Bone Dance

I lay on my side hugging my knees, biting the inside of my mouth, while Mick and Frances made love in the next room. I didn’t move until Sher knocked on both doors and said it was time to go.

Card 7: Fears

Ten of Swords

Waite: Death, pain, desolation. Advantage, profit, success, power, and authority, but all transient.

Douglas: Desolation and ruin, but with the idea that it is a community, rather than individual, tragedy.

Crowley: Reason run mad, soulless mechanism, the logic of lunatics and philosophers. Reason divorced from reality.

Case: End of delusion in spiritual matters.

7.0: Off to see the wizard

“Well,” said Frances, “have we forgotten anything? Hot dogs, pickles, potato salad, ants — you did bring the ants?”

“Frances,” I said, not for the first time, “that’s enough.”

The trike was parked on the apron of an unused garage door, in a service drive between Loondale and the empty Gilded West tower. That put it near our preferred exit route. We’d circled Ego on foot, and were now on the opposite side, at Ego’s front door, where the guard station was. It was five minutes to midnight.

“I suppose we’ll have to do without the ants.” She tilted her head back and looked at Ego’s top, where the ring of white lights shone smugly, and ru

“Is the best one more fiendish, or less?”

“When we finish this, you have my permission to tell me.”

“If I still can.”

She looked at me, and opened up a moonlit death’s-head grin. “If I can hear you.”

“On that jolly note — it’s time.” I headed for the doors as Frances tucked herself in the shadows of the door embrasure. She wore something dull and dark and snug, with a pocketed vest of the same stuff. The fabric didn’t make any sound when rubbed against itself. Motionless, out of direct light, she disappeared.

I pushed through the door and squinted under the bare bulb at the guard station. There were two men there, swapping gossip as their shifts overlapped. One I’d never seen before: an earnest-looking youngish man with short, sun-bleached blond hair. The other, a big man with a heavy red beard and a Santa Claus belly who occupied the desk chair, was a regular on the midnight-to-eight shift. I almost smiled at him. He did lousy work.

“Hey, look who’s here!” he called, leaning back. The desk chair screeched on its base. “It’s the handyman! Albrecht keepin’ up his service contract, huh?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” I said. The blond man curled his lip, whether at me or at his fellow guard I couldn’t tell. Seeing that, I tried a shot at random. “Is that a blackjack in your pocket, or are you just excited about working with this guy?” I said to him.

The curl became a full-fledged sneer. He turned to the red-bearded guard. “I gotta go, Shoe. Got a date out at the pier.”

“Tell him hi for me,” I said to the blond one’s departing back. Shoe thought that was fu

Good. Down to one; now to move him around. “You want to call up to Mr. A. and let him know I’m here?”

“Let him know who’s here, boy?”

“D. W. Griffith,” which was the name Albrecht knew me by. “Tell him I’ve got the one he wants.” In my hand was an unmarked box, something nobody would identify as a container for a videotape. Just like always. Everything had to be just like always.

“I bet you do,” said Shoe. He went through a door behind the desk. There was a little pane of glass in it to watch me through, but the door kept me from hearing whatever he might choose to say to the person upstairs.

I dropped the videotape. Swearing, I went to my knees in front of the desk and bumped it farther under. Then I reached beneath the desktop and twisted the door camera’s coaxial cable loose from the wall jack, where it co

“So, what’s in the package?” he said, and my bone marrow turned to brine.

“You’ll have to ask Mr. A. about that, too, won’t you?” I hoped my voice was firm and pleasant. Hadn’t I been passed? Did they know somehow that there would be a break-in? If that elevator moved without authorization, hell, in condensed form, would break loose.

“Maybe I will. You’re supposed to get your ass up there. You know the way.”

The release of fear was almost harder to bear than the onset. I couldn’t answer him, snappily or otherwise. I walked at what I hoped was a leisurely pace down the hall and turned the corner.

Frances materialized from whatever surface she’d adhered to. I poked the button, and the scarred bronze doors in front of me opened. There had been lots of elevators there once; the sealed-off openings for their doors were all that were left. Frances stepped in next to me as I pushed the button for the top floor.

I sagged against the wall when the doors closed. I could feel sweat wandering down my spine and chest and rib cage. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t swearing.

Frances had a pistol in her hands; she was mounting a silencer on it with quick motions. “If I were you, I’d save my emotional collapse for later. That was the easy part.”

“For you, maybe.”

“Could they have seen you drop the box?”

“Upstairs, you mean? No. The camera only covers the area right around the front door.”

“Then there isn’t anything to co

She was right: that had been the easy part. I’d forgotten. “Fifty-fifty. There hasn’t been one the last few times. I’m hoping I’m considered trustworthy.”

“Fine. When the door opens, don’t run out, but don’t dawdle.”

For the first time it occurred to me that if it went to hell, I could say Frances forced me to do this. I wondered if I would. If I asked Sherrea, what would she recommend? Would she say that life was precious, and that I should save mine if I could? Or would she say things about honor, and commitment, and the greater good?

Or would she say, in a voice that wasn’t hers, You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits! She’d said I had to do something about my evil ways. Well, Sher, here I am. I wished I could have found something less drastic.

“Get ready,” Frances murmured, and I tried desperately to remember, and re-create, what leaving this elevator had been like when it wasn’t a matter of somebody’s life or death.

The doors opened, and I strode out. No one. No one at all. All this relief would be the ruin of me. Frances moved up and touched me on the shoulder. No talking now; we’d talked the floor plan to pieces back on the island. I nodded. She disappeared down the hall while I knocked on the familiar door, dark wood, heavy and polished. A voice called from beyond it, and I turned the cool chrome knob and stepped through.

The room was the same, dark and close, with its desk and draped window and high-backed chair. The light fell, neat and constrained on the desktop. The white hands in the light were Albrecht’s, and the pale, fleshy face dim above them.