Bone Dance

The sun couldn’t wake me in the archives, and the chair was made to be comfortable. But it was a chair, not a bed. My knees got stiff at last from being bent, my neck got sore from being turned, the circulation slowed in my right arm, and I woke up.

I peeled a corner of the felt back from the living-room windows, squinted out, and found it midmorning. The Night Fair would be sealed, stagnant around the base of the building. I’d go back to sleep until sunset. The Night Fair in sunlight loomed as an unknown, u

He hadn’t. I’d had a hopeful moment when I found the bedroom door unlocked, but he was there. His cotton jacket and a broken-down pair of boots were on the floor by the mattress. He lay on his back under my blanket, his limbs neatly arranged, staring at the ceiling.

Without blinking.

Once I’d taken a step into the room, I was sure it was true, but death is a diagnosis that can never go untested. I jabbed his shoulder. Then I felt for a pulse in his throat. There was none, and his skin had the same chill on it as the top of the dresser. But his flesh was soft, and his arm, when I lifted it, limp. Didn’t rigor mortis set in as the body cooled? Maybe he had some disease that produced this convincing catalepsy. Who would know — and how could I find them, in the Night Fair in daylight?

I began to examine him for some kind of damage. Perhaps a blow to the head? Nothing. He’d clutched at his side the night before -

Under his shirt, just to the heart side of middle, between one ridge of muscle and the next, there was a hole. Not a large one, not a fresh one, and not healed. I stared at it for a while before I rolled him over. There was a corresponding hole in his back. They were the entrance and exit wounds made by a bullet, and since they hadn’t been dressed, treated, or healed, they must have killed him.

Sometime before we’d met.

It was only a few steps from the corpse to the door; easy to do walking backward. I closed the door. Then I stumbled down the corridor and out into the building hallway. I locked my front door, methodically, watching my hands work. I went down in the freight elevator, climbed the basement stairs, and slipped out, at last, into the silent street. Somewhere in the sleeping Fair I had to find someone who could help me get rid of Mick Ski

Card 3: Beneath

Two of Pentodes, Reversed

Crowley: The Lord of Harmonious Change overthrown.

Gray: Inability to handle many things at once; disruptive change; harmony at the expense of change.

Waite: Enforced gaiety. Simulated enjoyment. False news.

3.0: The goddess and the girl next door

It was already as hot as it had gotten the day before, and promised to be one of the arid ones. The street smelled like scorched tar, and the sidewalk glared where the sun hit it between the building shadows. Nothing moved, not in the hard light, not in the shadow. In a thousand years, when planet-hopping archaeologists discovered the ruins of our civilization, the photos in some alien National Geographic would look like this. They’d be silent like this, too. The Dead City: remarkable state of preservation.

I was reminded of my houseguest. So I moved on, briskly.

Once I began to penetrate the heart of the Fair, I had to stop again. Hadn’t I had a nightmare like this once, before I’d been lulled into thinking that there would always be enough people?

The food vendor’s booth on my right was empty; it had been stripped down by its operator at closing, at dawn. I reminded myself of that: It had been open just hours ago. The turquoise paint on its corrugated metal sides was peeling in places, fading all over. “Mariscos” said the hand-painted letters, above a portrait of a shrimp. The word was bleached from red to pink, the shrimp to mud-green. The counter was gritty with dust. The booth had had an awning once; I saw the rusty brackets above the service pass-through. The iron barrel chained to the wall had no trash in it.

In front of me, a Ferris wheel rose against a chromakey-blue sky. Or rather, the geometric bones of the wheel were there, black against the light, thickened at the joints, flanged at regular intervals by the vertebrae of the seat buckets. The flesh for those bones was darkness and little lights and noise, and that was gone. There was rust and grit here, too. I sniffed, trying to smell alcohol or ozone, and got nothing but sun-heated metal and concrete.

It was the light, of course it was the light. When I stayed at my place in the Night Fair, I rarely went there before dawn. If I did, I went there to work, then sleep, then wake up when the Fair woke. I’d never seen the Night Fair at midmorning. But I couldn’t shake off the conviction that everything I saw had been transformed — that this was not the Ferris wheel I’d seen last night, but one a thousand years older, a thousand years broken and silent.

“Sparrow,” said a voice behind me, and if I’d been my namesake, I would have been halfway across the City in a breath.

Context is everything; wrap enough strangeness around them, and familiar things become unrecognizable. It was Dana’s voice, firmly attached to Dana’s person. She leaned in the entryway of a brown brick building. She wore a dressing gown printed with herons and palm fronds that reached almost to her ankles, and a pair of little-heeled slippers of a sort I’d only seen in movies. Her pale hair was loose and brushed back to fall straight down behind her. She’d been standing there awhile; there was half a cigarette in her fingers, and the stub of another on the porch at her feet.

“You okay, sugar?” she asked with a quirk of the lips, and I realized I hadn’t said anything yet.

“Fine. I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

More quirk. “I live here. Upstairs. You act as if I caught you trying to steal that thing.”

I shook my head. The sense of unreality, Dana in mid-necropolis, had doped me.

“No snappy comeback?”

“I guess I’m just not a morning person,” I said finally.

“That’s better. So what brings you out?” She laid the cigarette between her lips and took a long pull. She looked disturbingly undressed without lipstick.

The cigarette wasn’t hand-rolled, and I thought I could see a tobacconist’s mark printed on the paper. Luxuries, rarities, and indulgences: Dana surrounded herself with them.

She had offered me her help. Here was a problem that might yield to wealth and contacts. If she really had them. And where else was I likely to find a solution?

“… I need a favor.”

Dana let the smoke out of her lungs and watched me through it. “Anything I can do?”

I suffered a rush of doubt — had I ever been out of balance with Dana, on the owing side of the Deal with her? Always too many debts. I pushed the corners of my mouth away from each other and hoped it looked like a smile. “I have to dispose of a corpse.”

From her face, I might have just shed my skin. She whispered something and spit left. Her eyes slid away from me, then back. “I guess you better come in.”

I followed the swirl of her hem off the porch and, sunblind, into the building’s front hall. The smell of last night’s lamp oil hung around my head as I climbed the stairs. Very old marble ones; each tread was scooped out and shallow in the middle, as if the stairs had been a watercourse. The second-floor windows were shuttered, but on the third-floor landing, light fell on us like a malediction in shafts of dust. It was very hot in the hall.

Dana pushed open a door and sauntered in. I had never been in a place Dana called home. This one was so much hers that I found myself shying on the sill like an animal at an outstretched hand.