Bone Dance

“Eleggua,” she said, as if to someone in the room. “Find this man for me, and see if he has something to say. Exu Lanca, somebody fooled you when you closed the way behind this one. Let him through to speak to me, and I will see that the joker is punished in your name. Papa Ghede, this is your daughter asks you this, and it is right that you give it to me.”

I wanted to rub my eyes; they burned with tiredness, with the candlelight, with not blinking enough. But I didn’t want to move. It was important not to move. Someone might notice me. I wanted to see what Dana was doing, but that would have meant turning my head. The candles, the singing, the beat, were narrowing the world alarmingly. The woman let a drop fall from the vial onto the corpse’s lips.

Silence. Silence as if the air had turned to mercury, heavy, thick, and poisonous. The candles burned straight up, not moving. I was watching Mick Ski

The liquid in the shot glass burst into flames, and the glass shattered.

I was halfway to the sink for water before I realized I wasn’t holding still anymore. The teakettle was full, and I grabbed it. Nothing we did in this room could harm the contents of the other, of the third room, except fire. Except fire. I bolted back toward the mess on the floor.

But when I tried to fling the contents of the teakettle on it, I couldn’t. I looked down and found two huge brown hands closed around my wrists. “That will only spread it,” Mr. Lyle’s whistling voice said above me. “Look.”

The corpse was burning. The black, oily smoke of it rose straight up and stained the ceiling. But where the flames should have splashed around it with the burning alcohol, there was nothing. The nine black candles stood untouched, like everything outside them. I couldn’t even smell the smoke.

The woman was on her knees, bent double, and Dana hovered over her, her hands stretched out and falling a little short of La Maitresse’s shoulders. Then the black-wrapped head lifted. The woman looked straight into my eyes and said, “He wasn’t there.”

The sunglasses had come off. Below the line of the scarf, at the bottom of the sweat-marred forehead, were her eyebrows, two arcs of silver metal inlay in her skin. I hugged my teakettle and stared.

“He wasn’t there. Where has he gone?” She rose and advanced on me, her eyes very wide under those bright, motionless brows.

I edged around the smoking corpse. “Who?” I croaked.

“The one who was in there. Le chevalier,” she spat. Her hand snapped sideways and down, toward the body.

“He’s dead.” Even in my own ears, I sounded hysterical. “What do you expect?”

On the left, around the pillar of smoke, I saw Mr. Lyle moving carefully toward me. Dana was on my right, looking back and forth between me and the woman in dark blue on the other side of her.

“You are an ass, an ass,” the woman said to me. “Where is he now? Tell me, or I’ll wring it out of you like water from a rag.”

I didn’t kick Dana, exactly; I pushed her hard with my foot. She stumbled into the black woman. And I threw the teakettle at Mr. Lyle, and plunged for the front door.

It seemed to take five minutes to turn the knob and pull the door open, half an hour to run down the hall, with the sound of footsteps coming fast behind. The elevator control box took a week, and I looked up from the crossed wires to the sight of the doors closing on a huge brown hand, with an angry face behind. Two fingers stuck through the rubber door seal, so I bit them. They disappeared and the car lurched downward.

The opposite wall of the elevator was farther away than usual. So was the ceiling, and the floor. I rubbed my eyes. The light in the car was fading. I knew, suddenly, what was happening. This time, for the first time, I had some scrap of warning. And it didn’t help a bit.

I went down.

Card 4: Behind

Seven of Swords

Gray: Possible failure of a plan, arguments, spying, incomplete success, unstable efforts.

Crowley: The policy of appeasement, which may fail if violent, uncompromising forces take it as their natural prey.

4.0: What friends are for

… And came back up, easy as a swimmer who rises, breaks the water’s surface, and opens eyes and mouth to the air. I opened mine to the night. I heard the churning, guttering sound of water moving over something; smelled a faint odor of dead fish, beer, perfumes, and old smoke; and saw row after row of little electric lights, swinging vigorously on their strings overhead. My Hyde persona had brought me to the street in front of the Underbridge and dropped me off. I was standing up, my feet wide apart on the uneven concrete. Finding myself so suddenly in charge of my own legs almost made me fall off them. I caught myself on an iron stanchion that marked the edge of an old parking lot.

The Underbridge had been a generating plant for electricity once, stealing force from the water dashing past the river dam. Electricity was still generated there, but on a much smaller scale. Now the river ran spotlights and a few tubes of neon and the sound system and the video projector and these festive strings of lights outside the building. When the river was low in midsummer, we snuffed the outside lights and the neon, and kept the volume down and our fingers crossed. Yes, we; the operation of the Underbridge was the only thing I did in which I identified myself as one of a group. I didn’t do it with very good grace, but even so I recognized the Deal in action. I got to work with the skills I’d been born to; I paid with my independence. Fair’s fair.

This was the first time I’d come back up without discomfort or outright pain somewhere on or in me, and in a familiar place. So it was a minute or two before I panicked. What time was it? How had I gotten here from the Night Fair on the other side of the river, and what had gone on while I did? Were Dana and her friends still there? Had they found the third room? No, they couldn’t have, not without knowing to look for it, and even Dana wasn’t aware of my collection. Had they found and braved the stairs? If they had, maybe they’d all broken their necks. But if they’d made it to the ground floor, they might be in pursuit of me even now.

A frantic look around told me they weren’t, at least not immediately; nor was anyone else. Then I realized that for all I knew, it had been months since I went down. By now we might all be best friends. I hated this.

The moon had risen down the river, above the Bank. That would make it about nine o’clock. It was a furry squashed sphere, near full, veiled with converging clouds. The wind was cool, emphatic, and from the west. The Underbridge would soon be packed, then: we were going to get a storm.

Robert was doing the door, his dark curling hair loose over his thin shoulders and his antique T-shirt with the London subway symbol on it. He turned one corner of his mouth up and nodded at me.

“Didn’t know you were coming in tonight,” he said.

I had to clear my throat — how long since I last talked? I hated this — before I said, “Just lucky, I guess.”

“You or me?” he asked, perfectly serious.

I wasn’t prepared to answer that, so I didn’t. “Actually, I forgot what day it was.” I shrugged for de-emphasis.

“Oh,” said Robert.

I cursed him in my heart. “Um, what day is it?”

With the infinite patience of someone used to dealing with drunks, musicians, and techies, he replied, “Sunday.”