Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

  “Is coffee worth shooting people for?” I asked.

  “Or getting shot at for? Have you never had it?”

  “No.”

  An indecipherable expression crossed her face at high speed. “In that case, I suppose not. But I wish I had some, all the same.”

  Headlights appeared and bobbed in front of us, blinding, as a car turned into the other end of the alley. “Bother,” Frances said, and began to clear wrapping paper away from the ignition.

  “Stay where you are, please,” said an air-filled whistling ruin of a voice behind me.

  I was drinking the last of the pear nectar. As I lowered the bottle, I reversed my grip on the neck, smacked the glass against a sign post as I turned, and ended crouched in front of Mr. Lyle with a broken bottle in my hand. I was probably more surprised than he was.

  He was smiling, in fact, way up at the top of his great height. I’d forgotten how unreasonably large he was. “Teakettles, bottles — do you always fight with your drinkables?” he asked. And: “You should turn round and have a look before you use that. There are things you don’t know.”

  I did not, of course, turn around. “Frances?” I called.

  “I don’t—” I heard the clunk-squeak of a car door opening. “Ah. I see,” she said. “Sparrow, before I decide how to manage this, tell me, who are these people?”

  I was frantic to look behind me. People, plural; the woman must be there. I tried to figure out what Frances wanted to know. “Night before last, Mick saw their car and avoided it,” I said slowly. “Then yesterday, when Mick left his last body at my place, I went to someone — someone I thought I could trust — to help me get rid of it. She brought these two around. They were pretty peevish when they found out Mick wasn’t resident anymore.”

  “Is that true?” Frances asked, but not, I realized, of me.

  “It is so, absolutely,” said the other familiar voice, the rough, low-pitched female one. I could hear that she, too, was smiling. “A careful witness, that one, who draws no conclusions. But it is not all that is so.”

  “What do you want?” said Frances.

  “That we should help one another, maybe.”

  In failing tones, with a fortune in skepticism, Frances said, “And this, I take it, is symbolic of your good intentions. My God.”

  “And which one is yours?”

  I couldn’t bear it anymore. I looked over my shoulder.

  The long black car had pulled out of the alley at as much of a diagonal as it could manage; it blocked the sidewalk as well. The woman Dana had addressed as “Maitresse” stood in the open passenger’s side door. Her costume yesterday must have been casual wear. Now she was a different kind of formidable: black suede pumps, long dark legs, a black sheath dress of dull nubby silk, a fur stole white as a cloud of talcum, long dark neck rising out of it. Her face, under a black-and-white turban, seemed younger than it had yesterday. And still, nothing shone or sparkled anywhere about her except her immobile silver eyebrows.

  Behind the wheel was the dark-skinned person in the bright-patterned hat, the one who’d peered in the windshield waving spark plugs. Beside the driver was the big gray dog.

  The back door on our side was also open. And on the back seat, head lolling down as if it had been propped against the door before it opened, entirely unconscious, was Mick Skinner’s new body.

  Then one of Mr. Lyle’s big hands closed around my wrist, and the other plucked the bottle away, sent it flying to smash on the sidewalk. His fingers closed around my upper arms, pressed them to my ribs. It felt as if he might flatten me between his palms like softened wax. He half walked, half carried me to the car and poked me in the back on a rear-facing seat opposite Mick. I shot across to the other door and tried the handle. No response, and no lock in sight. The driver with the bright hat turned and smiled at me through the glass between us.

  “If you will come with us,” the woman said to Frances, “we will go to a safe place, where we may talk. You will not come to harm.”

  Frances nodded toward the back seat of the car. “How do I know you have him, and not just a body?”

  “He is there,” the woman with the eyebrows said. “You know it.”

  “Yes.” Frances’s voice was low, but I heard her.

  None of us moved, and time seemed to keep us company. I was waiting for an explosion of violence — soon the rifle would come up in Frances’s hands, there would be lots of noise, and we would probably all die — or a ripple of the bizarre — soon, now, Frances would possess one of them.

  Slowly, Frances got out of the trike. Her face was full of resigned and weary disgust, and her hands were empty.

  “Leave the key,” the woman said. “Etienne will drive your vehicle after us.” Etienne — the one in the hat.

  “If Etienne wrecks it,” said Frances, toward the driver, “I will eat Etienne’s liver. If I have to come back from the dead to do it.”

  Etienne smiled and nodded, as if he thought that was reasonable.

  Mr. Lyle gestured Frances into the back, and she slid onto the other rear-facing seat. Not for Frances the indignity of being tossed in like a piece of luggage. He pushed Mick’s unresisting body farther along the upholstery, and closed the door. Somewhere inside it a lock chunked.

  Mr. Lyle took the driver’s seat, and the dog wagged its tail once, briskly. The trike did not explode when Etienne started it. As we pulled into the street, I watched its two close-set headlights swing and settle in behind us.

  Frances had rescued me once; against all reason, I had expected her to do it again. “You didn’t shoot them,” I said finally, watching her.

  She’d let her head drop back to rest against the glass partition, and her eyes were closed. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Or ride them. Or even drive the hell away. Why not?”

  “You sound as if you’re taking it personally.” She opened her eyes and rolled her head to look at me. The lights of the trike slid and shuffled over her face, and I saw her eyes clearly for a moment, all pupil. “I found, on examination, that I couldn’t afford it.” She turned her face back toward the roof and closed her eyes again.

  Her nose was short, and tilted up a little at the end. But then, it wasn’t her nose. “Are you ever going to let her back out?” I asked sharply.

  “Who?”

  “The person whose body that is.”

  I thought she wasn’t going to answer. The pause was attributable, perhaps, to thinking. “No. Either way, no.”

  “Either way?”

  But that, she didn’t answer.

  Outside it was dawn, a light so fragile that it seemed a strong wind could break and scatter it. On the edges of the City, people would be gathering the things they would bring to market: peppers, poultry, straw hats, water jugs, fabric dye, burn ointment, door hinges. On Loring Common, the milking would be finished; the heavy-shouldered, lyre-horned cows would be plodding out of the shed to graze. The milk would be on its way to market soon. I was on my way to… where? Someplace safe, where we could talk. What if I had nothing to say?

  The long black car passed out of the gates of the Night Fair. Somewhere in the City Theo and Sher were alive, or dead. Myra and Dusty and Dana and Cassidy were doing whatever they pleased, or could get away with, or thought they had to. To them, for now and maybe forever, the three people in the back seat of the limousine were irrelevant. I wedged myself in my corner of the car and wrapped my arms around me. I wouldn’t, had I been asked, have said I was cold.

  In the morning light, the Schmidt beer cap sign looked as if it had been painted on the sky behind it. The suspension bridge, its cables looping like the flight of swallows, ran above and below us. If La Maitresse hadn’t intercepted us, we’d have gone this way anyway; the Underbridge was on the other shore, east along the river.

  Then the car slowed and turned, and I straightened up and pulled my gaze down from overhead. We’d turned off — not on the other shore, not quite as far as that.

 
I stared, and breathed, “We’re on the island.”

  “I know,” Frances said. Her head was up and her eyes open. “What, then?” She must have understood me from my voice; hers was low and level. I saw in her face the effort to focus her mind, to gather up her scattered reserves and hold them ready.

  “The place has unreasonably high ju-ju levels. For instance, they say if you don’t belong, or weren’t invited, you won’t be able to turn off the bridge onto this street.”

  “The ultimate private subdivision.”

  I shrugged. “Don’t believe it, then.”

  “I almost do, actually. This always was an oddity sink. Maybe someone’s found a way to use it. Do you believe it?”

  “I’ve never had business on the island.” That was true. There was no reason to mention the times when, on the way to or from business elsewhere, I’d intended to test the folk wisdom, and forgot the intention until I was on the other side of the river. I wished I’d been paying more attention to where we’d turned off.

  “I’ve been here,” Frances said. “Before… The row houses look the same. I wonder who lives in them.”

  We were on an old brick street that followed the edge of the island. To our left, the river ran gold in the morning light. The row houses were on our right, a handsome old block of gray stone and long windows, glossy doors with brass hardware. We drove past. Trees hung heavy over the road and shrubbery grew up between them, making a dim green tunnel. Sometimes we saw an opening, with a dusty gravel drive; sometimes a house and yard behind the weathered pickets of a fence. Once three chickens scrabbled out of the road in front of us, scolding.

  “It was always a little wild,” Frances said softly behind me. “But never so wild as this.”

  I thought I knew what she meant. People lived here; but it was as if the land had gathered itself around them, veiling and swaddling them, hiding them and the signs of their habitation. If I hadn’t been on the outside of it, it might have seemed benevolent.

  The car turned and nosed up to a peeling wooden double gate in a piebald wall of round stones and mortar. Ivy and clematis were turning the wall into a hill of shifting green starred with crimson. There was a flash of yellow on the other side of the gate, and it swung open to reveal an elderly woman in a yellow dress. She made a half bow to the car in general. The people in the front seat smiled at her. Since my window was one-way glass, I didn’t feel I had to.

  Then we were on the other side of the wall; and if what we’d passed through was wild green, this was its civilized cousin. It was solid garden on either side of the gravel drive. There were fruit trees and flowering ones; the dense, druglike smell of mock orange and butterfly bush, strong even in the car; a mass of tall orange and yellow flowers like a streak of fire; grapes hanging heavy and green on a long arbor; the red cones of hot peppers set like jewels in their bushes. There might have been paths or terraces of grass, but I couldn’t see them from where I was.

  And in the middle, a somber monarch in some highly ornamental court, was a three-story, sprawling wood-frame Victorian house. It was mostly dark green, trimmed in black, brick-red, and yellow. Once, maybe, it had been of modest size, before the gables and dormers and bays, the additional rooms and entire wings. It should have been awful; instead, it had a sort of rhythm, as if half a dozen dissimilar people had agreed to dress alike and dance in figures.

  “I would swear,” Frances said, “this wasn’t here when I left.”

  “How the hell long ago did you leave?”

  “I know. That house is a lot older than I am. Still… ”

  By that time, the car had stopped at the broad front porch, and the tri-wheeler had pulled up behind us. Mr. Lyle got out, the dog following with a great lazy spring, and opened the passenger door for the woman. He performed the same office for Frances, as his — employer? partner? — went briskly up the steps, the sound of her heels uncompromising on the wood. She turned at the top.

  “I think,” she called back, “that you should carry your friend. It will be more work than it would be for Mr. Lyle, but it will keep you from trouble.”

  Frances stood in the angle of the open door and looked in at me. She seemed torn between amusement and frustration. “Let us, by all means, be kept from trouble. Would you like the head or the feet?”

  “The head,” I said. “His feet will be lighter.”

  “Don’t be chivalrous. You haven’t the plumbing for it.” She stood back to let me out. Mr. Lyle was nearby, his distance nicely judged: too far for us to surprise him, but close enough to stop us if we did something rash.

  “But I’ve got the energy.” I grabbed the inert Mick under the armpits and dragged. “I thought you had to eat a poisoned apple to stay under this long. What do you suppose they did to him?”

  “Not, I hope, an apple, or one of us will have to kiss him. Perhaps if we’re very good the lady with the alarming eyebrows will tell us. She might even tell us where she got the eyebrows. God damn it!” she said suddenly, then pressed her lips closed. It was the only leak in her supernatural self-command. It wasn’t so bad for me; I didn’t expect to be able to control the situation.

  Since I’d picked the head, I went up the steps and into the house backward. I don’t suppose the effect would have been much softened if I’d gone in face first.

  The coved ceilings were fifteen feet high, all of them, and the hall and the two parlors to either side were outlined and ornamented in glossy walnut. In one parlor, the walls were the color of chilled butter, and painted ivy climbed out of the baseboards and twined around the window frames. In the other, the paint was pumpkiny; beneath the ceiling molding was a frieze two feet high of Egyptian kings and queens and gods and all their attendants and accessories. The door I’d just come through was double, and mostly stained and leaded glass. It was flanked by a pair of benches that looked Middle Eastern, piled with pillows covered in African cloth. Under my feet was a carved-pile Chinese rug; inside the door of the ivy room was a stone carving that might have been Mayan; on the hall table was a shallow reed bowl that was almost certainly Native North American. I didn’t want to be obvious about looking, but I had the impression that the place went on in that style: a world government of interior design, rich in a way that couldn’t be achieved solely by money.

  And one thing more. Around the edges of the rug, the parquet floor was bordered with inlay in many woods. It ran across thebottom of the door, along the walls, and continued unbroken across the doors to the two parlors. In it I saw designs and figures I almost recognized, from Sherrea’s cards, from the veves, from amulets. If the border was continuous behind me, too, then whoever stood in the hall would be well protected. Or nicely contained.

  “Mr. Lyle,” the woman said from behind me, “would you take him now, please?”

  Mr. Lyle had come in after us. He nodded and smiled, and gathered Mick up and over his shoulder.

  “You should rest,” the woman said. She stood at the foot of the wide walnut staircase. “Then we will talk. Come with me.”

  Frances might have been made of stone, if stone could shrug. She walked stiffly toward the stairs. Mr. Lyle, behind me, said, “After you.” So I went.

  We climbed to the third floor, turned right down a short hallway, right again, and stopped halfway down another hall, carpeted, lighted by a window at one end. The walls were yellow, and the trim was white. It’s hard to feel apprehensive in surroundings like that, but I did. After all, werewolves only grew hair at the full moon. The woman opened a door and stood aside for Mr. Lyle to pass. Then she went to the next door in the hall and opened that.

  “Yours,” she said to Frances. “If you need anything, pull the bell.”

  After an instant’s hesitation, Frances inclined her head and went in. I didn’t hear any loud noises.

  I, of course, got the next door. It was open, and the woman waiting for me to go in, when I said, “Do I need to call you anything yet?”

  A look crossed her face, something like emba
rrassment. “I’m China Black,” she said. “Though there are many other things to call me, even respectful ones. Is it respectful to call you ‘Sparrow’?”

  “It’s the only name I have.”

  She nodded. “Until you have another, then.” She turned and walked to the joining of the two halls, where Mr. Lyle waited for her. I heard them a moment later, going down the stairs.

  I looked back at the open door. Apparently it was not going to be locked behind me. I went in.

  It was a very nice room. It had sloping, papered walls and a large dormer window. It was so honest and pleasant and innocent that I felt a rush of panic. I hurried to the window. It was neither barred nor locked, and looked out over the gardens we’d just driven through. I thought back over the orientation of the stairs and hallways. I must have missed something; I hadn’t expected this to be the front of the house. I opened the window and sat on the bench under it to examine the rest of the room.

  There was a bed, with a high carved head and foot, and a dresser with a round mirror. On the dresser was a pitcher and bowl, soap and towels. Any minute the porter will bring my luggage up, I thought wildly. Across from the dresser was an armoire. I got up and flung its doors open. A sudden movement, a person — a mirror on the inside of one door. I closed the armoire and sat on the bed until my pulse settled down. On a table next to the bed was an oil lamp and a box of matches. One doesn’t supply a prisoner with the means to burn down the house. Unless it’s impossible to do; I thought of the inlay in the hall.

  “Comfortable?” said Frances from the door, and I jumped.

  “I see you’re not resting.”

  “No. I’ve reconsidered the wisdom of keeping from trouble. I want to know what happens when we try to walk out.”

  “You should have just made a break for it back in the Night Fair.”

  “Oh, I expect to be stopped. But I think it would be instructive to know where, and how. Care to join me? We could say we were looking for the bathroom.” She seemed relaxed and casual, leaning in the doorway; but I suspected she wasn’t.