unspoken messages, all the contempt on the faces of my family —
what did Jamie think he was doing, for God's sake? Spending his time with cattle and the cattle-coloured, when we needed him...
— and I decided to stay with the girls myself, just to keep out of the family's way. My anger and distress was no less than theirs, possibly greater; but I was prepared to cede them the stage entirely, to avoid drawing any more of their attention. There was an advantage, I was thinking suddenly, to being seen as weak: seen once and dismissed and never looked at again.

After the cousins, the uncle. James again, back in his big car but driving himself for once, nosing down the alley until his headlights painted us all too brightly in the night, gave us thick shadows and too little colour else. He left the lights burning as he got out, stood four-square in their beam looking down at what there was of Steve, then lifted his head and said, “Jamie.”

“Here, Dad,” and my cousin-brother stepped forward from the pack.

“You were with Steve when this happened?”

“Well, not exactly. In there,” nodding towards
il Milano
with its shattered window. “He came in, had a word with us, went back out — and then he was screaming. I went after the guy who did it,” he added: not looking for praise, only giving information, a soldier being debriefed. “Didn't get him, though,” and didn't say a word about the chance passed up, the road not taken.

“All right. Get in, we'll talk back at the house.”

Obedient soldier or obedient son, Jamie moved towards the car; but then he stopped, looked around and found us, held a hand out and said, “Laura...?”

When a hierarchy's working well, obedience runs all the way down. She didn't hesitate, ready to dance with dragons in exchange for the better comfort of his arms now and the promise of his bed later.

I saw Uncle James frowning in the light, and my less generous half wanted to hear the veto which all of me expected; but all he said was, “She was with you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, she was,” though Jamie had avoided saying so earlier, a vaguely chivalrous gesture that he'd blown entirely now.

“Very well, then. And these, too?” as his eyes found us, Carol and me still backed up against the wall, Carol's two hands working hard on one of mine.

“Yes,” said Jamie.

“No,” said I. And when everyone stared, “I mean, no, we're not getting in the car. We've got nothing to tell you, more than Jamie and Laura can,” and I had my own agenda for the night, which didn't include spending it under Uncle James' roof.

This was the second avuncular invitation I'd turned down, in similar circumstances. Grown cocky, I guess, from my success in walking away from Uncle Allan last night, and encouraged by having Carol at my side now as then. There were enough bully-boy cousins there to throw me in bodily if Uncle James insisted, but I thought his dignity would rule that out as an option.

Too right, it did. He wouldn't even argue. He only looked at me consideringly, stepped out of the car's fierce beams into the night's shadows, and broke the first and only commandment a Macallan ever recognised as right.

He used his talent on me.

Parents apart, the only thing my two uncles had in common was their talent. It often goes that way, that brothers develop the same skills, though in different proportion.

My uncles were manipulators, both. Mostly these days neither one exhibited their talent much; they had other ways to achieve their ends, they manipulated with money or terror or political guile. I'd once seen Allan pull a punter's strings, and never James. Family wisdom had it that Allan's was far the finer control: that if he chose to he could have a punter pick up a pen and sign their name to something, and the signature would be incontestably their own, although it was no will or intent of theirs that had managed their fingers as they wrote. Legend said that finesse like that was far beyond Uncle James; but legend said that Uncle James had been threatened once, by a carload of thugs up from London. Out to extend their overlord's hegemony and believing nothing of the rumours, they'd followed Uncle James's car across one of the high bridges; and halfway over the thug driving had suddenly wrenched at the wheel and stamped on the accelerator, so that they'd careered up onto the pavement, ploughed through pedestrians (there'd been a baby, legend said, crushed in his buggy, and his teenage mother left legless) and slammed head-on into a stanchion.