Dead of Light (11 page)

I had a body in my arms now, I was hugging a cousin I couldn't name, although I loathed to touch him. I only watched his face, but there I saw things swell like muscles clenching, and move like internal leeches through his veins.

His eyes were open, watching me; but he was long past screaming now. All the whites of his eyes were black, and God only knew what he was seeing. I didn't believe it, try though I might, though I did; but still I hoped, I
hoped
he saw a cousin, he saw family come to hold him at the last.

I couldn't help it, we're a sentimental breed. Rod McKuen poetry and big-eyed little kittens, and all that candyfloss crap. It worked, somehow; even for me, even then, it still worked. Went with the territory, I guess. When home is the definition of comfort and family is the only definition of home, emotions need to be as artificial and dishonest as the environment, and they need to feel as real.

And you could see through it, as I had; and you could try to walk away, as I did; and you still wound up taking it all with you. “Seasons in the Sun” could still make me sniffle. And yes, if a man had to die, I still thought he should die with his family around him.

Christ, sometimes I still thought that was what I wanted for myself. Morbidity went with the territory too, especially the territory that I occupied then, that I'd hacked out for myself; I thought about dying all the time. And when I thought about doing it slowly and in a bed, it was family I imagined being there with me. Faces in the gloom, Jamie and Uncle Allan. They were the ones I wanted. Not my parents, so much: they could be there if they chose, but I wouldn't send for them. Favourite uncle and favourite cousin had always been my choice, and still was.

And Laura, of course. Family, right? Favourite uncle, favourite cousin, wife. That was how I dreamt it, when I allowed myself to dream.

Dreaming's shit, sometimes.

o0o

Dreaming's shit, but dying's worse; and watching someone die, that comes somewhere between the two, I guess. It ain't good, but it's got to be better than the other thing, better than doing it yourself. Hasn't it?

o0o

Couldn't hold his gaze, not with pale blue irises bulging at me, all but engulfed in sick black; but I didn't take my eyes from his changing face. I owed him that much, at least, whoever he was; and slowly, slowly I worked it out. All the flesh on him was in motion, heaving and subsiding like mud in a geyser-hole, a little too thick to burst; but his bones were holding their shape, I could see how long his jaw was. And his brown hair chopped short and thinning a little on top, but still thick as a hedge round the sides; and those eyes the clincher, pale blue and unusual. Only one slender side-branch of the family tree had run to eyes like that in this generation, from another tramontane wife. I hadn't seen Tommy for years, hadn't spotted him at the funeral or anything; and had surely never thought to see him like this, grotesquely dying by his own thin light.

Tommy was a leg-man, none too bright a flame in my bright family. He was a hod-carrier, taking messages and driving trucks, doing the bog-standard everyday stuff that none the less they wouldn't trust to anyone not Macallan. He must have had talent of some sort, but I'd no idea what; and one thing for sure, it hadn't been enough to save his life. The best he could do was set a nightfire burning on a car, to mark where he was and how needful.

Just his bad luck, that the only Macallan who came to check it out was Benedict the renegade, the talentless, the wimp.

o0o

“Take it easy, you, Tommy,” I said, only to let him know that I'd got him placed, at least, that he wasn't going utterly unremembered.

Not leeches under his skin, no. It wasn't that. His face bubbled and bubbled, and finally some few of those bubbles did burst. There was a filthy spray across my clean-white-for-driving, let's-look-smarter-than-the-doctor shirt; and then the real stink of it rising, released now to choke me. All I'd had before was a sniff of putrescence, contained within his skin; now I had it all over me, all his blood turned black and boiling out of him, smelling like something long rotten.

He was surely dead now, though I hadn't felt his going. That was the only blessing, that he was gone from this rampant decay, though his body was still dreadfully working. He was erupting, inside his clothes; his joints jerked, and I instinctively clung on tighter, not to let his bones dance away from me. But what I held, what I hugged was slimy and stinking, slithering and dead; my virtuous, thrifty dinner came up and spewed all across it, before I could turn my head away. His bad blood on me, my sour vomit on him; fair enough, I suppose. Look at it whichever way you like, I had the better of it. I was the one still breathing, though what I was breathing wasn't air by any reasonable definition.

After the vomit, hot tears and snot, my own body doing its best to replicate what had spilled from his. I think, at least I hope that some of that was for Tommy, not just for myself: not only a biological response to the bite of bile in my mouth or an early touch of self-pity for the state of me, vilely saturated and my future dreaming well supplied with nightmare stuff to weave from.

The nightfire flickered out, no one now to sustain its burning; and still no one came, no other cousin, none more useful than myself.

I'd have to tell the family by telephone. There'd be the police also, I supposed, at least some token enquiry before the dead weight of my uncles' displeasure stifled any questions; but the police I could cope with, they wouldn't trouble me. Telling the family, though, would be something else, something entirely other. They'd have questions, they'd pick my bones with questioning...

Still sniffing, barely holding it one step down from sobbing, I pushed myself finally to my feet, and let the corruption that had been Tommy fall away from me, wetly onto concrete. I wasn't any too steady on my feet, but I made it across the court to the nearest flat not boarded up, and hammered on the door until I got a response.

They didn't open it, nothing so foolish. I only heard a hoarse, strained male voice shouting out, “Who is it?”

“Benedict Macallan,” I yelled back, truly thankful for once for all the associations that name carried.

It got me inside, on the instant and no questions asked. Two people there, a man and a woman and both of them bigger than me; but there was terror on their faces as they looked at me, terror mingling with the disgust.

“I need to use your phone,” I said, as mild as I could manage. “And if you could let me have a shower and a change of clothing, that'd be brilliant...”

No chance of better than that, no chance of getting to go home.

Behind me, I heard a querulous voice call, “Driver!” I almost smiled for a moment, kicking the door shut without looking back. Stupid, no doubt: I couldn't afford to lose this job. But what the hell, this was an emergency. If he made a fuss with the desk controller, I'd see to it that he came out smelling a lot worse than I did. Worse than I did right now, which was really saying something. He was the Christless doctor, after all, and he'd done nothing.

Besides, these good people wouldn't want him in their flat, while I cleaned up. It was for their sakes I was shutting him out, as much as for my own. After all, we inbreeds had to stick together...

o0o

Taking their mute shrugs for an invitation, I found my way through to their bathroom first, needing to feel clean at least on the outside before I talked to my family. No proper shower, but they did have a length of plastic hose that fitted over the mixer tap at one end and had a shower-head at the other.

I stripped off, dumping my soaked and stinking clothes in the washbasin; then I stood in the bath and rinsed myself off with the water as hot as I could bear it, which was just about as hot as it would come.

Not enough. I poured half a bottle of cheap shampoo over my head and worked it into a vigorous lather to cover every inch of skin, sluiced that away and did it all again with the other half.

The walls here were apparently made of some flimsy cardboard-substitute; even above the noises of the plumbing and the rushing water, I was conscious of tight, murmuring voices in the room next door, then of someone moving around the flat.

Content at last, if not exactly happy — I wouldn't be happy till I'd soaked for an hour in a better bath than the paddling-pool we had back at the flat, and doused myself with some more powerful eau-de-cologne than I'd ever use from choice, to get the clinging stink of Tommy's putrefaction out of my nostrils — I dried myself quickly, tied the towel around my waist and opened the bathroom door.

And found a rough pile of clothes on the floor there, waiting for me. Jeans, sweatshirt, jockey shorts and socks. I called my thanks through the closed living-room door, and went back into the bathroom to dress. No surprise that nothing fitted; the man I'd seen wasn't my shape in any direction. But I could make shift with these, at least until I got home. Better than a towel, and infinitely better than what I'd been wearing before.

A sudden thought took me over to the basin: my wallet was still in the pocket of my trousers. Picking with fastidious fingers, touching the sticky fabric as little as possible, I managed to manoeuvre it out. Checked inside, found a couple of fivers. Not much, but it would have to do. There were coins loose in the pocket also, but I wasn't fishing for those.

I left the cold tap running into the basin with the plug out, so that a constant flow of water could carry at least the worst of the slime away, and hopefully the worst of the smell with it. Then I picked up my shoes, which had escaped pollution by virtue of the fact that they'd been beneath me as I knelt, and went through to find my reluctant hosts.

They were sitting close together on the fake-leather sofa, very upright, very uptight. I tried a smile, which did no good at all; then I thanked them politely for the use of their facilities and the lend of their clothes, and asked where the phone was.

The man showed me, with a stiff jerk of his head. I went over to the window-sill, found it hiding behind a curtain — saved on the bills, I suppose: what you don't see, you're not so tempted to use — and phoned Allan.

Found the number coming automatically to my fingers, though I hadn't used it or thought about using it for years.

His wife answered, her voice neutral before I gave my name and neutral again afterwards, though I thought I could hear the effort she made to keep it so.

“Aunt Jess, can I speak to Uncle Allan, please? It's really important...”

“I'm sorry, Benedict, he's not here just now.”

“Oh, Christ...” Too late, I remembered that it wasn't a good idea to swear in front of Jess; it used to cost us a lecture every time when we were kids, and once it even cost me my birthday present. This time, though, there was an advantage to it.

“What is it, Benedict? What's happened?” Her voice had crisped up with distaste, but behind that she was responding to what she was hearing from me, a genuine need backed up with resurgent shivers as the heat of the shower started to wear off. Being rid of the foul residues of Tommy's death had freed me to remember the fact of it, the awfulness, how much he'd suffered. This wasn't just a duty call I was making, I realised suddenly, a fraction later than my aunt; it was a cry for help.

“There's been a, another accident,” I said, a long way from telling the truth but close enough, I hoped, to prod her towards it. “Like Marty,” I added reluctantly, in case not. “And I, I'm on my own here, Aunt Jess, and I don't know what to do...”

“Who was it?” she asked sharply, her voice high with anxiety. No children of her own, but that wouldn't make a difference. Anyone's death would diminish Aunt Jess; she was the hub the family turned around.

“Tommy,” I said, and heard her sorrow in the quietest of sighs down the line. But there was more to say, and I couldn't spare her. “It's, it's horrible, Auntie. Not an accident,” telling truth now that she knew it already, no more harm to be done. “What do I do, do I call the police or what? I wanted Uncle Allan,” I wanted to dump it all on his strong shoulders, “but if he's not there, then...”

“Where are you?” Jess demanded, interrupting as I started to babble.

I told her, gave her the best directions I could; and, “Wait there,” she said. “And no, don't call the police. We'll do what needs to be done.” Of course, don't call the police; of course, the family would deal with it. I should have known that, her voice said. I did know that, I wanted to reply, I was only babbling.

Too late, she'd gone. Hung up on me without a goodbye, but no blame for that, in the circumstances. Nothing for me to do now but wait; but I couldn't do it here, under the gazes of this family I'd barged in on, hostile and afraid.

I offered them one last smile, which they duly ignored. So I said thanks instead, “Thanks,” I said. “I, um, I'll see that you get these back,” plucking at the ill-fitting clothes I wore.

“Don't you bother,” the man said, each word a problem, seemingly clinging to his mouth, needing to be spat out hard. I gathered that if the clothes did come back, they'd go straight in the rubbish, if not straight onto a fire. They'd touched a Macallan's body, after all, and were by definition contaminated now. How could they tell what evil might not cling to the fibres, though they were washed and washed again?

I would have liked to disillusion them, I would have liked just once for people not to assume that I and my family were one; but I couldn't have it both ways. I'd already traded on the illusion, on the family name, to get what I wanted from them. Too late now to deny a power I'd already exercised.

So I nodded, took my wallet out, took out what money I had and set it on a sideboard where they could pick it up or leave it lying, as they chose. “There's cash in the trousers, too,” I said, again leaving it up to them what to do about it.