Dead of Light Read Online Free

him, or some part of me agreed; but that was all he was seeing, my rejection and my walking out. Where I stood there was a wider picture, and it had a great gaping hole torn in it, edges fraying in a bad wind.
    â€œYou’ll want to view the body,” he said, and now I couldn’t agree with him at all, no part of me wanted to view the body. But, “You’re the last,” he said, “I’ll take you up myself.” And he was already turning towards the stairs, and spineless Benedict Macallan asserted himself exactly as much as he usually did, and followed quietly in his uncle’s wide wake.
    There would be a wake, I realised suddenly, a wake for Marty from now until the dawn. I hadn’t been invited, though, not for that. This was a blood meeting upcoming and I was blood, I had a duty to attend; but the mourning party after would be for true mourners only, not for the likes of me.
    Not that there were any others like me. I was renegade, I was outcast, I was alone.
    By my own choice, and apparently forever; and oh Laura, Laura, not fair to send me into this alone, where’s your compassion?
    o0o
    Up the stairs to the first landing, and I turned automatically to the next flight, thinking of Marty’s old room in the attic, thinking they would have put him there. But Uncle James was going the other way, along the corridor where I almost was a stranger, where children had never been welcomed when I had the run of this house, when I was a child. That made it easier, a little. I didn’t want to see Marty still and dead in the room where I’d seen him so often death’s opposite, so full of life, laughing or wrestling or hustling me out with hard hands and hard words and a girl mysteriously half-seen in the shadows behind him, perfume in the air.
    And if they’d changed the room, or he had — if there were no posters on the walls now, no sports teams or women posed half-naked and provocative; no broken childhood toys gathering dust in cupboards; no adolescent trophies, this girl’s bra and that girl’s knickers; no clothes kicked in corners, no reek of sweat and aftershave, no Marty — I didn’t want to see that either, like an underlining that there was no Marty in the world.
    o0o
    I followed Uncle James, hustling a little to catch up; and he took me past half a dozen doors firmly closed, and brought me to one that stood a little open.
    He pushed it wider, gestured with his head; and I hardly hesitated, hardly paused for one last breath and a momentary eye-contact, I don’t want to do this , before I went obediently in to Marty.
    o0o
    It was dim in there, heavy lace curtains over the windows and no lights on. My stupid hand was already reaching for the switch before I caught it and dragged it down again, feeling Uncle James’ eyes still watching me.
    This must have been a guest-room ordinarily, there was nothing personal in it. Pale blue wallpaper, a couple of prints, heavy furniture with china doodahs on lace doilies, an ashtray on the window-sill. Only a single spray of flowers, white lilies and orchids on a low table by the bed.
    Queen-size, the bed, and in the middle of the room; and on the bed, of course, my cousin Marty.
    Naked to the waist, he was; or naked all the way, rather, but there was a sheet drawn neatly up for decency, only its weight to shadow the shape of him from the chest down.
    I was surprised, I’d thought to find him in his best clothes like the rest of them, suit and tie and a flower in his buttonhole; and what surprised me more, someone had spilt ink on his shoulder.
    No, couldn’t be ink. Get real, Macallan. But something there was, a black stain on his skin; and I was leaning closer, trying to make it out in this uncertain light — better to look at a little part of him than the whole, better a small puzzle than the big one, who and how and why — when someone did flick that switch on the wall behind me.
    Then