by Sean Stewart
...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.
But President Kennedy was said to favor a return to good old Yankee know-how. He wanted a monorail grid, an orbital satellite, or maybe the creation of a government-directed research effort to capitalize on the new superconducting ceramics coming out of M.I.T.'s Materials Tech Division.
In November of that year Aunt Sophie's coins foretold a harsh winter.
Dante was breezing through Grade 5. It had been almost two years since he had last felt the angel in him stir and flex its wings. When he thought of magic, he thought of Dr. Strange and the Children's Rescue Society and I Dream of Jeannie.
The river at the bottom of the garden rarely froze before Christmas, but just as Aunt Sophie had predicted, November ended with two weeks of hard cold. By the first of December ice stretched almost to the middle of the channel.
Jet always said it was Dante who made the dare. Certainly it was Dante who left Sarah watching Gilligan's Island under strict orders not to leave the parlor. The boys snuck down to the river and it was Jet who went first, walking with his customary strange certainty, seven steps out onto the frozen surface and seven steps back.
Then it was Dante's turn.
It was half past four, but already the sun had slipped below the edge of the river valley. The air was as dim and heavy as Aunt Sophie's leaded crystal. Dante's breath smoked in the cold. Jet's didn't.
Dante took a step out onto the ice. Near the bank it was white like frost, but over the channel it was the same murky blue as the sky. He walked out a little farther, trying to step in Jet's bootprints, knowing Jet's instincts would be better than his.
On his fifth step, the ice creaked with a sound like wooden floorboards, only crisper. Dante stopped. Smoke curled from his mouth. (He imagined a winter palace, lit with candles of ice that threw off cold blue light and coils of white vapor.)
On his sixth step he felt the ice shiver under his feet. The creaking was louder. (The light would come from the souls of little boys, one trapped inside each icicle. When a candle burned down to nothing, the boy inside would be gone forever.)
Here the bank dropped sharply to a deep channel. If he felt the ice start to go he would have to throw himself back to the bank. If he went through he might get lucky and be able to touch bottom.
The ice groaned and shuddered underfoot.
Carefully Dante turned his head.
"You can back out," Jet said. The butterfly clung to his pale face. It could have been resting on a scrawny snowman with coal-black eyes.
Jet knew Dante was going to go through: suddenly this was very clear to both of them. He had led Dante out to the exact place where he would fall in and die. Dante would drown and Jet would have everything to himself: Dante's house, Dante's parents, Dante's room and comic books and chemistry set and toboggan. It was so obvious, Dante wondered why he had never seen it before: Jet wanted him to die.
His left foot went through as he tried to turn around. He lurched back. Another plate of ice gave beneath his thigh. He yelled and twisted onto his front. More ice gave way. He was through to his hips, lying on his chest with his hands splayed out, reaching for the bank.
Jet turned and ran.
Dante screamed and clawed the ice, trying to drag himself up, but there was nothing to grab and his legs were heavy as iron. His muscles cramped in the unbelievable cold and his legs were two iron posts tied to his waist, pulling him into the black water. He had always imagined the river was still when the ice closed over it, but the current was murderous, dragging at his useless legs.
He was going to drown. They would pull his white body out of the river and his father would weep as he sliced him open.
And then Jet was flying down the riverbank, great stumbling strides, dragging an oar he must have pulled from the boathouse. Dante grabbed the wide flat blade and Jet, lying with his stomach on the ice, pulled with all his strength. Dante wriggled forward like a fish, working his hips back onto the ice, then his thighs, then churning and splashing to shore.
Shivering and crying uncontrollably, he let Jet lead him up to the house. Mother, taking in his sniffles and his waterlogged clothes in a glance, sent him off to the bathtub, tight-lipped with fury. All the time he lay in the tub he could hear her hammering away at Jet, but Jet never said whose idea it had been to go out on the river.
"'Of all the animals, the Boy is the most unmanageable,'" Father said at the dinner table that night. He glanced approvingly at Jet. "Good thought, to fetch that oar. If you'd reached out for my silly son here with your hand, you'd have gone in yourself. It happened six or seven years ago over in Millerton: five people drowned one after another, each one trying to pull the last one out. But for once, the fool seems to have profited from the wise man, Cato notwithstanding. I'm surprised you thought of the oar in time."
"It was easy," Jet said. He shot Dante a look, half-mocking, half-merry. "I knew he was going to fall in."
From that moment, Dante knew he hadn't imagined the hunger in Jet's eyes as he fell through the ice. Jet had saved his life, that was true. But as the years went by, time only added to Dante's belief that a part of Jet was always watching him, waiting for him to die.
* * *
They dared one another often.
Dante dared Jet to jump from the big willow on Three Hawk Island straight into the river; dared him to pinch the latest X-Men from Percy's Store; dared him to eat Aunt Sophie's schnitzel after covering it in chocolate sauce (which he did), and dared him to sneak downstairs after the grown-ups were asleep, take the tall bottle of Glenlivet from the liquor cabinet, and drink a brandy snifter full of it in under five minutes, which he also did, with his eyes watering in pain and his thin body racked with suppressed coughs.
In turn, Jet dared Dante to steal one of Aunt Sophie's coins, to walk widdershins around the Pentecostal church by the school, and, in the aftermath of the Glenlivet episode, to smoke Father's pipe.
Only Dante's pride kept him from funking on this one. Father kept his pipes in a mug on top of his desk; also dangling from the edge of the mug, like an insect crawling from its depths, was the old fishing lure that only Dante knew was one of the three magic things in the house. (The others were Grandfather Clock and the mirror on Dante's bureau, where many years later Jet would force him to look at his own dead body.)
The desk was scary enough without the lure. Dr. Ratkay kept a skull on it, for starters; to keep him humble, he said. Jet had
once dared Dante to put his fingers through its eyeholes.
Beside the skull sat the old leather scalpel case. It was just like the velvet-lined box Aunt Sophie kept the family silver in. Four knives and four pairs of surgical scissors waited inside, gleaming against the red velvet interior. One scalpel in particular, the second largest, held a special horror for Dante: his father always brought it with him when he came into Dante's dreams.
But at some level Dante knew the skull was only polished bone, the scalpels sharpened steel; each wrapped in coils of his own fear. He knew that. Even the dreaded Gray's Anatomy wouldn't hurt him if he didn't open the pages, or meet the hollow eyes of the Skinned Man on its cover.
The lure was different. It had three segments, like a steel wasp: a small rounded head, a teardrop thorax, and a curving tail. Thin barbed hooks dangled from it like legs and it held its own madness, its own venomous sting.
Goaded on by Jet's needling, Dante had finally snatched a pipe from the mug, keeping his hand well away from the lure. He lit the pipe with trembling fingers, inhaled and then hacked desperately around the hand Jet had clapped over his mouth to quiet him. It was no good: the alarm had been raised, and they couldn't disguise the smell before Father marched downstairs to administer what turned out to be the last spanking Dante ever got.
Dante never touched the pipe again, but it wasn't the fear of a whipping that kept him away, or the choking memory of the smoke. It was the horrible presence of the lure, crawling like a wasp from between the pipes.
* * *
Dante had been unable to get the lure out of his mind for some time before the Thanksgiving visit that brought him home to discover his own dead body. For weeks he had seen it every night as sleep welled up and set his mind drifting. It winked and glittered dimly before him as if twisting through dark water, and he followed it into deeps of dreaming....
And so like a fool, never imagining it would lead to finding his own dead body less than twenty-four hours later, he picked it up at last. He knew it was madness, but he was tired of being afraid, tired of the sight of the lure in his dreams every night, glinting and glimmering. Fishing with it by day, he reasoned, would be like flipping on the bedroom light to prove there were no monsters crouching underneath the bed.
So easily it hooked him.
He took off from the lab a day early and drove home on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. In the gray dark before the next dawn, heart hammering, he unhooked the lure from the pipe mug on his father's desk and slipped outside into a cold morning.
When the hook caught his hand on the first cast, he should have taken the hint. He should never have sucked his finger and swore and sent the lure spinning into the river with a smear of his red blood on it.
The lure gleamed and guttered in a river dark as sleep; guttered and gleamed like a cold steel candleflame. A doomed pike snapped it up.
After a hard fight Dante landed the brute. Scooping it into a net, he got a firm grip on its tail and slammed its head into the concrete piling at the end of the dock. The pike stiffened. Shudders raced along its body.
Dante closed his eyes.
He slammed the fish into the piling again. It arched, more slowly this time. Tiny shudders ran along its back. It lay still.
Dante shivered. His hands were cold and slimy, and stank when he blew on them. It was only a fish, he told himself. An old fat river pike, two and a half feet long. Sewage-colored. He picked it up by the tail. Water dripped from its mouth, and a little blood, spotting the dock. Dante walked back to the filleting table by the boathouse.
(And the exact slimy feel and the precise dank stink of this fish rushed over his senses and filled him up with echoes of hundreds of other fish he had caught here, a lifetime of jiggering hooks out of their stiff lips, of avoiding their accusing eyes.)
Dante caught his breath.
Holding the pike upside down, he picked up a knife and started cleaning it. Pike scales showered onto the table, fingernail-sized, fan-shaped. Dante remembered his father with a pocket magnifying glass, showing him how you could count scale-rings to tell how old a fish was, as if it were a tree.
"Every part of the cadaver is instructive," Dante muttered. "As Father used to say." He wondered what he would find.
A broad flat light was spreading in the sky.
Nothing. He wouldn't find anything.
He made a long incision along the pike's back, following the spine. The mottled skin split, showing transparent flesh below. Next, two perpendicular cuts just below the head, one on each side of the backbone. Then slowly he peeled the flesh back, digging delicately at any clinging meat to expose the spinal column and the ribs.
Father would be proud.
Flipping the fish over, Dante cut off the fins and slit its belly open. The viscera slid out in a pool of blood. Carefully Dante dissected the bladder, liver, heart.
Inside the stomach, a clutch of shapeless half-digested minnows, the remnants of two small perch, and a curiosity: another pike, a little one half the length of his hand, and so fresh he could have cleaned and served it too. It couldn't have been swallowed more than an hour before Dante had avenged its murder.
Delicately Dante took out the smaller fish, and began a second autopsy.
In its belly he found a square golden ring. It could have been a man's thick wedding band, though Dante could not remember having seen a square ring before. With the tip of his knife he pulled it clear of the viscera and studied it in the broadening daylight.
Aunt Sophie was in the kitchen, brewing a cup of willow-bark tea, when Dante returned to the house. When he showed her the ring she screamed and fainted. Later, when Mother brought her around, Aunt Sophie swore and coughed and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, but she would not speak to Dante, or look at the strange square ring.
* * *
At dinner they pretended nothing had happened. The silences were excruciating. For Dante it was like being a child again, fidgeting while grown-up secrets filled the air.
At first it looked like Sophie wouldn't be able to cook, after the shock Dante had unwittingly given her, but after a short rest upstairs—they could hear the clink and clatter of her coins—she decided to return to the kitchen, and prowled it, scowling, for the rest of the afternoon, vengefully slicing vegetables and hammering her meat into mute submission.
Beef broth came first, salty and black as blood. Countless afternoons Dante had helped her make it, chopping vegetables and fussing with seasoning, until at four o'clock she would scoop up the bones in her big wooden ladle and fish out the marrow for them to spread on toast and eat. For a proper broth all the vegetables came out just before serving, making two tureens: one black bouillon with noodles in it, the other beef-stained potatoes and onions and carrots, and peppers slathered with so much horseradish that eating them was like having your sinuses dosed with ammonia.
Jet scooped potatoes onto his plate. "So they shot a minotaur in Westwood Heights yesterday."
"Westwood Heights!" The little worry lines in Mother's white forehead deepened and she couldn't help glancing at Dante. "I thought those things only haunted The Scrubs, or maybe Peter Street."
"Extra, Extra: Minotaurs manifest outside the slums." Jet shrugged. "The magic's rising all the time. Who knows what brought it on—fear of Volvos? I don't know. I shot some pictures for the paper."
"Maybe the Mammon Men have oracled a stock crash coming," Sarah suggested. "How many people did it get?"
Jet helped himself to some peppers and horseradish. "One family and a paperboy, plus two more injured. It was a slasher: standard dark figure with a knife. When they shot it, it was wearing the face of its last victim."
Dante shuddered, not sure whether Jet meant the minotaur had flayed one of the people it had killed and made a mask of the skin, or whether, governed by the strange dream-logic that drove such manifestations, the monster always appeared as its victim's twin. Both possibilities seemed equally horrible.
"But still. You would n
ever have seen that five years ago." Mother's small head shook in crisp disapproval. Dante noticed that her gorgeous hair, once red as fire, was now embering into ashes. Guiltily he wondered when that had happened, and why he hadn't noticed until now.
"Oh, it's clearly getting worse, there's no doubt about that," Father said, filling Mother's wineglass with a nice French white from the mid-eighties. "I remember when we first started hearing of this sort of thing—at the end of the War, when they liberated the concentration camps."
"The Golem of Treblinka," Jet said.
Father filled his glass. "There was one at Dachau too: killed two hundred prisoners and four guards, and they never shot it down." He moved around the table, pouring for Sarah and Aunt Sophie. "Now, what's needed is a scientist with some aptitude for this angel business to make a thorough study of the phenomenon." He paused, standing over Dante's shoulder. "There are tremendous contributions to be made. The man who learns enough to banish these manifestations, or better still stop their formation, will be the Pasteur or the Fleming of his time." He emptied the bottle deliberately into Dante's glass.
"Hurrah for that unknown savior," Dante said.
Mother looked at Dante sharply, her hand hovering over a dish of honey-ginger carrots. "Don't you go looking for trouble."
Father returned to his place at the head of the table. " 'But the bravest surely are those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it'—Thucydides."
"And after all, what are his alternatives?" Jet mused, ignoring Dante's glare. "He certainly doesn't apply himself to anything else— Was it not Hippocrates who said, 'Idleness and lack of occupation tend—nay, are dragged!—towards evil!' "
Dr. Ratkay scowled.
Sarah ladled black broth into her bowl. "Parody is the sincerest form of flattery," she observed, smirking at her father.
Aunt Sophie snorted over her wine, her smoke-blue eyes angry, her old hand trembling around the stem of her glass. "Dante get hurt playing Angel? Pfeh! Dante couldn't make a living reading tea leaves."