Chapter 6 #3
She saw understanding come to Melissa’s face, caught at the edge of Ross’s light.
Or at least a different kind of bafflement.
Whatever she was about to say was washed away by the abrupt and appalling shock of light that pinned them all in place.
Less a torch than a mobile spotlight that bleached all colour from everything around them.
Elena shielded her eyes with her hands, hunched against the light as if it were a gale.
“That’s very perceptive,” came a voice from the sightless dark. Neera’s voice, cool and amused. “With this species, though, the interval is rather longer. And, as you’ve seen, they grow somewhat larger on a more nutritious diet.”
The focus of the light shifted downwards, still keeping them well within its ambit, but giving them a chance to face up to their interrogators.
Neera was still just a shadow behind the fierce glare of the lamp, but beside her was Jeffrey de la Pole, looking sour as a toad.
He had his hands shoved in the pockets of his thick coat, and something long and metal gleamed in the crook of his arm.
“Enough talk,” he said. “Back to the house, now.”
“Dad,” Melissa said simply. “No.”
His eyes flashed. “Back!” he barked. “To the house! You will not defy me on this. You will not show me up in front of the others. You have a duty to your family, and you’re deluded if you think you can stamp your feet and throw a tantrum about it.”
“Dad, I’m leaving,” she told him. “I’m walking out of here.
And if you come after me I will tell the whole world every damn thing we saw here, and everything else too.
What you did to Mum, and to me, and to everyone.
Every last sordid detail. I don’t care who you threaten or who you bribe.
I’ll find somewhere to print it or I’ll do it myself.
So let us go, cut me off, write me out of the will.
Let’s just call it quits and nobody needs to see any of the family’s fucking dirty laundry. ”
“You,” Jeffrey told her, “are a resource. You are my contribution to our family’s future.
You are not free to walk away.” He had his hands out of his pockets now, shaking with fury, and Elena saw with a shock he was raising the shotgun.
The same one Melissa had found before, and that Jeffrey must have confiscated and kept hold of.
“I will fight you,” Melissa said flatly. “In any way.”
His face was flushed with rage, so contorted that if a monstrous winged thing had burst from his throat and chest right then, Elena wouldn’t have been surprised. “God damn you, girl. I’ll—”
“What? Shoot me? But you need me alive for your fucked-up ritual or experiment or whatever, right? So, what, Dad? You’re going to slap me about again? Did you know about that?” Melissa was looking at Neera now, squinting past the light. “Are you proud of what you’re part of?”
The light shifted as Neera shrugged. “It is what it is,” she said, calmness personified compared to the man beside her.
Then the shotgun shifted and Elena was looking right down the barrels.
“We don’t need her alive,” Jeffrey said. “Nobody needs her—goddamnit, Ross, get the hell out of the way!”
Because Ross had actually done the white knight thing.
He’d stepped between her and the gun. Back in Baltimore they’d been mugged once, and he’d just stared at the pistol as though not recognising what it even was.
Numbly handed over his wallet without ever quite engaging with the situation.
But now he was facing a home-grown threat, something he could own and take responsibility for.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on, Uncle Jeffrey,” he tried in his best reasonable tones, “but I think—”
Jeffrey shouted him down, demanding he get out of the way, and then Melissa flew at him, grappling for the gun, screaming in his face. Elena shrank away, pulling at Ross, imagining a convulsive twitch on the trigger, the sudden roar.
It came, but at a heartbeat’s delay. Jeffrey had thrown Melissa off, just ramming the length of the gun against her and shoving with that brutal Enderbough solidity, knocking her to the ground.
And later, doubtless he’d claim it was an accident, a misfire, the heat of the moment.
Elena saw it all in the uncompromising light of the lamp, though.
The moment when Jeffrey de la Pole decided he’d had enough, that further investment in this particular future was just a sunk cost fallacy.
When he levelled the gun at his own daughter and let fly, it was with absolute clarity and premeditation.
The right hand image, balancing this, was a photograph, faded sepia, two white men in immaculate shirts and shorts and pith helmets, a black man in shorts, all standing before a rock face on which was carved…
The style was very different, huge-headed, angular-bodied, and yet the thing itself was immediately recognisable, the same terrible angel as was preserved in expensive pigments on the vellum page.
A different culture’s attempt at articulating the same inexpressible thing.