by Emma Bull
“We’re throwbacks,” I said. “No, you’re a throwback. I’m sort of a throw-forward. If that cigarette you showed me downstairs has marijuana in it, would you be willing to share it with me?”
He pushed his glasses back up his nose and poked his hand through his smooth brown hair. “It’ll put you on your butt. It’s high-test stuff.”
“You’ll be amazed.”
“I’m already amazed. Let’s get petrified instead.”
We’d passed the thing back and forth twice, in near silence, before I said, “Did you tell Frances I knew my way into Ego?”
Theo looked insulted. “Hell, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because I figured if you wanted her to know, you’d tell her.”
“Are you going back with her?”
He shook his head. “I think she wishes she could ask. But, man, I’ve talked to Kru — Worecski. And I’m staying right here ’til it’s over. I’ve got a good excuse.” He tapped the sling.
“I owe you for that,” I said softly.
He gurgled. “Heck, I didn’t do anything. And now I’ve got this cool dueling scar.”
“But you tried. And you didn’t have to.”
He looked at me owlishly. Finally he grinned. “You’re an asshole,” he said happily.
“In cannabis veritas. Don’t fall asleep with a lit joint.”
“Can’t,” he sighed, leaning back against his pillows. “We finished it.”
“You’re no fun,” I told him. “Guess I’ll just go away.”
I felt relaxed, but not at all absentminded; Theo would have been amazed, if he’d still been awake. I finally found Frances outside, on the broad covered porch that faced the driveway. She was sitting in a wooden chair with her feet on the porch railing and the chair balanced on its back legs. She didn’t move when I came out the front door.
I dragged up another chair, its back to the railing so I could see her face. “Last night, Mick tried to talk me into going with you.”
“I hope he didn’t spend a lot of time on it.” Her gaze moved idly over the distant edge of the garden.
“Why?”
“Because I won’t take you. Or him, or anyone else.”
For several minutes we sat in uncompanionable silence, while I tried to talk myself out of doing the inevitable. Was it inevitable? I thought of Theo, recuperating upstairs from the wound he’d received on my behalf. Even if Frances left the City now, left Worecski undisturbed, he could never go back to Ego. He had stepped between Myra and Dusty — Worecski’s servants — and their quarry, and they would remember. And how long would it be before Theo let slip that he knew who and what Worecski was? But if Frances killed Worecski and left town, Theo would be safe. I would be safe, too. Frances would be gone, Mick would leave, Myra and Dusty would take their orders from someone else, and I could go back to something like the life I was used to.
“If you get Worecski, will you go away?” I asked, to be sure.
For the first time since I’d come onto the porch, Frances looked at me. “If I kill Tom Worecski, you’ll never see me again. My word of honor, for whatever that may mean to you.”
I took a deep breath and sighed it away. “The guard shift at the front door changes at midnight,” I said. “They get sloppy then. The only working security camera is on the front door, and it doesn’t pan anymore, so it covers a pretty small area. The fire stairs are great for getting out, but they won’t do you any good getting in; the doors lock from the stair side on all the floors. So you want to go up in the elevator, which, as long as I’m with you, is no problem.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Then I have a problem.”
“Because you won’t have me with you? Bet you five bucks, hard.”
“Do you know what Tom would do,” she said, her voice low, “when he found out what you are? My God, he’d love it. It would be horrible. You, of all people, are not going in with me.”
This wasn’t supposed to be painless for her, either. “What can he do to me that you and Mick haven’t done already?”
A muscle fluttered in her jaw, but she didn’t turn away.
“Did Theo give you a good technique for getting in?”
“He couldn’t,” Frances said, as if she hated to.
“I can. Unfortunately for both of us, it needs me to work.”
She spread her fingers like a fan across her forehead. At last she said, “Why?”
She didn’t mean, “Why does it need you?” Because something has twined you and me and Mick Skinner together, and the only way to get free seems to be to go forward. But I didn’t say that. “I’ll tell you my idea. If you come up with a better one that doesn’t involve me, I won’t complain.”
I told her. I told it again to Mick Skinner, to explain why he couldn’t be in on it. I told it to Theo when he woke up, because, however different his view of Ego was, there were observations of mine that he might be able to check and correct. And I told it to Sherrea, because she insisted on it. With each iteration, it became more and more the shape of the future. The plan.
It required me to spend that afternoon in the cellar learning the ways of movable type, and sent Theo and me to the Underbridge for a day and a half of hard work making equipment do things it wasn’t designed for. Frances probably spent the time cleaning guns; I didn’t ask. On Thursday afternoon we came back to the house on the island. I went up to my room, to try to get some of the sleep I was going to lose that night.
When you’re lying in a room that isn’t yours, on an uninhabited floor of a house that isn’t yours, trying to fall asleep in spite of the rat maze your mind is running and the sick feeling growing in your bowels, you discover that your hearing is marvelously acute. I heard Frances’s door open and close, and something — shoes? — drop to the floor.
Later (it seemed like fifteen minutes, but it might have been three) I heard someone knock there, and Frances’s voice. Then someone else’s. The creaking floor, and the door opening. Voice, voice, the door closing. The intermittent rise and fall of conversation from Frances’s room. Then quiet.
That’s what I heard with my ears. But the other things, what I didn’t hear, or maybe heard with other ears than mine; and what I didn’t quite see, and didn’t quite feel, but thought I saw and felt all the same -
I can’t describe it. I can half explain it: Mick had been in my head several times. Frances once, but she’d been there. Frances herself had said that there was a connection between a Horseman and the horse, a link that remained after the contact was broken. That the connection became relevant just then might have been an accident. I wanted it to be. I didn’t like to think that either Frances or Mick could hate me so much, or be so cruel without cause.
I lay on my side hugging my knees, biting the inside of my mouth, while Mick and Frances made love in the next room. I didn’t move until Sher knocked on both doors and said it was time to go.
Card 7: Fears
Ten of Swords
Waite: Death, pain, desolation. Advantage, profit, success, power, and authority, but all transient.
Douglas: Desolation and ruin, but with the idea that it is a community, rather than individual, tragedy.
Crowley: Reason run mad, soulless mechanism, the logic of lunatics and philosophers. Reason divorced from reality.
Case: End of delusion in spiritual matters.
7.0: Off to see the wizard
“Well,” said Frances, “have we forgotten anything? Hot dogs, pickles, potato salad, ants — you did bring the ants?”
“Frances,” I said, not for the first time, “that’s enough.”
The trike was parked on the apron of an unused garage door, in a service drive between Loondale and the empty Gilded West tower. That put it near our preferred exit route. We’d circled Ego on foot, and were now on the opposite side, at Ego’s front door, where the guard station was. It was five minutes to midnight.
“I suppose we’ll have to do without the ants.” She tilted her he
ad back and looked at Ego’s top, where the ring of white lights shone smugly, and running clouds edge-lit with moonlight made the view look like the opening shot of a horror movie. “Use it while you’ve got it, Tom. And so will I. May the best fiend win.”
“Is the best one more fiendish, or less?”
“When we finish this, you have my permission to tell me.”
“If I still can.”
She looked at me, and opened up a moonlit death’s-head grin. “If I can hear you.”
“On that jolly note — it’s time.” I headed for the doors as Frances tucked herself in the shadows of the door embrasure. She wore something dull and dark and snug, with a pocketed vest of the same stuff. The fabric didn’t make any sound when rubbed against itself. Motionless, out of direct light, she disappeared.
I pushed through the door and squinted under the bare bulb at the guard station. There were two men there, swapping gossip as their shifts overlapped. One I’d never seen before: an earnest-looking youngish man with short, sun-bleached blond hair. The other, a big man with a heavy red beard and a Santa Claus belly who occupied the desk chair, was a regular on the midnight-to-eight shift. I almost smiled at him. He did lousy work.
“Hey, look who’s here!” he called, leaning back. The desk chair screeched on its base. “It’s the handyman! Albrecht keepin’ up his service contract, huh?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” I said. The blond man curled his lip, whether at me or at his fellow guard I couldn’t tell. Seeing that, I tried a shot at random. “Is that a blackjack in your pocket, or are you just excited about working with this guy?” I said to him.
The curl became a full-fledged sneer. He turned to the red-bearded guard. “I gotta go, Shoe. Got a date out at the pier.”
“Tell him hi for me,” I said to the blond one’s departing back. Shoe thought that was funny.
Good. Down to one; now to move him around. “You want to call up to Mr. A. and let him know I’m here?”
“Let him know who’s here, boy?”
“D. W. Griffith,” which was the name Albrecht knew me by. “Tell him I’ve got the one he wants.” In my hand was an unmarked box, something nobody would identify as a container for a videotape. Just like always. Everything had to be just like always.
“I bet you do,” said Shoe. He went through a door behind the desk. There was a little pane of glass in it to watch me through, but the door kept me from hearing whatever he might choose to say to the person upstairs.
I dropped the videotape. Swearing, I went to my knees in front of the desk and bumped it farther under. Then I reached beneath the desktop and twisted the door camera’s coaxial cable loose from the wall jack, where it connected to the monitor upstairs. I was careful not to break the connection entirely; I wanted streaks and snow, not a blank screen. Frances came through the door like a patch of black fog, under the guard’s window, and around the corner to the elevator. I popped the coax back on. Never use quick-connect jacks on security equipment, I thought as I came up smiling from behind the desk with the unmarked box in my hand. I had time to dust off my knees and straighten my collar before the guard came out.
“So, what’s in the package?” he said, and my bone marrow turned to brine.
“You’ll have to ask Mr. A. about that, too, won’t you?” I hoped my voice was firm and pleasant. Hadn’t I been passed? Did they know somehow that there would be a break-in? If that elevator moved without authorization, hell, in condensed form, would break loose.
“Maybe I will. You’re supposed to get your ass up there. You know the way.”
The release of fear was almost harder to bear than the onset. I couldn’t answer him, snappily or otherwise. I walked at what I hoped was a leisurely pace down the hall and turned the corner.
Frances materialized from whatever surface she’d adhered to. I poked the button, and the scarred bronze doors in front of me opened. There had been lots of elevators there once; the sealed-off openings for their doors were all that were left. Frances stepped in next to me as I pushed the button for the top floor.
I sagged against the wall when the doors closed. I could feel sweat wandering down my spine and chest and rib cage. I couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t swearing.
Frances had a pistol in her hands; she was mounting a silencer on it with quick motions. “If I were you, I’d save my emotional collapse for later. That was the easy part.”
“For you, maybe.”
“Could they have seen you drop the box?”
“Upstairs, you mean? No. The camera only covers the area right around the front door.”
“Then there isn’t anything to connect with the snow on their monitor. Good.” She seemed to be content with the pistol, but she didn’t put it away in her vest. “How likely is it that we’ll be met at the top by another guard?”
She was right: that had been the easy part. I’d forgotten. “Fifty-fifty. There hasn’t been one the last few times. I’m hoping I’m considered trustworthy.”
“Fine. When the door opens, don’t run out, but don’t dawdle.”
For the first time it occurred to me that if it went to hell, I could say Frances forced me to do this. I wondered if I would. If I asked Sherrea, what would she recommend? Would she say that life was precious, and that I should save mine if I could? Or would she say things about honor, and commitment, and the greater good?
Or would she say, in a voice that wasn’t hers, You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits! She’d said I had to do something about my evil ways. Well, Sher, here I am. I wished I could have found something less drastic.
“Get ready,” Frances murmured, and I tried desperately to remember, and re-create, what leaving this elevator had been like when it wasn’t a matter of somebody’s life or death.
The doors opened, and I strode out. No one. No one at all. All this relief would be the ruin of me. Frances moved up and touched me on the shoulder. No talking now; we’d talked the floor plan to pieces back on the island. I nodded. She disappeared down the hall while I knocked on the familiar door, dark wood, heavy and polished. A voice called from beyond it, and I turned the cool chrome knob and stepped through.
The room was the same, dark and close, with its desk and draped window and high-backed chair. The light fell, neat and constrained on the desktop. The white hands in the light were Albrecht’s, and the pale, fleshy face dim above them.
How had I done this before? Had there been a routine, a series of actions that made up the dance of trade? I stood with the box in my hand, my mind blank, my heart slamming in my ribs. The box, the box. I lifted it, set it on the desk, and with my index finger slid it across the wood to Albrecht.
“What is it?” he said.
“What you asked for. Open it.”
I realized belatedly that I hadn’t needed to make the tape look like an original. If I was right, he would have settled for a dub, and it would have been reasonable for me to claim that a dub was all I could find. But he pulled the box (cardboard, this time) open, and I watched his hands, his face, for any sign that I’d failed.
In the mellow light of the desk lamp, I thought it was still convincing: the block lettering for the title, the running time, the distributor’s name; the scuffing and fading of the print where fingers would have worn it. The label glue didn’t even smell. I’d missed my calling; I should have been a forger. When Albrecht played the tape, he’d see a title sequence that gave surprisingly little evidence of its low-tech origins, and five minutes of non-specific establishing scenes assemble-edited from six different B-horror flicks. By minute seven, I calculated, he’d know this wasn’t the movie he’d paid for. But by then, I’d be gone.
He closed the box. His hands didn’t have the acquisitive curl I was used to seeing in them. But again, if I was right, it wasn’t simple acquisitiveness that had driven him to seek this out.
Frances, have you found your damned monster yet? I would have to leave her there. If
I left without her, before she found Worecski, they’d let me go unhindered, unconnected to the thing about to happen. As it was, the business reputation that was making this possible would evaporate; I’d never sell another tape to Albrecht; I’d have to leave town for a while; but I could survive that. Now Albrecht would open his desk drawer and pull out the leather bag.
He stood up. “Come with me.”
My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth. “Why?” I asked. His expression was neutral, as any good bargainer’s would be. “You don’t think I keep that much in here, do you? Come along.”
So much for maintaining our routine. There was nothing I could do, except follow him and stay alert. He worked a latch on a door set into the paneling behind the desk, and light shot out all around it. I squinted and stepped through.
“Sugar?” said a voice I knew, a woman’s. “You all through — Sparrow!”
She wore a narrow dress of midnight-blue silk that draped like water running over her skin. Her lips were bright coral-red, and her eyelids were smoky. Her shining white-blond hair fell unbound all around her lightly tanned shoulders and decolletage.
“Hello, Dana,” I said, and was surprised that my mouth worked. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Her gaze snapped to Albrecht. “Sugar, what’s — Is this — What’s going on?”
“Just a little business, sweetie,” he said, his attention on the cabinet he was opening. “Don’t you worry.” But she’d used a name for me he’d never heard. Or had he? Myra and Dusty had known it.
It was a large room, exquisitely appointed. Dana was sitting in a pose that suggested she’d been lying down a moment earlier, on a cream-colored couch. It was one of two, set in an L shape. A carved Chinese table stood in front of them, scattered with things: a carafe of dark red wine and two partially filled glasses; the remains of a small meal for two; a little silver-stoppered vial half full of something white; a heavy necklace of silver and turquoise medallions. The lighting came from recesses in the ceiling. The air was cool and dry. There was a sky-blue carpet on the floor three inches deep, and a rack of stereo and video gear topped with a twenty-five-inch monitor.
