Resurrection Man (2 page)

"Does this excite you?" Sarah asked, turning on him. "Have you got some money riding on Dante's death, or are you just an asshole? I'm curious."

Sitting on his bucket by the rowboat, Jet went very still. His eyes were hooded and expressionless; his face was as white as the corpse beside him. "I didn't mean it to be like this."

Sarah's eyebrows rose. "Oh, really? I would have thought this would be perfect, Jet. Don't you just love scaring us shitless?"

Dante got his voice to work on the second try. "It's not his fault, Sarah." Didn't she understand that Jet was dying inside over his part in this? Didn't she know Jet loved Dante like his own breath?

Of course she didn't. Somehow Jet remained a stranger to everyone but him; and this house was only home for him when Dante was there.

Dante swallowed. God, he wished he were braver.

Why couldn't he be like Sarah or Mother or Aunt Sophie? Even Jet wouldn't be such a coward. "Jet just made me look. The body is some kind of angel thing. It grew on my dresser, it wears my face. It's some god damn angel thing and I must have called it up. It's my responsibility." Once again Dante picked up Aunt Sophie's knife. "It's my responsibility."

With a shaking hand Dante cut a line down the skin of his own dead throat, feeling it split beneath his blade.

A spider-crawled out through the crack and scuttled around his neck, dropping out of sight.

Dante fainted.

*   *   *

As he fell he held on to one thought: this was his fault for being wicked, for having used his madness. He had let it out years ago, and now it was back to devour him.

Dante's magic first escaped on a playground when he was six years old. Two henchmen were holding Jet down while Duane the bully kicked him in the side. Jet was flailing and screaming at Dante for help. Dante was crying and helpless, horribly afraid, but Duane and his buddies were Grade Threes. There was nothing he could do.

"Let's p-poke out his eyes," Duane suggested, looking around for a stick.

Something in Dante gave way.

It was the strangest feeling, like a tent peg pulling out, only deep inside. Something coming loose, water rushing, and looking at Duane he smelled a horrible smell, hot and dark and close, and heard a squeak, like a bedspring. He saw Duane lying in the dark with his eyes wide open. Vision spilled through Dante like hot water. His skin crept and shivered and he felt sick to his stomach. "I'll tell," he shouted.

"Oh y-yeah? Tell what?" Duane jeered, flipping blond hair out of his round face.

Creak, creak. Creak, creak. A fan beating in the next room. The heat.
"I'll—I'll tell Uncle you told on him," Dante shouted, not sure what he was saying.

The world stopped.

Dante's words went through Duane like bullets. "I n-never," he whispered.

Creak, creak.
Dante smelt his fear like something cooking. Triumph rushed up in him, a flood of pure power because he hated Duane and now he
had him
, he could thread him like a worm on a hook. "Duane is a bad boy," he sang. "Duaney is a bad boy."

Because there was something, something in the dark room, in the heavy smell. "N-n-no," Duane said. "I d-I-I—" His stammer was back, so bad he couldn't talk. A wet stain crept across the front of his pants.
And Uncle sat beside him, and he closed his eyes, closed them hard,
and suddenly Dante didn't want to touch it anymore, but he couldn't stop seeing Duane's insides, as if he'd slit him open with one of his father's scalpels. Duane's buddies were staring at him, staring at the pee stain on his pants, but he just rocked back and forth, stammering, panic-stricken.

Terrified, Dante shook his head. There were spiders crawling in it. The madness was creeping through him, stinging him inside; his whole body curdled with poison. Frantically he tried to drag Duane's skin back over him.

A heavy weight settled over Duane—over Dante too—
and the dark air was hot and stank, and something stroked his leg, and he cried out.

Duane turned and ran blindly for the school. His buddies exchanged looks and backed away from Dante.

Jet had stopped crying. His black eyes were still wet, the butterfly smeared with mud. Slowly he grinned at Dante, wiping his tear-stained face on the arm of his shirt. "Hey," he said. "Took you long enough."

*   *   *

That night Dante stood for hours before the mirror in his room, staring. From time to time, a spider would slide from between his lips, legs waving, and creep across his face.

He could not scream. He could not move.

How could he have known that a monster crouched inside him?

*   *   *

There was an angel buried in him; that much he figured out. It was terrible and could not be controlled. At six years old he knew it would split his father's head and eat his brains if Dante let it escape. It would tear off his mother's arms and drink her blood. He could never, ever, let it out.

It was impossible to ignore his talents, but it was easy to hide them. Once every two or three years all the kids in school would troop down to see his mom in the nurse's office to get their immunization shots and take their tests: color blindness, vocabulary, spatial manipulations, and the one the kids called the Angel Test. But the Angel Test was little more than a simple psychometry quiz: here's the object; which nurse had it last? We're going to put it behind one of these five screens; which screen is it behind? Easiest thing in the world to fail. Besides, psychometry wasn't one of Dante's strengths.

How could you devise a test for sneaking into someone's soul and freeing the wild animals there?

Some angels foresaw death. What school nurse wanted to hear a vision of her own ending?

Not Dante's mother. Once or twice, administering the Angel Test, she'd given him sharpish looks when maybe he'd gotten a few too many answers wrong. He guessed she was fudging his scores, and he knew that she had looked the other way when Duane's story, or ones like it, came to her ears. She did not want to lose her child to the angel's world of ghosts and visions. That was a comfort to him.

Father was different. He pushed Dante to use his gift—but rationally, for the common good. He thought of magic only as a tool, a potentially interesting new therapy yet to be perfected. He didn't understand about the madness.

He should have. It was Dante's father who taught him about God. "If there is a Deity, the one thing we can feel of Him is his savagery," Dr. Ratkay used to say.

Dante believed him.

"A two-dollar holding clamp shears; three hundred people die in an airplane crash. Are we really expected to believe in so monstrous a Divinity?"

Yes, yes! Dante would think. That's what it's like to be an angel, too. A bully lords it in the playground and an angel spears him like a worm on a hook.

But Father never understood.

Dr: Ratkay was a man of precise and definite tastes. He read only classical philosophers, drank only French wine, and listened only to German composers, except in certain frivolous moods when he might condescend to play a Hungarian—Liszt or Kodaly.

Dr. Ratkay brought his children up as atheists, on moral grounds. "You know what they used to call the grave robbers who sold bits of dead bodies for research?" he would ask. "Resurrection Men, that's what. There's your Christ for you, my children. A Resurrection Man, making pennies off a bag of old bones. 'Neither fear your death's day, nor long for it,' as Martial says. If there is a God, don't give Him the satisfaction. If there is a God, He is more than harps and grace and candlelight.

"God hissed through the vents at Auschwitz," Dante's father used to say.

God creeps on eight thin legs.

Y
OU ARE OBSTINATE. PLIANT, MERRY, MOROSE, ALL AT ONCE.
F
OR ME THERE'S NO LIVING WITH YOU, OR WITHOUT YOU.
  —
M
ARTIAL

CHAPTER
TWO

It was always the two of them. Dante quick and laughing, Dante the lead in the school play, Dante and the girls, Dante, Dante: his smile, golden. His touch, magic.

...And Jet always behind him, thin and dark as a shadow. Watching. Hardly real, the neighbors murmured to one another, glancing at the butterfly on his cheek. Already marked for some strange destiny.

Only Dante was close enough to bully him, needle him, swap comic books, catch him crying at the end of
Charlotte's Web
. They grew up like twins together; to the rest of their little community on the outskirts of the city Jet was insubstantial, but to Dante he was always real enough to touch. He had felt Jet's wiry strength when they wrestled in the grass; tasted Jet's blood when they swore their brotherhood. Jet had saved his life.

Of course that was only fair, after that day on the playground when Dante had lost his soul to save Jet's eyes.

*   *   *

The first time Jet saved his life it was 1969.

Minotaurs were stalking Watts and Harlem in broad daylight. On the bright side, the oracle who had tried to save JFK was taken seriously enough to thwart an assassination attempt on Robert Kennedy. The United States and China, in a rare show of superpower responsibility, had brokered a peaceful settlement to the conflict in Vietnam, though ugly wars still burned in Georgia and Turkmenistan. Five thousand lottery families had settled into Perfect, U.S.A., but they still weren't getting the same kinds of health and productivity stats the Chinese routinely reported from the Permitted City, and the Administration was said to be looking for a different project to restore American prestige. Rumors abounded. Social activists clamored for the allocation of Great Society money to rebuild the Philadelphia slums, or integrate Indian and white cultures in the Great Plains.