o0o
Special, they were telling me I was. Different I’d always been; now suddenly I was special, and though I didn’t believe in ghosts or ghostly voices, I still felt as though I’d been through a rite of passage, proved myself in a desperate court; and I needed desperately to talk to Uncle Allan.
Walked over to my sister’s bike, touched it with pale fingers that still held a tremble in them, claimed it for my own. Never mind what records said: for the first time in my life, I felt confident to take something from Hazel. Okay, she wasn’t there to argue, but that only underlined the point. It had been hers and now it was mine, by right of survival.
Rights and duties ride pillion behind each other, take it in turns to drive. It was more than the bike I was claiming here, more than a possession I was taking on. And I knew it, and that was the choice I made. Swung my leg across the seat, settled myself, gripped good and hard and made my mouth work, called my passenger over. Said, “Carol, get on. We’re out of here.”
“Ben,” she said, thin and sick, “you can’t. You can’t just drive away...”
“Would you rather stay here?” I demanded. With him? unspoken but very much there, as he was so very much there between us.
“We shouldn’t leave him...”
“He’s dead, Carol. Our staying isn’t going to help that. It’ll just make trouble, as soon as someone comes.” More messages not needing to be voiced: it could happen again the loudest of them, do you want it to happen again?
And no, she didn’t, because she didn’t argue further; but she didn’t come to me either. She only looked at me, directly across this little distance, and she said, “I don’t want to ride with you.”
“How, then?”
“I’ll hitch it.”
“No one’s going to stop. Not for you, not after this.” A burning bike and a dead policeman, and a girl trying to hitch away? No chance. “You’ll just get picked up, and they’ll screw you. You know they will.” Whatever they thought and whatever she told them, she’d not be allowed to walk away from this. Could be a long, long time before Nicky saw his mum again. “Get on the bike, Carol...”
Her hands made shapes in the air, blank of any meaning, just little gestures of weakness and uncertainty; and at last she came warily over and got on the bike. Sat way back on the queen seat, putting her hands behind her for a hold and trying not to touch me at all with the least part of her clothing.
I felt briefly desolated. Powerful, dangerous, desolated. Not good, any one of the three.
Said nothing, nothing more to say; and turned the key, kicked the bike off its stand, put it in gear and drove away from the climbing shadow of smoke.
o0o
Steady and careful now, too late, not to attract any more attention. I didn’t ask what Carol wanted, I only took her straight to where she lived, a terrace in a village in the city’s hinterland. Free of me she could maybe reclaim a little of her life, a little of her confidence in the world before she went to reclaim her son from his father.
She dismounted awkwardly, still trying not to touch; and stood looking around, breathing deep for a second or two before she could bear to look at me. And then it was only a glance, her eyes brushing across mine, any greater contact too much for her. She didn’t speak, though she did try to sketch a nervous farewell with her hands.
I nodded, not to break that silence that was seemingly giving her some kind of shelter. Nodded and left her, and thought that was probably it. Another friendship dead on the altar of what I was, or what I was becoming. Goya had it wrong, I thought: it was only ever blood that begot true monsters. My begetting might have been a little delayed, but clearly blood would out in the end; and she’d been right there at the outing, and I thought she would never forgive me for that.
Hard enough to forgive myself, maybe that also would prove impossible. I had no right to expect it from her, neither did I.
o0o
I drove quietly through town, to Uncle Allan’s house in the suburbs. Parked in his driveway and got off the bike, stretched in the cold sunlight and felt my traitor blood sing around my bones, soul’s music too revealing to be borne; felt the unaccustomed tingle of power, and hated myself for smiling at its touch.
Allan and Jess didn’t have money on Uncle James’ scale, or if they did they didn’t flash it about. Allan wouldn’t be interested in extravagant cars and country houses, comfort was enough for him; Jess, I guessed, would think it ungenteel to be so ostentatious. Whatever, they lived in what was really a Victorian semi, albeit a big one: three floors of red brick, with gables and mullions and mansard dormers and all the fun that architects used to be allowed. It was an expensive street, where high walls and mature trees separated each family from its neighbours; but those neighbours were mostly surgeons or solicitors, successful but not exclusive. Nothing warned you here, nothing said that at the head of this short drive and behind that slightly weathered door lived the man who kept the town in his pocket, his to milk if ever he should choose to. Uncle James was the family milkman, but Allan could have taken that role to himself at any time. I used to think maybe that was one reason why Uncle James did wield his power so widely, simply because his quiet elder brother had so much more.
No grandeur inside the house either, unless there’d been a radical change since the last time I was here. Rare for my family, these two had had no children; but they still needed a large house, to demark the space between them.
Uncle Allan’s Volvo was there in the drive; I felt a brief touch of gratitude — mingled with surprise — that there were no other cars, no family gathering yet convened. I couldn’t stop myself glancing quickly through the back windscreen, to confirm what was surely obvious, that Hazel’s body was gone from there. I didn’t want to ask even myself where she might be lying now, though I would certainly have to ask Allan.
No weeds in the gravel, of course, just as there would be no tiles missing from the many angles of the roof and no smell of damp in the cellar. Aunt Jess liked to keep things nice. Wherever Hazel was now, I wouldn’t find her here.
Three steps up into the porch, and I jerked hard on the old bell-pull, hearing a dim jangle inside that was instantly nostalgic and oddly comforting. I’d always found my reassurance here. Never called this early before, and I didn’t expect Jess to be up yet; but even if he wasn’t expecting me — and he surely couldn’t be expecting the news I brought with me, the great change that had come upon me — I didn’t think Allan would be sleeping.
o0o
Nor was he. He came to the door within a minute, greeted me just with a nod and a hand on my arm — and then checked, looking so startled that I couldn’t keep a fleeting smile off my face.
“Ben...?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can we talk?”
“Of course. Come on through.”
He led me into the hall, which was shared territory between the two of them, bland and characterless as a result. Long oak boards indifferently gleaming, nothing paranoid or obsessive; occasional rugs neither new nor worn, only ruggish; a dial phone on a table, not much else. Through open doors I could glimpse Aunt Jess’s domain: the dining-room with its long table protected under a velvet cloth, silver candlesticks on the sideboard and dull prints on the walls; the sitting-room where I’d almost never ventured unless invited, where Jess held court among the smells of flowers and fresh polish.
Up the uncarpeted stairs, where I followed Allan now, other perfumes held sway. Learning has its own proper odour, particular to itself, compounded of papers and inks, dust and leather and age. There were traces of it on the landing, where a couple of bookcases narrowed the passage; but only pass through the door on your left into what was my uncle’s favourite room, only close your eyes and you could have been in any old library or any don’s study in England, entirely encompassed with words.
Open your eyes, and you couldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. Only one man like my uncle and only one room like this, the only place fit to
contain him.
o0o
A high room and not a bright room, for all that it faced south; the mullioned windows were tall but narrow, letting in only fingers of the sun. Books darkened it more: books everywhere, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed tight and more books in piles on the desk and on the floor. Rare and valued volumes were more carefully treated, kept behind curtained glass where the slow-creeping sunlight couldn’t fade their spines.
Books were only the leading edge of this room, though, only what came first to the eye. A locked oak door led through to Allan’s laboratory, where he played with chemicals and fire, where he used to take Hazel and Jamie and me to show us wonders when we were kids; but his curiosity couldn’t be contained so easily, nor his collector’s soul. All the instruments of light had invaded his library.
Prisms and patterns in hand-stained glass hung in the windows, spilling motile colour across the room. Standing on every bare inch of shelf-space that they could salvage from the greedy books were telescopes and magnifying-glasses, other lenses that he’d ground himself; and on his desk, set up high on its own polished wooden case, was what I’d always loved best of all his treasures: gleaming tubes and cogs and curling arms of brass, an antique Victorian microscope.
What space was left in this busy room was taken by two old chairs, their leather soft and worn from many years of use. Allan gestured me to take one; I didn’t sit so much as drop into its enfolding, body and mind both suddenly exhausted, wanting nothing more than this remembered comfort too long missed.
Allan looked at me for a moment, then went wordlessly behind me into a corner and came back with a bottle and two massive glasses. Just a splash of dark amber into each; he passed me one and I held it, looked at it blankly, needed his prompting before I thought to lift it to my mouth and sip.
Thirsty I should have been, and wasn’t; but this had nothing to do with thirst. Cool and smooth and tingling in my mouth, it was fire in my throat, heat and life to my belly; and Allan was smugly smiling, watching me intently, his eyes measuring the potency of his prescription.
“Wow,” I said ineffectually. “What is it?”
“Armagnac, you ignorant puppy. Cognac,” being briefly didactic and enjoying that for its own sake, letting me see his pleasure, “is the wine-drinker’s brandy; but this is the true drink, the brandy-drinker’s brandy. Specifically, this is a Janneau, and it’s, what, some seven years older than you are. Treat it with respect.”
“Nah,” I said, struggling to match him. “Let’s get drunk, yeah?”
“Well, if you want to. If you need to. We can do that too.”
“Oh, I do,” I said, trying to raise up a young nephew’s proper bravado. “I do want to,” or I thought I did, or I wanted him to think so. What my body most wanted was a bed, anyone’s bed, didn’t have to be mine; and what my mind most wanted was to slip the last twenty-four hours into nothing, to come back to yesterday and have Hazel living again and myself a weak and powerless cypher, no killer me. Only neither one of those was on any reasonable agenda, so drinking just might be the next best option. Drinking and talking, and my uncle’s old sweet wisdom to help make some kind of sense of this new world...
o0o
He passed me the bottle over, not a mean bone in his body, though I could as easily have got drunk on the cheapest spirit in the house; and while I poured myself an indecorous slug, he said, “I took your sister home, Ben.”
For a second, I didn’t know what he meant. ‘Home’ had always been an elastic concept for me, and I’d long since snapped the elastic. Exiles can have no home, by definition; and what are the dead, if not exiled? I even had a crazy image of Allan like Holman Hunt’s Christ, I am the Light of the World and guiding Hazel’s spirit the path to heaven. As if they’d let her in.
But I was forgetting, years of determined separation had loosened my grip on the family perspective; Allan’s would be as tight as ever. Children belonged with their parents, that was fundamental, written in stone. The more so for Allan, I thought, because he had none of his own. He’d never been happy, those times I’d decamped to Uncle James’ custody; better to have kept under my father’s roof, he used to tell me, however difficult the relationship might be.
Hazel had been a shit all her life, but she’d always been a good shit, taking the family whip. Staying home. She’d never left my parents’ house; and that would be where Uncle Allan had taken her this night. She’d be lying in state, and never mind the state of her: up in her own room with her own life around her, in the place that had always been most hers; and like any exile I could envy her that, I could yearn for a share in that poignancy.
And might yet regain it, called back to the fold, the strayed sheep returning...
“I’ll take you to see her, in a little while,” Allan said. “When the hour’s decent.”
I’ve seen her already, I thought. But he didn’t mean quite what he was saying, of course. He meant that I needed to be seen there, decked in grief; and that I had to see my parents. And, bless him, that he would come to make it easier, to act as intermediary if necessary.
And maybe also it was a gentle suggestion, don’t get too drunk, Ben. As much as you need, but no more. Unsteadiness would be understood, I supposed, and the smell of alcohol on me at close quarters — my twin, after all, and I’d found her — but reeling and vomiting, not.
I nodded, which would surely be enough for this subtle man; and then, “Uncle? What’s going on?” Sounding stupidly young even to myself, too young to be drinking. Young and frightened and whining for reassurance, and far too young to be a murderer.
Never old enough for that, though, by definition. Unless you’re a Macallan born and bred and running true to form, of course, in which case empirical evidence suggests that sixteen is about right, though they usually want to get into it a lot earlier.
Unless you’re me, of course, a Macallan born and bred and coming to the party hopelessly late and already wishing I’d stayed away...
Allan pursed his lips and ran a meditative finger around the rim of his glass, making the air shiver with the high sweet note of cut crystal.
“Two things, I think,” he said at last, stilling himself as he spoke. “Two things, quite unconnected; though one may yet bring an unpleasant surprise to the man behind the other.
“First,” he said, “the family is under attack. But you know that, and I can’t tell you any more than you know already. I can’t tell you who our enemy is. Your Uncle James is doing what he can to discover that, sniffing among the echelons of power, asking questions. Making himself very unpleasant, by all accounts; but he has a right to, and his methods are usually effective.”
I nodded, suppressing a shiver. I’d seen Uncle James in his anger; spiteful and formidable both, an appalling combination. Pity the poor cattle, I thought. No fun, to be the object of James’ interrogation.
But then, I wanted answers as badly as he must. If I were there, I thought, I wouldn’t interfere. I had no self-righteousness left, no honour to support me in a protest.
“Second,” Uncle Allan said, “is what has happened to you, since Hazel’s death. I can’t tell you about that, I wasn’t there; but I do need to know. You have to tell me. In detail, please, everything you’ve done and felt and thought tonight...”
o0o
Took a long time, took the longest time: words were hard to handle and memories worse, and the Armagnac was very necessary and no pose at all, even if it only helped because I had persuaded myself that it would.
I sipped slowly, no bravado in it; and measured out my phrases, laid them against the truth I carried and saw how useless, how inadequate they were. Only that they were all I had to trade with, and if I wanted understanding — and I did, very much I did — then this was the only deal in town.
So I took it, I laid everything out for Uncle Allan as honestly as I could manage. Only the once did I try to elide the tale a little— “and the patrolman, he, he died, Uncle, I burned him and he died”
— and I wasn’t allowed even that much shelter.
“Died how, Ben lad? I need to know how.”
Died horribly, died sick and cruel and all my own work, I’m a pavement artist and I screeved him, I drew his death on the road there...
I took a breath and a little more brandy, and somehow I found the proper words and I told him. As neatly, as accurately as I could.
“I laid a web, I guess. Like, like Hazel used to do, sort of; but she only ever had moonlight to work with, and I had the sun, somehow,” which was what was so wrong with it all, the real McGuffin that we both needed to understand, “and that made it all so different...”
“Describe it,” he said; so I did that too, as best I could.
He nodded, plucked at his lip a little, then said what I suppose he was inevitably going to say, what I should surely have expected. “Could you show me? If we go out into the garden, in the sunlight, could you do it again?”
Last thing, very last thing I wanted to do. But, “Yes,” I said, remembering how my blood had stirred within me on the short walk from the bike to his front door. Whatever this was that I had, it hadn’t left me. Nor, I thought, would it in the future. Once found, never lost again. “Yes, I’m sure I could. No question. But I don’t, I don’t want to kill anything...”
“No need,” my uncle said, his smile saying more: that I hadn’t changed so very much after all, that I still didn’t have the true Macallan soul, and why the hell should I?
His hand strayed then, to touch a sheep’s skull that had been on his desk for years now, that he used as a paperweight; and there was a message in that too, that I was obviously meant to read.
“Is that...?”
“Mmm,” he said, nodding, smiling wider.
Hazel’s sheep, that was: the one she’d webbed so long ago, the one we’d watched until it died. Its skull was traced with dark lines that I’d always thought he’d scored on it himself, for some arcane reason of his own. Not so, I realised now; that was the brand of Hazel’s web. Not like mine, she hadn’t woven it of flame, but it had still been vicious enough to leave its mark on bone.
Dead of Light Page 15
