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“Voodoo shit,” Tom spat out. He fingered the glass bead. “Was this supposed to fool me? Figured you were go
“All right, now,” he breathed. “Let’s party.” And he began again.
Water action. Filthy liquid filling me up slowly, dissolving me, toxins rushing into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears, filming my eyes, devouring the co
Only twenty-four hours before, my friends had acted out the gathering-together of a tangle of energy, the naming of it: Sparrow. Now Tom O’Bedlam consumed it, strained its juices between his teeth, picked the meat out of it with delicate, epicurean delight. Mick and Frances had told me that the host personality could be starved or smothered gradually, or killed outright. They didn’t tell me it could be eaten.
I couldn’t feel anything. I could still hear: thunder, rain driving against the window, the two of us panting in unison. I could see; he hadn’t taken the optic nerves yet, or the muscles that moved my eyes. Over Tom’s shoulder I had a view of Frances, her head turned against the door frame, her face drawn in loosely with pain. But only loosely, as if it was a leftover expression, as if what had caused it was gone or nearly so.
Maybe she would find that white, flat place. Once Tom was done with my battered body, maybe I would, too.
There was a roaring in my ears, growing steadily. It was in the room, too; the window glass was rattling.
Then the building cracked in half. I heard it.
There was light like white air burning, like a welder’s arc against the eye, like the light in the old military films of nuclear tests. Tom/I screamed; and did it again when the light didn’t wink out. It was his scream in my throat, but I felt it. Somewhere along the tu
Silly. Say goodbye. The sound was one I’d heard in movies, when a train thundered down upon the camera like doom.
“Pw? your lips… Nothing to lose.
… and blow.
I had lost sight and hearing. But white fire filled the bottom of my blindness, lapped around my ankles, surged up to my knees, my hips, my rib cage, sliced between Tom’s fingers and my neck, and closed over my head. I thought I heard a shriek, but sound wouldn’t have carried in that medium.
I didn’t know if it was a flat world; there was nothing in it. It was white. It wasn’t warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel. It was not the place I had come to before. There was nothing in it. No helpful pictographs, no street signs. The natives knew their way around.
Bait, I thought furiously, in a state of nonawareness. You wanted me for bait.
It worked. There were no words formed. The answer was just a part of the void that meant something.
Your timing sucked!
My timing was perfect. The lightning froze him in the midst of possessing you, my whirlwind lit the building and destroyed the barriers that kept me out of Ego, my possession of you consumed him. There was no other possible order.
What did you do to Worecski?
Nothing. I rode you. He was no business of mine, except that you were concerned with him. It was his bad luck that I arrived when I did, and that it’s true what they say, that “Great gods ca
Tom… wasn’t your business?
You know my business. If you don’t remember, ask my little sister. Your friend the witch.
You never said you couldn’t get into Ego.
There is no technical manual for the spirit world. You will never know everything.
Why me? Why was it ever me?
Your left foot is in the past. Your right foot is in the present. You hold steel in your left hand, and flint in your right. You are the dancer between the old world and the new, because I made you to be so.
Fuck you! I deny you!
Do you deny your hands and feet?
Silence, in that volumeless space that had never admitted sound.
Let me go back, I said. Frances is dying.
I’m not keeping you here. Go.
I opened my eyes on a room bathed in watery golden light. The Gilded West was still gilded. The wind still roared outside. I was lying on my back. Tom lay three feet away in a half curl, one hand flung out loosely on the carpet, his eyes open and motionless.
“Anybody home?” I croaked. “Are you dead?” There was no response from whatever was left of Tom Worecski.
I crawled to the door, and Frances. Her breath still fluttered in and out of her parted lips, quick and shallow. Her eyes opened.
“Oh, why did I do that?” she whispered.
“Shut up, Frances.”
“Don’t be silly; you wouldn’t be able to tell who I was. He didn’t used to be a very good shot, you see. The nerve of the bastard, practicing up. It’s not fair.”
“Frances, please—”
There was a sound, from on the floor — from the inert body of Tom Worecski. I should have known; it was in all the horror movies. One last resuscitation. But in this movie, the heroes weren’t going to be able to kill the monster one more time.
The sandy head lifted from the floor and turned its frantic ice-pale eyes on me, and its mouth said, “Who are you? What’s… where am I?”
“Good grief,” Frances sighed. She sounded weakly amused. “He didn’t kill the host.”
“Are you sure? I mean, that he’s not—”
“We can… could always spot each other. He’s not there.”
I looked back into those nearly colorless eyes and tried to see them as the eyes of a stranger. For a moment I couldn’t think what to say to him. Then I called on my memories of the same experience. “You’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll help you in a minute, but please — just wait, okay?”
I knew it wasn’t going to work. He stared at me, and at Frances who had most of her blood, it seemed, on the outside of her.
“Don’t—” I began, but of course he turned his head and saw Mick, too. He would now have hysterics, and there wasn’t time for them.
Perhaps Tom had let him surface to scenes like this before. He didn’t have hysterics. He folded back up on the carpet with his hands over his face, in a pitiful attitude of submission and hopelessness. Eventually, I think, he passed out; I didn’t see him stir.
I turned back to Frances. “Now, shut up and mount up.”
“What?”
“Ride, damn you. I’m not half as near to dying as you are. Mount up and we’ll both get out.”
She smiled, almost. “And then what? Shall I steal another body once we’re out? Or just stay in yours forever?”
“What’s wrong with Mick’s solution: taking someone who’s getting out of the living racket anyway?”
“Why should it be better to steal people’s deaths than their lives? It’s a rite of passage. How do you know that Mick’s suicides weren’t harmed by what he did?” She winced, and shifted slightly against the molding.
I wanted to fetch a couch cushion to prop her up, but I was afraid she’d die while I was away doing it. I looked around for anything else I could use, and saw her near hand, palm down, on the carpet. Showing between her fingers was a bit of black leather thong strung with a black onyx bead.
“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”