Bone Dance

The wax held the impression of a thumbprint, and the letters “FR” quickly scratched with a fingernail. I was confused for a moment, until I remembered that Frances’s last name began with an “R.” I broke the seal.

The message was in a small, angular hand, and the ink was very black. It read:

It was better identification than the thumbprint and initials. I crumpled it and handed it to Beano. “You’d better burn this. If they knew she’d been here, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it.”

He took me literally; he lit the oil lamp on the table and burnt it over that. Then he came and squatted next to the chair I’d spent most of the day in. His face gleamed evenly all over with sweat, like wet marble. In the skin under his eyes there was a faint flush of pink, like fever. He wore the same clothes he’d opened the door in that morning; the T-shirt was black with sweat down his chest and under his arms.

“You’ve run up a big tab,” he said softly. He touched a long fingernail to the blood on my shirt. I felt the nail go through the cloth and dig slowly into my skin.

Deciding is not the same as being reconciled; and reconciled is nothing like being willing. In self-imposed isolation all day, entertained with the thoughts I couldn’t muffle, I’d had time for reconciliation. But my stomach churned anyway, and my heart pumped at a speed to support any desperate action I wanted to take. I stood up. Beano stood, too, half a head taller, stark with muscle.

“That’s the Deal,” I said.

He licked his lips — unconsciously, I thought. “Nothing’s free,” he agreed.

I closed my eyes, waiting for whatever it was going to be. When nothing happened, I opened them again.

Beano was smiling. “Whattaya say you make a dash for the door?”

“Why?” I whispered.

“It’s more fun that way.” He turned and walked purposefully toward the back.

I meant to pay my debts, honorably, without protest. But I couldn’t stand against that last flicker of hope. I bolted for the shop and the front door.

He caught me there, slapped me up against the wall, pi

I couldn’t breathe past his grip. I couldn’t answer. He twisted the cord around his fist and yanked, and the cord broke. I heard the pendant hit the floor.

He found out, eventually, that I was not like other people. It didn’t seem to trouble him much.

Card 8: Surroundings

The Devil Reversed

Gray: The dawn of spiritual understanding, loosening of the chains of slavery to material things, conquering of self-interest or pride.

Crowley: Renovating intelligence. His magical weapon is the secret force, the lamp. His magical powers are the Evil Eye and the witches’ sabbath. The Child of the Forces of Time. A secret plan about to be executed.

8.0: Where the serpents go to dance

I left Del Corazón on my feet, by the back door. It wasn’t pride; there was no one watching, besides me, and my interest in heroic gestures was at an all-time low. Beano had gone away somewhere, and the building was quiet. No, I would have preferred being taken out on a stretcher, but there was no one to do it. And I really wanted to leave.

It was as if my body were a parcel I was carrying for someone else. It was heavy and hard to hold on to, and worse on both counts with each passing minute. But I was obliged to carry it, I’d get in trouble if I dropped it. I made an honest effort for half the length of the alley, in the dark, holding myself up on the sides of buildings. There was noise from the streets all around — I was close to the Night Fair, after all — but the alley was empty.

I think I tripped over something, but my memory of the evening is blessedly imperfect. I might just have dropped the parcel.

A little later I was lying facedown and having trouble breathing. I don’t think I was in the same place. I turned my head and got more air, laden with the smell of garbage from nearby. I don’t remember any noise; someone must have turned the sound off.

After that — or before that; these are islands of awareness in a foggy voyage, and I’m not sure of the order in which I reached them, or whether they were really there — I remember being terrified that Beano would find me. Then I recalled that I was safe from Beano. He was paid off. It was the other people I owed who were dangerous. Like Cassidy. Of course he was dead; that was the heavy thing on his side of the scale, that I was having such trouble balancing. He didn’t seem angry about it. He looked sad, in fact, and I wondered if I’d told him about the apartment burning. I meant to ask him why he didn’t have a hole in his face, but I don’t know if I did, or if he answered.

Curiously, none of those islands had pain as part of its shoreline. The first one that did involved, again, not getting enough air, and being in darkness. But this time I was on my back on something level and hard, and the smell was of livestock and clean straw. I heard the rise and fall of voices at a distance, and suddenly a thump, something striking wood, very close to my face. Reflex made me flinch. That, in turn, started my nerve endings speaking to my brain. I’m fairly certain that the endpoint of that memory isn’t random, that I passed out.

Sherrea’s voice — Sherrea’s? — shouting, and a bang like a screen door, and a fresh breeze. I opened my eyes on a black satin sky full of stars and the dry-brush streak of the Milky Way. Somewhere under that sky was my body, which was as full of pain as an orange is of juice. But I didn’t have to live in it. I recognized the effect of some painkilling drug, and something else; a distant relative of the healing process, in that it relieved suffering that healing couldn’t handle. I closed my eyes again.

“… broken,” Sherrea was saying not far away. “Can you fix it, Josh?” There was a frantic edge on her casual words.

I was marginally aware of cloth being drawn back, of contact with one of my hands. “Oya Dances,” said a new voice, softly, as if there was a terrible thing described in it. “LeRoy, quick, get Mags out of bed and tell her to prep. I’ll meet her in the surgery. Sher, fingers here — that’s it — and monitor the pulse. Do you know CPR?”

I was glad I wasn’t there. It sounded scary.

For a while my mind kept working while my body was giving notice to quit, which is a sensation I don’t recommend to anyone. Memory, dream, and drugs collaborated to open doors that I wouldn’t have so much as walked past, had they been real doors, and had I been given a choice.

Behind one was a roomful of water, where I swam, badly, looking for an exit. It didn’t help that the water was full of people floating. They were naked and limp; their limbs waved like seaweed. Their eyes were open on nothing. Mick as I’d first met him, tall and athletic, with a bullet hole that went all the way through him. Dana, her pale hair clumped and writhing around her face, more alive than she was. Theo, his glasses on his nose despite the water, his head at a quizzical angle. Cassidy, a little blood trailing behind him like bright red thread and a half smile on his lips.