by Emma Bull
This time she didn’t refill my teacup.
There was a car in front of the building when we got there: long as the course of history, black as a killer’s thoughts, and damnably familiar. “Wait,” I said, reaching for Dana’s arm. I missed it.
“They’re here. That’s the car.”
I watched her cross the street to the front door, and followed slowly after. Someone who’d been looking for Mick Skinner was about to find him. Or maybe Mick Skinner had successfully avoided someone he didn’t want to see. It all depended on your point of reference. Mine, I decided with a sinking feeling, was too close to the action. But there wasn’t much I could do now.
Two figures commanded the ruined grandeur of the lobby. One was a teak-brown man, nearly seven feet tall, carved with muscle and shining bald. He wore narrow trousers and a sleeveless double-breasted tunic with silver buttons; tunic and pants were black, and suggested a uniform without insisting on it. He had a baroque pearl hanging from his right earlobe. His arms hung loose at his sides, his hands open; he looked as if he was thinking about matters several miles away. On the floor at his feet was a leather case with a handle, like an old salesman’s catalog case.
The woman next to him seemed small only in contrast. She had to be the owner of the car — she belonged in something that long, that black, that silent. She was black herself; I’d never seen skin so dark. She wore a long dress, almost to her ankles, of dull dark blue chiffon over a dark blue slip. Her hair was hidden under a sheenless black scarf wrapped close around her head. Her long, angular face was interrupted by sunglasses with dark lenses and matte-black frames. Even her lipstick was black, and didn’t shine. I was afraid to look at her fingernails.
“Cherie,” she said to Dana with regal near-warmth. Her voice was low and hoarse. Against all that darkness, Dana, in a hyacinth-blue dress, looked like a faded print.
“Bonjour, Mattresse,” said Dana, in a startling schoolgirl voice. I glanced at her face and found an expression there to match. “This is Sparrow, who… has the problem.”
I was about to say something snappy — mostly to banish the urge to bob or tug my forelock — when I realized that the black woman had gone very still. I couldn’t tell what held her attention because of the sunglasses. I shot a look over my shoulder.
“Sparrow. Bonjour. What is your age?”
My heart gave one powerful beat and seemed to quit. “Old enough for most things.”
“Where have you come from?”
“I don’t think that’s relevant.”
“Sparrow!” Dana said.
But the black woman shrugged. “Keep your secrets, then, if you feel better. It doesn’t matter. Take me to this dead man.”
“Shall I call you Mistress, too?”
“When you need to call me anything, I will tell you what it will be,” she said pleasantly.
Gosh. Since there were no more channels for the small talk to run in, I led them all to the basement.
Again, I stood in the elevator in such a way that no one else could see what I did with the loose wires in the control box. I knew it was a delaying tactic; one of them could, with enough incentive and time, duplicate the process. I hated knowing that. Three more people who were aware that the elevator was not broken down. Mick Skinner seemed to be doing me all his disservices posthumously.
The apartment door was still locked. The apartment, when I opened the door, was quiet as — well, perfectly quiet. Dana came in after me, followed by La Maitresse and the large man. He closed the door after himself, which made me uncomfortable.
When I opened the bedroom door, I knew immediately that something had changed state. Mick Skinner’s mortal remains were where I’d left them. But the body seemed altered; maybe in its color, or the texture of the skin. I stepped in and plucked gingerly at the wrist I’d lifted before, and found that this time rigor mortis worked. “He’s different.”
Dana was standing in the doorway, staring. The woman pushed her gently out of the way and came to the bedside. “How?”
“Well… deader,” I said.
I found myself staring at my reflection in the sunglasses, long enough to realize that my way with words had not impressed her. “I need more room,” she said at last. “Can you give it to me?”
“Oh. Yes, down the hall.”
“Mr. Lyle. Bring him, please.”
At that the big man came forward and took the body off my mattress with no apparent effort. I led the parade to the next room, wondering what she needed space for. Dissection, maybe. I ought to tell her I didn’t have a garbage disposal. Mr. Lyle laid his burden tidily on the floor, and went back to the hall. When he returned, he had the leather case. He gave the woman an inquiring look.
“Yes,” she said.
He took candles out of the case. Lots of candles, in black. They all had something sticky at the base, and stayed upright when he placed them on the floor — one at the top of Mick Skinner’s head, one at each shoulder, at each wrist, at the outside of each knee, at the sole of each bare foot. He reached into the case again and came up with a tin box. I craned my neck when he took off the lid; the contents looked like flour. When he began to dribble it on the floor in fine lines, I realized that of course it was flour, and he was making the veves with it.
I turned to Dana, who sat cross-legged on the floor out of the way, her skirt spread out around her. “Maybe I gave you the wrong impression,” I told her. “I said I wanted the real-world version.”
“Don’t bother them when they’re working, sugar.”
“Does it bother them if I talk to you? I want him disposed of, not raised from the dead.”
“We will dispose of him,” the black woman said behind me. “When we are done with him.”
“I’d think the whole world was as done with him as could be. He’s dead.” The veves were going remarkably fast, for drawings done in flour; there was one elaborate triangle at the corpse’s head already, and another taking shape at its feet.
“In an ideal world,” the woman said fiercely, “the dead are left in peace. Do you live in an ideal world, do you think?”
I wasn’t even tempted to answer that.
When the veves were done, Mr. Lyle stepped back, and the woman began to take things out of the leather case. An unmarked bottle of clear liquid. A shot glass. A little dark glass vial. A square of red silk, embroidered around the edges. She spread the silk over Mick Skinner’s chest, with points toward his head and feet. Then she poured some of the liquid into the shot glass — the smell of high-proof drinking alcohol reached me — and set the glass in the middle of the square of silk. After that, she began to light candles.
She was speaking, and so was Mr. Lyle — in unison, I realized only after a moment, because their voices were so different I had trouble listening to both at once. Hers was low and smooth; he might have had some damage in his throat, to judge by the whistling, broken, breathy sound of it. I didn’t recognize the words, or even the language, but the speech had a dance rhythm. I had to work to keep from swaying. Dana wasn’t bothering. Her eyes followed the woman in black, and her shoulders moved freely with the words.
It was taking a long time to light nine candles. The room was already warmer, and the points of light swam in halos before my aching eyes. By the time there were nine of them, bouncing in their golden auras, the speaking seemed to have a tune, and someone was patting a drumbeat on the floor. The woman produced the dark vial, unscrewed the cap, and held it over the corpse’s closed mouth.
“Eleggua,” she said, as if to someone in the room. “Find this man for me, and see if he has something to say. Exu Lanca, somebody fooled you when you closed the way behind this one. Let him through to speak to me, and I will see that the joker is punished in your name. Papa Ghede, this is your daughter asks you this, and it is right that you give it to me.”
I wanted to rub my eyes; they burned with tiredness, with the candlelight, with not blinking enough. But I didn’t want to move. It was
important not to move. Someone might notice me. I wanted to see what Dana was doing, but that would have meant turning my head. The candles, the singing, the beat, were narrowing the world alarmingly. The woman let a drop fall from the vial onto the corpse’s lips.
Silence. Silence as if the air had turned to mercury, heavy, thick, and poisonous. The candles burned straight up, not moving. I was watching Mick Skinner’s lips so hard, I thought I might be sucked into his mouth if they opened. The whole room might; the space behind his teeth was such a vacuum, it would take the whole room to equalize the pressure. I thought I felt a drop of sweat crawl from my forehead, past my ear, to my jaw.
The liquid in the shot glass burst into flames, and the glass shattered.
I was halfway to the sink for water before I realized I wasn’t holding still anymore. The teakettle was full, and I grabbed it. Nothing we did in this room could harm the contents of the other, of the third room, except fire. Except fire. I bolted back toward the mess on the floor.
But when I tried to fling the contents of the teakettle on it, I couldn’t. I looked down and found two huge brown hands closed around my wrists. “That will only spread it,” Mr. Lyle’s whistling voice said above me. “Look.”
The corpse was burning. The black, oily smoke of it rose straight up and stained the ceiling. But where the flames should have splashed around it with the burning alcohol, there was nothing. The nine black candles stood untouched, like everything outside them. I couldn’t even smell the smoke.
The woman was on her knees, bent double, and Dana hovered over her, her hands stretched out and falling a little short of La Maitresse’s shoulders. Then the black-wrapped head lifted. The woman looked straight into my eyes and said, “He wasn’t there.”
The sunglasses had come off. Below the line of the scarf, at the bottom of the sweat-marred forehead, were her eyebrows, two arcs of silver metal inlay in her skin. I hugged my teakettle and stared.
“He wasn’t there. Where has he gone?” She rose and advanced on me, her eyes very wide under those bright, motionless brows.
I edged around the smoking corpse. “Who?” I croaked.
“The one who was in there. Le chevalier,” she spat. Her hand snapped sideways and down, toward the body.
“He’s dead.” Even in my own ears, I sounded hysterical. “What do you expect?”
On the left, around the pillar of smoke, I saw Mr. Lyle moving carefully toward me. Dana was on my right, looking back and forth between me and the woman in dark blue on the other side of her.
“You are an ass, an ass,” the woman said to me. “Where is he now? Tell me, or I’ll wring it out of you like water from a rag.”
I didn’t kick Dana, exactly; I pushed her hard with my foot. She stumbled into the black woman. And I threw the teakettle at Mr. Lyle, and plunged for the front door.
It seemed to take five minutes to turn the knob and pull the door open, half an hour to run down the hall, with the sound of footsteps coming fast behind. The elevator control box took a week, and I looked up from the crossed wires to the sight of the doors closing on a huge brown hand, with an angry face behind. Two fingers stuck through the rubber door seal, so I bit them. They disappeared and the car lurched downward.
The opposite wall of the elevator was farther away than usual. So was the ceiling, and the floor. I rubbed my eyes. The light in the car was fading. I knew, suddenly, what was happening. This time, for the first time, I had some scrap of warning. And it didn’t help a bit.
I went down.
Card 4: Behind
Seven of Swords
Gray: Possible failure of a plan, arguments, spying, incomplete success, unstable efforts.
Crowley: The policy of appeasement, which may fail if violent, uncompromising forces take it as their natural prey.
4.0: What friends are for
… And came back up, easy as a swimmer who rises, breaks the water’s surface, and opens eyes and mouth to the air. I opened mine to the night. I heard the churning, guttering sound of water moving over something; smelled a faint odor of dead fish, beer, perfumes, and old smoke; and saw row after row of little electric lights, swinging vigorously on their strings overhead. My Hyde persona had brought me to the street in front of the Underbridge and dropped me off. I was standing up, my feet wide apart on the uneven concrete. Finding myself so suddenly in charge of my own legs almost made me fall off them. I caught myself on an iron stanchion that marked the edge of an old parking lot.
The Underbridge had been a generating plant for electricity once, stealing force from the water dashing past the river dam. Electricity was still generated there, but on a much smaller scale. Now the river ran spotlights and a few tubes of neon and the sound system and the video projector and these festive strings of lights outside the building. When the river was low in midsummer, we snuffed the outside lights and the neon, and kept the volume down and our fingers crossed. Yes, we; the operation of the Underbridge was the only thing I did in which I identified myself as one of a group. I didn’t do it with very good grace, but even so I recognized the Deal in action. I got to work with the skills I’d been born to; I paid with my independence. Fair’s fair.
This was the first time I’d come back up without discomfort or outright pain somewhere on or in me, and in a familiar place. So it was a minute or two before I panicked. What time was it? How had I gotten here from the Night Fair on the other side of the river, and what had gone on while I did? Were Dana and her friends still there? Had they found the third room? No, they couldn’t have, not without knowing to look for it, and even Dana wasn’t aware of my collection. Had they found and braved the stairs? If they had, maybe they’d all broken their necks. But if they’d made it to the ground floor, they might be in pursuit of me even now.
A frantic look around told me they weren’t, at least not immediately; nor was anyone else. Then I realized that for all I knew, it had been months since I went down. By now we might all be best friends. I hated this.
The moon had risen down the river, above the Bank. That would make it about nine o’clock. It was a furry squashed sphere, near full, veiled with converging clouds. The wind was cool, emphatic, and from the west. The Underbridge would soon be packed, then: we were going to get a storm.
Robert was doing the door, his dark curling hair loose over his thin shoulders and his antique T-shirt with the London subway symbol on it. He turned one corner of his mouth up and nodded at me.
“Didn’t know you were coming in tonight,” he said.
I had to clear my throat — how long since I last talked? I hated this — before I said, “Just lucky, I guess.”
“You or me?” he asked, perfectly serious.
I wasn’t prepared to answer that, so I didn’t. “Actually, I forgot what day it was.” I shrugged for de-emphasis.
“Oh,” said Robert.
I cursed him in my heart. “Um, what day is it?”
With the infinite patience of someone used to dealing with drunks, musicians, and techies, he replied, “Sunday.”
I’d lost a day and a half. It could have been worse. It could have been a lot better. But I relaxed some. “Who’s here?”
“Theo, so far. Spangler. There might be somebody else in later.”
And now me. Gracious. Hadn’t anyone been watching the weather? Robert on the door was a waste. The Underbridge was his creation, and if there’d been three of him, the place would have run best if he’d done it all himself; he was that much better than anyone but me — and I had unnatural advantages. For him, screwdrivers didn’t slip and solder went on like a liquid kiss. His fingers would brush patterns over the sound board’s faders, dab at the EQ, and one song would segue into the next out of the main speakers like pleats in a single piece of fabric. I knew I ought to offer to take over the door, but I didn’t want to be the first thing anyone coming to the Underbridge would see.
I looked past Robert into the main room, all three stories of it. The long windows showed me
the Deeps across the river, a silhouette against the mounting clouds, speckled with lights in the towers. The reflected moon stuck to one of Ego’s faces like a dab of wet silver; then a tail of cloud stroked across it, like a finger drawn through the puddle. I’d once referred to the windows as the passive video system. People paid to come and dance under that view, and more of them paid to do it when the City cowered under lightning and thunder. A great show, and it didn’t cost us a thing to put on.
Over by the beer taps were a dozen or so clubbers, looking lost and embarrassed in all the empty space. Someone was tending bar, of course, but bartenders were not included in Robert’s or my tally. At the other end of the room up by the screens, a tall wooden ladder, spraddle-legged and spindly, stuck its head up into the confusing darkness of the rigging. A beam of light on the dance floor changed color and position. A monotonous stream of comment and obscenity rolled gently down from the ladder top.
Robert tilted his chin toward the ladder and grinned. “He’s been at it since before sundown.”
“I’ll go see,” I said. “It always makes him feel better if someone asks.”
I walked to the bottom of the ladder, warily; solid objects had been known, at moments like this, to follow the stream of sound that fell from the ladder. “Hullo, Spangler. What’s it this time?”
“Oh, nothing, we just lost another fresnel, that’s all, there’s no goddamn fucking way in the world I can get it working by showtime, if ever, and the whole lighting balance is fucked at this end of the room because we’re running out of goddamn units I can fill in with.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Shows what you know.” He did, in fact, drop a crescent wrench, but on the other side of the ladder. By the time his feet were on the rungs at my eye level, my heart rate was almost back to normal.
“I take it you don’t want to say something like ‘Hi, Sparrow, how’s it been?’ ”
He jumped the last three feet to the floor and gave me a disgusted look. Spangler was not exactly the youngest crew member, but he claimed the distinction, and it would have been counterproductive to contest it. Half his brown hair was long and worn braided beneath his ear; the rest of his head, from forehead to nape of neck, was shaved clean and tattooed with Japanese carp and water lilies. Whenever the shaved part went to stubble, it looked as if the pond had an algae problem. “I know how it’s been,” he said. “Wonderful. You never have anything go wrong.”
