Bone Dance

“Sorry, all out of slack.”

He squeezed his forehead between thumb and fingers, which almost hid his face and the turned-up corner of his mouth. “Guess I’ll just get some sleep, then.”

“In here,” I said, and stepped back into the corridor. He followed. I showed him into the little bedroom, and lit the candle on the dresser. “What about you?”

“I’ll sleep in the next room. The sink works like a sink, the icebox works like an icebox — if there’s anything in it; I don’t remember — and the toilet, which is through there, works like a toilet. Whatever you do, don’t smoke in bed, and don’t wake me up.”

I was in the corridor already when he said, “You don’t remember anything that happened last night, do you?”

No. But I never said so to you. “What makes you think that?”

He was standing in the half-open door, that vitreous grin in place, eyes alight and untrustworthy. “Because I do remember.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I know. You ever want to find out what went on all those times you can’t recall — Just ask me nicely.”

With that, the bastard shut and locked my bedroom door.

I could have broken the door open, I now realize. Or apologized lavishly through it, and begged for an explanation. Under ordinary circumstances, I’m sure I would have. Instead, I stared at the blank wood until the insides of my eyes hurt. Then I walked down the corridor to the third room, the one I didn’t show him, unlocked it, went in, and locked it behind me.

(Mick Ski

The third room was accessible through the false back of a closet. It was the largest of the rooms I called mine. It no longer had windows; sunlight does damage, and the sun, at least, I could stop. The heat, too, though not so thoroughly; the thermometer at the duct from the swamp cooler on the roof showed 78 degrees. This was the only room that wasn’t furnished like a thrift-store campsite. The steel shelving covered most of the wall area, the chair was meant to be sat in for eight hours at a stretch, and the light, when I needed it, was strong and steady. This, after all, was the terminus for the cable that came down from the roof, from the batteries that charged off the windmill disguised as a rusty roof vent.

(Mick Ski

I moved around the room touching things — my talismans, the trappings of my sect. More books: the ones I needed to keep that room working, and the ones that would disappear (and their owner with them) if it were known I had a copy. Thought-contraband in fiction and nonfiction. The video monitor fifteen inches, with three switchable levels of resolution. The record/playback hardware: three videotape decks; a video editing board; three audio cassette decks, one digital; a CD player; an eight-cha

(Mick Ski

And, of course, the archives. They were mostly copies; I’d sold the previous generation of each one after I’d dubbed it, to collectors rich enough, crazy enough to own something rare and powerful and useless. Then I’d taken the money and spent it on hardware, and on more product, and the media to record it on.

Audio- and videotapes, their mylar bases fragile with age. Vinyl audio disks, brittle as porcelain. Audio CDs, their information becoming vague as if with senility. Two thousand movies, four thousand albums, music and words and pictures like voices whispering from a sweet, su

It ought to have been depressing — just as every day should be depressing, because it leads to the grave. On bad days I sat in the next room and thought about the value of the plastic tape shells alone to a reprocessor, never mind the mylar, I could be rich… But they were like slaves on an underground railroad, outlaws I hid from the sheriff. Who’d keep them alive, if I abandoned them?

(Mick Ski

I sat in my valuable, comfortable chair and contemplated the possible distractions. I’d found a new CD two days before; I’d check that over. I rolled the chair over to the rack, powered up the CD player, and plugged headphones into the amplified jack. The insert under the scarred plastic of the jewel box was a faded drawing of five bemused-looking people sitting or standing around an immense antique car with a startling paint job. It was only one page, front and back, with a ragged edge — there had been more, once. The name of the group wasn’t familiar. I cleaned the silver rainbow disk, set it in the tray, closed the phones over my ears, and put my feet up.

The first cut opened with a sweet whine of fiddle, the tsk of a cymbal, a muttering of bass. Two women’s voices traded lyrics, as if they were telling each other a story.

Hunched in my chair, I almost laughed. So much for the sweet illogic of a sunshine past. This could have come from Here and Now, from the clean irreducibility of the Deal, from the hard surfaces of the Deeps. Two skips — I’d try another cleaning.

Then the second song began. None of the reckless flourish of the first one; this opened with a plaintive swell and ripple of guitar notes and a shivering fall of chimes. Fingers long since dust slid evocatively on strings corroded, snapped, discarded, on a guitar broken or burned or somehow lost long, long ago, and a voice slid like the fingers, hypnotic with its power of life-after-death. I’d been disarmed by that first song, cynical and safe.

A dead woman sang about isolation, and faced me down with mine.

We were all of us alone in our heads, Cassidy said. Living and dying alone in our unbreachable heads, our indefensible bodies.

The Jammers were mad. The Horsemen before them had breached the unbreachable, gone mad, and pressed the red button on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But the tarot flickered garish on Sherrea’s coffee table, thick with the major arcana, saying, The issue you have raised is largely controlled by others.

And Mick Ski

The disk played on in my headphones, unattended. Eventually I noticed the silence and the smell of warm circuitry. I was curled up tight in the chair; Sher’s pendant was poking me in the chest. I unfolded, painfully, and turned things off. Then I sat in the dark, thinking hard about nothing. Eventually I fell asleep in the chair.