Resurrection Man

by Sean Stewart

  Gwendolyn's eyes closed, her shoulders sagged, and for a brief moment she looked very old. "Shh," she murmured, softly stroking her daughter's hand. "It's okay, sweetheart. It's okay."

  Sarah shook her head, furious. "She would have been eight years old," she cried. And wept and wept.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, Sarah cried while her mother gave her what comfort she could. In his study, Dr. Ratkay smoked and, sighing, painted a charm for the Gregson girl, who was young enough to hope it might somehow cure her baby's leukemia. Upstairs, Aunt Sophie bent over her sewing table, studying a pattern of coins with an expression both wondering and resentful, unable to believe what she saw prophesied in their fall.

  Jet and Dante were talking softly in the parlor, where Grandfather Clock wove his steady, ceaseless spells against the dark night and the spattering rain. Red light flickered in his glass heart from the fire that hissed and creaked on the hearth. Dante jabbed moodily at the fire with a brass poker. It blazed and burned. Hungry flames caught; held; flowed in blue streams up the pale sides of the naked wood. Little red tongues licked black streaks onto it, burning it up, burning it away, burning it down into embers and ashes.

  "What are you thinking?" Jet asked.

  Dante blinked and shook his head. "Nothing. Everything." The bones of the human hand; Jet carefully rolling up the bamboo walls of their fort and storing them in the boathouse; the willow tree, its welts gummed with sap; dirt falling by the shovelful over his own face; the white sac webbed around his kidney and liver.

  Maple leaves, burning down into winter.

  "Someone broke into my apartment last night, you know. Laura called." Wearily Dante rubbed his eyes. "The cops think the guy was looking for something."

  "What! Someone broke through the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak and penetrated the Sanctum Sanctorum! It must have been Baron Mordo!"

  Dante laughed. "Or the Dread Dormammu!" Slowly his smile faded. "I can't imagine what anyone would want from my apartment. I don't even have a turntable."

  Jet shrugged. "A maniac with a thirst for ugly white furniture, perhaps."

  "I've never heard Laura sound so worried before. She probably said a prayer over my lock or something."

  Jet said, "It's coincidence, no doubt."

  "What is?"

  Jet glanced at Dante, shaggy black eyebrows raised. "Someone breaking into your apartment the exact same night you discover your own dead body."

  Dante stared bleakly into the fire. "Well, shit."

  Time passed. Dante poured out the shot of whisky he had been promising himself all day, and another for Jet. Dante detested the way lesser Scotches blew up like firecrackers in his mouth; but the Glenlivet sank smoothly back to detonate like a depth charge deep in his chest, sending ripples washing through his whole body.

  "Hm—good." Jet shivered and grinned, looking into his glass. "You know how I got the name 'Jet'? Short for 'jetsam.' Something tossed up by the river. Father's idea, of course. Something salvaged from the rushes."

  "It could have been worse," Dante pointed out. "They could have named you Moses."

  His foster-brother laughed.

  Dante rubbed his temples. With his flaring eyebrows, it made him look like a weary Satan. "Jet, I have no damn idea what to do next."

  "Let us consider." Putting down his whisky, Jet steepled his fingers and pursed his lips, looking for all the world like a spidery Sherlock Holmes, his cheek marked with a lascar's tattoo for undercover work in an opium den. "Have we hit upon a method for angeling yet?"

  "We?" Dante regarded Jet unenthusiastically. "Yes, I suppose 'we' have."

  "In what does it consist?"

  "Carefully identifying the most horrifying course of action and then taking it," Dante said morosely. "Like playing leapfrog with porcupines, or bobbing for apples in a vat of acid."

  "Dating Amalia Jensen."

  "Shut up."

  Jet smirked. "And what have you got to work with? Things, I mean, not ideas."

  "What?"

  "Like the mirror in your bureau. Places with magic in them."

  "Oh." Dante nodded. "Uh, okay. Pendleton's ring. His thumb bone. The willow tree. The bureau mirror. The lure."

  "Anything else?"

  "Not that I—Oh. Gray's Anatomy," Dante said slowly. (His father's voice: "The autopsy is the third movement of a sonata: the body, the living, the body reconsidered.")

  Jet looked at him sharply. "You're thinking again. Good. Anything else?"

  "Grandfather Clock, I suppose. But that's different."

  "Is it? Why?"

  "It isn't horrible," Dante said. "I don't know. It's just different. Closer... closer to the center of things."

  He bared his teeth around another shot of whisky, felt it slide down his throat like smoke, drifting into his stomach and lungs and into his blood, billowing through the chambers of his beating heart, loosening him inside.

  The angel in his belly stirred.

  Jet's father would have sat in this parlor before the fire, Dante thought. Pendleton too would have had his life sliced into sections one second long by Grandfather Clock, that meticulous pathologist; each second a reflection mounted on the clock's glass casement for study, as on a slide.

  It was obvious that he must have drowned: the ring and the thumb bone were clear evidence of that. Pendleton's living, the flow and flux of it, was lost forever when his lungs filled with river water. But the facts, the body reconsidered: Was it possible Dante might have enough of these to discover Pendleton's story? Reconstruct it, as a paleontologist could reconstruct the lifestyle of a prehistoric man from a single jaw or a couple of teeth?

  "We know some things about magic in general," Jet said. "Ritual: ritual is good."

  "There isn't exactly a liturgy for this."

  "Not yet." Jet grinned. "You'll think of something. But a certain solemnity, a certain privacy... Where would the best place be? The boathouse?"

  "Not on my life," Dante said.

  "What's wrong with it? It's isolated, it's big enough. It has a little extra numen from the autopsy, I should think."

  "It's also cold and damp," Dante said. "I don't intend to sit around freezing my ass off. I need my concentration," he added, with all the dignity he could muster.

  Jet acquiesced. "Okay, how about your room? On the bureau, in front of the mirror."

  A serpent of dread slid down Dante's spine. He sighed. "Yeah, that's the place."

  Jet glanced at Grandfather Clock. "We can just manage to start by midnight, if we hustle."

  "Oh God, Jet, can't I at least take a nap? My eyes keep crossing and my hands won't stop shaking."

  Jet shook his head. "You want to see visions, remember? That's why the Indians used to fast and go without sleep until the gods sent them dreams. Come to think of it, we shouldn't have let you eat any dinner."

  Dante whimpered.

  He buried his head in his hands, and let sleep wash over him for one delicious moment before regretfully opening his eyes. "I won't let you down."

  "I know."

  "You must think I... Well, who the hell knows what you think? But I won't let you down."

  "I know."

  He found Jet looking at him with calm certainty. "I know. I would die for you, if I had to. You would die for me."

  Dante drained the last of his whisky. "I may yet have that opportunity."

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later he sat before the bureau in his room, his hands curled around a mug of hot willow-bark tea.

  It was nearly midnight and very dark. The only light came from a single emergency candle Jet had filched from the kitchen and set at the base of the mirror. Arranged before Dante on the bureau like surgical implements were Pendleton's ring and thumb bone, the lure, Gray's Anatomy, and Dr. Ratkay's second largest scalpel. Even in plain daylight it terrified Dante to touch any of these objects. In the candle's dim flicker their outlines grew shadowy, and dread poured from them.

  Grown-up secre
ts.

  Unclean.

  What they found out behind the barn. What waited in his belly. Ann-Marie Bissell, who ran off to the City when she was twelve years old. Duane: a little boy in a hot room, bedsprings creaking. His uncle's hand.

  Death to touch. Death to know.

  Dante's face in the mirror was pale and mottled. He tried to calm himself, but his chest was banded in iron and he could barely breathe.

  A spider crawled out of the candleflame and scuttled into the shadows.

  Dante yelled. The fear was like having a syringe of ice water plunged into his heart. For an endless instant he went completely numb.

  Am I dead?

  Am I dead?

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Shh," Jet murmured. "Shh, Dante. It's okay. It's all right. We knew it was going to be like this."

  "We?" Dante hissed savagely. "Who the fuck are we?" He reached out impulsively and jammed Pendleton's ring on his wedding finger. It fit.

  Something scuttled over the back of his left hand.

  A shudder went through Dante's body like a spear. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists until the trembling passed.

  Some time later he remembered to breathe. The fumes from the willow-bark tea were bitter as regret.

  In his mind's eye Dante saw the Skinned Man on the cover of Gray's Anatomy. The Skinned Man had nothing anymore. No life, no love, no hope, no regret—just a body. Dismantled man.

  Dante groped in the shadows for Pendleton's thumb bone. He found it, held it for a long moment, and then, prompted by something he dared not examine, he dropped it into his mug of tea.

  Let it steep.

  He heard a sharp hiss of indrawn breath from Jet. "Give me your hand," Dante croaked, his voice throttled in his cramping throat.

  Jet's hand left his shoulder. "What?"

  Dante held up the scalpel. "It's your story, damn you. Give me your hand!"

  Slowly Jet extended his right hand. It was shaking. Good! Let the bastard sweat a little. Quickly Dante drew the scalpel across Jet's palm, a shallow cut. Blood beaded up along the incision. Dante tilted Jet's hand, and three red drops spilled into the tea.

  Dante put the scalpel down. "We're ready to start," he said.

  A first long sip of Pendleton, to get his subtle flavors. Instinctively, Dante adopted his father's clinical persona, stepping into it like a surgical gown. It fit perfectly. Though he had never chosen to wear it, it must have been there inside him always, patiently waiting until he chose to draw it on.

  So then: Pendleton's flavor as it rolled across the tongue. Salt and bitter both, but very little sweet. It had been the salt Sophie craved, the sharp tang of him. Tasting him again, as if through Aunt Sophie's lips, Dante noted a resemblance, stronger in her tasting than in his, between Pendleton and her father. But Dante's grandfather (the one to whom he owed his flaring eyebrows) had been a jokey, a wise man, a magician born too soon to flower. What he loved was the wonder of his audience, its delight. For Pendleton there was a thinner savor: the thrill of conquest, of fooling people. He was a man of averages, of calculated risk.

  Dante sat with eyes closed, Pendleton's ring on one hand and the other lying on the Anatomy as if it were a book of necromancer's spells. He took another sip of bitter water, steeped with willow bark and a human thumb. Blasphemy soaked into him like oil into dry wood. One part of Dante, cowering in horror behind his father's impassive, surgical mask, felt as damned as the first angel fallen. What madness had taken him, to turn his back on grace and plunge into the dark?

  But Dante's time was short and his need great. His sharp steel intelligence flashed and bit into his family, peeling back its skin, looking always for Pendleton's story, following its course as he might note the progress of a cancer. All his life he had left certain silences unbroken, ignored certain cuts and bruises in his family's flesh. Now the things he had trained himself not to see were what he needed to examine. His own fear was his guide, fear of secrets and things best left unseen. Dread had closed like scar tissue over the wounds in his family, sealing them.

  Where he found it, he cut.

  FOR EXTREME ILLNESSES EXTREME TREATMENTS ARE MOST FITTING. —HIPPOCRATES

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Jet had been watching Dante for what seemed like ages. From time to time, lost in his strange angel's world, Dante would whisper unintelligibly, like a man talking in his sleep. Sometimes his eyes were closed. Other times they opened wide, staring into the candle- flame or gazing at things hidden deep within the mirror. Different expressions haunted Dante's face: fear, most often; sometimes anger, or bitter grief, or unhealthy curiosity. Occasionally his devilish eyebrows winged upwards in astonishment. At least once he laughed, making Jet jump like a startled cat.

  For over an hour Dante had nursed his cup of tea, but now, whether he had sipped it all away, or followed some inscrutable impulse, he set the mug down, slowly as a blind man, and groped across the bureau until his fingers touched the fishing lure.

  * * *

  A friendly game.

  * * *

  There was a soft tap on the door. "Dante?" It was Sarah.

  Quietly Jet turned the knob. "Surprise," he murmured.

  "You again! What's going on?"

  "An angel in converse with the spirit realms." Jet blinked the candleflame from his eyes until he could make out Sarah's pajama'd form, looming in the hallway like a white flannel ghost. "What brings you here, O specter of the night?"

  "Couldn't sleep," she said shortly. "Or rather, the sleep was fine: it was the dreams I couldn't stand. I was going downstairs to get some hot milk and I thought I would see if anyone was awake."

  " 'Anyone' meaning Dante," Jet murmured dryly. "I doubt you were looking for me."

  "You don't have to be such a touchy bastard."

  Sarah shuffled into the room and peered at her brother. Dante showed no signs of noticing either of them. "What has he got in his hand?"

  "Fishing lure," Jet said. "It's tied up with Pendleton's story somehow."

  * * *

  The two of them at the table, Jewel's friend smiling, smiling. Jewel herself lying, in the bed, wearing nothing but one of his shirts. Young, so smooth and young: it made him drunk to look at her, by God; it made the laughter bubble in his chest. And she would laugh back and prod him with one naked foot; she could just reach his chair from the bed. On the table by the pack of cards a glass of champagne, pale pale gold, and the bubbles rising in it like his luck. That's how it was. That's how it felt before the first deal.

  * * *

  "Pendleton, Pendleton," Jet murmured. "My father."

  Delicately, he licked his lips. "Curious. I don't believe I've ever said those two words in that particular order."

  "What do you know about him?" Sarah whispered.

  "He left," Jet said flatly.

  During the long, uncomfortable silence that followed this reply they watched Dante stroke the back of the lure, lightly, with the fingers of his right hand. Finally he picked it up and held it before his eyes. It dangled over the candle flame, faintly jingling. Light gleamed on its carapace and glinted on its thin barbed legs.

  * * *

  A dead man's hand. Aces and eights: what Wild Bill Hickok was holding when they shot him in the back. Should be enough to win at Stud, but somehow a shiver went through Pendleton as slowly he picked up his cards. It was hot in the room, but he was cold inside. Something trickled down his cheek, pale pale gold; as if he were sweating out the fine champagne, leaving him stone-cold sober, his face as gray as ashes.

  What could happen? So he'd bet his firstborn son, so what? The joke was on the stranger; Pendleton didn't have a son to lose.

  Wasn't going to either—not with Jewel.

  He realized this suddenly, looking over. He had always seen how young she was, how fierce and alive. Always before, it had made him feel young too.

  Not now. Now gray age streaked his fine black hair. It sat in his belly like a cold gray
stone. Now he held a dead man's hand.

  He lost his nerve at that moment, so cleanly he could hear the snap. He'd had a lot of nerve, once. He had followed Crowley like a textbook, mastered his tricks with countless hours of practice. Brought his will to bear, and made of illusion a careful science. "A wizard needs nerve," he'd told Jewel.

  Pompous ass.

  She had grinned like she was grinning now, utterly beyond him. He had made himself a wizard, but Jewel was an angel. Her generation had been born into this world of wonders. She talked to her dolls, she told him once, and they talked back. She never stopped to wonder at that. How amused she had been, at his surprise. How many times had be seen that look in her, that amused contempt? As many times as he had thrust it away, buried it, slicked back his graying hair and made grand promises of the miracles he would teach to her.

  Him teach her! She would melt him like wax if he got too close.

  She prodded him with her naked foot and laughed. She must know it was over for him. His nerve had broken and she must have heard the snap.

  He stared down at his cards while cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

  Aces and eights.

  * * *

  "Do you think Dante's really going to die?" Sarah murmured. "Soon, I mean."

  "I hope not; we just got through burying him. It would be very inconsiderate of him to keel over while I still had shovel-blisters on my hands."

  "Don't be flip, Jet. Not about this."

  They stood together, watching Dante. Sarah stirred. "What about the larval sac?"

  "Maybe there isn't one in his real body. Even if there is, it didn't give him any trouble before last night."

  "But he thinks he's going to die."

  "He's been running from himself for thirty years," Jet said. "Now he's facing himself at last and it's got him scared shitless. Just because he feels like he's going to die, that doesn't mean he will."

  Sarah said, "Maybe it does, if you're an angel."

  "It's not my fault!" Jet hissed. "God damn it, just because I made him take a look at his life, that doesn't mean I made the problem. The problem was there!"