Dead of Light (39 page)

“That is one knackered bird,” he said cheerfully, his eyes in the skies still. I flicked my gaze briefly upward, it was irresistible; and saw the phoenix only a mess of twisted metal now, still glowing faintly against the night.

“No surprise,” my uncle said, “if that snaps off now, and falls. Just another family tragedy, if it happens to fall on you. Nothing I could do to stop it, everyone knows my talent doesn't lie in that direction.”

“Any particular reason, then?” I enquired, trying to sound genuinely curious when actually all I wanted was another minute, another thirty seconds of being alive if I could scrounge that much. God knows why, I wasn't feeling so hot just then, but even the terror clutch of a web seemed a little better than nothing at all, which was the alternative on offer.

“Reason?”

“Why you're doing this. Killing us off. Or is it just because you can?”

“Well. There is a satisfaction, in extending my range of talent. I admit that. Scientific exploration. Like you kids with that sheep, I'm intrigued by my own abilities. But yes, of course I have another reason.”

He paused, and I saw him smile at me; and the smile said,
Just as you have a reason for asking. I know you, Ben, I understand you intimately.
And then he said, “I don't think we need to go into that, though. Do we? Why delay the inevitable? I'm not being cruel, but it's not exactly going to be useful information for you, and I'd sooner just get on with things. The family will be waiting for me; and the longer we're out here, the more they're going to wonder what we were doing...”

And he glanced up at the raddled phoenix, and so did I, again couldn't resist it.

Dimly I saw the soft-shining thing topple from its perch, and start to slide down the steep slated roof of the spire; and he'd worked out the trajectories fairly well, I thought, he wouldn't have to help it much. Just a twitch when it hit the gutter, perhaps, and goodbye, Benedict...

The web tightened then, held me rigid in a way that even Hazel never had. It hurt, more than anything had ever hurt me all my life; I wanted to scream, I needed to scream and couldn't shift my jaw or my throat enough to do that, couldn't breathe or even focus my eyes now to see my death come down.

o0o

Except that there was light suddenly, a blaze of white light engulfing me and an engine racing, and above that another voice screaming for me, screaming my name; and the web was gone as my uncle lost it in the light, and the pain was gone too. And I wasn't thinking to move, I wasn't thinking at all, but it had only been the web that held me upright and with that gone I collapsed, my legs gave way and I fell sideways, and the brutalised metal bird came crashing down to earth so close to me that I felt the fierce chill of it as it thudded into the grass just by my head.

The engine revved and roared, came louder, closer; and there was that voice again, yelling at me.

“Ben, get up, for God's sake...!”

And I knew the voice and the note of the engine both: Carol and the bike, Carol
on
the bike.

Carol in appalling danger, because Uncle Allan had legs and a brain, and shock wouldn't hold him in the bike's light more than a second or two. As soon as he was out of the beam, Carol was dead; and then me too, a moment later...

I pushed myself up onto hands and knees, and then onto my feet, though every muscle I had was shaking; and I dashed my arm across my wet eyes and blinked into the light, saw the bright eye of the bike coming at me across the grass.

And thought,
That won't do it, girl, you'll drive right past him and he'll be in the dark again, and that's us fucked, the pair of us together...

But I didn't have time or breath enough to tell her, even if she could have heard me shouting; and I couldn't even see Allan now, blinded as I was, had no idea where he'd got to.

Rescued and doomed regardless, both at once. Life loves irony. I tried to signal Carol with a wave, to say
Not me, don't think about me, just keep the light on him
; but if she saw she didn't understand. She was there instead, right by me on the bike, and I didn't have the strength even to run from her, to hope — vain hope — that he would let her go and just come after me.

It was all I could do to swing a leg across the bulk of the bike behind her, to slump into the queen seat and grab at her slim body for balance, to stop me toppling right over and off the other side.

“Hang on!” she called, her voice high and tight as the bike carried us away.

She wanted to get us around the great bulk of the transept, I guessed, and out of his line of sight; and there'd never be time to do that. Again I couldn't help looking round, expecting only to see my uncle's shadow dark and deadly behind us; and yes, there he was, but far too clearly for my dizzy mind to comprehend.

He was a silhouette trapped in light, stranded and alone; they were twin beams that had caught him now, twin points of brightness jouncing right at him and he was helpless in their glare. Gone
tharn
, perhaps, with the double shock of all this. I was kind of tharny myself, truth to tell; took me too long to click that it was the jeep that had him now, that Carol wasn't saving me alone.

Longer still to click that the jeep wasn't just doing a holding action, keeping Uncle Allan in its light, keeping his talent quelled until we'd made it away from there.

Didn't click altogether till I saw those headlights one on either side of Allan's shadow and coming hard now, and him trying to dive aside too late, far too late...

o0o

Not possible, with the roar of the bike beneath me and the roar of the jeep behind me, but I still swear that I heard it, the abrupt thudding sound and then the softer, wetter noises as the jeep's tyres ploughed over my uncle's body.

o0o

And then we were round the transept, and the massive church was a line of dark, fast eclipsing what I could see; and for a little we were alone then, Carol and me, until we were washed with light again as the jeep came round after us.

How much Carol had seen or guessed — or heard — I couldn't tell; but she wasn't trying to escape any more, she'd slowed right down, so that the jeep could draw up alongside.

And that was the last terrible shock of a terrible evening, because I looked across and all I could see was that I still hadn't got it right, still hadn't got my head around it.

Jamie
, I'd thought at the instant of contact.
Jamie's cottoned on, and he's done tonight what he couldn't do last night. Stranger is one thing, uncle is something else; and that's been the trigger, he's taken revenge for Marty...

Wrong again, Ben boy. Not Jamie, not at all.

Jamie was sitting over on the passenger side, hanging on tight, his face tense and dreadful.

Laura was driving the jeep.

There was a police car parked outside the main doors to the hospital, brightly white in sunlight.

That wouldn't have worried me, only that because I noticed it I noticed also the car parked beside it, a chunky 4 x 4. That I recognised. I'd seen it around town a few times this last year, and seen it again last night, at the roadblock where I'd been turned back. Looked like Cousin Conor was on guard duty again, the police permitted a presence only as a sop to the collective civic ego.

What the limits of Conor's duties might be, I wasn't certain; but best to avoid him, whatever. I didn't want to get into an argument this morning, let alone a fight.

So I didn't go in, I went around.

o0o

Laura had had to shunt a Merc aside before she could get off the grass last night. She'd picked up a couple more dents to the jeep's off wing and some long scratches on the paintwork, done rather more damage to the Merc.

No trouble weaving a bike through the gaps that blocked a car; Carol and I had been down on the road already, waiting for them. I'd been watching the side door of the church, and only as the jeep came down to join us had the first curiosity been shown from inside: shadows in the doorway followed by the people who made them, first looking and then tentatively stepping out, their voices distantly calling.

Carol had driven away, hurrying no longer, only wanting to keep that sensible distance. Laura had followed, and we Macallans had been nothing but passengers in the girls' hands, which had felt as strange as anything that had happened all night.

o0o

As the church had a cinder path, so the hospital had a flagstone path that tracked all around the irregular outline of its main building.

After last night, my superstitious soul couldn't decide which way to walk. Widdershins had brought both doom and rescue; was that ill luck or the other thing? Or did it just turn your fate around, so that only if you went in badly could you come out well?

I dithered shamefully, disgracefully and in the end went deasil, simply because that was the shorter route to where I wanted to be.

Compromise, it's all compromise between faith and pragmatism.

Rhythm, Jacko would say. Oscillations.

o0o

Carol had driven a while, five or ten minutes, without reference to me or to those who followed us. Once I'd looked back, seen the jeep, seen nothing else behind; then I'd stopped worrying. We'd got Jamie with us anyway, if the family did come after. He could play hostage or hero, depending.

Then Carol had pulled into the kerb. Laura had drawn up beside us, looking a question; Carol had said, “I want to go home. Can Jamie get us through that?”

Her hand had lifted to point, and I'd seen another road-bridge up ahead, and another roadblock just this side of it. Here they'd set a minibus across the carriageway, that burned with a pale light. Carol lived in a village that grew closer every year, but still had a couple of miles' separation from the town; she must have been lucky — or the other thing — with her bus in that night, just getting through before the road was closed.

We'd all looked at Jamie; he'd nodded. “If it hasn't been set there to stop us,” he'd said, his voice harsh and strained, ready to snap.

“I don't think so,” Laura had said. “They wouldn't have had the time, even if they knew where we were going.”

“Well. Let's see, then,” though he'd sounded far from ready.

The jeep had taken the lead, slowly down the hill to the burning bus. Figures had moved out in front of it, one raising his hand to halt us; but I'd seen the hand falter in its determination and then drop quickly down to his side again, as he'd recognised the jeep.

I'd recognised him also. Cousin Marlon, fat and forty, this probably the most responsibility he'd ever been given in his life.

“Jamie, hullo, lad. What are you up to, then, sentry-go?”

A shake of the head, and no matter how tight-wound he was, Jamie's brain had still been briskly functional. “Dad says you might as well pack up, nobody's moving tonight. Clear this off the road,” with a casual wave, “and go home, okay?”

“Okay, terrific. Thanks, Jamie.” Marlon had almost saluted, before he'd turned to his shadowy companions with expansive gestures and hoarse commands.

We hadn't waited for them to haul the bus out of the way. Jamie had yelled at Marlon to kill the flames, and then Laura had just bumped two wheels of the jeep up onto the kerb and edged past with us trailing. I'd seen Laura hunch her shoulder up to shield her face a little, as she passed; when it was our turn the ice-burn of it had stretched my skin dry and tight in a moment, while the stink had caught like barbs at my throat and lungs.

But then we'd been through, we'd been free and clear and Laura had already been accelerating away down the road, so that we'd had to race to overtake, to lead them to Carol's.

It wasn't the thrill of speed, I'd thought, or the wind in her face that had had Carol whooping suddenly into the sky; it was only the knowledge that we were driving into another country now, a brave new world with only two Macallans in it.

o0o

The private rooms in the hospital were all on a single side-ward, branching off the main corridor. I knew them well from a couple of stays in my childhood, once when I'd had my appendix out and again when I'd broken my leg, trying to follow my sister and our cousins on a climb up the side of a quarry. I'd slipped and fallen, and what I remembered most — better even than the pain of it, or Marty bending over me to ask about the pain, more curious than concerned — was the sound of my sister's mocking laughter, coming down to me from high above.

It was a stray thought that struck me now, that all my family's talents were destructive. Not one of them had any gift of healing.

Shaking that out of my head — too harsh a judgement on myself, that was, with the sun on my back and all my skin alive to it, blood singing — I turned my mind back to hospital, to private rooms; and particularly to the rooms on the south side of the corridor, with their french windows wide enough to wheel a bed outside on sunny days. Always those rooms my family had, my mind remembered. Not only my own stays, but paying duty visits also to sick cousins, always the bright rooms and the wide windows...

o0o

Carol had had to hire in a local teenager to babysit her son, while she came to town to rescue me. We'd found Tina doing what was classic, snuggling up on the sofa with a boyfriend, a can of lager between them and the telly on. Nice thing was, she'd been utterly unembarrassed about it, though they'd both been rendered monosyllabic by the influx of so many of us where they'd only been expecting Carol. The only smiles had come when Carol had discovered she'd got no money to pay Tina, and she'd had to touch each of us in turn, coming round to Jamie at the last.

We'd hustled the kids out after that, not hard to do. What had been hardest was the minute after the door had closed behind them, when we'd all been facing each other in the living-room: staring from face to face, seeing our own tense exhaustion mirrored in one another, monosyllabic ourselves now, confronted seemingly by something too big to talk about.