Dead of Light

by Chaz Brenchley

  But then I’d seen the damage done, and the only surprise was that he’d survived it at all. A tough breed, we Macallans: hard on others and hard in ourselves.

  “Hullo, uncle.” I walked over to sit on a chair beside the bed, and it was no surprise at all that he wasn’t yelling, he wasn’t calling his undoubted guards in to repel boarders. I’d never expected him to. A logical man, my uncle, logical above all; and a man of words and arguments, he’d want to talk.

  Besides, he knew what I was capable of, and he knew what likely mood I’d be in when I came, if I came. I could toast his guards if I chose to, if they made trouble for me.

  “Well, Ben. This isn’t good, you know,” and he didn’t only mean his state of health, though his faint gesture took in all the machinery he was attached to, signifiers of all that damage.

  “No,” I said. It’s fucking awful was what I wanted to say, what I hoped he’d hear from me regardless; but Aunt Jess had trained me not to swear in front of senior family, and it’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime.

  For a minute neither of us said anything more, we only looked at each other; then, “Worst thing about hospital visits,” he said, “those long silences where you can’t think of anything to talk about. What shall we talk about, Ben?”

  “Let’s pick up where we left off last night,” I said, grabbing with relief at the same light, easy, superficial tone, as if it really didn’t matter a damn. “You were going to tell me why.”

  “Was I?” He sounded momentarily doubtful, just a teasing little reminder that actually he’d chosen not to do that, to kill me in my ignorance; but, “All right, then. It’s a cull, I suppose is the best way to say it. A necessary weeding out.”

  “They were family...” I said, the reality breaking through for a moment. They were my twin, my cousins — your niece, your nephew, your blood also, every one of them your blood...

  “Exactly.”

  Walls of containment weren’t doing their job any more. I stared at him, and even to my own ears sounded like a child in despair, hurt beyond bearing, as I said, “I thought you loved us...?”

  “Ben, Ben.” He shook his head a little, smiled a little, just exactly like an adult with his taller perspective on a child’s griefs. “It’s the body that matters, not the cells. Not the individuals. Yes, I have loved you — but that doesn’t matter either. You can’t preserve a weakened or corrupted bloodline, simply for sentiment. The family deserves better of us.”

  Fuck the family, I wanted to say. Would have done, perhaps, only that I’d said it so often before and with so much less cause, it was devalued past recovery.

  Besides, Allan wasn’t giving me the time to interrupt.

  “The family expects better,” he said. “There’s historical precedent for it. If you look back at the records, all our history is a tale of feuds and schisms, one branch warring with another — and the weaker always lost. By definition. It’s survival of the fittest, you see? The family corpus doing its own pruning, thinning out the inferior stock.

  “And we need it again now, we need it so badly. Our ancestors were so much the better men. We’ve grown stunted, Ben, we’re losing our magnificence; and losing it so fast, on a historical scale, it’s frightening.

  “I’d hoped that marrying out would bring some mongrel virility to the line, but that was an experiment that largely failed. Except with you, of course. You’re aberrant, obviously, but it’s a fascinating aberration. And potentially fruitful. I’d love to know if you’re just a sport, or if your talent will breed true.

  “For that reason, I didn’t mean to harm you. Not until you got too close to me. I was sure of Jamie — even if he’d recognised me, I could have squared him with what I was doing — but you’re too volatile, and you’ve lived outside the family ethos for too long. You’re also very powerful, I think, and we can never have a trial of strength. Except at twilight, perhaps, or dawn: but even then one would be waxing and the other waning, it wouldn’t be a true test.”

  I was barely listening to him then, rather thinking about Jamie, and whether Uncle Allan could really have talked him around. Maybe he could have, even despite Marty, though I hated myself for conceding the possibility.

  But, “So you killed Hazel because she was a half-breed freak,” I said. “Is that right?”

  “More or less. She couldn’t be allowed to breed, Ben. The bloodline is fragile at the moment; it needs purifying, not further dilution.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wasn’t going to think about that right now. Wasn’t going to think about it. “What about the others, then: Marty and Tommy, and Steve? How did you pick them, for God’s sake?”

  He sighed at my vehemence. “Tommy again had too much outside blood in him,” ah, those giveaway blue eyes, shoulda worn contact lenses, Tom, “but there’s more than one corruption in the line. They were all of them weak, to start with; rough, certainly, but their talents were very crude. I didn’t hold out much hope for their children, or their children’s children.

  “But more than that, they were too much your Uncle James’ men. Seeing talent only as a means to an end, a way to grab more for themselves; and that’s what will destroy this family, as much as an encroaching dissipation. Marty and Hazel already had their own private little business running, milking extra on their own account, did you know? And doing it badly, greedily, as you’d expect from those two. Misuse and miscegenation, those are the forces at work against us now. Either one of them could prove fatal, and working together they’re deadly. And of course they work from the inside, by definition; so no hope of attracting allies, I had to work alone.”

  And then he sighed again, and his face twitched with pain as he settled against his pillows. “I’ve done a little,” he said, “but only a little, and there’s such a job needs doing. I’ve barely scratched the surface. But I don’t suppose I’ll be allowed to go much further, will I?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose you will.”

  “James came to see me earlier. Stood at the foot of the bed, scowled at me, went away again. You must have told him, did you? He can’t have worked it out for himself, he hasn’t got the agility.”

  “Jamie told him.” I only said that in my cousin’s defence, hoping to make Allan think he couldn’t have recruited Jamie after all; because if Allan was thinking so, I might manage it myself.

  But Allan only smiled, and said, “Ah. Yes. After the fact, of course he would.”

  Oh, he was a manipulative bastard, was Allan. Even then he knew exactly what he was doing to me. It wasn’t cruelty, nothing malignant; he was still trying to remake me a little, to have me see the world a little closer to the way he saw it, even if all he could influence now was my perspective on a cousin I loved.

  We were both silent again, for a little; then Allan said, “There’ll be a doctor coming soon. They check on me every hour or so.”

  “Yeah. Right. Thanks.”

  I stood up, and walked back into the path of sunlight where it was falling through the open window. It was the dazzle of that which had me rubbing at my eyes, nothing more.

  “Goodbye, Ben,” my uncle said softly, at my back.

  “See you.”

  Came to the window, didn’t want to look around at all; but some things you have to do if you can, so I gripped the frame for strength and turned my head, and saw how he was resting his cheek on his pillow as he smiled a farewell, and saw how sick he really was though he’d worked hard to disguise it, saw his own mortality deep-printed in his flesh, and—

  o0o

  Reader, I martyred him.

  Twenty-two: Goodbye to All That

  Doesn’t matter how many questions you ask, how many are answered. There are always more come burning, bubbling into your head like bad blood, keep you awake, keep you jumpy and unsettled in your life.

  Plus ça change, right?

  o0o

  So, questions. Carol was a question in her own right, but she answered herself obliquely. Already had, really
: I need to be alone. And with my son, I need that too. To remember what’s important. All right?

  Sure, fine. Thanks, Carol. As long as we’ve got that straight...

  Ach, I could sicken myself sometimes. Morbid self-pity a speciality.

  Jamie, what would Jamie do? Jamie, I thought, would stick close to his dad for a while yet. For a wee bit. The comfort of what’s familiar, he’d fall back on that. Only I thought he’d find it not so familiar now, he’d find it changed and his father also; and Laura, I thought, would change him if they stayed together.

  If. That was another question, that was a big one. What hope for those two now — and what did I hope for there, and was it the same thing at all, at all?

  Actually, what I hoped for most was to stop thinking about it, and that was a different question also, that was when? and that at least I could do something about, in an indirect way.

  The full question was longer, it was Things have changed unbearably; when will they change again? and it carried its own answer along with it, at least for me.

  When you make them change, I told myself. Unless you just want to wait, and let it happen by erosion?

  And no, I didn’t just want to wait.

  o0o

  Packed a rucksack, packed the panniers on the bike; took me half an hour and I was off, I was out of there.

  Call it running away, why not? My speciality. Or call it moving on, it doesn’t matter. Either way, I maintained my reputation; I did what no Macallan lad before me had ever truly managed. I hit the road, crossed the scarred tarmac that demarked the city limits, headed for the wide blue yonder carrying nothing much in my pockets and nothing I wanted in my mind.

  Finally and at last, I left home.

  Publication Information

  Dead of Light

  First Publication Information

  Copyright © 1995 Chaz Brenchley

  Hodder & Stoughton

  oOo

  Published by Book View Café

  April 2010

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  oOo

  Cover art courtesy C E Murphy

  www.cemurphy.net

  oOo

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