There were rogue doctors too, inevitably: that ‘dangerous’ tag wasn’t too off-target, in some cases. Others were terrific, working Medicall shifts on top of a day-job for the very best of reasons, but drivers couldn’t pick and choose. Turn up good and early and you might strike lucky, as I did on good days, having a favourite doctor ask for me specially. Turn up in the very nick of time, like tonight, and luck just wasn’t a feature.
I was last in, and there was just the one doctor waiting for me, in a bad mood already with a hefty list of calls to make down the dodgy end of town. I’d driven this guy before, and spending six hours cooped up with him in the closest of quarters was some considerable distance from my definition of a good time. I sighed inwardly, as I collected keys from the desk controller. It was going to be a long night.
His name was Devereux, Doctor Devereux to me and my kind, we common drivers; and if we existed on a lower social level than his own good self, then his patients for the night were so far beneath him he could barely be bothered to feel contempt for them.
“Scum of the earth,” he said, as we headed downhill towards the first of the night’s calls. “You can chart it, demographically. The closer you come to the river, the more inbred they are. And the more stupid, the more ugly, the more vicious...”
I nodded vaguely, concentrated on driving. I’d heard it all before. And besides, I had my own experience of inbreeding, and of stupidity and ugliness and viciousness. There wasn’t much he could tell me about it, but neither was I on any safe ground to start an argument.
o0o
We’d been four hours on the road, we’d worked our way through that first list we’d started out with — the good doctor spending an average of three minutes and fifty-five seconds in each house, I was passing the time by counting — and we’d had as many calls again come in on the radio. Normally I brought sandwiches and a can of coke to tide me over, but I’d been too much rushed tonight; and while some doctors were amenable to refreshment breaks — one even bullying me back to his house a couple of times for a chicken curry if we were on top of the work — I wasn’t going to broach the subject with Devereux.
Instead, I decided that the car was going to break down. Not badly, just enough that I’d need to pull into a garage and fiddle under the bonnet, and buy myself a pint of milk and a stottie while I fiddled.
Not yet, though. I’d wait a little longer, and hope that things quieted down a bit.
On the way from one call to the next, trying to find one small cul-de-sac in a dead-end estate that was all dirty concrete and no street-lights, every other window boarded up and not a street-name to be seen, I heard something that was neither the radio nor Devereux’s endless, grumbling voice.
Instantly, automatically, I had the car stopped and my door open, to hear better.
“What?” Devereux demanded. “What is it, why’ve you stopped? This isn’t what we’re looking for...”
No more it was; but suddenly here it came again, somewhere close, a man’s voice screaming in high agony.
That time Devereux heard it too, and was still for a moment; then, “Not our responsibility,” he said, as I should have expected. “Leave it alone, for God’s sake, we’re not the police.”
Ignoring him, I got out of the car — and then I could see, as well as hear. Then I knew. Not my responsibility, no, I’d disinvested; but not well enough, seemingly. At any rate, there was no question of my leaving it alone.
Through an archway under a run of flats, through a short square tunnel came that wailing scream again, and a light that failed as the scream failed: a cold, pale, flickering light, the nightfire that marked all my family but me.
Somewhere through that archway there was a Macallan in desperate trouble, his strength no succour now; and me, I was already moving.
Seven: Total Meltdown
Through the tunnel at a run, heedless and stupid, and what was that Devereux had been saying about inbreeding? ‘Vicious’ I might have argued with, back then at least, but the rest was plain to be seen.
Through the tunnel and into a mugger’s paradise, one of those Sixties housing experiments that went so dreadfully wrong. It was an enclosed court, with blocks of flats three or four storeys high and no grass, only paving underfoot. Just the one way in and out for cars, but several more of those tunnel passageways; and balconies and stair-wells all around, any route you fancied to go under or over or through, and hardly a light to see it by except for the car burning like a torch, like a lantern, like a sign.
No noise, no heat. Nightfire’s no true flame, unless it’s the opposite of that: unless it’s the truest expression of flame and mortal fire is only a clumsy imitation.
Nightfire doesn’t feed on what it burns. Destruction isn’t incidental. Where it touches, damage is cold and slow; the light it throws is blue and thin and telling. Seen once, there’s no mistaking it.
Here was a car burning that way, the metal of it writhing as I watched; and someone of my kin had set it to burn there. That was a given, didn’t need debating.
No one in sight, though, no one at all. There should at least have been faces lining the balconies, peering down. Not all those flats were empty. A fire, and a man’s screams: they should have been irresistible.
But maybe these riverine families weren’t so stupid after all, however inbred they might be. I guessed that the people who lived around here would know nightfire as well as I did and were being as wise as they knew how, keeping behind closed doors and shuttered blinds. If a Macallan was screaming, they truly didn’t want to know.
That’s what it was, no question: the man who set that fire to burn was the same man who’d been tearing the night apart with his howls. This was Jacko’s universal rhythm in action, and inarguable. The light had flared with the scream, searingly bright, striking out through that passageway to find me; and now in the scream’s silence it flickered and guttered, bright enough in here where no light was but no beacon now.
I might have no fire of my own but at least I wasn’t vulnerable here, my blood was worth that much to me. I could walk up to the flaming car, and did; I could and did walk around it, looking to see inside, seeing nothing but fire and distortion; being that close I could and did stumble over the body lying dark on dark paving, lying where no one would see him because they’d all be looking into the light.
It was only logic now, told me that this was a Macallan. All his skin was moving.
o0o
I knelt beside him when kneeling was the last thing I wanted to do, or close to the last. Kissing him would have been bottom, maybe, but any form of getting closer was bad. Kneeling was quite bad enough. It took me near enough to see and to smell what was happening to him, without doing what it was meant for. My eyes searched him desperately, clothes and skin, looking for any giveaway, any clue as to who this was; but seemingly I didn’t know my family well enough. Take their faces away, and I couldn’t tell one cousin from another.
This one, this cousin wasn’t dead yet, and neither was his body dead, though I thought perhaps the two of them were independent now. I thought his body might go on containing life for a while, only that it wouldn’t be his own. I thought giant maggots infested his flesh, because I could see them writhing.
Even in that cold light he looked hot, and when I touched him his skin was baking dry, baking from the inside out and scurvy with salt, where all his moisture was leaving him. Touching him, I felt something buck and swell beneath my fingers, hardening like an egg in a hurry as it grew, as I saw it distend on his arm.
I snatched my hand away, too late ever to forget how that had felt.
Watching, surely doing no more than wait for an inevitable death in the family, it never occurred to me to call for the doctor somewhere in the night behind me. Even if I’d liked the man, if I’d wanted to let him anywhere near any cousin of mine, there was no work for him here. This was talent at work, and way beyond any talent there might be in the medical profession. We might inhabit the sam
e world, but Jacko would say that even the molecules in our bodies marched to a different beat.
I had a body in my arms now, I was hugging a cousin I couldn’t name, although I loathed to touch him. I only watched his face, but there I saw things swell like muscles clenching, and move like internal leeches through his veins.
His eyes were open, watching me; but he was long past screaming now. All the whites of his eyes were black, and God only knew what he was seeing. I didn’t believe it, try though I might, though I did; but still I hoped, I hoped he saw a cousin, he saw family come to hold him at the last.
I couldn’t help it, we’re a sentimental breed. Rod McKuen poetry and big-eyed little kittens, and all that candyfloss crap. It worked, somehow; even for me, even then, it still worked. Went with the territory, I guess. When home is the definition of comfort and family is the only definition of home, emotions need to be as artificial and dishonest as the environment, and they need to feel as real.
And you could see through it, as I had; and you could try to walk away, as I did; and you still wound up taking it all with you. “Seasons in the Sun” could still make me sniffle. And yes, if a man had to die, I still thought he should die with his family around him.
Christ, sometimes I still thought that was what I wanted for myself. Morbidity went with the territory too, especially the territory that I occupied then, that I’d hacked out for myself; I thought about dying all the time. And when I thought about doing it slowly and in a bed, it was family I imagined being there with me. Faces in the gloom, Jamie and Uncle Allan. They were the ones I wanted. Not my parents, so much: they could be there if they chose, but I wouldn’t send for them. Favourite uncle and favourite cousin had always been my choice, and still was.
And Laura, of course. Family, right? Favourite uncle, favourite cousin, wife. That was how I dreamt it, when I allowed myself to dream.
Dreaming’s shit, sometimes.
o0o
Dreaming’s shit, but dying’s worse; and watching someone die, that comes somewhere between the two, I guess. It ain’t good, but it’s got to be better than the other thing, better than doing it yourself. Hasn’t it?
o0o
Couldn’t hold his gaze, not with pale blue irises bulging at me, all but engulfed in sick black; but I didn’t take my eyes from his changing face. I owed him that much, at least, whoever he was; and slowly, slowly I worked it out. All the flesh on him was in motion, heaving and subsiding like mud in a geyser-hole, a little too thick to burst; but his bones were holding their shape, I could see how long his jaw was. And his brown hair chopped short and thinning a little on top, but still thick as a hedge round the sides; and those eyes the clincher, pale blue and unusual. Only one slender side-branch of the family tree had run to eyes like that in this generation, from another tramontane wife. I hadn’t seen Tommy for years, hadn’t spotted him at the funeral or anything; and had surely never thought to see him like this, grotesquely dying by his own thin light.
Tommy was a leg-man, none too bright a flame in my bright family. He was a hod-carrier, taking messages and driving trucks, doing the bog-standard everyday stuff that none the less they wouldn’t trust to anyone not Macallan. He must have had talent of some sort, but I’d no idea what; and one thing for sure, it hadn’t been enough to save his life. The best he could do was set a nightfire burning on a car, to mark where he was and how needful.
Just his bad luck, that the only Macallan who came to check it out was Benedict the renegade, the talentless, the wimp.
o0o
“Take it easy, you, Tommy,” I said, only to let him know that I’d got him placed, at least, that he wasn’t going utterly unremembered.
Not leeches under his skin, no. It wasn’t that. His face bubbled and bubbled, and finally some few of those bubbles did burst. There was a filthy spray across my clean-white-for-driving, let’s-look-smarter-than-the-doctor shirt; and then the real stink of it rising, released now to choke me. All I’d had before was a sniff of putrescence, contained within his skin; now I had it all over me, all his blood turned black and boiling out of him, smelling like something long rotten.
He was surely dead now, though I hadn’t felt his going. That was the only blessing, that he was gone from this rampant decay, though his body was still dreadfully working. He was erupting, inside his clothes; his joints jerked, and I instinctively clung on tighter, not to let his bones dance away from me. But what I held, what I hugged was slimy and stinking, slithering and dead; my virtuous, thrifty dinner came up and spewed all across it, before I could turn my head away. His bad blood on me, my sour vomit on him; fair enough, I suppose. Look at it whichever way you like, I had the better of it. I was the one still breathing, though what I was breathing wasn’t air by any reasonable definition.
After the vomit, hot tears and snot, my own body doing its best to replicate what had spilled from his. I think, at least I hope that some of that was for Tommy, not just for myself: not only a biological response to the bite of bile in my mouth or an early touch of self-pity for the state of me, vilely saturated and my future dreaming well supplied with nightmare stuff to weave from.
The nightfire flickered out, no one now to sustain its burning; and still no one came, no other cousin, none more useful than myself.
I’d have to tell the family by telephone. There’d be the police also, I supposed, at least some token enquiry before the dead weight of my uncles’ displeasure stifled any questions; but the police I could cope with, they wouldn’t trouble me. Telling the family, though, would be something else, something entirely other. They’d have questions, they’d pick my bones with questioning...
Still sniffing, barely holding it one step down from sobbing, I pushed myself finally to my feet, and let the corruption that had been Tommy fall away from me, wetly onto concrete. I wasn’t any too steady on my feet, but I made it across the court to the nearest flat not boarded up, and hammered on the door until I got a response.
They didn’t open it, nothing so foolish. I only heard a hoarse, strained male voice shouting out, “Who is it?”
“Benedict Macallan,” I yelled back, truly thankful for once for all the associations that name carried.
It got me inside, on the instant and no questions asked. Two people there, a man and a woman and both of them bigger than me; but there was terror on their faces as they looked at me, terror mingling with the disgust.
“I need to use your phone,” I said, as mild as I could manage. “And if you could let me have a shower and a change of clothing, that’d be brilliant...”
No chance of better than that, no chance of getting to go home.
Behind me, I heard a querulous voice call, “Driver!” I almost smiled for a moment, kicking the door shut without looking back. Stupid, no doubt: I couldn’t afford to lose this job. But what the hell, this was an emergency. If he made a fuss with the desk controller, I’d see to it that he came out smelling a lot worse than I did. Worse than I did right now, which was really saying something. He was the Christless doctor, after all, and he’d done nothing.
Besides, these good people wouldn’t want him in their flat, while I cleaned up. It was for their sakes I was shutting him out, as much as for my own. After all, we inbreeds had to stick together...
o0o
Taking their mute shrugs for an invitation, I found my way through to their bathroom first, needing to feel clean at least on the outside before I talked to my family. No proper shower, but they did have a length of plastic hose that fitted over the mixer tap at one end and had a shower-head at the other.
I stripped off, dumping my soaked and stinking clothes in the washbasin; then I stood in the bath and rinsed myself off with the water as hot as I could bear it, which was just about as hot as it would come.
Not enough. I poured half a bottle of cheap shampoo over my head and worked it into a vigorous lather to cover every inch of skin, sluiced that away and did it all again with the other half.
The walls here w
ere apparently made of some flimsy cardboard-substitute; even above the noises of the plumbing and the rushing water, I was conscious of tight, murmuring voices in the room next door, then of someone moving around the flat.
Content at last, if not exactly happy — I wouldn’t be happy till I’d soaked for an hour in a better bath than the paddling-pool we had back at the flat, and doused myself with some more powerful eau-de-cologne than I’d ever use from choice, to get the clinging stink of Tommy’s putrefaction out of my nostrils — I dried myself quickly, tied the towel around my waist and opened the bathroom door.
And found a rough pile of clothes on the floor there, waiting for me. Jeans, sweatshirt, jockey shorts and socks. I called my thanks through the closed living-room door, and went back into the bathroom to dress. No surprise that nothing fitted; the man I’d seen wasn’t my shape in any direction. But I could make shift with these, at least until I got home. Better than a towel, and infinitely better than what I’d been wearing before.
A sudden thought took me over to the basin: my wallet was still in the pocket of my trousers. Picking with fastidious fingers, touching the sticky fabric as little as possible, I managed to manoeuvre it out. Checked inside, found a couple of fivers. Not much, but it would have to do. There were coins loose in the pocket also, but I wasn’t fishing for those.
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