Dark Angel Read Online Free Page A

think I’m a terrible coward, and of course I am. Sickrooms make me queasy. But you see, Steenie would have understood.”
    This was true. I raised my glass. Vickers gave me a rueful look.
    “To Steenie, then? Old times?” He hesitated. “Old friends?”
    “All right. To Steenie.”
    We both drank. Vickers set down his glass. He rested his hands on his knees; he gave me a long, appraising look. The blue eyes were alert. Vickers, for all his affectations, was a great photographer; he had a photographer’s ability to read a face.
    “You’d better tell me. I do want to know. When you called … I felt like a worm. Was it easy? For Steenie, I mean?”
    I considered this. Was death ever easy? I had tried to make it easy for Steenie, as had Wexton. We had succeeded only to a limited extent. When he died, my uncle had been afraid; he had also been troubled.
    He had tried to disguise this at first. Once he realized there was no hope, Steenie set about dying in style.
    Uncle Steenie had always valued the stylish above everything. He intended, I think, to greet Hades as an old friend, remembered from past parties; to be rowed across the Styx as carelessly as if he took a gondola to the Giudecca. When he met his boatman Charon, I think Uncle Steenie meant to treat him like the doorman at the Ritz: Steenie might flounce past, but he would bestow a large tip.
    This was achieved, in the end. Steenie went as he would have liked, propped up against silk pillows, amusing one moment, dead the next.
    But that sudden departure came at the end of a long three months, months during which even Steenie’s capacity to perform sometimes failed him. He was not in pain—we saw to that—but, as the doctors had warned, those morphine cocktails did have strange effects. They took Steenie back into the past, and what he saw there made him weep.
    He would try to convey to me what he saw, talking and talking, often late into the night. His compulsion to make me see what he saw was very great. I sat with him; I held his hand; I listened. He was the last but one of my family left. I knew he wanted to give me the gift of the past, before it was too late.
    It was often difficult, though, to understand what he said. The words were clear enough, but the events he described were scrambled. Morphine made Steenie a traveler through time; it gave him the facility to move forward and back, to pass from a recent conversation to another some twenty years before as if they happened the same day, in the same place.
    He spoke of my parents and my grandparents, but only the names were familiar, for as Steenie spoke of them they were unrecognizable to me. This was not the father I remembered, nor the mother. The Constance he spoke of was a stranger.
    One point: Some of Steenie’s memories were benign; some, quite clearly, were not. Steenie saw, in these shadows, things that made him shake. He would grasp my hand, start up in the bed, peer about the room, address specters he saw and I did not.
    This made me afraid. I was unsure if it was the morphine speaking. As you will see in due course, I had grown up with certain puzzles that had never been resolved, puzzles that dated from the time of my own birth and my christening. I had outgrown those puzzles, I thought. I had put them behind me. My uncle Steenie brought them rushing back.
    Such a whirl of words and images: Uncle Steenie might speak of croquet one minute, comets the next. He spoke often of the Winterscombe woods—a subject to which he would return with increasing and incomprehensible emphasis. He also spoke—and then I was almost sure it was the morphine—of violent death.
    I think Wexton, who witnessed some of this, understood it better than I did, but he explained nothing. He remained quiet, resilient, reticent—waiting for death.
    There were two days of serenity and lucidity before it came, days in which Steenie gathered himself, I thought, for the final assault. Then he died, as I say, with a