The Double Life of Cassiel Roadnight Page 16

  Helen breathed softly and evenly next to me on the bed. She held my hand.

  What would she do if I told her? Where would she break if she knew the truth about her sons? That one was dead, one was a killer and one was a thief and a fake and a liar.

  I tried to think straight. I tried to decide what to do next.

  Tomorrow was Hay on Fire, and Frank was going to pay for what he did. I wanted to make sure of that.

  And for Frank to pay, I’d have to tell the truth.

  Helen would have to find out.

  She’d lost a son, but it wasn’t Damiel.

  The fire didn’t kill me.

  Cassiel’s twin brother was sitting right beside her. Cassiel’s twin brother was me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Every year, Hay on Fire starts in the town, outside the Parish Hall, waiting, holding its breath. The steam engine growls and threatens thunder at the head of the procession. The dancers and drummers and revellers stand behind in costume, unreal with silver and gold, swathed in black, hidden by masks, freakishly, skittishly tall, quiet, waiting. The children carry lanterns made of paper and willow. The stilt walkers and faceless, cloaked sentries hold burning torches. The dancers wear red and orange and yellow, like fire, the band amongst them, their instruments glinting like jewels in the flames.

  When the signal comes, the engine rolls, the drums start up, the band plays, the dancers move and sway and turn and rise and circle and do it again. The body of them, bedecked and horrific and splendid, squeezes through the narrow streets, gathers pace and other bodies, past the watching crowd. Stopping traffic, snaking its way with drumbeat heart to where the river snakes, where the land flattens out on to the common and disappears into the dark water, the line between the two seamless and invisible in the night.

  I was there. I was in the procession. I saw it. I saw it all from start to finish. Helen didn’t want me to go.

  She said, “It worries me, Cass. It’s like it’s happening again. Like it’s all about to happen.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen,” I lied. “I’m just going out to have a good time. We all are, right?”

  I was wearing a black hooded cloak that closed over my other clothes completely. My face was half gold and half silver, my eyes hidden behind a red and black mask. Floyd had sorted out my costume. It was exactly the same as the one Cassiel had worn two years before. That’s why Helen had objected. That’s what she hadn’t liked.

  Frank hadn’t liked it either. I was rubbing his nose in it. I was getting above my station.

  I wondered if he knew yet I had taken all his money too.

  I didn’t think so. He would hurt me once he knew it.

  Edie’s face was painted a sickening pale. The shadows under her eyes were grey and blue and black. She had backcombed her hair until it fell, electrified, over her shoulders, almost to the small of her back. Her dress was white, her veil a soft gauze between her and what she saw. The red gash across her throat had dripped, staining the front of her bodice.

  “Corpse bride,” she said to Helen, grinning, before she noticed me, before she saw what I was wearing, before she stepped back anxiously in time. I saw the fear come into her eyes. Her teeth looked dead and yellow against the white of her skin.

  “Brilliant,” I said, but she didn’t answer.

  Helen and Frank weren’t dressed up. They’d go and watch, they said, see the procession and watch the show and the fireworks from the hill.

  “And then we’re coming home, aren’t we, Mum,” he said. “Getting an early night. Things have got to get back to normal in the morning. I’ve got to get back to work tomorrow, got to leave early.”

  His voice was strained, his speech brazen and well-rehearsed. The women looked at me with hollow, melancholy eyes. Edie bit her lip. Helen chewed her fingernails. Frank smiled, shameless and sordid and arrogant.

  I knew, somewhere deep inside my mind, very calmly, that he was already planning to kill me that night. I knew I didn’t need to say what Floyd and I had decided I would, to make sure of it. I think he’d decided he couldn’t trust me alive. I think he’d decided he couldn’t risk it.

  This is what it would be like living with him, I thought. Worrying every day that he’d had enough. Looking over my shoulder all the time, waiting to die.

  I wasn’t going to be a part of keeping his secret.

  “Don’t go, Cass,” Helen said again.

  “Leave him alone,” Frank said. “It’s just a bit of fun. He’s not going to run off again, are you, Cass?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “Hay on Fire,” I said, my voice thin and airless, every cell in my body wiry and taut. “How can I miss it?”

  “Be careful,” Edie warned me, like she knew what I was doing.

  The dancers dipped and writhed around me. The drums went through my feet and into my body and out of my ears, just like Floyd said they would. He was somewhere close. He said he would be, although I hadn’t seen him. I wasn’t supposed to.

  He said, “You do what you need to do and don’t worry about me. I’ll be right there when it comes to it. If you know exactly what’s going to happen, it won’t work. Just do your bit and trust in me for the rest.”

  The procession moved through the town. We were on the uneven footpath that took us to the warren. The crowd funnelled into the narrow space, the dancers faster, the drums louder, the costumes more striking and vivid than they’d been under streetlight, more real.

  I waited for Frank to find me. I was expecting him.

  I’d done what I had to. I’d done what Floyd told me I should. Frank and Helen had been watching outside the chemist. I saw them standing in the doorway, huddled against the other spectators in the cold. I ducked out of the procession for a second, black against the dark, unnoticed really. I smiled at Helen, my mother, kissed her on the cheek, and I leaned in to Frank, spoke simply and clearly into his ear.

  “The deal is off,” I said. “You’re not safe. I have Mr Artemis. I’ve changed his name. I’ve taken your money and tomorrow I’m going to tell. To stop me, you’ll have to kill me like you killed your other brother.”

  Frank didn’t notice the “other”. He kept his face still, kept the smile on it that he had arranged there. There was nothing he could do, not with Helen next to him. His eyes burned, dark and furious and livid, the monster inside the man. I felt the heat of his breath on my neck. Three words. Calmly and surely spoken.

  “So you’re dead.”

  I joined the procession again, slipped back in and flowed on. I wondered how he would do it. In a crowd like this, now, here, in the dark, something fast like a knife, something quiet like that, quick and easy, if you knew what you were doing.

  Or something slower, just me and him in the dark somewhere, with the sound of the crowd behind us, with no one there to see.

  I wondered if he planned to kill me the same way he killed Cassiel. And I knew that I deserved it, to die the same way as the brother whose life I had stolen.

  Please God let Floyd be somewhere, I thought. Please God make sure he gets this down.

  The crowd settled on the slope of the common and the procession wound its way ahead of them down to the flat land, to where the willow creatures and the circular labyrinths and the giant Wicker Man all awaited their fate, their beautiful burning.

  I stood to one side, quiet and watchful and, I hoped, unseen in the centre of the show, in the middle of the chaos and activity. The music boomed. The flames cracked and flickered. The performers waited on the edge of the circle, practising, their fire toys cutting the air with loud, rhythmic sighs. The smell of paraffin was thick and acrid in the air. Wires ran across the field, this way and that, a network of connections. The chimneys belched flame like breath, like sleeping dragons. The fireworks bided silently in the ground, their noise and energy and light shut in, poised. It was curiously quiet where I stood, in the eye of the storm. I saw everything and nothing at the same time. It was
deafening and without sound, all at once. I wondered if these were the last things I would see, the last sounds I’d hear. I was surprised to find how sad I was if this was it, if I was going.

  I didn’t want to die. It seemed so unfair. I’d just found out who I was.

  I saw Frank first, now in red and black, disguised, coming towards me across the burning floor, the everyday mask gone from his face, the black mask he wore hiding none of his rage.

  A willow man and child held hands behind him, their outlines bright with flame against the black sky. The gasp of the crowd retreated suddenly. I lost it. There was only Frank.

  I knew what he’d done. He’d gone home. He’d taken Helen to bed. He’d given her an extra pill so she would sleep without waking. He’d made a big show of going to bed too. She was his alibi. I knew how Frank worked. Weren’t we the same? Now he was coming at me, cold and purposeful, with nothing but murder in his eyes.

  Shit! I thought. I might even have said it out loud. “Floyd, where are you?”

  And then I saw Floyd too, coming from the other direction, headed straight for us. I don’t know how I could tell it was him. Wild and stunning and resplendent, the circus boy risen above shame, the phoenix from the ashes. Frank would never recognise him. He could be inches from us and Frank wouldn’t know it. Nobody would.

  Floyd was taller than I’d thought possible, his stilted legs draped in cloth, his blackened face almost invisible beneath a huge and flaming dragon, its wings guided by steel rods in his hands, its spine a mass of writhing flags and banners, its head strangely mobile, graceful and fluent.

  He took my breath away.

  And then Frank did. He grabbed me by the throat and he carried me, unseen, despite my struggling weight, despite my kicking and grabbing and throttled screaming, down to the edge of the river, down into a dip where the light from the fires didn’t reach, where the sound didn’t travel. The water glowed strange and green under the lights. It slipped past, oblivious.

  “You’re dead,” Frank said, and he threw me hard on to the ground. The stones bit into my back and my shoulder and my legs.

  “How are you going to kill me, Frank?” I said, the hurt and rage in my voice sounding like bravado. “The same way you killed Cassiel?”

  I felt something in the bushes just to my left then. I didn’t see it or hear it, I just felt it, like an intake of breath. Was that Floyd? How did he get here so fast? How had he done it without us seeing him?

  He was right here. Was he recording this? Was my death going according to plan?

  “Where’s my money?” he said. “Where have you put it?”

  “I’ve given it to Cassiel,” I said. “I’ve put it in his name. He earned it, don’t you think?”

  Frank hit me then, hard across the face with the back of his hand. It went numb for a second, I felt nothing, and then the pain rushed in to fill the sudden vacuum, my cheek burning, my jaw alight. I reeled, tried to get up from where I was, down in the mud and the stones.

  “So you’re stealing it,” he said. “You’ve taken his place and now you’re taking my money.”

  “I don’t want a penny,” I said. “I don’t want any part of what you killed Cassiel for.”

  He hit me again.

  “Shall I feed you to the Wicker Man too?” he said. “Knock you out with Helen’s drugs and stuff you in his belly while the flames are licking at his legs? I think you’re too big for that now, whoever you are. I think you’ve outgrown it.”

  “Is that what you did to him?” I said, scuttling away from his hands.

  “I think I’ll just drown you,” he said. “I think you just fell and hit your head and breathed in river water. Such a shame, with you just back. Such a tragedy.”

  “Where is he?” I said. “Where did you put my brother?”

  “Your brother?” Frank said, and he hit me again, harder this time, across the side of my head. At the same time, the first firework went off above us, a screaming, terrified bolt of white light that burst open, drawing sighs from the mouth of the crowd, illuminating the look on his face of pure hatred. “Who are you?” he said, grabbing me by my hair, pulling me to my feet.

  My jaw ached, my head spun. There was a stabbing pain in my cheek, like a pulse. The bush rustled, I heard it. I saw someone in it move.

  “I am Damiel Roadnight.” I said it out loud for the first time. I felt sad and proud to say it. “Your brother. I’m Cassiel’s twin. You didn’t know about me, did you.”

  The crowd sang again to red and green rockets, to a burst of silver that fell slowly, like water glinting in sunlight.

  “You and I are not the same, Frank,” I told him while he readied himself to hit me. “But Cassiel and I were. We were identical. I came back to avenge him.”

  And I hit Frank on the side of the head as hard as I could, with a rock I’d picked up from the ground. I hit him again, as he was going down, and he lost consciousness and fell, crumpled and loose at my feet.

  At the same time I saw Floyd’s dragon, rushing towards us from where the fireworks shot up, from where the flames were leaping up the Wicker Man’s frame, hot and suddenly loud and crackling, turning the dark sky light, turning night into nothing like day. He wasn’t close enough. He hadn’t got it. It was all for nothing. What had I imagined in the bushes? What had I seen and heard?

  A white figure, small and hunched and trembling, with black, backcombed hair and grey shadows under her eyes. Edie stood up. She had heard everything. She held her phone out in her shaking hand for Floyd and me to see. She had recorded it all.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Cassiel’s body burned up to almost nothing in the Wicker Man. Nobody saw Frank pack it with extra wood and wool and fibre, with chemical-soaked towels to explode and boost the temperature to make it hot enough to rob a body of its flesh before the fire died. Nobody saw him climb up the ladder, Cassiel slung over his shoulder, drugged and wrapped in sackcloth. It was a good Wicker Man that year, that’s what everybody said. It was especially dramatic.

  Frank stayed behind afterwards to help clear up. He’d done it before. It wasn’t anything special. The hole was already dug for all the hot ashes. Frank scooped what was left of the Wicker Man and his brother inside it. My brother. Mine and Frank’s and Edie’s.

  No one noticed Cassiel was missing until the morning. By the time Helen raised the alarm and Frank led the search, all concern and brotherly love, Cassiel was tidied away, his computer was wiped. All trace of him was gone.

  Except what he had given to Floyd.

  And nobody believed Floyd. Not the first time.

  He called the police on Edie’s phone. I stood over Frank with a rock in my hand just in case he woke up before they got there. I wasn’t afraid to hit him again. I wasn’t shy of doing it. I wanted to.

  Edie shook. Her eyes were glassy. I didn’t want to put her through that.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  She looked straight through me. She didn’t answer.

  Floyd took his costume off and laid it on the ground. It flapped feebly in the wind, a defeated dragon.

  “Why is Edie here?” I said. “Why did you drag her into this?”

  “I didn’t,” Floyd said.

  “What?”

  “Believe it or not, she came to me.”

  He didn’t have time to explain. A police car crossing the common and stopping by the river wasn’t so unusual, not on a night like this. The police were everywhere. We gave them Edie’s phone. They wrapped a blanket round her shoulders. Floyd told them what she had seen and heard, what she had recorded. They picked Frank up like a dead weight and put him in the car. He groaned a little, and the sound of him waking up made me realise how afraid I’d been, made me see how close I’d come to dying, how close Cassiel had come to dying twice.

  Floyd drove us home in Edie’s car. She still couldn’t stop shaking.

  “Helen’s asleep,” I said. “Frank gave her extra medicine.” And as soon as I said it, Edie’
s panic broke, like the quick white crashing of a wave. It spilled out all over the car, stealing the oxygen.

  Her voice was rushed and broken. “I can’t do this,” she said.

  She opened her door and tried to get out while the car was still moving. She was outside in the dark before we stopped, all in white and white-faced, like a ghost. Floyd got out. I stayed where I was. I thought if I tried to go near her she might run away. I watched through my window. Her hands were fists at her side, her mouth a black hole, the muscles in her neck straining.

  “I can’t do this,” she shouted. “Oh God!”

  I didn’t know what to do. I bent down and put my head in my hands. She was my sister, and she wasn’t my sister any more. I had everything and nothing at the same time.

  “Edie,” said Floyd, his voice low and steady. It moved towards her in the dark just like he did.

  She turned away from him, stepped further from the car. She almost disappeared into the darkness. She held on to herself and rocked.

  “Who is he?” she moaned.

  Floyd looked at me through the window. “He’s your brother.”

  When I’d told him that night that I was Cassiel’s twin, Floyd had smiled quickly and bent double and covered his eyes. Then he’d hugged me. He said he was happy and sorry at the same time. He said “Why?” and “How?” and we knew we had plenty of time to talk about everything, later.

  I waited. I waited for what Edie would say.

  “What’s our grandmother’s name?” she said to me through the glass. She was shouting.

  “What?”

  “What was our first dog called? What’s my favourite colour? When’s Mum’s birthday?’

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What film do we always watch at Christmas?”

  “Edie—”

  “Shut up!” she said. “Get out of my car.”

  I got out and faced her across the grimy wet-stained silver of the roof. Floyd looked at me. The black hadn’t come off his face. It was smeared and half wiped. His face was disappearing into the dark, like he was vanishing.