Behind her, Uncle James said, “Get into the car, please. We don’t have time to waste.”
Laura bit her lip, glanced at me briefly and read my surrender in my face. She climbed in over my legs and sat down beside me, squeezing my knee as she settled; after a second the door opened on the other side and Carol got in. She seemed confused, unhappy with the arrangements; but this was no time to start swapping around.
Jamie sat in the front, although he could have joined us three without squeezing, the car was wide enough. It felt like a class division, real Macallans only in the first rank of seats. He did his best to bridge that, sitting awkwardly sideways and peering Chad-like at us over the headrest, even reaching between the seats to fumble for Laura’s hand before she shook her head at him, don’t be ridiculous; those were gestures, though, gestures at best. This was Uncle James’ car, Uncle James’ world we were sat in, and that meant them and us with barriers between too wide to breach. Even Jamie couldn’t punch those walls down; and he knew it, and he wasn’t really trying.
His father was still out in the street, talking to Lamartine. I could see them through the windscreen, and also the harsh-lit white shape in the road that was Steve cloaked with Gino’s tablecloth. Dark patches were spreading already through the linen, doing more than stain.
A few abrupt words, a jab of his hand towards that tablecloth, and Uncle James came back to the car. Got in, sat down, twisted like a mirror-image of his son to see back for reversing, and Laura said, “Could we have this window open, please? Ben’s side?”
He just stared at her.
I heard Jamie suck a warning breath and I guess both of us were sending her telepathic messages, be careful, for God’s sake, you don’t know what he’s like when he gets mad; but, “Ben needs air,” she said calmly, seeming totally unfazed. Only her fingers on my leg said that was a lie, twitching nervously at the wrinkles in my jeans.
“Don’t want him throwing up again,” Jamie murmured. Uncle James’ finger stabbed on a button, the window wound itself quietly down beside me, and pity me because I caught the look that Laura gave my cousin then, her own sweet sending.
I love you, that look was saying; and I turned my head away into the flow of dark air, dark thoughts as the car shot backwards up the alley, crunching broken glass with no respect for its tyres.
o0o
Uncle James drove us quickly out of town, and none of us spoke again before he’d pulled up with a scatter of gravel in front of his big house. I’d kept my face in the wind all the way, slowly recovering my body, testing my possession of it: clenching fists and toes, flexing muscles, reclaiming what should never have been lost. I wanted yet another bath, deeper and hotter; I wanted to wash the taint of my uncle from my flesh inside and out, but I wasn’t Laura, and I knew I wouldn’t dare to ask.
Probably I wasn’t the only one glad of the breeze in the back there. It couldn’t have been easy for either Laura or Carol to be cooped up in a car, even a car so large, with three Macallans setting their nerves to shiver. Too much else on their minds, I thought, for either my cousin or my uncle to have noticed the change in me, but I had to be adding to the girls’ inevitable discomfort. Guilt again: for the first time I was irredeemably part of the problem, and no solution in sight.
As soon as the car was still I had the door open and was out of there, stamping and stretching, still feeling weak and uncertain. Carol was no slower, on the other side. One glimpse of her across the limo’s roof and my own face twisted in sympathy with hers; she looked close to chundering in her turn, and I hated myself and all my blood. And hated my uncle for dragging her along, and myself again and more for having been the catalyst that drew her into this.
“Just breathe deep,” I told her quietly. “It passes.”
She nodded, thanks or maybe thanks, but I worked that out for myself already, and then she doubled over, propping her arms against bent knees for balance. I was around the back of the limo without pause for thought, but when I got there she lifted her head to greet me with a half-hearted grin.
“Thought you were going to throw up,” I muttered, oddly embarrassed.
“Not me. I never throw up. Felt dizzy standing, that’s all. But what is it, damn it? What does that? It’s fun, sort of, with one of you. With you,” making me look around quickly, see if anyone was listening; but Laura was only just getting out on the other side with Jamie helping, and Uncle James was already halfway to the door, expecting us to follow. There were lights burning all through the house; no sleep for anyone tonight. “But Laura says it’s always like this when there’s a bunch of you together. You make us poor mortals feel awful...”
“We’re mortal,” I said, and winced to hear myself say it, so soon after Steve had proved it. From the expression on her face, she didn’t need reminding either. “Uncle Allan says it’s psychic resonance, we’ve each got our own and they sort of clash when we’re together. Like music, yeah? A lot of instruments, all tuned differently. Sets up bad harmonics. If it’s any comfort, we’re not exactly immune. It can get difficult, if there’s too many of us.”
“There are loads too many of you,” she said flatly. “And no, that’s no comfort at all.”
But she straightened slowly, and slipped her arm through mine; and we went into the house tracking my cousin and my love, and Laura was leaning on Jamie as much as Carol leant on me.
o0o
No sign of Uncle James in the hall, but the door to the big room was standing open, and there was the murmur of voices inside. Long displaced here, in what had once been my second home, I was glad to be going in behind Jamie; he even held Laura up briefly at the door, looking back to be sure of me, so that we could all make our entrance together.
Uncle James was standing down at the end, by the big fireplace, striking a pose as ever. Uncle Allan was there too, quietly in an armchair picking at his fingernails, striking no poses at all. And my father was there, giving me a nod of greeting and a frown for the company I kept; there were others there, just about all the senior men of the family; and surprisingly Father Hamish was there also, and I couldn’t work that out at all. This was family business, surely. I couldn’t see the need for a priest.
Uncle James beckoned us impatiently forward, and we stood in a little group in the centre of that watchful circle, holding close together, feeling like witnesses at a star chamber.
“Very well, then,” Uncle James said, talking directly to Jamie. “Tell us everything: everything you saw, everything you heard. If he leaves anything out,” scanning the rest of us with a single flick of his eyes, “you tell us.”
“Everything you thought,” Uncle Allan put in mildly from his chair. “That, too. Impressions. Even if they don’t seem relevant.”
o0o
Jamie did his best, I guess we all did, though it didn’t seem to satisfy.
It was a hard audience we had to play to, and they made no concessions. Even Allan was rough with his questioning, trying to squeeze out of us more than we’d consciously absorbed. And they wanted to know precisely how Steve had died, exactly what we’d seen and what he’d done, what had been done to him; and though Jamie and I could start it off, at the last that came down to Carol because of course we hadn’t been there, we’d been away chasing a man with more than his fair share of talent.
Spotting him, chasing him, and in Jamie’s case at least blasting away at him — and then that moment, that instant of decision when he could have played splatterpunk with the man’s body and had chosen not to.
They were good, our interrogators. I don’t think either one of us had intended to tell them that, but they learned it anyway. Which made it my turn to rescue Jamie suddenly from his father’s cold and malignant anger, as Jamie had rescued Laura in the car; so I said, “Come on, it’s no use shouting at him. He made his choice, and it’s over now, we can’t go back and do it different. But I’ll tell you what’s interesting.”
“What, then? Apart from my son being afraid of his responsib
ilities?”
Jamie shifted at my side; Laura grabbed his wrist, I talked loud and urgent over the top of his hissing protest.
“What’s really interesting is that the other guy didn’t do anything either. It should’ve been a classic shoot-out, only neither one of them fired...”
“Too far away,” Uncle James said dismissively.
“We don’t know that, and we certainly can’t assume it. We don’t know how he does it, what he does; but it wasn’t too far for Jamie, and whatever else, this guy’s strong. He’s got a lot of talent. We can’t afford to make assumptions, and I think that one’s wrong anyway.”
“What, then?” Uncle Allan butted in, and at least he sounded interested in my opinion. “You’ve obviously got a theory, Ben. What is it?”
“Light,” I said. “I think he lost his light. Otherwise he would have splattered Jamie, and me too; Christ, why not? That’s obviously his goal in life, to kill Macallans. Only he’d just been playing slam-dunk with a stone basketball, and the dust of that was all around him, we could see it like a cloud; and I think it worked like a cloud, like ten-tenths cover. I think he didn’t zap us because he couldn’t, he was cut off from the source.”
“So?” Uncle James demanded impatiently. “Is this leading anywhere?”
“Yes,” from Uncle Allan. He was way ahead of me, I could see; but he was a gentleman above all, he left it to me to finish.
“It means they — or he, or whatever — work the same way, the same way you do,” and God help me, I’d almost said ‘we’. “Which means with the same limitations, pretty much. This guy seems to have two talents at once, he can blast things like Jamie as well as doing that blood trick, whatever it is; but apart from that, it means we know what we’re up against, at least. Nobody knows about talent, better than us. And it means the playing-field is pretty much level; or else it tilts our way, because there are more of us.” Even if he is picking us off one by one, while we still don’t have a clue who he is...
Uncle Allan was nodding approvingly. Uncle James simply snorted. “If you’re right. Seems to me you’re making assumptions yourself, all down the line...”
He was right, of course, I couldn’t dispute that; only that it made better sense to assume that whoever we were facing obeyed the same laws that we did, until it was proved otherwise. Another close shave for Occam, I thought, and shut up.
o0o
Eventually they let us alone and talked among themselves. Didn’t dismiss us, though, kept us around for supplementary questions; and didn’t offer us a chair or anything so civil as that. In the end the girls just sat down on the carpet there, looking totally beat. Jamie squatted behind Laura, wrapped his arms and legs around her, drew her head back against his chest; I blinked, looked the other way, couldn’t do likewise for Carol however much she might have appreciated it. Whatever she was or might be to me, I couldn’t just use her as a Laura-substitute. Not fair, not honest; and if I wasn’t honest, I wasn’t anything.
So I compromised, I stood with my legs together for Carol to use as a back-rest if she chose, which she did. Which anchored me, upright and alone; I couldn’t whisper to her as the other two were whispering to each other, so instead I listened in to what our elders and — certainly in their own opinion — betters were saying.
Turned out that Father Hamish was there as a consultant. As a parish priest, he was far more in touch with the town, with the mood of the community, than any Macallan could be. Apart from myself, perhaps, because I at least tried to live in the community. A student’s life is always fairly artificial, though, too much insulated to be true; and doubly so in this town, where the university was pretty much the only institution my family left alone.
“No,” Hamish said in response to the obvious, the only real question. “There’s no sign of any opposition to you, that I’ve seen. No rival, I should say. Opposition in the other sense, of course, you’re pretty much detested,” and he was the only non-relative who could get away with such straight talking, and that only because he had God very much on his side, he had my family charmed, “but you know that. Nothing new there. There’s no sense of things shifting, or the balance of power being disturbed. Rumours about the deaths, that’s inevitable; but they think it’s internal, if anything, some kind of power-struggle between you. There’ll be no revolution.”
Uncle James snorted. “Of course there’ll be no revolution. It’s not the cattle I’m concerned with, unless they prove to be harbouring this mob, in which case there will be retribution.”
“Mob?” Uncle Allan queried.
“Mob, gang — family, if you like. Does it matter?”
“The kids only saw one man.”
“Even so. There must be others,” stated with absolute assurance, absolute pomposity. Uncle James couldn’t possibly admit that a single man could throw the Macallans into such turmoil. Me, I thought he was absolutely wrong; and I also thought that such certainty was dangerous. And, of course, I said not a word.
o0o
It was Jamie’s mother who rescued us at the last, my long-suffering Aunt Lucy. Some species of distant cousin she was, totally cowed by her bully of a husband and not of course invited to join the men’s debate, though she’d lost a son to the enemy; but for once, for the first time I could remember, she asserted herself now. Her territory, I guess, looking after the kids. Never mind that we were all of us adult by now, and more adult than we’d been a couple of weeks before. She knocked lightly on the door, came in just a few hovering, nervous steps, and said,
“If you don’t need the children any more, James, I’ve made beds up for them. It’s too late to send them home now...”
Uncle James grunted, and waved a dismissive hand. Carol reached an arm up to me, came lightly to her feet as I lifted; Jamie and Laura took a second longer to disentangle themselves but still weren’t far behind us, equally glad I guess to be allowed to leave.
“I’ve put you in your old room, Benedict,” Lucy said as she led us upstairs, her voice as pale as ever, pale as her face and her sad life. “Your friend — I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name?”
“Carol.”
“Carol. How do you do? You’re in the guest room, along here,” turning left on the first landing. I went along with her, of course, to see her comfortable; and smiled privately, thinking that even if Carol had been a well-known and long-established girlfriend my decorous aunt would still have done this, still have given her a room to herself on another floor from me. Propriety was all Lucy had to keep a grip on, all she’d ever had in all the time I’d known her. Nice manners and tea at four o’clock, dinner at eight and the house always pristine, her wild and rowdy sons always a problem and a grief to her. She’d have preferred daughters, most likely, except that she was Macallan stock and married to a Macallan, and the male line was the only one that counted.
Thinking that, I thought that she hadn’t said anything about a bed for Laura; and I glanced back, just in time to see the other two heading on up the next flight of stairs, hand in hand and heads together. My problem, my grief; his mother wouldn’t challenge Jamie. And my room was right next door to his...
Keep it quiet, guys. Though it wouldn’t matter, actually. They could romp all night or be as silent as cats curled together in a basket, I still wouldn’t be sleeping this night.
One door stood open, waiting; and Carol at least could sleep tonight. I’d never tell her that the last time I’d been in this room, so had Marty. And on the same bed, yet. Queen-sized and comfortable, the bed, as I remembered it; though it had been pushed back to the wall now, it wasn’t so much the focus of the room, a dais for a death.
Lucy left us alone to say goodnight, as she would have thought proper; but I thought she’d still be hanging around outside, waiting to see me out of there.
“Are you going to be okay?” I murmured.
Carol nodded uncertainly, looking around her at the blandness of the room, seeing towels and a toothbrush laid out on the dressing
-table and seeing nothing of what I saw in my mind’s eye, cold body and thick black scabs. “Sure. Why not? It’s a bit like a b & b, but I’ll be fine.”
“All right, then. But listen, if you need me, I’m just upstairs in the attics. First door on the right, that’ll be me.”
She nodded again. Then, practically, “Where’s the bathroom?”
I had to stop and think, for that one; this had been the grown-ups’ floor, no part of my territory. But I worked it out on my fingers. “Other side of the corridor, two doors down. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“No need, I’ll find it. How about you, Ben, will you be all right?”
“No problem,” I said, finding myself dishonest after all. “This place is a second home to me.”
She grunted, and I didn’t know what that meant; but then she hugged me, kissed my cheek and said, “Goodnight, then,” so I simply said goodnight and left.
Came out, pulling the door to behind me; and said goodnight to the hovering aunt, and climbed uncarpeted stairs into what had been lads’ land, absolutely my territory for all that I’d really only ever been a guest, the attics of the house.
o0o
Up there the walls were only wooden partitions, and my bed — the same old bed where I’d slept or sweated out so many teenage nights and mornings, with the same squeaky springs and the same dip in the mattress, renewing old aches in my spine and heart both — was right up against the wall that divided me from Jamie; but bless them, they didn’t make a sound to disturb me. Jamie, I reasoned, must have held out for a new bed.
But whether they slept or were tactful, silent lovers, it made no difference. I Tiresias had foresuffered all, enacted on this same divan or bed; and no, I didn’t sleep.
In the false light before dawn I broke, finally and irrevocably. I padded softly down the stairs again, barefoot and barechested, camp as they come in just my jeans; and I made my way along the dim corridor to the guest room, edged the door open and slipped inside.
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