Dead of Light (16 page)

o0o

Frantic, struggling with complexities —
the Yale won't turn, I can't open the door, why won't the Yale turn? Because it's on the snib already. Just pull it, Benedict, just pull the door
— while my mind sang like a wire with the simplicity of Hazel's despair, I made it at last into the air.

Outside, things were better. Only marginally, but we're a marginal people and I was operating right on the margins here. I took a breath and stood in the quiet of the street, turning and turning, feeling for her.

“Ben?” Carol's voice, in the doorway behind me. I shushed her with a dizzy anger, too shaken yet to speak; and went on turning, though my head was twisting still in some other direction and my stomach churned in sympathy with neither.

Don't give up on me, sister. Keep yelling...

Mathematically, I couldn't prove it; there was no sense of a signal increasing or tuning in more precisely. But even when we were very little, “Ben, where's Hazel?” would produce a finger pointing, unerringly accurate over short distances and fairly reliable over miles. Not a trick I'd thought about for years; but now she was trying, now she needed me, and I was certain.

That
way, then; and not close, not a quick sprint and Benedict to the rescue, a black sheep redeemed by valour, the ugly duckling made beautiful at last.

Don't give up on me, sister
— though probably she would, I thought. I'd never been reliable before, why should she depend on me now?

Because there's no one else
, an easy answer to one of tonight's questions. It was in the blood more than the mind, I thought, but I shadowed her, I still echoed when she shouted. There was no one else she could reach this way, so of course it had to be me.

And of course I had to go; and was going already, was running at a stagger down the road.

Carol caught up with me before I'd reached the corner. She grabbed my arm with a fierce strength, and dragged me to a halt against all my pulling.

“Ben, what
is
it? What's wrong?”

My mind was still yearning towards Hazel, giddy and hurting with it; it was hard to find space in my head to make the words. “My sister,” I said effortfully, thinking that I owed Carol that much, at least. “My twin. She's in trouble...”

She nodded briefly, didn't ask how I knew. It was already a night for faerie and Celtic myth, for the mysteries of blood; and besides, I was a Macallan.

“Where is she?” Carol asked; and oh, the echoes were strong tonight. How many years since anyone had asked me?

“That way,” pointing, as I used to point as a child.

“How far?”

“I don't know. Miles, I guess...”

“Well, you can't run it, boy. You're in no state.” She looked at me consideringly, and I could see the pattern of her thoughts, better than I'd ever seen my sister's.
He should phone someone else
, she was thinking,
one of his cousins; but he won't
, and she was reading me right also,
he thinks he's got to go himself. His sister, his twin...

“Come on back inside,” she said briskly, the decision made. “We'll find someone to drive us.”

o0o

Going back with my eyes less blinded, I saw something at least of the damage I'd done: bowls spilled and broken, nuts and tortilla chips crushed into the carpet, broken glass and wet patches. The greater damage, though, was in the near-silence I walked into, the unsure glances and the nervous shifting back. Friends and strangers, they were all visibly remembering that I was a Macallan, and that strange things happened around people like me. When I was gone, I knew, they wouldn't talk about me, or not for long. Safer that way. My family had a regiment of spies, and traditionally didn't like to be gossiped about.

o0o

Carol found a man prepared to drive me where I wanted to go, but he wasn't exactly a volunteer. More a reluctant conscript. Fear of that unspoken family name helped, I guess; more persuasive perhaps was the equally unspoken pressure from everyone else at the party,
get him out of here, before something worse happens
, or else it was Carol's relentless urging, the way she gripped the man's arm and pleaded for me until he took the easy way out, and said yes.

Carol came too, sitting in the back with me, holding me close with one arm while the other hand squeezed mine: holding me to the world, I thought deliriously, as my head still spun with my sister's singing terror. Others had offered to come, Jacko and Jon together; but one was enough, and Carol was better than either. More genuinely concerned, maybe, and certainly less frightened.

o0o

Finding Hazel was easier than any of us was expecting. We drove north because it felt right, Carol translating my mumbling and my sharp little cries into directions for the driver, and not often misunderstanding. After a couple of miles, thinking perhaps a little more clearly — unless it was just that the options narrowed as we left the city, as we drove into less familiar territory — I remembered one of our childhood haunts, a sudden valley with a bizarre garden hidden and abandoned behind high walls.

Taking a gamble, or else responding more deeply than I knew I could to Hazel's summoning, I hauled up old memories that told me which way to go. Wrong turns in the darkness fazed me, but not for long; soon we were pulling into a drive of weeds and broken tarmac, that led to locked wooden gates topped with rusty wire.

And there, ticking gently in the cool night, was Hazel's bike.

For a moment I only sat looking at it, trying to send a message of my own,
I'm here, sis. I've made it this far, at least.
And not too late, seemingly, because I could still feel her in my head, less strongly now but no less urgent.

My hand fumbled at the car's door, getting nowhere. Carol leaned across me and worked the catch for me; I almost fell out onto the gravel as the door swung open.

Standing was difficult, the ground seeming to buck beneath my feet. Stoned and drunk and desperate, I staggered to the gates and briefly had no idea how to get past them. There was no strength in me, to jump and scramble over. But memory rescued me again, surfacing slowly through the chaotic stew inside my skull; I left the gates and blundered along the wall, hands pressed against gritty stone while my feet ploughed through nettles and dock and stumbled over branches fallen from the overhanging trees.

Soon I was in a ditch, dry at this time of year, choked with growth. Brambles caught at my jeans like wire, tangling my legs, making all but impossible what was hard enough already; but it couldn't be far now. Guided by my hands' fumbling more than my eyes in starlight, I groped my way onward while Carol tracked me along the road, above and behind. I was conscious of her as a voice calling my name, puzzled and anxious; but I paid no attention. Hazel was calling me the other way, calling me on, and hers was the only voice that counted.

Stones and lichen and old, crumbling mortar against the palms of my hands — and here at last, here the stones shifted under pressure. And here was greater darkness, a wide gap in the wall where a tree's slow-time pushing had tumbled it into rubble. Here I could clamber up and over even in the dark, and drop down the other side into the blindness of the wood.

o0o

Soft beneath my feet, the ground sloped steeply down. Foolhardy, I let it draw me into running from tree to tree, catching my weight against each trunk as I came to it and sighting ahead for the next. This was memory again, the memory of muscle and bone; we always ran here as children, usually tripped and fell sprawling into the mast and loam. And got up straight away and ran on, ignoring bumps and scratches. Too tough to cry herself, Hazel never let me cry either. If withering contempt wouldn't keep me quiet, then a hard hand over my mouth and a fist grinding into my side, whispered threats of major retribution later always would. Nothing was allowed to spoil Hazel's fun, particularly not a dirty and grizzling brother.

Tonight I didn't trip, though I slipped and skidded and should have fallen half a dozen times. Saved by trees and shrubs and simple luck, anything I could grab, I plunged recklessly all the way down to the water.

Too small for a river, though that's what we'd always called it, too wide and full-flowing to be a stream: it came down through farmland rough and unready, then dressed itself smart and civilised for its passage through the garden before vanishing into a culvert under the road and not showing again on the other side.

At night with no moon up it was black and alive, flat and wriggling with the stars like flying sparks reflected in its flanks. My hectic descent had brought me down at an angle I hadn't intended, careering almost into the hedge that divided the wood from the farmer's fields. The water rushed and gurgled through a mess of brick and ironwork, half choked by banked-up rubbish; then it ran on free and clear, and I ran beside it to where low walls and a high arched gateway marked the limits of someone's forgotten garden.

There was no house. So far as I knew, there never had been a house. We'd never found any sign of it. Only the garden, private and secluded, hidden and wonderful.

The gate under the arch was long gone, though its hinges still rusted in the bricks. I went through, sobering abruptly as I felt my sister sliding from my mind.

I called her name nervously, “Hazel?” into the darkness. Nothing came back to me.

This side of the wall, the water was broad and hushed between stone edgings, running into pools where fish flourished despite our childish efforts with bamboo and bent pins. There were bridges and a roofed verandah, slate benches and plinths where statues must once have stood. We'd loved this place once, Hazel and the cousins and I; now suddenly I hated it, as I'd always hated anything that scared me.

“Hazel?”

Still nothing. Only the water moved and all the shapes were strange, stark shadows against the sky.

Slowly now, all my urgency displaced by a creeping terror, I made my way along the water's bank to the first of the bridges, where we'd carved our names once with Marty's knife in the rail; and that's where I found Hazel.

o0o

She was lying slumped and still on the mouldering planks, and even she looked alien for a moment, her head rounded and swollen and black, faceless and shining with stars.

I shuddered, too breathless to scream; I stood over her remembering Marty, remembering Tommy and frightened to touch.

But it wasn't her head, of course, it was only her helmet. Once I'd understood that — though it took a while, before I could bear to look close enough to see — I was all brother again, dropping to my knees and reaching for her, fumbling under her chin to undo the strap and lift the helmet off.

o0o

And then for the second time and far too soon after the first, I knelt in the dark with someone in my arms I couldn't recognise.

o0o

Hazel it was, it had to be. The short-cropped hair was Hazel's, and the helmet, and the leathers. But oh, the face was not hers; for one mad second in the starlight I thought it was Aunt Bella still in Hazel's web, and in her clothes now also.

Nothing identical about us, Hazel and me; no one had ever confused the one for the other even when we were babies in nappies and there was nothing for guidance, which was which. But still our faces had had the stamp of one womb on them, easy to tell that we were twins.

Looking at her now, I didn't know her.

A harsher web than Hazel could ever lay claim to had seized my sister. All the skin I could see was painted over with lines, in a bizarre geometry; but those lines danced with nightfire, and stung where my fingers touched.

I snatched my hand back, and I think cried out in shock or grief or some more complex feeling, more appropriately family. Even that, though, even my voice so close couldn't move Hazel now. Her open eyes were looking not at me, they ravaged the sky. Searching for a moon, I thought, even at the last; and cursing an ill-made pattern of stars and circumstance that left her moonless tonight when she most needed what strength she could borrow. Left her with nothing but me to shout for, and me too certain to come too late, and helpless...

As I watched, the nightfire glimmered and died.

After a little, my tingling fingers reached for her face again.

Those lines were cracks, black cracks seared in her skin, pathways for the fire to run. Between the lines, my hard sister was harder now than ever, nothing soft or human remaining to her. Crazed glass more than skin, brittle and sharp-edged, shattered into a craquelure of fragments.

Nothing of herself in that cracked and broken face, which meant nothing of me either. Losing sight of her, I lost also sight of myself. A more valued edition of what I saw in the mirror, all our lives her features had defined mine. With those now gone, I felt myself blurring, losing definition. If I looked now into the water, if there were light enough to see by, I was weirdly uncertain what I'd see.

I cradled her dead the way I never could when she was alive, the way I'd never wanted to; but it was her own true self I mourned, not some fictional dream-sister, sweet and amenable and loving. I knew too well what the world, what the family and what I had lost here. She'd taken a half-share of my life, or more than half, and I could never disinvest from Hazel; how could I help but mourn her?

o0o

I cradled her, I rocked her and my face was wet with tears; and I thought myself totally alone and free to howl and curse, until I heard feet crashing down the hill behind me.

Standing, it was oddly easy to lift Hazel in my arms, not to let her go yet. Turning, I didn't care who came. It wasn't the cavalry, it wasn't rescue for my spiky sister. That was my task, at which I'd roundly failed; and that being so, what did it matter who came now, later even than I was late?

I could hear breathing, rough and gasping from the fear and effort of that downhill run in the dark. Then a slow hiss of indrawn air at the first sight of the garden, the first touch of wonder; and then a darker shadow in the shadow of the arch, a figure moving in my tracks.