Light Errant Read Online Free PDF Page B

age, losing a little of his hair, sitting huddled with his face in his hands. Not so rare in this town, fear and depression were common currency. I checked, thought perhaps I should walk the other way, not to disturb a stranger in his misery; but too late for that, he’d heard my footsteps on the flags, he lowered his hands and lifted his head and turned his eyes to find me.
    One of those moments it was, when the world stills on its axis. Even in this most silent of nights, a greater silence fell. I lost the sounds of the river and the distant sounds of traffic to the south, even the sounds of my own breathing and the blood in my body. Lost the will to motion, any grip on good sense.
    Got my breath back first, a slow, juddering draw of air, just enough to speak with.
    â€œ Dad? ”
    He didn’t speak. No Benedict, son, how are you? or Where did you spring from, what are you doing home again, why didn’t you tell us you were coming? Not even Where’ve you been, your mother’s missed you, boy, she’s been worried as hell...
    No, he only stirred, stood, walked heavily towards me. Like his body, his face was puffing out, losing the definition of my childhood years; his skin glistened, and briefly I thought his flesh was all dissolving on his bones. I’d seen it happen. But no, that was only mind and memory and the night, the being back. He was sweating, that was all, surely. It was a warm night, and fat men sweat. I’m not fat and I was sweating myself, I could feel my skin sticky with it under my leathers and under my hair...
    But the first noise he made was a sniff—nothing neat or disdainful, this was a wet and raucous snot-sucking mother of a sniff—and the first gesture was a dash of his hand across his face, and maybe that wasn’t sweat after all. But why would my father, my father be sitting out in the city, in the night—his time, the night—and crying? It made no sense. Couldn’t be, that was all. Couldn’t be. I was misunderstanding.
    o0o
    He didn’t speak, he didn’t touch me, or not yet. Not with his hands or his heart, no silent hugging welcome for the strayed sheep straying home, the prodigal son unwashed, unclean but wanted none the less.
    He stood there in the moonlight, my loving father, three, maybe four metres away—close enough to be sure of me, not close enough to touch—and he didn’t lift a finger, but he hit me.
    Something hit me, at least. Or nothing did, but I was hit regardless. There was nothing there: no shape or shadow glimpsed in the corner of my eye, no breath of displaced air, but an intangible force slapped furiously against the side of my head and sent me reeling. The right way, thank God, away from the river, or there might have been a young man drowned that night.
    As it was, I staggered and stopped, gasped in confusion, lifted a hand to my pounding skull and was struck again, a thudding blow into my belly.
    All doubled up now, breathless and desperate and utterly muddled, I lifted my head to find my father, to look for help. Stupidly, I looked to him to help me; and saw the savage contentment on his face a moment before a brutal sideswipe against my jaw had me sprawling on my back.
    Then he really went to work on me.
    o0o
    Do what thou wilt, but not against blood kin. That was pretty much the whole of the law, any law that my family would recognise: that all things were open to them, except to use their talent on each other. That was a universal, it was Medes and Persians stuff, ineradicable from the fabric of what we were, except that it seemed to fall into utter disuse around me. All my life I’d been my sister’s soft target, until she died; and then Uncle James had done it, taken control of my body from me and tugged my strings like a malevolent puppeteer. Uncle Allan had been the great exception, acknowledging no laws nor common practice. And now it was my father’s turn, third and slowest of