Resurrection Man Read Free Page B

man, Cato notwithstanding. I'm surprised you thought of the oar in time."
    "It was easy," Jet said. He shot Dante a look, half-mocking, half-merry. "I knew he was going to fall in."
    From that moment, Dante knew he hadn't imagined the hunger in Jet's eyes as he fell through the ice. Jet had saved his life, that was true. But as the years went by, time only added to Dante's belief that a part of Jet was always watching him, waiting for him to die.

    *   *   *
    They dared one another often.
    Dante dared Jet to jump from the big willow on Three Hawk Island straight into the river; dared him to pinch the latest X-Men from Percy's Store; dared him to eat Aunt Sophie's schnitzel after covering it in chocolate sauce (which he did), and dared him to sneak downstairs after the grown-ups were asleep, take the tall bottle of Glenlivet from the liquor cabinet, and drink a brandy snifter full of it in under five minutes, which he also did, with his eyes watering in pain and his thin body racked with suppressed coughs.
    In turn, Jet dared Dante to steal one of Aunt Sophie's coins, to walk widdershins around the Pentecostal church by the school, and, in the aftermath of the Glenlivet episode, to smoke Father's pipe.
    Only Dante's pride kept him from funking on this one. Father kept his pipes in a mug on top of his desk; also dangling from the edge of the mug, like an insect crawling from its depths, was the old fishing lure that only Dante knew was one of the three magic things in the house. (The others were Grandfather Clock and the mirror on Dante's bureau, where many years later Jet would force him to look at his own dead body.)
    The desk was scary enough without the lure. Dr. Ratkay kept a skull on it, for starters; to keep him humble, he said. Jet had once dared Dante to put his fingers through its eyeholes.
    Beside the skull sat the old leather scalpel case. It was just like the velvet-lined box Aunt Sophie kept the family silver in. Four knives and four pairs of surgical scissors waited inside, gleaming against the red velvet interior. One scalpel in particular, the second largest, held a special horror for Dante: his father always brought it with him when he came into Dante's dreams.
    But at some level Dante knew the skull was only polished bone, the scalpels sharpened steel; each wrapped in coils of his own fear. He knew that. Even the dreaded Gray's
Anatomy
wouldn't hurt him if he didn't open the pages, or meet the hollow eyes of the Skinned Man on its cover.
    The lure was different. It had three segments, like a steel wasp: a small rounded head, a teardrop thorax, and a curving tail. Thin barbed hooks dangled from it like legs and it held its own madness, its own venomous sting.
    Goaded on by Jet's needling, Dante had finally snatched a pipe from the mug, keeping his hand well away from the lure. He lit the pipe with trembling fingers, inhaled and then hacked desperately around the hand Jet had clapped over his mouth to quiet him. It was no good: the alarm had been raised, and they couldn't disguise the smell before Father marched downstairs to administer what turned out to be the last spanking Dante ever got.
    Dante never touched the pipe again, but it wasn't the fear of a whipping that kept him away, or the choking memory of the smoke. It was the horrible presence of the lure, crawling like a wasp from between the pipes.

    *   *   *
    Dante had been unable to get the lure out of his mind for some time before the Thanksgiving visit that brought him home to discover his own dead body. For weeks he had seen it every night as sleep welled up and set his mind drifting. It winked and glittered dimly before him as if twisting through dark water, and he followed it into deeps of dreaming....
    And so like a fool, never imagining it would lead to finding his own dead body less than twenty-four hours later, he picked it up at last. He knew it was madness, but he was tired of being afraid, tired of the sight of the lure in his