Light Errant

by Chaz Brenchley

  “Who is he?” I hissed, barely above a whisper. Meaning the question for Jamie, perhaps for Conor, not seriously expecting an answer; and receiving one unexpectedly from an unexpected source, from Uncle James himself, some few paces distant.

  “He is,” he said with a slow satisfaction, “the Assistant Chief Constable with special responsibility for this city. He is a man with whom this family has had an understanding, for many years. His family owns and runs Pirate’s Island, by special dispensation. He is also the man responsible for all the recent outrages against us—but I think you know that already, do you not?”

  Well, yes, I did; I just hadn’t realised that my uncle was on to him too.

  “I began to suspect,” he went on, “when the police station burned down yesterday. It was reported to me that the fire seemed ... unnatural. Unlikely. When I attempted to contact this man,” whom it seemed he wouldn’t even dignify with a name, “I was told he was unavailable. Unavailable to me! So I made enquiries elsewhere, and learned that a number of women had been held in the police station for some time; also that they had been removed shortly before the fire. I presume that was your doing, by the way, Benedict? The fire?”

  I was about to confess it, but Jamie stepped between us. “Mine as well, father. They had our girls too, they had Laura; and we thought we could rescue them...”

  Instead of being rescued by them, but that I was not going to say.

  “You should have come to me.” He fixed us both with a portentous frown, his displeasure equally divided. “However, events have turned out well, despite your meddling. When the women came across the water this evening—and that was well managed, Jamie,” with a nod, all the approval it seemed he would allow his son for the minor miracle he’d worked, “they confirmed to me that they had been in the hands of the police. That meant that this man was responsible, beyond question. He had already left the district in a hurry, this afternoon; but I had had him watched and followed, in case my earlier suspicions proved justified. Collecting him tonight was not a problem.”

  And oh, he was pleased with himself, my uncle. Problem solved, normal service to be resumed immediately.

  “What are you going to do with him?” I asked, though I thought I could guess.

  “He will take a walk,” said Uncle James, with an unpleasant little chuckle and a glance at the rough rock outcrop. No accident, I realised, that the car was parked just so, where its lights threw a beam all along the arch.

  That was my uncle’s special talent, to make people do what they didn’t want, to work their bodies against their struggling will. Once, he’d used it on me; I could still remember the terror as my muscles jerked to his command, my mind a helpless prisoner, unable even to raise a scream of protest. And all he’d done to me was sit me in a car I didn’t want to sit in.

  Turning my head away from the memory, I saw tonight’s intended victim standing alone among his enemies, knowing for sure that he was due to die, though probably not knowing how. I thought of him taking that brief and cruel walk, pirates and planks, I thought, a long walk off a short pier; and I knew how it would feel, every step his unwilling legs would stumble over the rock under my uncle’s unrelenting gaze until they took a step too far, a step off rock and into air.

  And I grabbed Jamie’s arm and pulled him away from his father, away from all our indifferent cousins. “Jamie, I don’t, I don’t want any more killing.”

  “What?” He seemed honestly surprised, almost bewildered. “For God’s sake, Ben. This is the bastard who had Josie killed, and Karen. And that kid Charlie, delivered his bloody head, remember?”

  Yes, I did remember, I was not about to forget. Nor forgive, but even so. “I just don’t want anyone else to die,” I repeated. “It’s got to stop sometime, it’s got to stop now or it never will,” and I meant more than just the killing, I meant everything my uncle and my father and all my family did in this town. “And I can’t stop him, Jamie, it’s got to be you.” For Laura’s sake, I thought about adding, and didn’t. For your own sake, for both of you and the kid too; she won’t stay with you else, she’s too decent to tolerate this—but no, let him work that out for himself.

  Which he did, perhaps. At any rate, he nodded roughly and turned back towards his father.

  “Dad, no.”

  “What? What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean you can’t do this.” He was speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear; deliberately so, I guessed. Committing himself, making a public stand, leaving himself no back door to scuttle out of. Laura would have been proud. “There’s been too much killing already. Karen and Josie, they’re dead, they’re out of it; but so are two of theirs, and the rest of us are safe. This isn’t justice, it’s cold murder, and I won’t let you do it.”

  Uncle James stared, and then he laughed, loud above the muttering that surrounded him. He didn’t even bother to answer Jamie; he turned his head and gazed almost benignly at his captive, and the man began to walk.

  Began to sweat, too, for all his determined, silent pride. Christ, I was with him all the way, remembered panic sweating my own skin as I relived the few moments I’d felt Uncle James’ hand in my head, tugging my strings. I wanted to scream for him, because I knew he couldn’t scream for himself; I wanted to sob, I wanted to look away, I wanted to run away; above all I wanted to stop him, to hurl myself on him bodily if that was what it took to halt that inexorable march.

  And didn’t, did none of those things. Bodily hurling was as futile as screaming, I’d only be bodily dragged off again. Running away would help me no more than it helped him. At the least I had to be there for him, I felt an imperative urge to watch, to share what I could; but more than that, maybe far more than that, I had to be there for Jamie. I could do nothing here, but Jamie could. Not only the best of my many cousins, he was also the strongest in his talent. Maybe my will could stiffen his, help him stand up to his father with more than words...

  o0o

  Whether he needed my help just then, I don’t know. Whether he felt even a shadow of my mute urging, do it, Jamie, hold the guy back, break your father’s concentration, anything, but do something. Please...?

  Whether he needed me, whether he felt me or not, Jamie did indeed do something. Jamie did something wild, extravagant, fantastic.

  Jamie threw down Falston Arch.

  o0o

  Or blew it up, perhaps. Shattered it, scattered it, crumbled and splattered it. Whichever.

  He’d learned a lesson from me, I think, each time we’d stood at the causeway to work magic. The second time, I’d taught him that talent runs wider than any of us can imagine, that it’s limited only by our imaginations; the first, that we’re stronger even than we think we are.

  Tell him a week before this that he could and would seize a span of limestone as broad and deep as a good-size house, that he’d grip it and squeeze it and break it into shards and gravel and dust, he’d have laughed like a bampot and given you a hangover cure. But he’d seen me do it to the road, and now he did it to the arch.

  Like me, he didn’t do it all at once, he had to feel his way into it; unlike me, he didn’t have any time spare for experiment or failure.

  Standing behind him, I saw his fists clench spasmodically; I heard three or four sharp cracks like a rifle firing, somewhere close. Several of my cousins ducked and swivelled, looking for trouble, never thinking to look among their company.

  Stone cracks in sudden heat or sudden cold, or under tremendous pressure. The more straticulate the stone is, the more fault lines there are already, the sooner it happens and the more catastrophically.

  Plenty of strata in a limestone crop, plenty of faults in this one. The snapping, crackling noises were the sounds of faults running through the traumatised rock as fast and free as the tear in a balloon when it pops.

  Jamie I think was the only one of us who didn’t react at all, he just went on traumatising. Even Uncle James startled, he jerked and glanced about him, and the one man
who’d been moving before stood still now, abandoned like an animator’s model, inanimate in himself.

  Push comes to shove, squeeze comes to crush, everything comes to the crunch. Too many faults come to total failure.

  Total failure came to the arch as we stood and watched, as we stared in the dark. There was a halo of nightfire above and about it, dancing on the grass before us, sparkling in the air; there was a sudden ripping sound, a thousand buried fault lines pulling themselves apart at once; the top surface of the arch’s span, all that we could see, began to tip and tilt, this way and that, great slabs of limestone sliding and grinding and tumbling free.

  o0o

  Grind turned to roar, the ground we stood on trembled and shook, a great cloud of dust rose up in front of us. The wind off the sea blew it back in our faces like a smokescreen; the last sight I had of my cousins, most of them were running.

  My eyes were full of grit, watering, stinging. I fumbled my way like a blind man in a hurry, squinting and seeing nothing, hands stretched out to feel.

  At last, just when I thought I’d missed him, my fingers found cloth and flesh, found a man standing and shivering, his hands over his face. I pulled them down roughly, peered closely at him to be sure. My uncle’s sacrifice, his enemy and mine.

  I turned him round, away from the car’s lights and the path that had brought us here. Turned his back to the swirling dust and pushed him, screamed in his ear, yelled, “Run, you fool! Run like fuck...!”

  Gave him another shove to get him started, waited till I was sure he was moving under his own strength, the impetus of survival; then I turned again, groping more cautiously towards where I thought I’d left Jamie.

  o0o

  The wind blew the worst of the dust away, tears washed my eyes clear. When I could see again, it was Jamie I saw first, standing just where he had been and gazing in awe and wonder at what he’d achieved, what the sea had failed over centuries to achieve on its own account. Falston Arch had become something else, Falston Stack I supposed, a massive limestone pillar separated by twenty or thirty metres from the mainland now.

  There were half a dozen men left on the height here, where there had been dozens; others were coming back in ones and twos, but none of them concerned me. Only a couple truly mattered, Jamie and his father.

  Uncle James of course had not run, he too was still where I had seen him last; and all the power of his will, all his furious intent was fixed on Jamie.

  As I watched, helpless in moonlight, my uncle unleashed that fury on his son. As he had once—at least once—before, when I was his victim, he broke the cardinal rule and used his talent against his own family, his own flesh; and this time it was to crush no minor rebellion, not merely to move a reluctant boy to where he wanted him.

  Did he mean it, was it conscious choice or only the rage in him blindly reacting? I couldn’t say, and still can’t. Maybe a man of Uncle James’ stamp, defied once too often and too publicly, made to look small and weak in the eyes of those who look to him for power and command—maybe such a man on such a night could do such a thing coldly and deliberately. Maybe he did.

  At any rate, he did it. His eyes glittered, he reached out with his mind and seized Jamie’s, took control of it all; and he marched Jamie swiftly and silently to where the cliff was crumbling and broken, where the arch was gone. Thus far, and one step further. Without a word or a glance around at the rest of us, he marched his son, his only surviving child over the edge.

  Jamie, who’d been so ecstatic earlier he’d wanted to fly, or try it: Jamie didn’t fly, he fell. He fell and was gone in a moment, and briefly I thought I heard the sound of his body breaking on the broken rocks beneath us.

  Everyone was frozen, everyone was staring at Uncle James. They all knew what he’d done, and none of them believed it.

  I moved first, I think, a few faltering and useless steps towards the edge, where Jamie wasn’t. I checked before I got there, turned back, gazed wildly at the cousins where they stood bewildered, found Conor among them and ran to him.

  Grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him hard, shook him out of his stupor; then I spoke to him, forcing the words out on hard little breaths through a throat clamped tight with shock.

  “Conor. Listen to me. Take the car, drive to his house. Take him with you,” with a jerk of my head towards my impervious uncle. “Just do it, right? Take him, leave him there, bring Laura back. Not here, bring her down there,” another jerk, he’d get the idea, “to the beach. Tell her Jamie’s hurt, understand? Just that, tell her he’s hurt...”

  I waited for his nod, and got it; then before he could start having doubts or asking questions, I pushed myself away from him and ran.

  o0o

  Back along the path, but not as far as the pub where we’d left the cars. There was a way down from there, I knew, to the narrow strand beneath the cliff, but I was too urgent to take so long. There was a nearer place where the cliff had partly collapsed, where generations of scrambling kids had reduced it further, to a steep scree slope.

  Surfing the scree was a game we all used to play, despite fences and warning signs and our parents’ loud and frequent prohibitions. It was a stupid and dangerous game even in daylight, even with friends around you; by night, alone and with the moon’s shadow turning the whole face black, it was potentially lethal.

  Nor was there really so much hurry. Jamie was dead or dying; what could I do? Zilch, was what. Or near zilch. I could hold his hand, I could talk him on his way; perhaps that seemed urgent enough, to get me there before he was utterly gone.

  I don’t remember thinking so clearly. All I knew was the urgency, the appalling rush that was on me; and I don’t remember a moment’s hesitation at the fence, where the cliff fell away into darkness just a metre or so beyond.

  I vaulted the fence and stepped out almost as blindly, almost as driven as Jamie, though it was my own mind driving me.

  Stepped out, and down. My heel found gravel, that shifted and settled a little before it took my weight; I heard the scutter of loose stuff sliding already.

  My other foot now, my hands thrust out for balance and my mind striving to remember how to play this. Keep on your feet was the crucial rule. Bend your knees like a skier, lean into the slope and go with it when it goes, don’t try to fight it. Never, never try to stop.

  A few stuttering, uncertain steps down and then I almost didn’t need to step again, the whole surface was moving beneath me, slipping away like an avalanche of rock and I had to ride it, I had to stay on top. If I fell it would roll me over and roll over me, and there might be two bodies on that beach come morning.

  Truly an escalator, the cliff carried me down, faster and faster; I had to move fast to stay with it, because you can’t stand still or it steals your feet from under you. There’s a seriously smart trick where you can run backwards to go slow, but you need to be expert for that, and well in practice. I hadn’t done this for many years, and besides, slow was not on my mind. I leaped, made skidding, careering contact with the sliding scree and leapt again, going down through the dark in a series of crazy bounds.

  And hit the hard stuff at the bottom without warning, without being able to see. My foot turned on a boulder that didn’t shift, and then I did fall, I rolled and tumbled ten or twenty feet over jagged rocks and came to rest at last with a bone-bruising thump that knocked out of me what little breath I had left.

  o0o

  Lay where I was for a brief time, fighting for air while the last scatter of scree pattered down around me, torn horribly between the desperate need to move and the need not to move at all just now, the absolute imperative of stillness.

  Slowly, various bits and pieces began to hurt, quite badly. It dawned on me that if I didn’t go with the desperation and get myself up right now, they might hurt so much that moving became impossible. So I did move, just fingers and feet to start with, just to check that I could. Nothing was broken, seemingly. I put my hands down on rock-strewn sand and pu
shed myself awkwardly up onto my knees. Breathed deeply and ran what internal checks I could, finding sharp twisting pains and soreness but nothing worse; and then external, patting lightly over my head and what skin I could get to. Rips in my smart suit I found, skinned knees and knuckles and a few cuts, one swelling already forming under my hair where my head had cracked against a rock.

  I felt a little dizzy but not disoriented, not I thought concussed, though it was hard to be sure of that. I tried to count fingers, but couldn’t see even a hand’s span in front of my eyes; I had to wait a minute longer before they adjusted to the starlight.

  Decided I was okay then, that I could make out just the three fingers I knew I was holding up. Okay to walk, at least. I scrambled cautiously to my feet and set off. The tide was coming in again by now, waves hissing over sand, leaving only a couple of metres’-width of beach between water and tumbled rock at the cliff’s foot. That panicked me again, as I glanced up at the dark mass of the cliff and thought of Jamie’s long fall down. Even if he’d survived it he must surely have fallen into water, he must be drowning if he wasn’t dead already. And either way, dead or dying, the sea must be sucking at him, pulling him in deeper, pulling him away from us who loved him...

  That had me running again as best I could, stumbling through the hurt of a yanked ankle and much-abused muscles. And as I ran, even through the jolting pain of every step my traitor mind was thinking, dead or dying, Jamie’s lost to Laura.

  She would be free and needful, oh, so very much in need; I thought I could claim her now, I could step into my cousin’s shoes and take care of her, her and her baby both. I could take them and love them, take them away from here. We could build a new life together, the three of us and any more kids that came along; I could be her substitute Macallan, it’s what Jamie surely would have wanted for her. I could hear his voice in my head, his dying words urging me to do it; I could see his final movement, fingers fumbling weakly in his jacket pocket to find those rings, then pressing them into my hand as a token, these are my future, yours now, take and wear them with my blessing, in memory of me. Even if he was past speech, past movement as surely he must be, surely I’d be right to do that thing...?