Bone Dance

by Emma Bull

  As I found it, I built a replica of it in my memory, so I could find me again without the mirror. A high, smooth forehead fenced with thick, black hair; black eyebrows that arched high and even over large, long-lidded dark eyes; a thin, high-bridged nose and a thin, long mouth; an angular, almost fleshless jaw and chin. Bones and features, bones and features, and not much else. No extras and ornaments. The bones were tired of staying still.

  In my right eye, I saw a spark. A reflection in the black pool of the pupil, a light; a little scene. I opened my eye wider and came closer to the mirror.

  A riverbank, and a reflection off metal — there was a figure lying spread-eagled on the riverbank. It was transfixed with swords, the white metal bright in the new sun. The feet, the knees, the belly, the breasts, the hands. On the sand, silver-blond hair spread out in starfish arms, wet and clotted with dirt. One long bright sword stood upright in and through the open mouth, below the shocked, wide-open eyes.

  It was Dana.

  I was sitting up before I was awake, swaying and shaking. If I’d made a noise, it wasn’t enough to bring anyone else.

  It was morning, late, and no sounds in the house; Josh, Mags, and Paulo had probably gone off about their respective businesses. It was hot, and the air seemed to weigh me down like rocks where I lay. I stood up and sat back down again. Oh, what a lovely headache. And my whole face ached, skin and bone. It had been a while since I’d been hungover, but it had never given me nightmares before.

  I put on some clothes and wandered to the kitchen. Halfway there, I heard someone knock on the screen door, so I continued on a little quicker.

  It was Sherrea. “Hi. Are you just up?” she asked through the screen.

  “Um. D’you want breakfast,”

  “No. Look, could you skip breakfast, for now, and come out here for a minute? I want to tell you something.”

  I’d just opened the icebox; I shut it again. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Not really. Could you just come?”

  I stepped out on the back porch, and her eyes grew wide. “What?” I said.

  “You look — I don’t know. You look funny. Not really funny, but… ” Then she shrugged. “Forget it.”

  The sky was white-blue, and studded in the southwest with muddled scratches of cloud. It was thick air to breathe, and motionless. Around front, on the steps, I found Theo and Frances. I wondered if I should feel ganged up on, or if they’d missed breakfast, too, at Sher’s insistence. They looked up at me, and Theo’s brows pulled together; Frances stared, her lips open as if she’d forgotten them, and said, “What did—” and stopped.

  “Oh, what, already?”

  “You look,” Frances said slowly, “most remarkably like you.”

  “You look a lot like you, too. Won’t any of you guys make allowances for an ugly hangover?”

  “Stop,” Sher said, “or I’ll forget some of this. And I think I’m in deep shit if I do.” She took a huge breath. “Okay. I had a dream last night. And I have to tell it to all of you, and all at once so I don’t leave something important out.”

  Theo, Frances, and I exchanged glances, but we knew better than to say anything.

  “I was down in the Deeps,” Sher began, “just the way they are now, and it was early in the morning, with all the shadows on the streets. I can see dark clouds between the buildings, and little flickers of lightning between them. I’m just outside of Ego when this woman comes hurrying down Nicollet toward me. She’s almost running. As she comes closer I can see she’s frowning, as if she’s worried. The wind picks up all of a sudden, and paper and leaves are flying around. She comes straight up to me and says, ‘There’s no time. Go straight home and give this to your friend. Hurry.’ And she hands me a postcard.

  “It looks like one of the ones we found yesterday, with the buildings lit up, and the Gilded West right out in the middle. But the building that Theo asked about, that you knew the name of, Frances—”

  “The Multifoods Building.”

  “Right. That one wasn’t there.” She stopped.

  We waited.

  “Don’t you see!? It’s now, but with the buildings lit up.”

  “Okay,” said Theo. I thought so, too.

  “Why us?” Frances asked.

  “Because,” said Sher, thoroughly exasperated, “she said ‘your friend.’ She didn’t say which friend.”

  “And you thought maybe we’d be able to tell, when we heard it?”

  “I guess if I did, I was wrong. Blast it root and bough.”

  Across town, from the northward road, we heard the sound of a rough-running engine. “Huh,” said Sher. “Company.”

  “That’s odd,” I said.

  “You just haven’t noticed before. The neighbors stop by to swap favors or pass news along. That sounds like Skip Olsen’s truck.”

  “Maybe the wind was up last night,” I said. “It was a great night for dreaming.”

  “You had one last night?” Sher asked intently.

  “A whole raft of them. Terrible ones. There was a lot of hurrying in mine, too.”

  Across the circle, two people were walking toward us. One of them was Josh; the other was a white-haired man ten years older, in a straw cowboy hat. He carried something in one hand. “Sparrow!” Josh called when he was in hollering distance. “Meet Skip Olsen!”

  By this time they were at the porch rail. Olsen stuck out a veiny brown hand; I extended mine, took his, and shook it. It still required an effort. Olsen was smiling. “I’d never heard of you,” he said, “but this was sent sort of in care of the town, so I figured if I drove by and asked, they’d all know you. Damnedest bunch for knowing everybody else’s business.” Olsen laughed, and Josh laughed. I reached out and took the package Olsen held out to me.

  It was a scuffed white cardboard box, like a gift box, not quite as long as my forearm and a little less than half as thick. It was tied closed with brown twine. Printed on it in ballpoint pen was:

  Sparrow

  c/o the zoo

  Apple Valley

  There was, of course, no return address.

  Josh took Olsen into the house for tea. I stared at the box. It didn’t weigh much.

  “Don’t open it,” Frances said roughly.

  “Why not?”

  “Sparrow, don’t be an idiot. Don’t open it.”

  But I’d already pulled the twine off. I lifted the lid.

  Like all gift boxes, it had a piece of tissue paper in it. I folded that back. Inside was a thick tail of hair, silver-blond, tied off with a thin black velvet ribbon. One end of the tail was uneven; the other was straight and freshly cut. That end had been dipped about three inches deep in something that there was no use believing was anything but blood.

  I didn’t drop the box, because it weighed hardly anything. I moved very carefully to the top step and sat down, still with the box between my hands, still staring at the contents.

  Because neither Theo nor Sher would know, and because Frances might not remember, I said, “Dana’s.” My voice seemed to come from the other side of town.

  Frances reached down and almost, but not quite, touched the darkened end of the tail of hair. “And whose is that?”

  “I’ll never know, will I?” I said, looking up at her. “Unless I go and see?”

  Her hand drew back sharply. “No. He can sit like a spider in the middle of his web and starve, or thrive, or whatever he wants to do. You aren’t going, I’m not going, nobody’s going.”

  I picked up the box lid and held it out to her. “Then he’ll come here, won’t he? Would that be better?”

  “How did he know?” Theo asked.

  “We weren’t a secret,” I said, my voice cracking. “Somebody takes the cucumbers to market, exchanges a little community news, it gets overheard or passed on — he’s probably known for weeks.”

  “I’ll go,” said Frances, her mouth tight.

  I turned my face up to her again. “But you weren’t invited.”


  I watched her eyes change as she realized I was right. The box bearing my name, the threat to my friend. “You can’t,” she said, as she’d said at Del Corazón. “You can’t. She might not even be alive by now, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Again, there’s only one way to find out.” I put the lid carefully on the box. I had dreamed of Dana. Of the Ten of Swords, meant for me. Maybe this was the meaning of all that hurrying.

  “We need another damned plan,” said Sherrea.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say ‘we.’ I don’t need one to get in; this time I know he’s expecting me. He’ll probably leave a light on.”

  “Wait, wait.” Frances dropped cross-legged on the floor and jammed her fingers into her hair. “What do you want to accomplish?”

  I thought about it, and for a wonder, they kept quiet and let me do it. “I want to get Dana out. If you’re asking what I’d like for my birthday, hell, I’d like to make it possible for Theo to go back. And I’d like to keep Tom Worecski from ever doing this again.”

  “Then you’ll have to kill him,” said Frances.

  “Will I? You’re the expert.” I felt bad when I saw the color go out of her face. I hadn’t meant it to hurt.

  “Sparrow,” Sher said suddenly in a terrible voice. “What did you dream?”

  I tried to recite it as fairly, as clearly as she had hers, but she’d had a more coherent original to work from. She closed her eyes partway through, and drew her knees up and rested her forehead on them when I was done. “Oh,” she said, muffled. “Oh, no. I’ve blown it. We’ve run out of time. I’m sorry,” she said, and raised her head. She was red-eyed. “You don’t know anything, because I started too late, and now it has to be done whether you’re ready or not. It’ll kill you. Oh, what’s the fucking date?”

  The rest of us sat awed by the whole terrible-sounding, unintelligible speech. But Josh’s voice, from the front door, said, “June twenty-third. Saint John’s Eve.”

  “Well, I’ll be plucked and basted,” I said. “It really is my birthday. What a coincidence.”

  “Don’t you understand?” Sher cried. “There are no coincidences here. You were made by the loa for this. Everybody else has a soul that’s part of the continuity. Yours is brand-new. You’re a custom-made item for breaking up a jam in the energy flow, and this is the jam, and the time. Tomorrow is Midsummer. The celebration of the sun, the energy source. Of course it’s supposed to be done then. And you’re not ready!” She buried her face in her knees again.

  Josh stepped out onto the porch and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t take it all on yourself.”

  “Who’m I supposed to share it with?” she groaned, but she raised her head and wiped her eyes. “You’re right. That won’t accomplish shit.”

  It had accomplished something, actually. “This is what that reading was about, wasn’t it, Sher?” I said. “The one you did for me back in the City. There’s gonna be blood and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. Right?”

  She nodded, slowly, probably because she didn’t like the sound of my voice. I wouldn’t have, either.

  “I’m a quick study. Let’s see if I have this right. You’re saying that the loa animated a cheval to use, eventually, to bust up something… ” Even as I said it, the answer occurred to me. “Albrecht’s monopoly, right? And they turned me loose to grow up and get ready for this. Now here they are. And the message is: We made you. You owe us.”

  Sher shook her head.

  “Sure it is. This may kill me, you said. But they have a right to do that, because I belong to them. I was right, Sher, and you lied. I don’t own anything. And nothing is free.”

  Frances and Theo were watching us. I don’t know how much of it made sense to them. But I wasn’t talking to them.

  Sher found her voice at last. “We’re reading the same book, but your translation sucks. Okay. If that’s true, you don’t have a choice. But you’re going to find out that nobody is forcing you to do this. I’m trying to make you want to do it, because if you knew as much as you ought to know by now, you would. Santos, the only person who’s leaning on you is Worecski. But your damned stupid life was a gift. And I meant it last night when I said that the only reasons to do a thing were out of love, or because you knew it needed doing.” She stood up, her shoulders very straight. “If you decide to go to Ego, because of Dana or Worecski or whatever, let me know. I’ll help. Out of love, and because it needs doing.”

  She was down the steps and six paces away before I could move, or knew I wanted to. I vaulted the railing, landed in the flowerbed, and lunged for her arm.

  “I take it back. I can’t replace it with anything yet, but I take it back.”

  “Why?” she said, her face pinched.

  “Because… because I don’t know anything about your damned loa, and I can’t say whether they would do what I just said they did. But I don’t think that you would.”

  She stared at me, her chest rising and falling. “Not bad reasoning,” she said finally, “for a dipshit. That reading I did for you — it had Death in it. D’you remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It doesn’t mean dying, in the tarot. It means change, transformation. I think that’s what it means on the Gilded West, and I think that’s why Theo’s family took it over and closed it up.”

  “Symbolic barrier to change.”

  “Hell, no — an actual barrier. Hoodoo works on the symbolic level to do something to the actual. I think closing up the Gilded West was a hoodoo work. And I think my dream was a request that we undo it. That we light the building again.”

  Theo, behind me, said, “I could do that.”

  “What?”

  “I could light up the Gilded West. The stuff’s all up there. All I’d need is some initial input of power.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not going back to the City.”

  “I’m not going back to Ego. I don’t have to. Except I have to get some charge. I might have to steal juice from next door.”

  “Frances,” I said slowly, “how do I stop Tom?”

  “You know very well how you stop Tom. You lock him in his head, and you kill the head.”

  “What would happen if he were locked out?”

  “What?”

  “Would he live if he didn’t have a body to ride?”

  “Of course not. He’s not a blasted poltergeist. But how do you propose to do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how to get Theo his first shot of juice, either, without getting it from Ego. But I don’t like that, and I don’t like the thought of killing someone else’s body to get Tom Worecski.”

  “He’s probably already killed the host mind,” Frances said, just as Sher said, “Of course not. It screws up the symbolism.”

  “It what?” Theo asked.

  “If hoodoo works on the symbolic level,” Sher said, impatient, “then what does it mean, symbolically, if you steal power from the thing you want to get rid of to fuel the process that gets rid of it? And you can’t kill the body that Tom’s in because you don’t have any more right to it than he does. You wouldn’t get rid of him, you’d become him.”

  “Probably literally,” I said, “based on past experience.”

  “Present company is unexcepted, of course,” Frances broke in pleasantly.

  “Save a little tar on that brush for me.” Sherrea, to my amazement, blushed.

  “It doesn’t do to forget that I’m one of them, too,” Frances added. She looked, abstracted, at her hands; then she said, “I’ve smothered her. Like smothering an infant with a pillow, though it took longer. I’ve been four years in her body, and she was not, God help her, a strong little soul.”

  “You’re right,” Sher said. “I had forgotten. But you can have a great time hitting yourself over the head later. It’s irrelevant to what we’ve got to do.”

  Frances slid one daunting eyebrow upward. “Where were we then? Sunk up to the undercarriage in a symboli
c pothole. Unless one of you has a metaphysical shovel?”

  She hated this, I could tell. She didn’t have even the tolerance for hoodoo that I did. She hadn’t spent her life in the streets surrounded by it, making deals with it, using its forms as polite social fictions, its person-principles as swear words. If Sher’s carryings-on about energy had any truth in them, Frances’s power was from the past that gave birth to her. She wouldn’t think of asking favors from the loa.

  “Oh,” I said weakly. “Well, of course.”

  “I’m glad you think so,” said Frances. “But you could be a little more help to the rest of us.”

  “What’s the use of having a god in the machine if you don’t holler for it to come out now and then? Sher, if the Hoodoo Engineers are more than a communal living experiment — are they?”

  “Finish your sentence,” she said harshly.

  “Can they mess with the weather?”

  “It’s slow.”

  “And can you ask the loa for favors, and do they deliver?”

  “Santos, Sparrow, what—”

  “Will they, for instance, provide a well-timed, incredibly melodramatic wind storm in the right place, if asked nicely?”

  Sher was still staring at me, but Theo whistled, and said, “Far out! You could maybe even make it work. Except — how much time do we have?”

  “A whole day,” Sher said dryly.

  “Bummer. I couldn’t mount a windmill up there that fast without a dozen people. And you’d be able to see it from Ego, anyway.”

  “So we need a really small windmill,” I said.

  Theo shook his head. “Then you lose vane area. You’d need a tornado—”

  “If we’re asking anyway, why not ask big? Let me think.” I rubbed at my forehead with both hands. “If — if we got the wind… we’d want an eggbeater turbine, the kind with the spin around the vertical axis, and we’d have to mount it… Chango, we’d have to build it first, because I don’t know where we’d find one.”