by Emma Bull
“You were with the nightbabies. Outside the Odeon,” I said. I was forgetting to breathe, which broke my sentences up. “With the bone in your nose.”
She looked pleased. “Very good! I didn’t even have to do the voice for you. Now — who are you, at the moment?”
I stared at her.
“All right, I don’t think your other half is a good enough actor to do that brain-damaged look. You’re still the little scavenger, whatsits… Starling? Sparrow.”
Behind me, I heard the steel door slam and feet come pounding down the fire stairs. “Well, damn it, Myra,” the pink-haired man said, “sometimes I feel like your damned bird dog. You can do your own flushing and chasing next time.”
He was simmering with something: adrenaline, anger, speed, maybe all of them. I could feel it behind me, and it made the skin on my back want to crawl around to the front of me for protection.
“Dusty, honey,” the red-haired woman — Myra — said, “I let you have all the fun while I stood out in the rain, so what are you complaining about?”
I cleared my throat and said, “Did you… was there anyone there when you passed through?”
Dusty came around at last into my line of sight. He might have been studying my face. Then he smiled his huge fluorescent smile. “That’d bother you, if I hurt somebody? No — messed up the real estate some, but the tenants, they’re all safe and sound. And I know where to find ’em if I need to.”
“What do you want?” I said again, and this time I was pleading in earnest. “Is there something you want me to tell you? I’ll tell you. You don’t have to hurt me — you don’t have to hurt anybody.”
“That’s good,” said Myra. She took me by one elbow and pulled me toward the packed-dirt service drive by the riverbank. The rain had turned the dirt to slurry. I hadn’t realized it would be so hard to walk with my hands stuck behind me.
I could feel the major arcana at work, the cards that said someone else was in control of my future. I was in terrible trouble, and yet it seemed to stand a polite distance from me. All I had to do was be propelled around, by these people, by another set — simple. They would make me do what they wanted me to do, right or wrong. I had no choice, and no responsibility.
There was a little electric delivery van parked in the drive, painted dark maroon with “Kincaid Adjustments” on the driver’s side door in gold. I wondered if I was going to find out what the inside looked like. I could start yelling, I thought, and hope someone came to see what the problem was before they could club me senseless and make me disappear. Silly. Who would come?
The red-haired woman pressed me against the van’s front fender and over the wet hood; then she hooked her foot between my ankles and forced my feet apart. She was going to pat me down. A long, uncontrollable shudder went through me. “Dusty,” she said, “take this and cover her.”
“Her?” said Dusty.
A loud voice, behind and above me, said, “Stand back from the truck. Sparrow, move away from ’em.”
It was Theo’s voice. I’d never heard him yell before. He was at the head of the fire stairs, with Sher beside him, and he, too, had a nice little gun, which he’d pointed at Myra and Dusty.
Oh, Theo, no. Didn’t he remember his own advice? Didn’t he know he was making the Underbridge look damned uncooperative? Didn’t he have the sense not to do this for someone who’d never done anything for him?
Dusty still had Myra’s gun. So he smiled and snapped it upward. I was lunging headfirst toward him, not sure how I’d gotten there or what I was going to do, when someone exploded the whole volume of air around us. At least, it sounded like it.
I was lying in the mud, deaf, looking at the toes of Dusty’s shoes. My nose was full of the smell of fired gun. I couldn’t get up, because my hands were behind me, so I rolled over.
Dusty still smiled, with the pistol in his hands pointed at the fire stairs. Theo stood where he’d been, wearing the archetype of expressions of surprise. Sher was flattened against the door at the top of the stairs, her eyes showing white all around, her face colorless. Everything was — I looked back at Theo. His attention was fixed on his right arm. It looked as if someone had spilled ink inside the sleeve of his white jacket, and the stain was spreading. I saw his lips move. Was it something profound? All I could think of that needed saying was, I’m sorry, and it wasn’t his line.
Then someone back by the van said, “If you try that with me, I’ll cut you in half, Peppermint,” and I thought, Have we had enough drama yet tonight?
I struggled to sit up, and found myself looking at Myra. She held an automatic rifle that I realized must have come from the van, was pointing it at Dusty, and seemed ungodly pleased with herself.
Card 5: Crowning
The Lovers
Waite: Trials overcome.
Crowley: Various twin deities. His weapon is the Tripod. His drugs are ergot and abortifacients. His powers are to be in two or more places at the same time, and prophecy. Analysis, then synthesis. Openness to inspiration, intuition, intelligence, second sight.
5.0: One hundred stories without a punchline
“Myra?” said Dusty with a quaver.
Myra surveyed us all with the same smile. “God, I love tableaux. Les Enfants du Paradis meet The Untouchables. Peppermint, hold that toy of yours by the barrel and fling it toward the river just as hard as you can. Now.” He did, and after a moment, there was a splash. “There’s a good boy. Lie down.”
“What the hell is going on?” Dusty’s voice was like a skin of ice over deep water.
“Allah has sent the change wind, and the world’s turned arse over ears. Now do what you’re told.”
“I ain’t gonna lie down.”
“Yes, you are. But you have a choice as to whether you do it alive or dead. I have no preference, myself.”
Dusty sank slowly to his knees in the mud, and finally lay on his stomach. Myra reached into the little van and started it, fiddled with some things in the cab, and stepped back. The van lurched forward into the darkness, toward the river. In a few moments, there was a crunch.
“Pity,” said Myra. “I was hoping it would sink. Now, as for you two,” she went on, turning her attention to Theo and Sher.
Theo had come to himself enough to clamp his hand over the wound in his arm, but he looked as if he would like to fall down. Sher was keeping him from doing it, and staring narrowly at Myra.
“Who are you?” Sherrea asked her.
Myra’s eyebrows went up. “Child, you frighten me. Bright young people always do. Take your leaking comrade back through that door, lock it, and don’t come out again. Will you do that for me?”
“What’re you going to do with Sparrow?”
“I am going to take Sparrow home, and you will damn well have to take my word for it. Get inside.”
“What home?”
I was, after all, a confirmed bird of passage, but I hadn’t thought that Sherrea knew that. Myra said, “If I wanted you to know, I’d invite you along.”
Sher was glowering from under her hair, a pixie with a bad attitude. “I’d rather she didn’t shoot you,” I croaked.
“You don’t belong to them,” Sherrea said savagely. “You never did. And you don’t now.” Then she turned and pulled Theo inside.
Myra walked over to me and hauled me up by one arm. “Your standards of personal grooming never cease to impress me,” she said, giving my mud the once-over. “Peppermint, stay there until I come back for you, and if I find you’ve twitched a finger, they’ll mistake your corpse for a screen door.”
He still had the silvertones on; their blankness gave his face extra malevolence. He said, “When I kill you, I’m gonna make you remember tonight.”
She looked down at him, the rifle pointed at his jaw. “Probably,” she said, her words slowed by the weight of some personal meaning. “I have a damnably long memory.” She took my elbow and drew me stumbling toward the parking lot.
The dust was rinsed away, but the thin
g parked at the pavement’s edge was recognizably the tri-wheeler from two days before. We stopped next to it, and Myra dug in her raincoat and pulled out a little chromed key. She poked it into my jeans pocket. “The cuffs,” she explained. “I’d ditch them now, but you’re so much more manageable this way. Get in.”
She’d popped the weather shell open, and I stood staring, a sickly colored light dawning in my battered head. In the driver’s seat of the tri-wheeler was the black-haired woman who owned it, she of the many names. She sat slumped, her eyes half-closed, her mouth slack, her hands dead on her thighs. Inert. Gone.
“Oh. Oh, hell,” I whispered. I glanced at Myra, back again to the black-haired driver.
Myra sighed. “Never mind; I’ll do it.” Before I could struggle, she grabbed the back of my shirt and the waistband of my jeans and swung me in behind that uninhabited body. Then she turned the driver’s limp hands over. Twined in the fingers of the left one I saw a strip of braided leather thong and black beads: my hair tie. Myra laid the rifle across the black-haired woman’s palms. I must have made a little noise, because Myra turned her flat gray gaze on me. “Sorry,” she said. “When you booked your seat, you should have specified ‘no shooting.’ ”
Myra walked away from the tri-wheeler, about a dozen feet. Then she turned around. Her face was blank.
The hands that had been limp closed around the rifle and raised it, pointing it at Myra. And above the rifle, the black-haired woman’s face was alive with the pleased expression that Myra’s features had worn moments before. Myra looked like someone who had gone to sleep in the basement and woken up on the roof, which I suppose wasn’t far from true.
“Myra Kincaid, you make me wish there were disinfectant for the mind,” said the black-haired woman. “Are you confused? Of course you are. The short version is that I’m not on your side, I’ll shoot you if you take one more of those steps, and I’m stealing your friend here. For the long version, ask your brother. He’s around back.”
I saw Myra take a breath; then, as if that had broken a spell, her face contorted, and she screamed, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the thing you’re a pale shadow of,” said the black-haired woman, and started the tri-wheeler. “Come see me again when your permanent fangs grow in.”
Myra took another step, and I steeled myself against the sound of the rifle. But the weather shell slammed down instead, and I was thrown against its scarred window as the trike launched and U-turned.
The driver said loudly, “If I’m lucky, her brother will kill her first, thinking she’s still me, and ask questions later. But God knows, I haven’t been that lucky yet.”
“I know what you are.” The words popped out of my mouth as soon as I opened it. Maybe they’d been sitting there too long.
“Do you?” she said, all polite inquiry. “How nice. I was afraid, for a moment, that you might disappoint me.”
Once there had been people who stole the prerogatives of the loa, who forced their way into other people’s minds and possessed them. They were a fantasy from silly novels and B-movies come alive. They were harnessed to the military — but who harnesses gods? In the end, they betrayed their side, betrayed everyone: they pushed the Button. Over half a century ago.
“You’re a Horseman,” I said.
The three wheels rattled and slammed over a street of potholes and patches, a typical street in this rough, hollow new world. The one she had made.
She stopped at the bridge to the Deeps and turned, and smiled a smile that made my skin creep. “Aren’t we all supposed to be dead?”
I nodded. Somewhere in the back of my head, where I couldn’t get to them, I felt facts begin to fall into line.
“Good. It would have been so confusing, otherwise. Now, shall I return the favor?”
“I don’t — what?”
“Well, you see, I know what you are.”
We stared at each other for perhaps ten seconds, which is a very long time. For the rest of the trip to the Night Fair, I tried not to move. It hadn’t worked with La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle; but this time I was hoping for better results than simply not being noticed. This time I meant to disappear entirely.
The gates of the Night Fair were open, the lights on, the party rolling forward in its habitual way. She stopped at the first opening in the fence and said, “Give me directions.”
I stared at her, all my possible responses shooting like scan lines across my mind: fill the screen, overwrite, overwrite.
She laughed. “As I’ve said once tonight, I have no preference. But I thought you’d rather I asked, since we’ll get there whether you help or not.”
I wanted to ask which of the major arcana she was. There was a gas lamp on one of the gateposts; it sent light skidding over the side of her face, across her nose, but it missed the eye socket. There was a little scar, barely more than an indentation, near the corner of her mouth. It might have been from a childhood injury, long forgotten. Oh, little laughing gods, of course forgotten — her body couldn’t have been more than thirty. It was an injury from someone else’s childhood.
“Keep going,” I said in an ugly, clogged voice. “There’s a closer gate.”
She took the handcuffs off as soon as we arrived. My wrists hurt, but I didn’t rub them. She kept the automatic rifle with her; I couldn’t imagine what she meant to use it on, since she didn’t need it for me.
There are no similes for the way I felt, leading her into the building, into the elevator, standing across from her in that little box as it lurched quietly toward the top of the building. Maybe it says enough that I didn’t try to hide my wire-crossing from her.
What had it been like for Myra Kincaid? Had she known that her body was being stolen? Had she struggled? Or had she missed it all, and suddenly found herself awake, face-to-face with the comfortless smile of the loa? Make the elevator work, Sparrow; or she’ll mount you, and sink her spurs into you, and have every scrap of knowledge out of you, of that, of anything. Let her fight me for it, I thought. But there were the wires in my hands, and here was the elevator quaking around me. Maybe a reputation for coercion was the best coercive tool of all.
Open the elevator doors, unlock the apartment door — no, it was already unlocked, because I’d bolted out of it with the key in my pocket and a large man close behind me. I didn’t feel anything at the memory. Through the dark front room, then, into the hallway.
I wasn’t numb after all. Because at the end of the hall, the doors to the third room stood a little open, spilling light and music, and I felt a shock of cold on my skin, and a scream blocked up in my throat.
I think I took the black-haired woman by surprise; I was through the hall door and the inside one as well before anyone could have stopped me. A man sat in my comfortable chair, his back to me. The song was Richard Thompson’s “Yankee Go Home.” I had an absurd, precise recollection of it; it was on disk, and the insert was inscribed to someone, in blue ink, in a pointy, idiosyncratic hand. Then the man swung around to face me, and smiled.
“I love this one,” he said. “Brings back a lot of lousy memories.”
I’d never seen him before. Maybe in his mid-twenties, with smooth, glossy brown skin, long hair bleached to chestnut-brown that was braided all over his scalp and twined with bright green thread and tiny copper fish charms. Wide mouth, heavy straight brows over large round black eyes. A compact, slender body in a yellow cotton shirt and loose gray trousers. But he was wearing Mick Skinner’s jacket, and smiling Mick Skinner’s self-mocking smile, and I knew who he was. And what he was. The facts were assembled now, because the driver of the trike was not the only person who ought to be dead and wasn’t, and Myra Kincaid wasn’t the only person with a chunk missing from her memory. Mick Skinner knew what all my missing pieces were.
Of course he did. He’d been me while they’d happened.
Now he was somebody else, but it was still him, using my best-kept secret, my archives, my sanctuary. It was as bad as using my b
ody.
“How the hell many of you are there?” I squeaked in his uncomprehending face.
His eyes went past me then, and narrowed, and his smile faded. The black-haired woman had come in behind me, the damned rifle leveled — Chango, if she pulled the trigger she’d chop the hardware to bits. She didn’t pull the trigger. She just stared with the same narrow-eyed concentration at him.
“Frances?” he said at last, as if he couldn’t breathe.
“Hello, Mick,” she said. The rifle never wavered. “I wondered when it would be you.”
He puffed air out through his nose — a substitute for laughter, maybe, though he wasn’t smiling. “You’re still a woman.”
“’Again,’ actually. Didn’t you go through a few learning experiences getting out of the goddamn stinking jungle? Or have you kept your boyish charm ever since Panama?” She had an edge on her voice and manner now, blackened and smoking and too hot for safety.
He shook his head, as if shaking off insects. “Fran… Jesus, would you put that gun down?”
“No, I don’t think I would. Why aren’t you dead, Mick?”
“Well, why the hell aren’t you?”
“Because I have the morals of a shark. On the basis of personal experience, I’m forced to assume the same of you.”
Mick’s new mouth pressed closed, crookedly. Then he said, “We all did. There wasn’t one of us I’d trust to feed my dog for a weekend. But that was a long time ago.”
“As long as that?” Her smile was really only a baring of her teeth. “Heavens, Mick, did you think we’d evolve!”
It took him a moment to rally. “Learn, maybe? Change? People do.” But his voice was fainter, battered down by her manner.
“And lucky they are, too. But we’re not people. We’re sharks. It’s our nature. We can’t stand to see clear water without a little blood in it.”
“Fran, can’t you—”
“What are you doing here, Mick?”
“Pardon me,” I said, and I was as amazed to hear my voice as they seemed to be. “If neither of you minds, we could have this conversation in the next room just as well. And if you’re going to shoot him,” I added to the woman named Frances, “I wish you wouldn’t do it in here.”
