Dead of Light

by Chaz Brenchley

  What had changed, what was very strange was to see fear on the faces of my family. It was suppressed, perhaps, they were ashamed and trying to hide it; but it was there, none the less. Not Jamie was frightened, only angry he; and not Allan either, I thought, though he would be cat-cautious till this was resolved, a man careful of his life and health. Uncle James, though, I thought Uncle James was a little frightened, beneath his bluster and his offended pride. On others it was more clearly to be seen: a nervous glitter to their movements, eyes shifting in search of a reassurance they couldn’t find, a fidget in their fingers. Someone was biting his nails, someone else biting his lip. This was hard for them, an insidious and unknown enemy with power that was supposed to be private, for family use only; and they weren’t coming through it too well. No experience, I supposed, they’d never learnt how to handle themselves in a crisis. Never expected to face one, being who they were.

  They were facing one now, right enough: three cousins dead, murder stalking the streets of their own home town with their blood in its nostrils, and it could have been anyone next on the list. No way of telling, nothing to link Marty and Tommy and my sister to predict who might be written down to follow, unless it was simply what Hazel had pointed out herself yesterday morning, that they were none of them the brightest stars in our constellation of talent. Maybe our enemy in the shadows was following a basic strategy here, picking off the weakest first, just to reduce the numbers...

  Watching, I felt suddenly disgusted, a surge of my old loathing for everything my family stood for. Gangsters and cowards, scared of the dark now because someone was doing to them what they’d spent so long doing to other people...

  I turned away, and caught Jamie’s eye in passing. Gave him a hint of a smile, a hint of a wink; if he’d read any of my thoughts on my face, I didn’t want him appropriating them to himself. Jamie had always been a little different, a little better than the herd in my critical judgement, even at its most harsh; today he outshone them by factors of brilliance, a man prepared to be angry along with me rather than fearful with them.

  “I’ll be back,” I murmured. “I’m going upstairs.”

  He nodded, misunderstanding as I’d meant him to. Hazel would be laid out on display up there as Marty had been, look what they’ve done to our girl; but I didn’t need to look. I wasn’t going anywhere near her bedroom. I was more interested in my own.

  o0o

  Others had been up, and were coming down. I waited politely at the foot of the stairs, nodding quiet gratitude when they touched me in turn, in sympathy, and said what a dreadful thing it was. Then I squeezed my way up past the overflow of people standing on the steps for lack of anywhere else to stand, accepting the same from them and thinking it strange, so many of my family touching me and seemingly none of them noticing what their hands were coming into contact with, that tingle in my skin. Like Jamie, I supposed, they had excuse enough; or else simply no standards of comparison. So long since most of them had touched me or talked to me or wanted to be seen anywhere near me, they’d likely forgotten how dead and cold I used to feel, my blood unstirred by magic. Looking at me now they’d see only another Macallan lad, strayed perhaps but properly brought home by grief; and that’s what their other senses would be feeling also, that ripple in the ether that marks out any Macallan lad. Small wonder if none of them remembered that I wasn’t supposed to do that, that I had always been a eunuch among studs...

  On the upstairs landing and blessedly alone at last, even unwatched once I got around the corner from the stairhead and the toilet door, I stopped, took a breath, ran both hands through my hair to hide their trembling — not scared, huh, Benedict? Like fuck, lad. That’s your past in there, and what could be scarier? — and pushed open the door to my bedroom. What had been my bedroom.

  I was half expecting, and I think half hoping, that the room would have been cleared: that everything that was mine would have been packed away or given away, the walls stripped and the cupboards emptied. At least then there would have been nothing to confront.

  I should have known better. I did know better; it had only ever been half a hope, and not really an expectation. My father would have been squeezed, leant on from two directions at once, his two brothers: he’s gone, he’s a traitor, throw it out from Uncle James and no, keep it all; he’s still your son, he’ll come home in time from Uncle Allan. Allan was senior, his words carried far the more weight; and I thought my mother also would have said no. Would have asserted herself, perhaps, even against James in his offended outrage, chin to chin and her frail arms blocking the door, ¡no pasaran!

  Strangest thing was to find my door closed. When I lived here bedroom doors never were, unless we were behind them. Even now, with the house full of people, the door to my parents’ room stood a little ajar; and, yes, so did my sister’s. No secrets now or ever, no privacy for Hazel.

  I turned the handle on my own door, closed but not locked, at least, not that; and then I was inside and closing it again behind me, and oh, this was a trap, it was a time machine. I was sixteen again and hurting, hurting all the time: hating myself, hating my life, hating everyone I was meant to love. Never had got past that here. Even at nineteen pushing twenty, I’d still been sixteen. Still hurting, still hating.

  I’d taken little with me, when I left. A bag of books and tapes scooped almost at random from the shelves; a rucksack stuffed with clothes; nothing else but bad memories and a lifetime’s burden of failure. All else that had been mine was here still, dusty but still fresh as tears, fresh as pain.

  Posters on the walls: camshafts and camiknickers, my mother used to describe my taste in decoration. Sisterless, I’d have had motorbikes up there also; but sisterless I never was, and had never thought to be. So there were cars but no bikes, Bugattis and Porsches and no BMWs. Among the motors were the models, the actresses and the rock stars: some qualified by beauty, some by raunchiness or sheer sex appeal, embarrassingly many simply by the skimpiness of what they were wearing, those snipped from magazines as close to soft porn as I dared to go in a room that I couldn’t lock behind me when I left. Anything I didn’t want to share, I had to carry. Everyone needs secrets, my mother used to say, but you don’t need secret things. Keep your secrets in your head, not in your bedroom.

  I’d made promises and stuck to them, more or less; made only token efforts to conceal those things a mother shouldn’t find. There were often cigarettes or cans of lager in the bottom of the wardrobe, barely hidden by an artfully-fallen jacket; quarter-bottles of vodka and the porn that Jamie passed on to me went classically under the mattress. I never could be sure if my mother snooped or not. If she did, she never challenged me with what she’d uncovered. My father snooped for sure, he made no secret of it; but he wasn’t looking for smuggled contraband, all he wanted was clues to help him understand his wayward son. Alcohol and fags would have been reassurance to him: signs of a youth being properly misspent, my actions speaking — he would have hoped — more truly than my words.

  What real secrets I was coming back to here weren’t in the room at all, only in my memories, where my mother would have hoped to find them. Where I’d spent three years trying to bury them, and never was time more foolishly and uselessly wasted. One otuch of eye or hand on the triggers that surrounded me now and out they came, toothed and eager, breaking through what thin crusts I’d coated over them...

  o0o

  My books: not as I’d left them, those that I’d left behind. Not tumbled across the carpet or tossed onto the bed. Nor put back the way they were before, in categories and alphabetical order; only shelved at random, as my mother must have picked them up. Even at random, though, and even with the curtains drawn against the light to make it hard to read titles, I knew them all by sight. And it seemed to me they spoke too loudly, of the boy I’d been back then. I’d left all my juvenilia, of course, the Enid Blytons and The Wind in the Willows and Biggles and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Most of the science fiction had been left also, dog-e
ared paperbacks bought second-hand and read late into the night, swapped with Jamie and read again when they came back to me. No fantasy, nor any horror: we’d never needed those.

  And scattered through the fiction was the hard science, physics and genetics and biology, mostly stolen from school or from the library during a few cruel months as I struggled to become Uncle Allan in a hurry, to understand about my family’s talent and my own clear lack of it. I’d made no headway, no surprise; and those had been the books I’d been most glad to leave behind me.

  o0o

  My tapes: again stacked neatly and not in any order, not as I’d ever left them. And the headphones on the shelf beside, with its cable neatly coiled as I never would have dreamt of coiling it; and these seemed like icons of my life or a shrine to the departed, and it was blasphemy almost for me to be back among them. Long hours, uncountable hours I’d spent with my eyes shut against the night and those headphones bonded to my ears, doing God only knew what long-term damage to my hearing but saving me surely in the then-and-there: blasting my mind with music, isolating me from my life whenever I couldn’t bear it longer.

  o0o

  My photos: not the fantasies, not the cars or the sex-goddesses that had teased my adolescent hunger. These were snapshots, blu-tacked onto the wall in a tight little cluster just by the head of the single bed, where I could lie in my depression and see them ganging up on me, truly tormenting.

  They were nothing really, only a diary in pictures, evidence of how I spent my days. It was pure masochism, that kept me taking my camera along; I knew what I was and what I did, I didn’t need reminders. Except perhaps reminders that I could be happy: and I had some of those, photos of me with Jamie mostly, moments of brotherhood where I felt I really belonged. Out on the scrambling circuit, both of us grinning through filth, celebrating some triumph of his not now remembered; or candid-camera snaps at a party with the two of us out of our heads, pawing unknown girls and drinking from whatever bottle was handy, smoking tobacco and anything else that came around, looking pale and sweaty and bare seconds from throwing up. Which we usually were. That was the summer we were fifteen, we hadn’t learnt to take it but still we couldn’t get enough. My voice was deeper than Jamie’s by then, we’d proved that on some piece of electronic wizardry we whipped up between us in his basement den; but his talent had shown itself that spring already, and I was still dead and flat and nothing. He had all his future to celebrate, I had bad feelings growing into almost-certainty, and good enough reason to spend the summer drunk. Marty helped, he was good to us all through those holidays, taking us to parties we wouldn’t have got into without him — getting me into at least one bed I wouldn’t have got into without him, starting me off on the trail that had led to Laura and my practising to be a virgin, not getting into her bed or anyone else’s any more — and I had Marty on my wall there also, in his role as adoptive big brother and all-too-fallible hero.

  o0o

  My drawer: still stuck, still squealing when I dragged it open. My sister’s bedroom had been remade every couple of years, to suit her changing tastes and quiet her demands; mine, not. I made no demands, and the room still had the units my father and I had put together from MFI when I was twelve. And nothing had fitted right even then, even before the years of teenage damage.

  Drawer stuck, drawer squealed, and even that was barbed with my own particular, vicious variety of nostalgia; but inside the drawer was what I sought, another pile of photographs. Better pictures, these, but not for display, not for looking at. I’d inveigled Uncle Allan into buying me a good SLR and teaching me to use his darkroom — again the instruments of light: Allan approved of photography — and I’d spent a few months seemingly taking it and myself very seriously. Landscapes and portraits, mostly; and no one noticed, or no one appeared to notice how much licence this gave me to be on my own, either out tramping the moors or else locked in darkness with a prohibition on the door. If they did notice, they never commented. Not to me, at least. By then everyone was murmuring about me, I was well and truly cast in my role of family freak, and probably they were just as glad as I was to have me isolate myself so well.

  Landscapes were landscapes, oh look, here’s another slab of countryside and nothing more. Portraits, though, were something else. Portraits were people, and people mattered; specifically, my family mattered to me — even if that matter was dark, another kind of poison in the blood — and all the people I photographed were family. Back then, all the people I knew were family. The world divided, family and cattle; and how was it possible to form relationships with cattle? Not at all...

  I’d left the camera behind, with so much else. It stood at a shelf’s end, accumulating dust, even the lens not protected; and I didn’t have a photograph of Laura, nor of any of my friends.

  I twitched the curtains back to let some sun in, held my relatives in my hands in the light and leafed slowly through them. Black and white portraits of parents, uncles and aunts, cousins close and distant; three I took out and put separate. Sister Hazel, photographed astride her bike, in full gear: black boots, black leathers, black gauntlets and helmet, mirrored visor down to render her alien and utterly anonymous. Not, in truth, the way I saw her, only the way she wanted to be seen by the world. Possibly this was my most dishonest photograph ever, pandering to her self-image for my own protection; but it had served its purpose at the time, pleasing her in as much as anything I ever did could please her, and covering me against the inevitable penalties of truth. And it had been an interesting challenge technically, all that glossy black in harsh light. Uncle Allan was nice about that, I remembered: praised the skill, said nothing at all about the artistic choices. No fool, my uncle; or else dead give-away, the work.

  Cousin Tommy: I had a photograph of him in hard close-up, trying to let his face speak for him, as I had little enough to say myself. I barely knew him, except from rare family gatherings. I couldn’t remember ever having five consecutive minutes of conversation with the guy, doubted if we could have found enough common ground to talk for five minutes together. So here he was, right in my face, every pock-mark and every bristle that he’d missed shaving that morning; and his eyes looked oddly pale and I wished, I really wished that I’d made one exception and taken him in colour, just to capture their faded denim blue like a memorial, just to say that at least one thing about him was unique.

  Too late now, those eyes were gone. I set Tommy aside with Hazel, and looked for Marty.

  And found him, striking and dramatic, me in my Richard Avedon mood and for once producing a picture that had gratified subject and photographer both. I’d taken him with his shirt off and his back to the camera, scowling over his shoulder, all muscle and threat and that great tattoo bulging and rippling on his back. Oh, I’d been proud of this, and found that I still was: even in monochrome you could see the dragon’s glory, the sheen of its scales and the strength of it, clinging tight and digging in.

  I’d give a print to Jamie, I thought, maybe; though not yet. Not till things were settled, and he could see more clearly.

  o0o

  And not this print. This one I laid beside the others, three blood kin linked now by more than blood or my photography.

  I laid them on the bed, and sat in the window looking at them; and felt the heat of the sun through glass on the back of my neck and felt the prickle of power under my skin, the window no barrier to magic.

  Because I knew I could now, I wanted suddenly to lay a web across those dead faces, to draw them together in a net of fire and send their images to ash. My fingers were already working, weaving threads of light, feeling the heat of them but no threat, no possibility of burning me.

  Didn’t do it, though. Opened my fingers instead, and let the threads fray. Too much of my sister: she was still making rules for me, it seemed, telling me what I could or couldn’t do. Or put it another way, say that I was still making assumptions and taking my cues from her.

  So no. No webs, no nets. And no hecti
c gestures, this time. I put both hands firmly in my pockets to be sure, looked at Tommy’s photograph and maybe narrowed my eyes just a little.

  A spot of discoloration, of blackness spreading out; a wisp of smoke, white and frail; and then a sudden flare of light, flame as pale as water, and the photograph curled and crisped and blackened and fell to crumbled ash and nothing.

  And Marty followed Tommy, and Hazel Marty; and by then, by Hazel there was no effort and I was sure no visible sign of effort. I simply looked, and my will needed no more than my eyes’ natural focus. I was ruining the coverlet on the bed — the same that I’d slept under for years, candlewick of a colour utterly nondescript — but no matter for that, this was still my room and I’d done worse here with less excuse.

  Hazel burned and crumpled, in a way that had no touch of Hazel to it; and I felt liberated at last, I felt limitless. I wanted to run, to soar, to play with fire while I learned just what I could do, how far I could go.

  Didn’t do that. I’d been too far already, back when something in me still looked to Hazel for its instruction.

  Something else I wanted. I wanted to make a grand gesture to Hazel, a sign of final release. I hated the thought of her cramped in a wooden box and stuck in the earth, or else mechanically rolled into an oven and grilled. I wanted to see to her myself. I wanted to walk into her bedroom right now, draw back her curtains and take the sunlight in my hands, make a globe of fire and roll it all the length of her, set her ablaze from end to end and let her go from here, from home, from her own bed among her family...