by Emma Bull
She keeps ’em coming in, and that keeps the party hot,
And she says there isn’t any point in praying.
Hunched in my chair, I almost laughed. So much for the sweet illogic of a sunshine past. This could have come from Here and Now, from the clean irreducibility of the Deal, from the hard surfaces of the Deeps. Two skips — I’d try another cleaning.
Then the second song began. None of the reckless flourish of the first one; this opened with a plaintive swell and ripple of guitar notes and a shivering fall of chimes. Fingers long since dust slid evocatively on strings corroded, snapped, discarded, on a guitar broken or burned or somehow lost long, long ago, and a voice slid like the fingers, hypnotic with its power of life-after-death. I’d been disarmed by that first song, cynical and safe.
Out in the light of the dark city scene
Pushin’ and shovin’ and blowing their horns
Only the pigeons are enjoying the view
The concrete is cold and the street is alive
But the only thing you hear is that voice inside
So you step off the curb…
A dead woman sang about isolation, and faced me down with mine.
We were all of us alone in our heads, Cassidy said. Living and dying alone in our unbreachable heads, our indefensible bodies.
The Jammers were mad. The Horsemen before them had breached the unbreachable, gone mad, and pressed the red button on the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But the tarot flickered garish on Sherrea’s coffee table, thick with the major arcana, saying, The issue you have raised is largely controlled by others.
There’s something in the air tonight,
I can see it, but it’s just out of sight…
And Mick Skinner knew about the blackouts.
The disk played on in my headphones, unattended. Eventually I noticed the silence and the smell of warm circuitry. I was curled up tight in the chair; Sher’s pendant was poking me in the chest. I unfolded, painfully, and turned things off. Then I sat in the dark, thinking hard about nothing. Eventually I fell asleep in the chair.
The sun couldn’t wake me in the archives, and the chair was made to be comfortable. But it was a chair, not a bed. My knees got stiff at last from being bent, my neck got sore from being turned, the circulation slowed in my right arm, and I woke up.
I peeled a corner of the felt back from the living-room windows, squinted out, and found it midmorning. The Night Fair would be sealed, stagnant around the base of the building. I’d go back to sleep until sunset. The Night Fair in sunlight loomed as an unknown, unnatural land, and I wasn’t going to brave it today. But before I slept, I’d look in on Mick Skinner. If I was lucky, he’d have slipped away.
He hadn’t. I’d had a hopeful moment when I found the bedroom door unlocked, but he was there. His cotton jacket and a broken-down pair of boots were on the floor by the mattress. He lay on his back under my blanket, his limbs neatly arranged, staring at the ceiling.
Without blinking.
Once I’d taken a step into the room, I was sure it was true, but death is a diagnosis that can never go untested. I jabbed his shoulder. Then I felt for a pulse in his throat. There was none, and his skin had the same chill on it as the top of the dresser. But his flesh was soft, and his arm, when I lifted it, limp. Didn’t rigor mortis set in as the body cooled? Maybe he had some disease that produced this convincing catalepsy. Who would know — and how could I find them, in the Night Fair in daylight?
I began to examine him for some kind of damage. Perhaps a blow to the head? Nothing. He’d clutched at his side the night before -
Under his shirt, just to the heart side of middle, between one ridge of muscle and the next, there was a hole. Not a large one, not a fresh one, and not healed. I stared at it for a while before I rolled him over. There was a corresponding hole in his back. They were the entrance and exit wounds made by a bullet, and since they hadn’t been dressed, treated, or healed, they must have killed him.
Sometime before we’d met.
It was only a few steps from the corpse to the door; easy to do walking backward. I closed the door. Then I stumbled down the corridor and out into the building hallway. I locked my front door, methodically, watching my hands work. I went down in the freight elevator, climbed the basement stairs, and slipped out, at last, into the silent street. Somewhere in the sleeping Fair I had to find someone who could help me get rid of Mick Skinner.
Card 3: Beneath
Two of Pentodes, Reversed
Crowley: The Lord of Harmonious Change overthrown.
Gray: Inability to handle many things at once; disruptive change; harmony at the expense of change.
Waite: Enforced gaiety. Simulated enjoyment. False news.
3.0: The goddess and the girl next door
It was already as hot as it had gotten the day before, and promised to be one of the arid ones. The street smelled like scorched tar, and the sidewalk glared where the sun hit it between the building shadows. Nothing moved, not in the hard light, not in the shadow. In a thousand years, when planet-hopping archaeologists discovered the ruins of our civilization, the photos in some alien National Geographic would look like this. They’d be silent like this, too. The Dead City: remarkable state of preservation.
I was reminded of my houseguest. So I moved on, briskly.
Once I began to penetrate the heart of the Fair, I had to stop again. Hadn’t I had a nightmare like this once, before I’d been lulled into thinking that there would always be enough people?
The food vendor’s booth on my right was empty; it had been stripped down by its operator at closing, at dawn. I reminded myself of that: It had been open just hours ago. The turquoise paint on its corrugated metal sides was peeling in places, fading all over. “Mariscos” said the hand-painted letters, above a portrait of a shrimp. The word was bleached from red to pink, the shrimp to mud-green. The counter was gritty with dust. The booth had had an awning once; I saw the rusty brackets above the service pass-through. The iron barrel chained to the wall had no trash in it.
In front of me, a Ferris wheel rose against a chromakey-blue sky. Or rather, the geometric bones of the wheel were there, black against the light, thickened at the joints, flanged at regular intervals by the vertebrae of the seat buckets. The flesh for those bones was darkness and little lights and noise, and that was gone. There was rust and grit here, too. I sniffed, trying to smell alcohol or ozone, and got nothing but sun-heated metal and concrete.
It was the light, of course it was the light. When I stayed at my place in the Night Fair, I rarely went there before dawn. If I did, I went there to work, then sleep, then wake up when the Fair woke. I’d never seen the Night Fair at midmorning. But I couldn’t shake off the conviction that everything I saw had been transformed — that this was not the Ferris wheel I’d seen last night, but one a thousand years older, a thousand years broken and silent.
“Sparrow,” said a voice behind me, and if I’d been my namesake, I would have been halfway across the City in a breath.
Context is everything; wrap enough strangeness around them, and familiar things become unrecognizable. It was Dana’s voice, firmly attached to Dana’s person. She leaned in the entryway of a brown brick building. She wore a dressing gown printed with herons and palm fronds that reached almost to her ankles, and a pair of little-heeled slippers of a sort I’d only seen in movies. Her pale hair was loose and brushed back to fall straight down behind her. She’d been standing there awhile; there was half a cigarette in her fingers, and the stub of another on the porch at her feet.
“You okay, sugar?” she asked with a quirk of the lips, and I realized I hadn’t said anything yet.
“Fine. I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
More quirk. “I live here. Upstairs. You act as if I caught you trying to steal that thing.”
I shook my head. The sense of unreality, Dana in mid-necropolis, had doped me.
“No snappy comeback?”<
br />
“I guess I’m just not a morning person,” I said finally.
“That’s better. So what brings you out?” She laid the cigarette between her lips and took a long pull. She looked disturbingly undressed without lipstick.
The cigarette wasn’t hand-rolled, and I thought I could see a tobacconist’s mark printed on the paper. Luxuries, rarities, and indulgences: Dana surrounded herself with them.
She had offered me her help. Here was a problem that might yield to wealth and contacts. If she really had them. And where else was I likely to find a solution?
“… I need a favor.”
Dana let the smoke out of her lungs and watched me through it. “Anything I can do?”
I suffered a rush of doubt — had I ever been out of balance with Dana, on the owing side of the Deal with her? Always too many debts. I pushed the corners of my mouth away from each other and hoped it looked like a smile. “I have to dispose of a corpse.”
From her face, I might have just shed my skin. She whispered something and spit left. Her eyes slid away from me, then back. “I guess you better come in.”
I followed the swirl of her hem off the porch and, sunblind, into the building’s front hall. The smell of last night’s lamp oil hung around my head as I climbed the stairs. Very old marble ones; each tread was scooped out and shallow in the middle, as if the stairs had been a watercourse. The second-floor windows were shuttered, but on the third-floor landing, light fell on us like a malediction in shafts of dust. It was very hot in the hall.
Dana pushed open a door and sauntered in. I had never been in a place Dana called home. This one was so much hers that I found myself shying on the sill like an animal at an outstretched hand.
We were in a lavishly cluttered, languorous room, where the light filtered through slatted blinds and folds of lace. The unmade bed beneath one window looked right and proper, as if the linens weren’t woven to lie flat, but would always form those shadowed valleys, that textile refuge. There were rugs on rugs, so that even Dana’s heeled slippers were soundless. The chairs were strewn with things: clothes, magazines, single shoes, embroidered towels, gloves, strands of beads, and a box spilling tissue and printed with a shop logo rarely seen in the Night Fair. On the kitchen table was a bowl of full-blown roses, and I smelled rose incense, very fresh. The room was sleepily warm, and all its colors were indistinct.
Dana swept a robe and a cedar box off a kitchen chair and onto a footstool. “Have a seat,” she said. “D’you want some tea?”
I wanted, in fact, to leave. “No,” I said, and sat down in a cloud of disorientation. “I want to move a corpse.”
“Well, if it’s already a corpse, then there’s no hurry.”
“In this heat?” I wanted to break this slow, hypnotic atmosphere with something crude. But the imagined stink of decay couldn’t hold out against the incense. I looked around and found it still burning on a wicker table half curtained with lace. There was a figurine there, too, draped with veiling, surrounded by an oval mirror, a shell comb, and nine pink candles. Maitresse Erzulie, the queen of love. At the foot of the statue was an apple, cut apart and fastened back together with straight pins. The skin at the cut marks was just starting to pucker. I thought of Cassidy the night before, suffering in silence. What was Dana asking for, so early in the day? What lay under Erzulle’s dominion that Dana didn’t have?
She stood at the counter, filling the kettle from a stoneware jug. Her hair fell straight down, between her face and my eyes. From behind it, she said, “This body, is it… Did you kill somebody?”
Her voice was smaller than it usually was. When I didn’t answer immediately, she pushed back the hair curtain and darted me a glance. I read her expression: If I had killed someone, well, the world was tough, and she was tough enough to live in it, wasn’t she? I realized suddenly that I didn’t know how old she was. A confusion of feeling smacked me from the inside, understanding, pity, tenderness. My thoughts leaped away from all of them.
“No,” I snapped.
“Oh.” She was trying not to be relieved. She moved out of sight behind me. I heard a cupboard open; then her fingers stroked my shoulder. “What kind of tea do you want?”
I shook my head, as if to dislodge something (which didn’t work). “There’s a dead person in my apartment. I don’t know anything about him, except that there were people after him that I don’t want after me. For all I know, they’re not the only ones after him. I don’t want his debts, I don’t want the blame, and I don’t want any tea. What I want is someone who can make him disappear.”
Dana shrugged. “Dump him on the sidewalk.”
“No. I mean disappear. I’m connected to him already. I don’t want City security stopping by. And the people who were after him saw me with him. If he turns up dead, they’ll come straight to me. You know the ritual for splitting with someone, when you draw a line across the threshold with a knife after they’ve passed? I need the real-life version. Just tell me if you know someone who can help.”
“Easy, sugar. While the tea’s making, I’ll go call somebody.” She gave me a sweet, indulgent look. “You see? It’s not so bad, having friends. Nobody can be by herself all the time. So who is — was — this character?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to decide if that was a lie or not. “It was just — sometimes you bump into people.”
“And take them home,” she added sourly. I wondered if she disapproved of my recklessness, or was only jealous of some imagined intimacy.
“Well, in this case, he got the worst of it.”
“What kind of tea?”
“Will you — Earl Grey,” I said, because I hadn’t seen Earl Grey tea anywhere since… Someone, once, had given me some, but I couldn’t remember who, or when. A long time ago.
She laughed and pulled a stopper out of one of a cluster of tins on the counter. The smell, very strong and fresh, added itself to the incense and unlocked a memory. At the edge of a town in what had been Ohio, in a farmhouse kitchen full of dirty dishes, a fast-talking man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, who told stories as if they’d been corked up in him and my arrival had broken the seal — he had poured tea into a cup for me. The dark liquid had spun and swirled, and wide-eyed, I’d asked, “Why does it smell like that?”
Dana dropped some of the tea in a china pot and lit the gas under the kettle. “Be right back,” she said, and whisked out the door.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait… You don’t have a private line, do you?”
She stuck her head back into the room and smiled. “I’m discreet, sugar.”
Without Dana, the room was much larger. Still, nothing in it seemed quite in focus. I stared at the wide-open roses in front of me. Down the hall I could hear, barely, the rise and fall of Dana’s voice as she talked on the phone. Finding me a corpse-removal service. I could probably have done it myself, if I wasn’t so rattled. But no — the telephone; this apartment, uncontestedly hers, filled with luxuries; the shop logo on the box; the tea — Dana had connections, of a sort I would never have expected. I knew people, from deals, from the Underbridge, but I couldn’t call them connections.
She came back in. “Where’s your place, sugar?”
“Why?”
“They’ll meet us there.”
I told her, because I couldn’t see any way not to. She went back down the hall.
When she returned, the teakettle had begun to hoot. She did appropriate things with kettle and teapot, and brought all the paraphernalia to the table.
“Shouldn’t we go?” I asked. If my privacy had to be invaded, it seemed better to get there first and prepare the ground.
“Drink your tea.” She poured, through a strainer, into two thin china cups that matched. For some reason, I thought of Sherrea, with no food in the house. I drank my tea, with milk in it.
It was beginning to catch up to me that I hadn’t had enough sleep. That would explain my inability to concentrate, the distance everythin
g seemed to recede to. Dana watched me over the rim of her cup, wearing her purring look. The angle was flattering.
“Why do you treat Cassidy so badly?” I asked suddenly.
“Do I treat him badly?” She sipped tea. “I don’t think I do. He’s one of my best friends, honey.”
“That’s not how he thinks of you.”
Left shoulder up, eyebrows raised, mouth pursed — it was such a graceful expression of regret that I couldn’t tell if it was genuine. “I can’t do anything about that.”
“You could stop giving him encouragement.”
“I treat him just the same as I treat you.”
“Ah, but I’m not your type.”
“Neither is Cassidy.”
“You should tell him so.”
She laughed. “Oh, Sparrow, honey, when did you start up in the lonely-hearts business? I thought you didn’t mess with romance.” She put the emphasis heavily on the first syllable, and grinned.
It was true; it wasn’t my place, my right, or my business. I turned my teacup around between my hands. I hadn’t had caffeine for months. I could almost feel my blood vessels narrowing.
“Cassidy,” she continued, “is having himself a fine time. He’ll collect just enough heartbreak, and then he’ll get tired of it and give up. In the meantime, he’s getting a little excitement, and not taking any harm. D’you want anything to eat with that?”
I shook my head. Dana pushed my cup gently down on the saucer and filled it again. It was time we left. I pointed to the wicker table and the draped figurine. “I didn’t know you were hoodoo.”
She raised her eyebrows again. “Sugar, we’re all hoodoo, aren’t we? Or whatever works.”
“What makes you think it works?”
“That it does, I suppose. I mean, you turn the fire on under the pot and it boils, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? What are you asking for?”
She smiled. “None of your damn business.”
