Dead of Light Read Online Free Page A

the light was certain, the light was definite and unambiguous and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I turned quickly, half to see and half to protest; but seeing was enough, the protest died somewhere between tongue and teeth.
    It was Marty’s brother stood there in the doorway. Marty’s kid brother, young Jamie. My age, my playmate; often my shield and defender against Hazel, and for a long time my very best-loved friend.
    No friend now, we had the whole family between us; and after today I thought we’d have Marty too, the way Jamie looked, the way he was looking at me. Once we used to unite against Marty, two allies under constant threat of war. Now he was going to lie between us, cold and dead and irrecoverable, like so much else.
    â€œGo on,” Jamie said, soft and sibilant and chilling, lean and tense in his tight suit, hard-trained and utterly out of any control but his own. “Have a closer look, you were going to anyway. That’s what you’re here for, that’s why you’ve come...”
    That’s why I was brought , I thought; and, that’s why he’s got no clothes on , I thought that too, suddenly seeing clearly, bright as the light around me now.
    And I turned away from Jamie, more for escape than to satisfy my curiosity, because he looked too dangerous to bear. But the one led to the other, not looking at Jamie meant looking at Marty, no other choices in that room that morning; and again I looked at the shoulder more than the face, thought about the skin sooner than think about what that skin contained, cooling bones and heavy flesh already part putrescent.
    It wasn’t only his shoulder, I saw that now, although his shoulder was worst affected. There were black marks on his arms too, in little patches; and on his knuckles, where his hands lay folded atop the white sheet. I thought of ink again, understanding the pattern of them suddenly.
    Marty had made his first tattoo at school, done it himself with a needle set in a wine-cork and Art Department inks. He was maybe fifteen then but already a big lad, already a bruiser, loving his own reputation; when he’d picked the scabs off there was a crude face on his forearm, with a black eye and missing teeth, and THE OTHER GUY in wobbly capitals around it. I was staying in the house just then, so I got to witness the row, and the week of cold silences after; and neither of us ever let on that Marty had used my idea and my original sketch to work from.
    That early amateur effort had been removed inside the month, and was never mentioned again. But Marty left school the following year and left home temporarily, to establish at least a little independence; and that was when he started paying for his tattoos.
    Last time I’d seen him he’d had LOVE and HATE across his fingers, like any self-respecting thug; and he’d had any number of designs up his arms, flags and football teams, impossible women; but his pride and joy, his new acquisition, what he’d taken his shirt off to show me was a dragon.
    No ordinary dragon, this. Brazen and bejewelled, it had clung to his back with all four legs and its wings outstretched, claws dug in and beads of blood dribbling down. Its tail wrapped around his buttock and arrowed into his groin, he said, though he didn’t show me that; its head peered over his left shoulder, and its eyes were laughing.
    That’s how it was, that’s what he wore under his clothes last time we met. He carried a dragon on his back, between his skin and him.
    No longer. What he carried now — except that he carried nothing, would never carry anything again — what marked his body was a puffy, crusted black blister where the dragon’s head had been, and lesser scabs to cover all his other tattoos.
    I thought they were burns, perhaps. I thought Uncle James had come after him with a blowtorch, flames to scrub him clean of filthy pictures. Or I didn’t, I only wanted