Bone Dance

She stared at me, then took in the room with a quick shift of her gaze. I think, until then, she hadn’t really seen it. “Bless my soul,” she said at last. “It’s the lost graveyard of the Sonys.”

“If it was only a graveyard, I wouldn’t care,” I replied, though I hated to do it. “They all work.”

She looked the room over again, this time with more attention. Then she looked at me. I could almost hear her thinking, though not well enough to know in what direction. “Lead the way,” she ordered. So I did. She gestured Mick Ski

I walked into the middle room. The teakettle was lying on the floor in a small puddle; most of the water seemed to have disappeared between the floorboards. That, and a black smudge on the ceiling, were all that were left to remind me of La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle. I took the kettle to the sink and started pumping water into it. There was a calm and reasoned dialogue going on in my head, something like:

This is a ridiculous thing to be doing.

The whole business is ridiculous. What should I be doing that would make more sense?

She might shoot me.

For making tea? I suppose she might. She might shoot me for not making tea.

In other words, I can’t fix things no matter what I do, so I might as well do anything at all.

I think I’m so scared I can’t feel it.

When I turned back to face my houseguests, Mick Ski

The woman, Frances, was perched lightly on the arm of the leather slingshot chair, the rifle comfortable in the crook of her right arm, its barrel tracking Mick Ski

She said, “I haven’t forgotten the subject before the committee, even if you have. What brought you here, Mick?”

“I came back for my jacket.”

“No, no, answer the exam questions fully; you’ve no idea what we’re testing for. This city, Ski

He looked steadily at her, his face baffled and hurt, and resigned. “Do you still have purposes?” he asked. “I used mine up. I just move around, Fran.”

“Why move here?”

“I’d never been here, so I came. I had a notion to go on north and try to get into Canada.”

“A pitiful and profoundly moving story,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been hoping she’d believe him until I felt my spirits fall. “Let’s explore a promising side passage, shall we? What’s your co

Mick Ski

“Oh, my downy chick, my sweet hatchling, I know that. I knew there was one of us here by the stink of it. When I laid hands on you, there on the bridge, I got the smell of Horseman in my nose so strong I thought I’d gag with it.

“Did you know that, Mick? That we leave a trail behind us, a spoor of possession? It’s related, I think, to the way we recognize each other in some other poor bastard’s body. And I thought, when I got a whiff of this one, that it was damned familiar.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Mick said. He sounded as if the words were being squeezed out of him. “I had… some bad rides. I didn’t know what happened the first time. I didn’t make the switch, it just—”

“Don’t, please, spare us the gory details,” Frances said pleasantly.

“The body I was on got hit by a car,” he said. I could tell — I thought I could tell — he hated doing it. “And suddenly I was three streets over, on Sparrow, being pushed out a door.” I had been in danger of being thrown through the door; if he had, by skill or fortune, spared me that, I owed him something. “I only stayed long enough to find another ho — another body.”

“What was wrong with that one?” Frances asked, pointing at me.

A muscle worked in Mick’s jaw. “He wasn’t done with it.”

Frances raised her eyebrows.

Mick Ski

“But it happened more than once,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say it again: You rode me.

“I couldn’t get a solid ride. Sick people are hard. Crazy ones are harder. Jesus, the last one I got on a second too late, and he was dead. I didn’t think that was possible.” He looked up at me, apologetic. “And you were such a good fit. I kept being pulled back. I didn’t mean to be.”

At that, Frances began to laugh. She rose from the arm of the chair and came over to me. She still held the rifle as if she meant to use it. “Heavens, yes. Fits as if it were made for you. And with every convenience built in. Of middling height, to avoid drawing attention. Strong, young, resistant to disease, toxins, and bad food. And eminently biddable.”

“Fran,” said Mick with great care, “you don’t have to mess with Sparrow.”

“No, I don’t. But I want to. Do you know, Mick, that by my reckoning there are only three Horsemen left? I’d thought it was two, until you surfaced, which only shows you that I may be a hair off in my figures.” She was close enough for me to see the gloss of sweat on her skin. “Only the real sharks survived the witch-hunts after the Big Bang. And I found that each passing year pruned them further, leaving only the creme de la creme of sharkdom.

“Now, Mick, my old friend and partner, if there are only three of us left, and my theory of natural selection is correct, mustn’t we be the three meanest sons of bitches in the valley?”

Mick shrugged, not too unconvincingly.

“And yet — I remember you, Mick. You weren’t a nice person—”

“We were all shits,” Mick interrupted.

“ — but you didn’t have the real, cold-hearted taste for blood. Now, how could someone like that have survived for years in a world that will not suffer a Horseman to live? By apprenticing himself to the biggest shark of all, the Daddy Killer of the whole toothy race, that’s how. The slayer of cities, the drowner of worlds, the pusher of Buttons. Let me tell you why I’m in this city. I’ve come to pay a long-delayed call on the Prince of Sharkness.”

The stove burner hissed in the silence while Mick and I worked out what that meant. “Who?” Mick said finally. His voice was a colorless whisper, and all the blood had deserted his face for parts unknown. “Who was it? My family lived in Galveston.”

“Excessive, Mick. Too much pathos. Add the dog that was your boyhood companion, and I’ll throw you off the stage.”

“Who did it, Fran?”

She was grave when she said, “For to see Mad Tom O’Bedlam, ten thousand miles I’ve traveled.”

Mick Ski

“He was the mastermind. He assembled the clique, and convinced them they would be humanity’s saviors. The clique, hubris-ridden idiots, have made permanent amends. Now there’s only Mad Tom.”

Mick put one unsteady hand behind him, found the wing chair, and sat in it. “It would have been Worecski. My God.”

The teakettle was rumbling, I realized, and I stepped toward the camp stove to turn it off.