Resurrection Man (5 page)

CHAPTER
THREE

The spider that had crawled from Dante's neck was gone. Swimming back to consciousness, he found himself sitting on an overturned bait pail. Jet was squatting next to him, propping him up, with one hand on his shoulder. Something was hanging just over Dante's head. He realized it was his own dead foot, sticking out beyond the end of the rowboat.

This right here is a pretty good approximation of Hell, Dante reflected. He glanced over at Jet: bastard Jet who had found the damn body beneath the bureau mirror. "Little spy" was right.

Sarah brought him a mug of water from the boathouse sink. It tasted cool and metallic. "Are you going to be able to do this? Because I can try—"

Dante shook his head. He frowned at his slacks, brushing off imaginary lint to steady his nerves. "Mine to do."

"You sure?"

Slowly Dante stood. He picked up the butcher knife and gave Sarah his best wry smile. "Cross my heart and hope to die."

With death, the blood had pooled on the underside of his body, giving a heavy, bruised look to the backs of his knees, thighs, back and neck.

Dante cut, and cut again.

The dead look nothing like the sleeping, he thought. Many times he had been moved by the vulnerability of a sleeping lover, the fragile innocence of a woman's mouth half-open like a child's. There was nothing innocent about death. The body that split heavily around his knife wasn't him anymore. It had become a thing: nothing more than what his godless father saw, a blind and purposeless machine, now broken and useless. There could be no more complete degradation.

Jet read on from Miller's
Practical Pathology
. " 'The next step in the process is the dissection of the skin and muscles of the chest from sternum, cartilages, and ribs, and, at the same time, of the skin of the neck from the subjacent tissue. This should be done by grasping the skin, et cetera, with the left hand—' "

"The skin, et cetera," Dante murmured. "Dear God."

Jet's thick black eyebrows rose in reproof. Still doing his unnervingly good imitation of Dr. Ratkay's Demonstration Voice, he resumed reading, " '—grasping the skin, et cetera, with the left hand and steadily pulling away from the sternum or ribs. The areolar tissues are then touched here and there with the edge of the knife as they are put upon the stretch.' " Jet glanced up. "Just like filleting a fish," he said.

" 'Commencing at the second costal cartilage close to its attachment to the rib, and cutting obliquely outwards, so as to avoid injuring the underlying lung, one divides the cartilages on either side.' "

Dante's hands were sweating inside their rubber gloves. Carefully he sawed through his own cartilage.

" 'Great care should be taken not to splinter the ribs in any way, so as to avoid puncture wounds of the hands in subsequent manipulations. An excellent way to avoid such wounds is to fold the skin which has been dissected from sternum and ribs in over the severed ends of the ribs,' " Jet read.

Dante felt like crying. Why had he gone fishing with the accursed lure? (Could that only have been this morning? It seemed like a lifetime ago—which it was, he thought, with a quick flash of bitter humor.) Was he meant to find the strange square ring? What did it signify? Clearly Aunt Sophie recognized it, or thought she did.

Why, why had he ever let Jet near the mirror?

*   *   *

Dante was twenty-one when the mirror overmastered him. He was home from college for Christmas, and hating it. In the City he was still a stranger to his impersonal apartment, living on the surface of things. He liked it that way.

But at home... The old house crawled with his childhood secrets, and he had lost the trick of ignoring them.

The mirror was the worst of all. The antique bureau it ornamented was a long mahogany monster that drank Aker's Lemon Furniture Oil by the quart. It had a facing of white Italian marble with black streaks through it, like fudge-ripple ice cream. A three-foot-high oval mirror rose from its center. The glass around the mirror's edges had been frosted, like ice ringing a pond in winter.

This was the mirror that had stood in judgment over Dante the day he poisoned Duane the bully with unclean secrets. He had watched spiders crawl from his mouth in its remorseless depths. Over the years the dread of it had grown in him. One night he heard its icy surface creak; felt it shift under the weight of his eyes. He snatched up an old bedspread and flung it over the mirror before he fell through the cracking glass into whatever black river waited below.

Since that time Dante had not dared to touch the bureau, letting it go dry and parched for lack of oil. He hated looking at it, and seldom came home anymore, because it meant spending a night in the same room as the cursed thing. And every time he did come back, he could not help noticing a shape growing beneath the bedspread.

Something solid was growing under the blanket. Something was waiting for him in the mirror's depths.

*   *   *

It finally caught him after dinner that night. He had snuck back to his room; Jet and Sarah found him sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the strange square ring and trying to think up some excuse for spending the night on the couch in the parlor.

"What happened with Aunt Sophie?" Sarah asked.

"She's bolted the door to her room. From the smell of it, she's trying to fumigate the place with a carton of Virginia Slims Queen-size."

"Dante wants to earn his wings and halo," Jet drawled. "Going to try his hand at angeling at last."

"To hell with you. Aunt Sophie can have her secrets; I don't want any part of them."

"What do you suppose happened to her husband?" Jet mused. "Or the baby?"

"He died a long time— Baby?" Dante's gingery eyebrows flared up in surprise. "What baby?"

"I... found a picture of them, Aunt Sophie and your mother. Both very pregnant."

"Found a picture? Where?"

"Can't remember."

"You remember everything," Dante said suspiciously.

"What happened to Aunt Sophie's baby, Dante?"

"How should I know? Miscarried, I suppose, or stillborn. That's enough reason not to talk about it." Dante shrugged, pushing away another one of Jet's unpleasant secrets. "What are you digging for? That should be horrible enough."

"Why doesn't she come to your birthday parties? Hey?" Jet grinned, and the butterfly trembled on his cheek. "What's that little ring you found, that least of rings? What did Aunt Sophie see in the depths of its golden eye, eh?" He steepled his fingers in monkish solemnity. "You cannot hide from Fate, my son."

Sarah grunted. "People don't have fates."

"No: fates have people," Jet said, suddenly serious. "It's quite, quite different."

Dante blinked, caught by Jet's stare. Unbidden, the thought popped into his mind: Jet. Jet is my fate. He has me.

"What happened to the father?" Sarah asked, not noticing the long look that hung between her brothers. "Aunt Sophie's husband, that is. She would never have a baby without being married, but she never wears a ring."

"A ring," Dante whispered, reaching into his pocket. It was still there, a thick, square gold band. Unornamented. Like a man's wedding ring.

"We'll get you your crystal ball license yet," Jet purred.

Sarah frowned. "If you found her husband's wedding ring in the river, maybe he drowned. Maybe he and the baby were drowned on the same day—on your birthday, Dante! That would explain why she never comes to your parties. She's at a cemetery or something."

"What's the first thing you remember?" Jet murmured. "The very earliest memory you have?"

"I don't know. Grandfather Clock, I guess. I could see my reflection in his front. I remember the ticking." Dante turned the ring over in his hand. The gold was a heavy, metallic yellow, the same color as his cuff links.

Jet said, "I remember everything." Sarah snorted but he ignored her, looking only at Dante, his black eyes fierce above a thin smile. "The first time I woke, you were seven days old. I know; I heard Aunt Sophie and your mother talking about it in the next room. I understood them perfectly."

Dante believed him.

"It was your crying that woke me," Jet continued, sitting on the bureau, his legs idly swinging. His hand rested on a lump under the bedspread. "I was lying in a basket on the kitchen table, beside an open window. You were lying beside me. They must have heard your whimpers; Mother sighed and came into the room. Her footsteps were slow and painful. Aunt Sophie followed her.

"Your mother picked you up and held you, singing, looking out the window to the river. She was young then, younger than Sarah is now." Jet grinned. "Prettier too."

Was it Jet who told you that?
Aunt Sophie had asked.
Of course it was, the little spy....
The most contemptible thing there is. He was a coward and a traitor, Aunt Sophie had said. Who? Who was the traitor she had been thinking of that day, as her eyes stared back into the past?

Dante fingered the ring. A man's wedding ring.

Jet's voice was soft. "Then Mother looked at me, and the singing died in her throat. 'Sophie,' she whispered. The next thing I saw was Aunt Sophie's face bending down. Do you understand?
I was the baby, Dante.
I was Aunt Sophie's child."

Sarah shook her head. "We would have known."

Jet ignored her, looking only at Dante, always at Dante. "She saw me and she screamed. She screamed and screamed and wouldn't stop screaming.... She has never stopped screaming. I hear it all day long between the ticks of Grandfather Clock, Dante. The whole house rings with it. The walls shudder."

Jet closed his eyes. "What happened to the baby, eh?" When he opened them again, Dante's heart stopped beating, so naked was Jet's rage. "
What happened to me?
You were Mother's child and I was Aunt Sophie's, only something happened to me when I was one week old. Something put
this
on me," he said, reaching up to finger the butterfly birthmark. "Something made me inhuman, Dante. Something took me out of the sunlight to be your god damn shadow.

"For years I didn't care, that's just the way it was, I grew up the outsider, who ever thought different? But that's not enough anymore. Now I want to know, Dante. I want to know what happened."