Dead of Light

by Chaz Brenchley

  We stood and stared, and saw how his palms melted, how the flesh deliquesced and dripped away; and God I hated that, I hated that I knew the word for what was happening to him. There shouldn’t even be a word, for something so appalling; it ought to be a nameless horror, even the possibility of it never foreshadowed in a dictionary. Certainly the word shouldn’t come slipping like a gobbet of foul meat into my mind, just as I watched my cousin fester so fast.

  “Steve,” Jamie said, and his voice slurred in his wet mouth, words too slippery to get a grip on. I could have given him deliquesce, I could have given it up forever; only he wasn’t interested in description, he wanted information. “Steve, did you see him?”

  Slowly, dreadfully slowly Steve lifted his face towards us; and in the cold blue light I saw pale pustules rising on his cheeks and forehead, and no, that wasn’t sweat running off his eyes. Nor tears either, I could see it steam.

  Whether he could see us, God only knows; but he was hearing Jamie, at least, and there was enough strength or courage or humanity left in him, just enough to honour us with an answer.

  He opened his mouth, and smoke rose around his teeth. Nothing by nightfire was the colour it ought to be, but his teeth were dark and pitted. His tongue I saw, a shrivelled thing weeping pus; he should not have been alive, nothing should be like that and live.

  But he lived, he moved, he lifted one arm to point, although his finger would not do it; and although he was actually pointing at a wall, the message was clear. There were only two ways his killer could have gone, left or right, down the alley or up; and it was his left arm Steve was pointing with.

  And his mouth hung open now, as though he had nothing left to close it with; and all the skin of his face was running as wet as his eyes, and I could see the shape of his bones too clearly and then the bones themselves, briefly white before they smoked and seared. And he was staring at us with sockets that were empty, and he had no voice to use in screaming; and Christ, it was such relief when Jamie ran off into the dark and I could follow.

  Only to protect my cousin, of course: being pro-life, voting to go with my living rather than my dying cousin. Nothing I could possibly do for Steve, but I wouldn’t have left him else. And Carol was with him anyway, Carol and Gino, he wouldn’t have to die alone.

  Except that, in the end, everyone dies alone; and if I couldn’t do anything for Steve, I couldn’t do anything actually to help Jamie either. No matter what he found down there before the alley’s end, be it all the hordes of Hell or just one medical madman with a syringe emptied of acid, I would be equally useless. This was the darktime, their time, none of mine.

  One thing certain, that there was someone — or something — down there. Jamie made another flare of cold fire and hurled it like a cricket ball into the dark, to show us whatever it could; and just before it guttered and died, too far for him to feed it, I did see what we were both looking for as we ran, what I most dreaded to see.

  Only a suggestion, a hint, a shadow of movement in the night; and not all the hordes of Hell, no. But not a maniac medic either. Less than the one, surely, but infinitely more than the other: one man alone or one of an army, either way this was the man — or woman, I supposed, but all my training and all my understanding said not, said to expect a man — who had destroyed Steve. That at the least, and maybe more. Marty and Tommy and Hazel might be laid also to his account, but we had no way of telling. Yet. We might be facing a family of formidable talents for all we knew, they might be taking turns at us...

  Whatever else they were taking, they were taking us. Knocking us over like skittles, they were.

  Had been, at least. But they hadn’t met Jamie before, presumably hadn’t been expecting anyone other than Steve; and Jamie was a power in the land. If I had to come face to face with nemesis in a dark alley, there was only one guy I’d sooner have there with me — or preferably ahead of me, as Jamie was now — and that was Uncle Allan.

  Jamie would do, though, in our uncle’s absence. Jamie would definitely do.

  Maybe that was how that fractional, that barely-glimpsed figure ahead of us felt also. Maybe he’d seen more than we had, maybe he’d recognised Jamie’s face behind the nightfire or told his power and intent from the hurl of light. That, or else once a night was enough for him. Whatever, he had no stomach to stand and fight; Jamie’s second bolt of fire, again made on the run and again thrown hard and flat, showed us nothing but the alley’s walls and gates.

  Hard to tell above the sounds we made ourselves, but I thought or felt that I could hear footsteps. Not sprinting, but running fast enough to reach the alley’s mouth and slip away, perhaps, before we had better sight of what we chased.

  Nothing I could do; but Jamie, yes. Jamie very much yes.

  Jamie ripped the road up.

  o0o

  Way back when we’d been hopeful lads, when I’d still been waiting for the first glimmer of talent to show itself in my outgrowing and curious body, Jamie had had his already and was exercising it every chance he got. That was classic, everyone did it; just another angle on adolescent experimentation, to go with sex and drugs and all the rest. No problem, until the town had woken up one morning to find his mark left large in many places. Most notably in the main pedestrian concourse, an English 1980s stab at a Mediterranean piazza not much improved by having JM gouged out of it in trenches two feet deep, as if some lunatic had been playing graffiti with a JCB in the darkness.

  We’d been high as kites during and after, convulsed by giggles; but Uncle James had been very much not amused. There were limits, even for family, and damaging the town’s infrastructure apparently surpassed them. Jamie had had to promise not to repeat that particular trial of his impressive strength; but looking like any likely lad for a way around a promise he didn’t want to keep, he’d come up with a real peach.

  He’d taken me with him on a tour of the town’s construction companies, and by the following night we’d had a list of half a dozen significant properties scheduled for demolition, and carte blanche to do with them as we chose. That last had gone without saying, actually, Jamie being who he was; but none the less he’d asked for and got permission in writing, to have some defence against his father’s presumptive disapproval.

  “One a night,” he’d said. “Got to ration ourselves, yeah?”

  So once a night for a short week — reminding ourselves cacklingly that even God rested on the seventh day, and He was only creating, damn it, He was only putting things up — we’d stood together on a pavement in town or on waste ground somewhere in the outskirts, and Jamie had torn things apart.

  A couple of times we’d taken others with us, we’d gone as a gang and had a party in the rubble after; but most nights it had just been Jamie and me, and I’d watched him as much as I watched the buildings fall. We didn’t often get to see talents in action, not for real, and I’d been fascinated to see how Jamie just stood there, hands in pockets and all his muscles easy, only the tight-lipped concentration on his face to belie his casual stance while his eyes had flickered from roof to wall to window, and destruction had followed wherever his eyes danced.

  At first he’d just punched holes a metre wide in brickwork or slates or whatever, though concrete might take two or three blows to crumble; he’d worked like a crane-driver swinging an invisible wrecking-ball, and taken the buildings apart piecemeal. But all that practice had made him ambitious, and taught him tricks: he’d learned to drag as well as punch; he’d learned to lean against the whole of a wall at once; he’d learned to focus more narrowly, to snap a concrete beam with a single whipcrack touch of his mind. Above all, he’d learned to think. A couple of months later — and at the demolition company’s request, and for a fee: they’d been well impressed by what he did that first fun week — I’d seen him level a multi-storey carpark that was in the way of some preferred development. It had taken him twenty minutes, and he’d made the whole structure collapse in on itself all at once, as if he’d brought it down with s
haped explosive charges.

  Around that same time, some fuckheaded fool of an incomer had thought to challenge Uncle James over a financial deal; had reckoned he’d be safe, the way I heard it, if he only stayed indoors during the hours of darkness.

  Not the first, of course, to come up with that particularly unbright theory or a variation on it. If he’d been a local, or if he’d only done his research, he’d have found out what had happened to the others, and maybe he’d have shown a little sense. Or maybe not, stupidity on that level is probably genetic. Anyway, rather than just sending in Marty and a small army of tough young cousins to drag the moron out, which was always the traditional response, Uncle James had turned to his younger son instead.

  I’d not been there that time, I hadn’t been invited; but the way I heard it after, Jamie had just disassembled the house around the idiot’s ears. Big house it was, expensive house, and he’d delicately taken it apart from roof-beams to basement without hurting a soul inside. The hurting had come after, I guess. Jamie had done what he’d been told, he’d picked and tweaked until there was nothing left but clouds of dust and rubble and holes in the ground, and the largest of those holes the erstwhile basement where the dickhead and his family cowered and screamed; and as the dust had settled, Jamie said, his father had sent Marty over from the car where they’d been waiting, and Jamie had just gone home. He’d done his bit, he’d said, enjoyed it, hadn’t wanted to see what came next.

  o0o

  That was then, this was now; and I hadn’t seen him work for years, but presumably he must have acquired even more finesse as he matured and hopefully grew out of that classic teenage obsession with raw power. As Jacko said so often, everything’s rhythm, light and life and all; and rhythm is nothing but vibration and timing, and I thought probably Jamie could shake a building to the ground, if he chose. Set up a tremble, and watch it come down.

  No such choice tonight. He didn’t have the time or the patience to be clever. The road under our feet rippled and bucked and split open like turf before the plough, like it was being unzipped. We both staggered, and I slipped to my knees. Pushing myself up again with my hands, I felt sticky clods of tarmac shifting beneath my palms, and I lurched off-balance again.

  No one could run on this. We were as disabled as the man we were pursuing, and we still couldn’t see him, though Jamie tried hurling his thunderbolts again to find him out. Only the suggestion of a figure scrabbling away, so low to the ground that he must have been crawling; we went on after him, but it felt hopeless. He was going to reach the street and good running-ground long before we did, he’d be well away before we could chase again...

  So Jamie stopped suddenly, and looked up rather than squinting uselessly ahead. There was a telegraph pole right beside him, leaning at an angle British Telecom never intended; and suddenly the pole was aflame, cold and blue, and the flames were running out ahead of us along the telephone wires.

  Nice, I thought, seeing that weird light dance from pole to pole. Not fiercely bright, still it was bright enough. Yes, there was a man there, only ten yards or so from the alley’s end now; and yes, he was crawling. A pale flash of face as he turned his head, when the light reached him; then he levered himself to his feet and stumbled towards the yellow glow of street-lights, and again I thought we’d lost him.

  There was a high wall running down one side of the alley, ending in a brick pillar topped with a great stone ball. Not looking at that, only watching the man scramble from one light towards another, only seeing him as a silhouetted shadow, none the less I saw when the pillar exploded.

  Actually it imploded, at least from my perspective. There was suddenly a little fussiness in the air at the base of the pillar, just enough to jag my eye; I looked, and seemed to see the bricks sucked away from me into an impossible vacuum the other side of everywhere.

  Actually Jamie had only gone crude again, gone back to basics and punched the lower courses of brickwork into dust, the best he could manage at that distance and hope for the best; but even an experienced eye struggles to keep up sometimes in bad light, has to improvise occasionally.

  Wherever the hell I thought its base had gone, I knew just where the pillar was going. It was toppling swift and sweet, straight at the head of the man we wanted...

  Christ knows if I wanted it to hit or not, if I truly had the killing-fever on me. I didn’t have time to wish, either way. The pillar fell, we saw how it was falling; the man looked up, and can have seen nothing but a new planet hurtling into his ken, hanging above him, filling his horizons. Anonymous to us he might have been, but that stone cannonball had his name on it.

  What I’d forgotten or discounted, though, this was a talented guy. More talents than one, seemingly, he wasn’t limited to killing my cousins.

  It should have been impossible, but in the eyeflick that was all the time he had he must have seen and understood and acted, all three.

  There was a flare of icelight, bright as magnesium; and again my eyes lied to me, they said he dissolved that stone into a little raincloud, that hung above his head for a moment and then showered him with water. Not so. It wasn’t water, it was dust; I figured that out a second later, seeing how it swirled about him in the breeze, as the glare faded to an afterburn. But oh, it was clever, it was fast and frightening; and it meant he had Jamie’s talent as well as his own, whatever that was. And whatever else it was, that wasn’t fair.

  Jamie’s turn now to act in an eyeblink, in this last second that we could see our quarry. I looked to him, and saw him pale in the eerie light, tight and concentrated; and he made his decision as I watched.

  It wasn’t only buildings, not just bricks and stone and concrete. Jamie could punch flesh as easily, could pull and twist and destroy bodies with as little effort. We’d proved that on dawn rabbit-hunts, and once when a stupid Rottweiler on guard duty had tried to stop us sneaking into a building-site when we’d fancied some night-time climbing practice up the girders.

  Jamie’s choice, and he made it. He could have pulped that man, could have made nothing but a mess of blood and bone out of what was living, breathing bastard; but he stood and did nothing, and then the man was gone.

  Too late, Jamie started after him again over that difficult ground. Maybe he was already regretting that quick decision not to change the habits of a lifetime, not to turn from dogs and rabbits to men; or else his killing heat had cooled but he still wanted to catch the man, as I did.

  Jamie led, and I followed; and I caught up with him at the alley’s end. He was breathing hard and turning, facing one way and then the other, seemingly as blind as Steve. All there was was the street and the station and the hill, the same hill we’d walked down earlier this evening. Little traffic and no pedestrians coming or going except on the far side of the wide road, under the station’s massive portico; there also the only parked cars in sight, and a queue of taxis waiting.

  “Over there,” Jamie squeezed out, hoarsely between breaths. “He must be...” And he surged forward, and I could only just hold him at the kerb’s edge, grappling with him as he tried to shove me away.

  “Jamie, don’t...”

  “Get your hands the fuck off me...!”

  He was glaring at me, spitting fury; and then he wasn’t. Just inches from mine, I saw his eyes not move, but change focus. My hands stung and burned where they were touching his skin, and they wanted only to snatch themselves away; and that was only a side-effect of what he meant, only the static charge.

  But I kept my grip, though it hurt me to do it. I kept his gaze, and I worked my mind and my tongue both, against the pain and the breathlessness that had me gasping. “Yes,” I said, “you can do that. You’re a talented lad. You can damage me enough to make me let go, though you’ll have to work, because a prod won’t do it; but that’s out here under the stars, and it’s only me. What are you going to do against him, Jamie, when he can turn your blood bad in your body? What are you going to do in there,” jerking my head towards the grea
t ironwork arch that covered the station over, “where there’s no stars and no moon to light you, and you don’t know how the fuck he does his little tricks? You’re angry and you’re scared,” I knew that because that’s how I was and we’d always been close like that, only that Jamie felt things more, “but neither one of those makes you invulnerable.”

  He stared at me, every muscle in him tense and trembling and a sour sweat on his skin. I saw his tongue move behind his teeth, shaping words he never said, curses to go with the lightning-blast that might destroy me; and then he turned his head away. Slowly, slowly I felt the burning in him subside to a tingle, just the usual white noise you get around any Macallan. I loosened my grip finger by finger and took my hands away, still wary. He only stood still, though, staring toward the station but making no move now to cross.

  So I worked my hands together, thumbs rubbing deep into palms and the pads of my fingers where they still felt they’d been scalded in steam, all the nerves ascream though there was nothing to show for it, not a mark on my skin. And it wasn’t only in my hands, every nerve in my body was jumping. All the years I’d been alive and among my relatives, only Hazel had ever, ever touched me with her talent; and that only because she was my sister, and because she could. It was the rule, the one rule that took precedence over every other rule at any time: cattle were legitimate targets, family not. You could choose like Jamie not to hurt cattle either, but that was a separate matter. Those of us who’d been touched by Hazel’s web never let on to an adult, rarely spoke about it even to each other. She was one of us so we’d defended her, even I would defend her against the presumedly awesome anger and undoubtedly tremendous punishments which that unforgivable offence would have brought down upon her head.

  And Jamie my cousin, my adoptive brother, once and I thought again my friend — Jamie had been dangerously close to unloading everything he had just then, and all of it aimed at me.