Bone Dance

“Close the circle. Legba Attibon, let it close and sit by the door. As we invite, let you admit. Legba of the stick, you are always welcome.”

On all sides of me, voices answered, in a language I didn’t recognize.

“Who knows this person?” Sher asked.

“I do,” said a strong and ragged chorus of voices. What person? Me?

“Keep what you know in your heads, then, good and bad. Hold it there, fix it in your eye, see it clearly from all sides. Because this person is bound for death, where the self is withered and washed away, where even names are cut like wheat and eaten. This person will cross the river that never runs, and on the other side, if you can’t give back the soul that you remember, this person will be truly dead, and go forever nameless in the dark.”

Hands again, that brought me to my feet. I was pouring sweat in the heat of the fire and the hot night, dazed and weak from hunger and from fear. The hands pushed, and I stepped forward into ice water. I was off balance; the other foot joined the first, and I fell to hands and knees into cold so intense it simply stopped my nerves. If I had known what I ought to do next, I’d forgotten it.

Then warmth on each arm — hands? — pulled me forward. My fingers closed in grass; I dragged myself, my feet useless as unshaped granite, and fell, facedown once more, on the ground.

Sound broke out like full-scale war. Yelling, drums, all the noises that can be made with the fingers and palms. It felt so good to be warm. It felt wonderful to be lying limp as wet newsprint, unable to rise, and to know that the condition was temporary.

In fact, I had to sit up almost at once, my legs under me, my head erect. The hands insisted. The hands cosseted and combed and smoothed, and where they passed, I was dry and free of any lingering chill. My skin seemed to have been remade and reinstalled. My heart gave a single, shattering bang and began to beat strong and evenly, and I wondered if it had been stopped and I hadn’t known. At last, the fingers traveling over my hair and face drew the blindfold away.

My eyes burned and watered with the light. The bonfire was behind me; before me was the great central tree of the town circle, surrounded in ramparts of candles. There were candles, too, in the hands of the people who formed the circle that enclosed me. There were enough people that it might have been everyone in town. No one stood close enough to me to have removed the blindfold that lay abandoned on my knees. Nowhere in the circle was there a body of water large enough that I could have stepped or fallen in it.

“You are born into the light,” said Sherrea, and I saw her at last. White cloth ran unbelted from her shoulders to her ankles and left her arms bare. Her hair was uncovered and massed like a thundercloud around her head, around her stern face. The stern waif’s face, with an indented place at the corner of the mouth as if a smile was stored there, with a lift of the eyebrows that said in her voice, clear as words, “Is this wild, or what? Isn’t this hot?”

“You who kept the soul and spirit plain, come and set it in its place again,” she said to the circle at large.

There was a big black ceramic pot at her feet. One by one, people came from out of the circle to put things in it. It was a singular, startling procession.

Josh began it. He wore an African shirt so large it might have roofed the sheep pen; he pulled from somewhere in it a paperback book. It was the copy of A Tale of Two Cities that I’d been reading at his kitchen table. He dropped it into the pot with a look at me so full of mingled things that I couldn’t begin to sort them out.

Kris followed him, with — it was. I almost laughed aloud. A leaf of lettuce, and a wink.

Paulo came, with both hands cupped closed around something. He held them over the mouth of the pot and opened them, but the contents went up, not down, and glowed for an instant, gold-green, against the dark sky. A firefly. He looked dismayed for a moment, then caught my eye. For the first time I could remember, he seemed very much the opposite of solemn.

LeRoy dropped in a spare bit of wiring harness I’d made him for the truck. And said, “I have a memory that isn’t mine.”

“Give it,” said Sher.

From a pocket, LeRoy pulled a video-8 format cassette. I couldn’t read the label, but I knew it by the colors and their arrangement. It was achingly familiar. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the best buddy movie ever made. Theo, Theo. Oh, santos, I was going to cry, and in front of everybody.

Then Sherrea leaned forward with something in her hand. A piece of paper… No, a card. The Page of Swords. Joan of Arc, with her boy’s hair and man’s armor, looking down to hell, up to heaven. The card flexed, fluttered, and was gone, into the mouth of the pot.

“You are reborn and remade,” Sherrea said, “and only the strongest and most true went into the making. Now you have to wake. Stand up and receive the spirit of your head.”

I had to do it by myself. I was weak; my legs trembled under me, and my hands shook. But I stood. Sherrea came to me — so small for such a kick-ass bruja — with a glass bowl full of something clear. Water? She dipped her finger in it, and the smell rose: alcohol. With her finger, she drew something on my forehead.

Someone must have fed the fire, because I was blinded with light. Empty whiteness rose around me from my feet to my shoulders to my chin (I saw Sherrea’s face for a last moment, through the thickening haze) and finally closed over my head.

Me, the dog/rabbit, patient and silly in black on white. The dancing flutist with the two feathers, or ante

“If you want anything,” said the flutist, “just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen that one,” I said.

“You ain’t seen nothin’, kid. Just whistle. You’re go

“You know, that almost made sense.”

“It will pretty soon. Or you’re dead meat.”

“Where are the others?” I asked it.

“That’s all we have time for! Tune in next week!”

I might be dead next week, I tried to say, but it was too late.

I opened my eyes on the ground, where I’d landed in what I recognized in hindsight as a boneless, uncontested faint. No one in the cluster of people around me seemed to think I ought to be embarrassed. I had a vague impression of some ritual things being done quickly; then Josh and Kris put a shoulder under each of my arms and half carried me back to the farmhouse. Not long after they’d stretched me on my bed, Sher poked her head, then the rest of her, in the door. She was back to the torn leggings. I felt much better.

“I don’t know if that will help,” she said. “But it was a damn good try. You take a mean initiation.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“There’s usually pronouns in it, though.”

It was a moment before I figured out what she meant. Then I laughed.

“We tried to fix your identity to your body, so that you’d be more likely to hold out against Tom. And we made this.” She lifted up an oblong glass bead, the size of the end of my thumb. “It’s not exactly a govi. It’s sort of your doppelganger.”

“Strong family resemblance,” I agreed.

“Your psychic doppelganger, dipshit. The idea is that you buck Tom off, and this doesn’t; you trap him in this and break it. It’s a decoy body.”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

She sat down, hard, on the edge of the bed. “No. But I can’t think of anything else to do. Santos, I wish we had more time.”

“We’re available for a limited time only,” I said, three-fourths asleep.