Excerpt
Dante stared and stared at the corpse, but a blindness waited behind his eyes. It was as if he couldn't see the body; couldn't grasp it, or what it meant.
He had never felt fear like this, not in the worst moments of his life. The angel madness was thick in him, and with it came the inevitable dread: a metallic horror that slid like a sword down his throat. His skin crawled mouth tasted like oil.
What did it mean? Christ. What did it mean?
"0 Jesus," he whispered. "Let's pretend it's all a bad dream, why don't we? Leave the damn thing here and go back to bed and hope it's gone by morning."
His foster-brother, Jet, grinned as Cain must have grinned at Abel. "Over your dead body," he said.
It wasn't the corpse of someone who looked like him, but Dante himself: he could see the tiny scar above the body's right eye where he had fallen into the stairs one Easter, hunting chocolate eggs. Just below the body's left elbow was the long white gash where a bucking saw-blade had cut into his arm one day when he and Jet were building their tree-fort. (Father had been out delivering a baby, so it was Mother who took over, swabbing the cut with mercurochrome and putting in the stitches, all fifty-three of them. Ought to save herself the trouble by running his arm through her sewing machine, she said, but she had been trained as a nurse and her fingers were steady.)
Even in the cold, the boathouse stank of mildew and engine oil and gutted fish. Jet and Sarah had rigged up an operating table, laying two-by-fours across the thwarts of the flat-bottomed rowboat. They had put Dante's corpse with its head in the stern, just touching the little Evinrude 2-stroke motor.
Jesus. What did it mean? That you're going to die, he told himself savagely. What do you think it foretells—a downturn in the economy? A low-pressure system bringing showers and scattered flurries? You're dying, dying, good as dead already and you know, you know it, somehow you can feel it coming somehow the angel's showing you O Christ Jesus—
He caught hold of himself.
Bad. Bad scientist, theorizing before all the data's in. Father would be disappointed (as usual). Examine the facts. Don't jump to conclusions. Lots of meanings for death symbols. Renewal. Sudden Change. Regeneration.
He looked again at his body, lying naked and pathetically vulnerable in the rowboat, with its feet hanging out over the prow. Renewal. Yeah, right.
In death, his pale skin was white as frost. His long white fingers looked sinister and strange. He imagined them creeping away, each hand a clumsy white spider crawling over the gunnels and dropping from the rowboat to scuttle out of sight, hiding behind the old oars and buckets of paint, the aluminum bait pails and fishing poles and disassembled Mercury outboard motor.
Dante's hair was a red-gold fringe around a high white forehead. He had his grandfather's ginger eyebrows, winging sharply up and out, like Satan's. The eyes below were narrow and blue. They stared unblinking at the naked boathouse bulb hanging overhead.
With a shaking hand Dante reached out and closed his own dead eyes.
Jet was papering the cold concrete floor with aging pagesfrom The New York Times, in case things got messy. "You make a lovely corpse," he remarked. "I always thought you would."
