Light Errant (37 page)

Whether he needed me, whether he felt me or not, Jamie did indeed do something. Jamie did something wild, extravagant, fantastic.

Jamie threw down Falston Arch.

o0o

Or blew it up, perhaps. Shattered it, scattered it, crumbled and splattered it. Whichever.

He'd learned a lesson from me, I think, each time we'd stood at the causeway to work magic. The second time, I'd taught him that talent runs wider than any of us can imagine, that it's limited only by our imaginations; the first, that we're stronger even than we think we are.

Tell him a week before this that he could and would seize a span of limestone as broad and deep as a good-size house, that he'd grip it and squeeze it and break it into shards and gravel and dust, he'd have laughed like a bampot and given you a hangover cure. But he'd seen me do it to the road, and now he did it to the arch.

Like me, he didn't do it all at once, he had to feel his way into it; unlike me, he didn't have any time spare for experiment or failure.

Standing behind him, I saw his fists clench spasmodically; I heard three or four sharp cracks like a rifle firing, somewhere close. Several of my cousins ducked and swivelled, looking for trouble, never thinking to look among their company.

Stone cracks in sudden heat or sudden cold, or under tremendous pressure. The more straticulate the stone is, the more fault lines there are already, the sooner it happens and the more catastrophically.

Plenty of strata in a limestone crop, plenty of faults in this one. The snapping, crackling noises were the sounds of faults running through the traumatised rock as fast and free as the tear in a balloon when it pops.

Jamie I think was the only one of us who didn't react at all, he just went on traumatising. Even Uncle James startled, he jerked and glanced about him, and the one man who'd been moving before stood still now, abandoned like an animator's model, inanimate in himself.

Push comes to shove, squeeze comes to crush, everything comes to the crunch. Too many faults come to total failure.

Total failure came to the arch as we stood and watched, as we stared in the dark. There was a halo of nightfire above and about it, dancing on the grass before us, sparkling in the air; there was a sudden ripping sound, a thousand buried fault lines pulling themselves apart at once; the top surface of the arch's span, all that we could see, began to tip and tilt, this way and that, great slabs of limestone sliding and grinding and tumbling free.

o0o

Grind turned to roar, the ground we stood on trembled and shook, a great cloud of dust rose up in front of us. The wind off the sea blew it back in our faces like a smokescreen; the last sight I had of my cousins, most of them were running.

My eyes were full of grit, watering, stinging. I fumbled my way like a blind man in a hurry, squinting and seeing nothing, hands stretched out to feel.

At last, just when I thought I'd missed him, my fingers found cloth and flesh, found a man standing and shivering, his hands over his face. I pulled them down roughly, peered closely at him to be sure. My uncle's sacrifice, his enemy and mine.

I turned him round, away from the car's lights and the path that had brought us here. Turned his back to the swirling dust and pushed him, screamed in his ear, yelled, “Run, you fool! Run like fuck...!”

Gave him another shove to get him started, waited till I was sure he was moving under his own strength, the impetus of survival; then I turned again, groping more cautiously towards where I thought I'd left Jamie.

o0o

The wind blew the worst of the dust away, tears washed my eyes clear. When I could see again, it was Jamie I saw first, standing just where he had been and gazing in awe and wonder at what he'd achieved, what the sea had failed over centuries to achieve on its own account. Falston Arch had become something else, Falston Stack I supposed, a massive limestone pillar separated by twenty or thirty metres from the mainland now.

There were half a dozen men left on the height here, where there had been dozens; others were coming back in ones and twos, but none of them concerned me. Only a couple truly mattered, Jamie and his father.

Uncle James of course had not run, he too was still where I had seen him last; and all the power of his will, all his furious intent was fixed on Jamie.

As I watched, helpless in moonlight, my uncle unleashed that fury on his son. As he had once—at least once—before, when I was his victim, he broke the cardinal rule and used his talent against his own family, his own flesh; and this time it was to crush no minor rebellion, not merely to move a reluctant boy to where he wanted him.

Did he mean it, was it conscious choice or only the rage in him blindly reacting? I couldn't say, and still can't. Maybe a man of Uncle James' stamp, defied once too often and too publicly, made to look small and weak in the eyes of those who look to him for power and command—maybe such a man on such a night could do such a thing coldly and deliberately. Maybe he did.

At any rate, he did it. His eyes glittered, he reached out with his mind and seized Jamie's, took control of it all; and he marched Jamie swiftly and silently to where the cliff was crumbling and broken, where the arch was gone. Thus far, and one step further. Without a word or a glance around at the rest of us, he marched his son, his only surviving child over the edge.

Jamie, who'd been so ecstatic earlier he'd wanted to fly, or try it: Jamie didn't fly, he fell. He fell and was gone in a moment, and briefly I thought I heard the sound of his body breaking on the broken rocks beneath us.

Everyone was frozen, everyone was staring at Uncle James. They all knew what he'd done, and none of them believed it.

I moved first, I think, a few faltering and useless steps towards the edge, where Jamie wasn't. I checked before I got there, turned back, gazed wildly at the cousins where they stood bewildered, found Conor among them and ran to him.

Grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him hard, shook him out of his stupor; then I spoke to him, forcing the words out on hard little breaths through a throat clamped tight with shock.

“Conor. Listen to me. Take the car, drive to his house. Take him with you,” with a jerk of my head towards my impervious uncle. “Just do it, right? Take him, leave him there, bring Laura back. Not here, bring her down there,” another jerk, he'd get the idea, “to the beach. Tell her Jamie's hurt, understand? Just that, tell her he's hurt...”

I waited for his nod, and got it; then before he could start having doubts or asking questions, I pushed myself away from him and ran.

o0o

Back along the path, but not as far as the pub where we'd left the cars. There was a way down from there, I knew, to the narrow strand beneath the cliff, but I was too urgent to take so long. There was a nearer place where the cliff had partly collapsed, where generations of scrambling kids had reduced it further, to a steep scree slope.

Surfing the scree was a game we all used to play, despite fences and warning signs and our parents' loud and frequent prohibitions. It was a stupid and dangerous game even in daylight, even with friends around you; by night, alone and with the moon's shadow turning the whole face black, it was potentially lethal.

Nor was there really so much hurry. Jamie was dead or dying; what could I do? Zilch, was what. Or near zilch. I could hold his hand, I could talk him on his way; perhaps that seemed urgent enough, to get me there before he was utterly gone.

I don't remember thinking so clearly. All I knew was the urgency, the appalling rush that was on me; and I don't remember a moment's hesitation at the fence, where the cliff fell away into darkness just a metre or so beyond.

I vaulted the fence and stepped out almost as blindly, almost as driven as Jamie, though it was my own mind driving me.

Stepped out, and down. My heel found gravel, that shifted and settled a little before it took my weight; I heard the scutter of loose stuff sliding already.

My other foot now, my hands thrust out for balance and my mind striving to remember how to play this.
Keep on your feet
was the crucial rule.
Bend your knees like a skier, lean into the slope and go with it when it goes, don't try to fight it. Never, never try to stop.

A few stuttering, uncertain steps down and then I almost didn't need to step again, the whole surface was moving beneath me, slipping away like an avalanche of rock and I had to ride it, I had to stay on top. If I fell it would roll me over and roll over me, and there might be two bodies on that beach come morning.

Truly an escalator, the cliff carried me down, faster and faster; I had to move fast to stay with it, because you can't stand still or it steals your feet from under you. There's a seriously smart trick where you can run backwards to go slow, but you need to be expert for that, and well in practice. I hadn't done this for many years, and besides, slow was not on my mind. I leaped, made skidding, careering contact with the sliding scree and leapt again, going down through the dark in a series of crazy bounds.

And hit the hard stuff at the bottom without warning, without being able to see. My foot turned on a boulder that didn't shift, and then I did fall, I rolled and tumbled ten or twenty feet over jagged rocks and came to rest at last with a bone-bruising thump that knocked out of me what little breath I had left.

o0o

Lay where I was for a brief time, fighting for air while the last scatter of scree pattered down around me, torn horribly between the desperate need to move and the need not to move at all just now, the absolute imperative of stillness.

Slowly, various bits and pieces began to hurt, quite badly. It dawned on me that if I didn't go with the desperation and get myself up right now, they might hurt so much that moving became impossible. So I did move, just fingers and feet to start with, just to check that I could. Nothing was broken, seemingly. I put my hands down on rock-strewn sand and pushed myself awkwardly up onto my knees. Breathed deeply and ran what internal checks I could, finding sharp twisting pains and soreness but nothing worse; and then external, patting lightly over my head and what skin I could get to. Rips in my smart suit I found, skinned knees and knuckles and a few cuts, one swelling already forming under my hair where my head had cracked against a rock.

I felt a little dizzy but not disoriented, not I thought concussed, though it was hard to be sure of that. I tried to count fingers, but couldn't see even a hand's span in front of my eyes; I had to wait a minute longer before they adjusted to the starlight.

Decided I was okay then, that I could make out just the three fingers I knew I was holding up. Okay to walk, at least. I scrambled cautiously to my feet and set off. The tide was coming in again by now, waves hissing over sand, leaving only a couple of metres'-width of beach between water and tumbled rock at the cliff's foot. That panicked me again, as I glanced up at the dark mass of the cliff and thought of Jamie's long fall down. Even if he'd survived it he must surely have fallen into water, he must be drowning if he wasn't dead already. And either way, dead or dying, the sea must be sucking at him, pulling him in deeper, pulling him away from us who loved him...

That had me running again as best I could, stumbling through the hurt of a yanked ankle and much-abused muscles. And as I ran, even through the jolting pain of every step my traitor mind was thinking,
dead or dying, Jamie's lost to Laura.

She would be free and needful, oh, so very much in need; I thought I could claim her now, I could step into my cousin's shoes and take care of her, her and her baby both. I could take them and love them, take them away from here. We could build a new life together, the three of us and any more kids that came along; I could be her substitute Macallan, it's what Jamie surely would have wanted for her. I could hear his voice in my head, his dying words urging me to do it; I could see his final movement, fingers fumbling weakly in his jacket pocket to find those rings, then pressing them into my hand as a token,
these are my future, yours now, take and wear them with my blessing, in memory of me.
Even if he was past speech, past movement as surely he must be, surely I'd be right to do that thing...?

o0o

Thinking so, I pounded along the strand hearing nothing but my own thoughts and my own blood pounding in my ears, my own aching gasps of pain and lack of breath; and at last I came to where the great pillar stood swirled by wild water, its fallen arch standing proud like a boulder dam between it and the cliff, with the sea washing against both flanks.

That's where I found Jamie, though it took me some time to do it. I checked this side and then the other, scrambling on hands and knees across the shifting rock; I couldn't see him on either side, and thought he must be gone already, utterly gone, carried away by tide and current to God alone knew where, what watery grave he would lie in. I walked the ridge of rock for the height it gave me, scanning, scanning; and almost trod on him then, almost tripped over his body and fell again.

Caught myself with an effort, staring down. There he was, lying sprawled and still at my feet, just meat and bone, I thought, flesh emptied of what was truly Jamie. I squatted beside him, reached to touch and found him cool already, spray-soaked and blood-soaked too, and not a twitch in his skin where my fingers lay against it.

No hurry now. I settled myself awkwardly on the sharp rocks, lifted the weight of him into my arms, cradled his wet head against my shoulder and didn't cry, didn't scream against the brutality of the world or my uncle or any world that could have my uncle in it. Only sat and held him, rocked him a little maybe, clutched him against me and waited for the world to catch up with us.

o0o

Which it did, though it seemed to take forever. The cold crept from him to me, I passed through shivering into an icy stillness that matched his own, and at some timeless point during that endless wait I became conscious of more than my own pulse beating between us, he had some faint threadbare pulse of his own.