by Emma Bull
Somewhere in my brain, I probably had the equivalent of jaw muscles, that I could have closed and kept closed. I didn’t know where they were. Tom Worecski had ridden me once before; but the circumstances had been such that I didn’t remember what it had been like. I expected something like the blinding shock of Frances’s assault, a forced mental entry like a mortar shell. I didn’t expect Mick’s easy falling in and out, like blinking, like a switch toggled. All my expectations were worthless.
Tom was a gelid, poisonous presence inserting itself through the soft places in my personality, trickling in like dirty water through a crack. He was a flavor of decay in the back of my throat, a rotting-vegetable slickness under my fingers, the rustling sound of beetles scurrying. And it was all done slowly, slowly, so that I had time to understand what was happening to me. So I knew exactly what sort of tenant would occupy the rooms of my body once I was forced out.
I struggled. I did it physically, flat against the wall, unable to so much as get a knee up between us; and mentally with even less effect.
Suddenly I was alone again. Tom still pinned me in place, but he’d jerked back a little. He was glaring. “What the fuck you got on you?” he said. “What is it?”
He let go of my left wrist. I went for his face with my freed hand, but before I reached him he slammed his right shoulder into my damaged one. The sensation was, for several seconds, literally blinding. My knees buckled, but Tom’s grip kept me from falling.
The chain must have showed a little inside my shirt collar. He hooked a finger in it and flipped it to the outside. The glass bead glittered between us in the crazy light, and he caught it. As soon as he did he knew it was important, by the way I behaved.
It was like Beano all over again: slapping me against the wall, twining fingers through the cord — no, chain — around my neck. But this couldn’t be Beano’s. No miasma of incense. Gunpowder stink, and the smell of blood, which at Beano’s had come later. Oh, santos, Sparrow, keep your mind on it, don’t pass out now. I blinked, trying to clear the smudginess from everything.
“Voodoo shit,” Tom spat out. He fingered the glass bead. “Was this supposed to fool me? Figured you were gonna stick a few pins in me? Shit.” He yanked, and the chain cut into the back of my neck and broke. The bead slid off and dropped to the floor. He moved his foot, moved it back, and I saw the scattering of bright dust in the mottled light through the windows. Something ran from the corner of my eye to my jaw. It might have been sweat.
“All right, now,” he breathed. “Let’s party.” And he began again.
Water action. Filthy liquid filling me up slowly, dissolving me, toxins rushing into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears, filming my eyes, devouring the connections between me and my senses. He’d taken control of my gag reflex already, or I would have obeyed it.
Only twenty-four hours before, my friends had acted out the gathering-together of a tangle of energy, the naming of it: Sparrow. Now Tom O’Bedlam consumed it, strained its juices between his teeth, picked the meat out of it with delicate, epicurean delight. Mick and Frances had told me that the host personality could be starved or smothered gradually, or killed outright. They didn’t tell me it could be eaten.
I couldn’t feel anything. I could still hear: thunder, rain driving against the window, the two of us panting in unison. I could see; he hadn’t taken the optic nerves yet, or the muscles that moved my eyes. Over Tom’s shoulder I had a view of Frances, her head turned against the door frame, her face drawn in loosely with pain. But only loosely, as if it was a leftover expression, as if what had caused it was gone or nearly so.
Maybe she would find that white, flat place. Once Tom was done with my battered body, maybe I would, too.
There was a roaring in my ears, growing steadily. It was in the room, too; the window glass was rattling.
Then the building cracked in half. I heard it.
There was light like white air burning, like a welder’s arc against the eye, like the light in the old military films of nuclear tests. Tom/I screamed; and did it again when the light didn’t wink out. It was his scream in my throat, but I felt it. Somewhere along the tunnel I was disappearing down, there was a remote control for that much of me, if I could just find a button and push… No, it was lips. Just put your lips together…
Silly. Say goodbye. The sound was one I’d heard in movies, when a train thundered down upon the camera like doom.
“Pw? your lips… Nothing to lose.
… and blow.
I had lost sight and hearing. But white fire filled the bottom of my blindness, lapped around my ankles, surged up to my knees, my hips, my rib cage, sliced between Tom’s fingers and my neck, and closed over my head. I thought I heard a shriek, but sound wouldn’t have carried in that medium.
I didn’t know if it was a flat world; there was nothing in it. It was white. It wasn’t warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel. It was not the place I had come to before. There was nothing in it. No helpful pictographs, no street signs. The natives knew their way around.
Bait, I thought furiously, in a state of nonawareness. You wanted me for bait.
It worked. There were no words formed. The answer was just a part of the void that meant something.
Your timing sucked!
My timing was perfect. The lightning froze him in the midst of possessing you, my whirlwind lit the building and destroyed the barriers that kept me out of Ego, my possession of you consumed him. There was no other possible order.
What did you do to Worecski?
Nothing. I rode you. He was no business of mine, except that you were concerned with him. It was his bad luck that I arrived when I did, and that it’s true what they say, that “Great gods cannot ride little horses.”
Tom… wasn’t your business?
You know my business. If you don’t remember, ask my little sister. Your friend the witch.
You never said you couldn’t get into Ego.
There is no technical manual for the spirit world. You will never know everything.
Why me? Why was it ever me?
Your left foot is in the past. Your right foot is in the present. You hold steel in your left hand, and flint in your right. You are the dancer between the old world and the new, because I made you to be so.
Fuck you! I deny you!
Do you deny your hands and feet?
Silence, in that volumeless space that had never admitted sound.
Let me go back, I said. Frances is dying.
I’m not keeping you here. Go.
I opened my eyes on a room bathed in watery golden light. The Gilded West was still gilded. The wind still roared outside. I was lying on my back. Tom lay three feet away in a half curl, one hand flung out loosely on the carpet, his eyes open and motionless.
“Anybody home?” I croaked. “Are you dead?” There was no response from whatever was left of Tom Worecski.
I crawled to the door, and Frances. Her breath still fluttered in and out of her parted lips, quick and shallow. Her eyes opened.
“Oh, why did I do that?” she whispered.
“Shut up, Frances.”
“Don’t be silly; you wouldn’t be able to tell who I was. He didn’t used to be a very good shot, you see. The nerve of the bastard, practicing up. It’s not fair.”
“Frances, please—”
There was a sound, from on the floor — from the inert body of Tom Worecski. I should have known; it was in all the horror movies. One last resuscitation. But in this movie, the heroes weren’t going to be able to kill the monster one more time.
The sandy head lifted from the floor and turned its frantic ice-pale eyes on me, and its mouth said, “Who are you? What’s… where am I?”
“Good grief,” Frances sighed. She sounded weakly amused. “He didn’t kill the host.”
“Are you sure? I mean, that he’s not—”
“We can… could always spot each other. He’s not there.”
I looked back
into those nearly colorless eyes and tried to see them as the eyes of a stranger. For a moment I couldn’t think what to say to him. Then I called on my memories of the same experience. “You’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll help you in a minute, but please — just wait, okay?”
I knew it wasn’t going to work. He stared at me, and at Frances who had most of her blood, it seemed, on the outside of her.
“Don’t—” I began, but of course he turned his head and saw Mick, too. He would now have hysterics, and there wasn’t time for them.
Perhaps Tom had let him surface to scenes like this before. He didn’t have hysterics. He folded back up on the carpet with his hands over his face, in a pitiful attitude of submission and hopelessness. Eventually, I think, he passed out; I didn’t see him stir.
I turned back to Frances. “Now, shut up and mount up.”
“What?”
“Ride, damn you. I’m not half as near to dying as you are. Mount up and we’ll both get out.”
She smiled, almost. “And then what? Shall I steal another body once we’re out? Or just stay in yours forever?”
“What’s wrong with Mick’s solution: taking someone who’s getting out of the living racket anyway?”
“Why should it be better to steal people’s deaths than their lives? It’s a rite of passage. How do you know that Mick’s suicides weren’t harmed by what he did?” She winced, and shifted slightly against the molding.
I wanted to fetch a couch cushion to prop her up, but I was afraid she’d die while I was away doing it. I looked around for anything else I could use, and saw her near hand, palm down, on the carpet. Showing between her fingers was a bit of black leather thong strung with a black onyx bead.
“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”
I swallowed, with difficulty, and it didn’t help. “Frances, please. Ride me out of here. If you don’t… ”
“You’ll kill me?” she whispered, grinning.
“Probably,” said a harsh voice above me, “by talking you to death. Get out of the light, you idiot.”
I ducked and rolled sideways, expecting a blow that never came. Then I recognized the broad shape leaning over me, and the voice. It was Josh. His face was set like concrete. LeRoy was right behind him, hauling gear, his eyes huge.
“It’s too late, Josh,” Frances said.
“I love a challenge.” He stuck a needle in her arm.
“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her eyes closed.
I knelt frozen on the carpet and stared. “Is she… ”
“She’s passed out. Now shut up.”
“Josh — what are you doing in here? It’s not safe—”
He jerked his head toward the window. “The building’s lit up.”
“Are you crazy? The place is full of—”
“LeRoy, plug up the hole in this and give it a sedative.”
I would have felt it less if he’d slapped me. He knew it suddenly; he was very still. “I’m sorry. I—” He shook his head and turned back to Frances.
“Not a sedative,” I said. “LeRoy, get that guy out of here.” I nodded at the sandy-haired stranger who’d been Tom Worecski. “He’s alive. Give him the sedative. He’ll go nuts if he wakes up. Tom was riding him.”
“My,” said Josh, his back to me, his gloved hands full of tools, “there’s one alive. Was that an oversight?”
“I didn’t—” Then I realized that Josh hadn’t suggested it was my oversight. I wondered who he blamed.
During the exchange, LeRoy had torn the sleeve off my shirt and examined my bullet hole. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to take the shirt off.”
It was good of him to remember. “Go ahead.”
He did it with a minimum of fuss or contact, and dressed the wound the same way. His hands were shaking, and cold, but deft nonetheless. He produced a hypodermic from apparently thin air — I wondered if I’d blacked out for a few seconds — and I shook my head.
“No, LeRoy, I’m serious.” I hadn’t finished something… ”
“I know,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “It’s not a sedative.” He wielded the needle like an expert, which I suppose he was. “It’ll take a minute. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
I didn’t think I could. Whatever message the needle delivered, my body was saying, Let go.
For a few minutes, I might have. Then I was standing, supporting myself against the window frame. At last, I saw the Gilded West. It was the skull side, a little irregular where a few of the floods had failed to light. It was gilded, the fantasy palace of the postcards, the monument of Frances’s childhood and the hoodoo work of Sherrea’s gods all at once. A bridge between the old world and the new.
A bridge between the earth and sky. Hanging twisting and quivering from the clouds above, its pointed foot dancing delicately just out of sight on the other side of the building, was a howling cone of wind. Oya danced before my eyes, and I understood, looking at her, why change, in the cards, was called Death.
Josh and LeRoy were at work, supplementing the light with a pair of battery lamps. I couldn’t see Frances. I moved, slowly, toward the office door, the one I’d come in through.
Wet hands closed around my face and lifted it, and Theo said, “Where is he?”
It was Theo. That was why I’d needed to keep going: to find Theo. His thick brown hair was streaked with rain and curling on his face and neck, his glasses were spattered with droplets, and he smelled strongly of burning cable insulation. I sighed and shut my eyes.
Theo shook me, very hard, and said, “Sparrow, where is he?”
His voice was raw.
I opened my eyes again. Theo’s face was laced through with horror, an expression so different from any I’d seen him wear that it almost made a stranger of him. I turned to find the cause of it, back the way I had come.
It was there. It must have been the same thing that had hardened Josh’s features and words, and made LeRoy’s hands shake. I had known it was there, and with unnatural camera angles and restricted depth of field kept myself from having to see it all.
The room was washed in the pale golden light that Theo had turned on, cast by the Gilded West: Death, the patron of change, the destroyer of the established order, looked in the window. What had been terrible in the dark was unbearable now. There had been change enough in that room to wake me up screaming for the rest of my life.
Theo shook me again, and I dragged my eyes away from Dana, from Mick, from the huddle of people who were trying to keep Frances from following the same route. “Sparrow!” Theo said. “Where’s my dad?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t here when… ”
LeRoy’s booster shot kicked in at last, and I could think again. It was a bad time for it. You know my business, she had said. I did. The Hoodoo Engineers had called her, Mr. Lyle and China Black and all the people who knew it was time and past time for change had called her, to break the stagnant hold of Ego on the City. The hold of A. A. Albrecht. She, in turn, had called me.
Not Legba the gatekeeper, male and female, to whom I was supposed to belong; it was Oya Iansa who’d come in with the light from the Gilded West, the goddess who brought revolution and the falling of towers. Oh, of course I was hers, not Legba’s. Out of all the things in that bunker, she’d preserved and awakened the one with the technical knowledge she wanted. I wasn’t a practical joke; I was the whirlwind.
And my friend’s father had been standing in the path of it.
10.2: Mister Death and the redheaded woman
“I have to find him.” Theo turned back to the office door.
“You said once… that you didn’t like him.”
Theo looked over his shoulder at me. The answer was in his face: that if I had been born instead of grown, I wouldn’t have said that.
I followed him out into the dark
hallway. I couldn’t do anything about Frances. But I would not lose Theo.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
“He has a bedroom one floor down.”
If this had been a movie, he would have said, “We’re not going anywhere.” I was glad it wasn’t. “Did — do you live here?”
“Not for years. I moved out a little after my mom died.” Tom had been honest about the illumination in the stairwell. Theo pulled a candle out of a jacket pocket and lit it, and we started down in that narrow field of jittery light. “I visited, though. Mostly to fight with him. And I always thought I hated that, but I kept coming back. I guess it was better than not seeing him.”
The candlelight offered emotional armor that even darkness couldn’t have provided. “Do you… do you love him?” I said.
“He’s my father.”
“Does that mean you love him?”
“It means I can’t tell,” said Theo.
The power was working on the floor below, and the stairwell door was unlocked. Theo opened it a crack and light blasted out, followed by a rush of slightly cooler air. He blew out the candle. When our eyes had adjusted, we stepped into the hall.
“Theo!” I whispered suddenly. It sounded like escaping steam in the silence. “Was there a guard on the front door?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you wonder why not?”
“I still wonder why not, man. Maybe he went to check out the tornado. You want to stand here ’til he shows up?”
“I should have brought a gun from upstairs,” I muttered. “There’s got to be a guard someplace.”
Theo shrugged. “Neither of us knows from guns.”
“You can’t tell that from looking at us.”
He gave me an encompassing stare. “Right now you wouldn’t scare me if you had a cannon.”
He was right, of course. I was suddenly aware of myself in every undignified detail: smeared with blood, soaked with sweat, blinkered with tangles of hair. And half-dressed besides. LeRoy had used a lot more bandage than he’d had to, but I felt the skin on my shoulders, arms, and stomach cooling as the sweat dried, and shivered more than was called for. I found I couldn’t meet Theo’s eyes.
