Dead of Light (20 page)

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.

“You weren't supposed to know about that,” I told him; and he laughed aloud.

“I know a lot of things I'm not supposed to.”

“Yeah, right.” About his family, I thought he knew it all.

“Come on, sunshine. Let's go and see what you're made of. You can bring your glass, if you want to. Top it up first. Not to the brim, if you don't mind...”

o0o

Not slugs and snails was I made of, that was certain. Neither magic in moonlight, to be on a par with the rest of my blood. As ever, I was not what I was supposed to be.

He took me downstairs and out to the back, onto a broad lawn sheltered by trees and walls, where we couldn't be overlooked. On the way he picked up an old leather football from a scullery full of kipple, a lifetime's collection of stuff they had no use for but had never got around to throwing out; and even a ball could be potent in this house, could carry me further than I wanted to go. I remembered long summers of games we'd played out here on the grass, me always in goal because my sister put me there; and I remembered all the goals she'd blasted past me, all the many times I'd retrieved the ball from the borders while Aunt Jess frowned out at me from her window. Every damaged plant had been my own fault, for not doing better what I was there to do. And nothing new in that, I could never do anything right, for Jess or for my sister.

Today, though, today for Allan I could do it right, I could show him what he wanted to see. He rolled the ball across the grass, and said, “All right, Ben. Let's see that in the back of the net...”