Resurrection Man (14 page)

"What! Someone broke through the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak and penetrated the Sanctum Sanctorum! It must have been Baron Mordo!"

Dante laughed. "Or the Dread Dormammu!" Slowly his smile faded. "I can't imagine what anyone would want from my apartment. I don't even have a turntable."

Jet shrugged. "A maniac with a thirst for ugly white furniture, perhaps."

"I've never heard Laura sound so worried before. She probably said a prayer over my lock or something."

Jet said, "It's coincidence, no doubt."

"What is?"

Jet glanced at Dante, shaggy black eyebrows raised. "Someone breaking into your apartment the exact same night you discover your own dead body."

Dante stared bleakly into the fire. "Well, shit."

Time passed. Dante poured out the shot of whisky he had been promising himself all day, and another for Jet. Dante detested the way lesser Scotches blew up like firecrackers in his mouth; but the Glenlivet sank smoothly back to detonate like a depth charge deep in his chest, sending ripples washing through his whole body.

"Hm—good." Jet shivered and grinned, looking into his glass. "You know how I got the name 'Jet'? Short for 'jetsam.' Something tossed up by the river. Father's idea, of course. Something salvaged from the rushes."

"It could have been worse," Dante pointed out. "They could have named you Moses."

His foster-brother laughed.

Dante rubbed his temples. With his flaring eyebrows, it made him look like a weary Satan. "Jet, I have no damn idea what to do next."

"Let us consider." Putting down his whisky, Jet steepled his fingers and pursed his lips, looking for all the world like a spidery Sherlock Holmes, his cheek marked with a lascar's tattoo for undercover work in an opium den. "Have we hit upon a method for angeling yet?"

"We?" Dante regarded Jet unenthusiastically. "Yes, I suppose 'we' have."

"In what does it consist?"

"Carefully identifying the most horrifying course of action and then taking it," Dante said morosely. "Like playing leapfrog with porcupines, or bobbing for apples in a vat of acid."

"Dating Amalia Jensen."

"Shut up."

Jet smirked. "And what have you got to work with? Things, I mean, not ideas."

"What?"

"Like the mirror in your bureau. Places with magic in them."

"Oh." Dante nodded. "Uh, okay. Pendleton's ring. His thumb bone. The willow tree. The bureau mirror. The lure."

"Anything else?"

"Not that I—Oh. Gray's
Anatomy
," Dante said slowly. (His father's voice: "The autopsy is the third movement of a sonata: the body, the living, the body reconsidered.")

Jet looked at him sharply. "You're thinking again. Good. Anything else?"

"Grandfather Clock, I suppose. But that's different."

"Is it? Why?"

"It isn't horrible," Dante said. "I don't know. It's just different. Closer... closer to the center of things."

He bared his teeth around another shot of whisky, felt it slide down his throat like smoke, drifting into his stomach and lungs and into his blood, billowing through the chambers of his beating heart, loosening him inside.

The angel in his belly stirred.

Jet's father would have sat in this parlor before the fire, Dante thought. Pendleton too would have had his life sliced into sections one second long by Grandfather Clock, that meticulous pathologist; each second a reflection mounted on the clock's glass casement for study, as on a slide.

It was obvious that he must have drowned: the ring and the thumb bone were clear evidence of that. Pendleton's living, the flow and flux of it, was lost forever when his lungs filled with river water. But the facts, the body reconsidered: Was it possible Dante might have enough of these to discover Pendleton's story? Reconstruct it, as a paleontologist could reconstruct the lifestyle of a prehistoric man from a single jaw or a couple of teeth?

"We know some things about magic in general," Jet said. "Ritual: ritual is good."

"There isn't exactly a liturgy for this."

"Not yet." Jet grinned. "You'll think of something. But a certain solemnity, a certain privacy... Where would the best place be? The boathouse?"

"Not on my life," Dante said.

"What's wrong with it? It's isolated, it's big enough. It has a little extra numen from the autopsy, I should think."

"It's also cold and damp," Dante said. "I don't intend to sit around freezing my ass off. I need my concentration," he added, with all the dignity he could muster.

Jet acquiesced. "Okay, how about your room? On the bureau, in front of the mirror."

A serpent of dread slid down Dante's spine. He sighed. "Yeah, that's the place."

Jet glanced at Grandfather Clock. "We can just manage to start by midnight, if we hustle."

"Oh God, Jet, can't I at least take a nap? My eyes keep crossing and my hands won't stop shaking."

Jet shook his head. "You want to see visions, remember? That's why the Indians used to fast and go without sleep until the gods sent them dreams. Come to think of it, we shouldn't have let you eat any dinner."

Dante whimpered.

He buried his head in his hands, and let sleep wash over him for one delicious moment before regretfully opening his eyes. "I won't let you down."

"I know."

"You must think I... Well, who the hell knows what you think? But I won't let you down."

"I know."

He found Jet looking at him with calm certainty. "I know. I would die for you, if I had to. You would die for me."

Dante drained the last of his whisky. "I may yet have that opportunity."

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later he sat before the bureau in his room, his hands curled around a mug of hot willow-bark tea.

It was nearly midnight and very dark. The only light came from a single emergency candle Jet had filched from the kitchen and set at the base of the mirror. Arranged before Dante on the bureau like surgical implements were Pendleton's ring and thumb bone, the lure, Gray's
Anatomy
, and Dr. Ratkay's second largest scalpel. Even in plain daylight it terrified Dante to touch any of these objects. In the candle's dim flicker their outlines grew shadowy, and dread poured from them.

Grown-up secrets.

Unclean.

What they found out behind the barn. What waited in his belly. Ann-Marie Bissell, who ran off to the City when she was twelve years old. Duane: a little boy in a hot room, bedsprings creaking. His uncle's hand.

Death to touch. Death to know.

Dante's face in the mirror was pale and mottled. He tried to calm himself, but his chest was banded in iron and he could barely breathe.

A spider crawled out of the candleflame and scuttled into the shadows.

Dante yelled. The fear was like having a syringe of ice water plunged into his heart. For an endless instant he went completely numb.

Am I dead?

Am I dead?

He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Shh," Jet murmured. "Shh, Dante. It's okay. It's all right. We knew it was going to be like this."

"We?" Dante hissed savagely. "Who the fuck are we?" He reached out impulsively and jammed Pendleton's ring on his wedding finger. It fit.

Something scuttled over the back of his left hand.

A shudder went through Dante's body like a spear. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists until the trembling passed.

Some time later he remembered to breathe. The fumes from the willow-bark tea were bitter as regret.

In his mind's eye Dante saw the Skinned Man on the cover of Gray's Anatomy. The Skinned Man had nothing anymore. No life, no love, no hope, no regret—just a body. Dismantled man.

Dante groped in the shadows for Pendleton's thumb bone. He found it, held it for a long moment, and then, prompted by something he dared not examine, he dropped it into his mug of tea.

Let it steep.

He heard a sharp hiss of indrawn breath from Jet. "Give me your hand," Dante croaked, his voice throttled in his cramping throat.

Jet's hand left his shoulder. "What?"

Dante held up the scalpel. "It's your story, damn you. Give me your hand!"

Slowly Jet extended his right hand. It was shaking. Good! Let the bastard sweat a little. Quickly Dante drew the scalpel across Jet's palm, a shallow cut. Blood beaded up along the incision. Dante tilted Jet's hand, and three red drops spilled into the tea.

Dante put the scalpel down. "We're ready to start," he said.

A first long sip of Pendleton, to get his subtle flavors. Instinctively, Dante adopted his father's clinical persona, stepping into it like a surgical gown. It fit perfectly. Though he had never chosen to wear it, it must have been there inside him always, patiently waiting until he chose to draw it on.

So then: Pendleton's flavor as it rolled across the tongue. Salt and bitter both, but very little sweet. It had been the salt Sophie craved, the sharp tang of him. Tasting him again, as if through Aunt Sophie's lips, Dante noted a resemblance, stronger in her tasting than in his, between Pendleton and her father. But Dante's grandfather (the one to whom he owed his flaring eyebrows) had been a jokey, a wise man, a magician born too soon to flower. What he loved was the wonder of his audience, its delight. For Pendleton there was a thinner savor: the thrill of conquest, of fooling people. He was a man of averages, of calculated risk.

Dante sat with eyes closed, Pendleton's ring on one hand and the other lying on the
Anatomy
as if it were a book of necromancer's spells. He took another sip of bitter water, steeped with willow bark and a human thumb. Blasphemy soaked into him like oil into dry wood. One part of Dante, cowering in horror behind his father's impassive, surgical mask, felt as damned as the first angel fallen. What madness had taken him, to turn his back on grace and plunge into the dark?

But Dante's time was short and his need great. His sharp steel intelligence flashed and bit into his family, peeling back its skin, looking always for Pendleton's story, following its course as he might note the progress of a cancer. All his life he had left certain silences unbroken, ignored certain cuts and bruises in his family's flesh. Now the things he had trained himself not to see were what he needed to examine. His own fear was his guide, fear of secrets and things best left unseen. Dread had closed like scar tissue over the wounds in his family, sealing them.

Where he found it, he cut.

F
OR EXTREME ILLNESSES EXTREME TREATMENTS ARE MOST FITTING.
   —H
IPPOCRATES

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Jet had been watching Dante for what seemed like ages. From time to time, lost in his strange angel's world, Dante would whisper unintelligibly, like a man talking in his sleep. Sometimes his eyes were closed. Other times they opened wide, staring into the candle- flame or gazing at things hidden deep within the mirror. Different expressions haunted Dante's face: fear, most often; sometimes anger, or bitter grief, or unhealthy curiosity. Occasionally his devilish eyebrows winged upwards in astonishment. At least once he laughed, making Jet jump like a startled cat.

For over an hour Dante had nursed his cup of tea, but now, whether he had sipped it all away, or followed some inscrutable impulse, he set the mug down, slowly as a blind man, and groped across the bureau until his fingers touched the fishing lure.