Bone Dance

3.0: The goddess and the girl next door

It was already as hot as it had gotten the day before, and promised to be one of the arid ones. The street smelled like scorched tar, and the sidewalk glared where the sun hit it between the building shadows. Nothing moved, not in the hard light, not in the shadow. In a thousand years, when planet-hopping archaeologists discovered the ruins of our civilization, the photos in some alien National Geographic would look like this. They’d be silent like this, too. The Dead City: remarkable state of preservation.

I was reminded of my houseguest. So I moved on, briskly.

Once I began to penetrate the heart of the Fair, I had to stop again. Hadn’t I had a nightmare like this once, before I’d been lulled into thinking that there would always be enough people?

The food vendor’s booth on my right was empty; it had been stripped down by its operator at closing, at dawn. I reminded myself of that: It had been open just hours ago. The turquoise paint on its corrugated metal sides was peeling in places, fading all over. “Mariscos” said the hand-painted letters, above a portrait of a shrimp. The word was bleached from red to pink, the shrimp to mud-green. The counter was gritty with dust. The booth had had an awning once; I saw the rusty brackets above the service pass-through. The iron barrel chained to the wall had no trash in it.

In front of me, a Ferris wheel rose against a chromakey-blue sky. Or rather, the geometric bones of the wheel were there, black against the light, thickened at the joints, flanged at regular intervals by the vertebrae of the seat buckets. The flesh for those bones was darkness and little lights and noise, and that was gone. There was rust and grit here, too. I sniffed, trying to smell alcohol or ozone, and got nothing but sun-heated metal and concrete.

It was the light, of course it was the light. When I stayed at my place in the Night Fair, I rarely went there before dawn. If I did, I went there to work, then sleep, then wake up when the Fair woke. I’d never seen the Night Fair at midmorning. But I couldn’t shake off the conviction that everything I saw had been transformed — that this was not the Ferris wheel I’d seen last night, but one a thousand years older, a thousand years broken and silent.

“Sparrow,” said a voice behind me, and if I’d been my namesake, I would have been halfway across the City in a breath.

Context is everything; wrap enough strangeness around them, and familiar things become unrecognizable. It was Dana’s voice, firmly attached to Dana’s person. She leaned in the entryway of a brown brick building. She wore a dressing gown printed with herons and palm fronds that reached almost to her ankles, and a pair of little-heeled slippers of a sort I’d only seen in movies. Her pale hair was loose and brushed back to fall straight down behind her. She’d been standing there awhile; there was half a cigarette in her fingers, and the stub of another on the porch at her feet.

“You okay, sugar?” she asked with a quirk of the lips, and I realized I hadn’t said anything yet.

“Fine. I’m fine. What are you doing here?”

More quirk. “I live here. Upstairs. You act as if I caught you trying to steal that thing.”

I shook my head. The sense of unreality, Dana in mid-necropolis, had doped me.

“No snappy comeback?”

“I guess I’m just not a morning person,” I said finally.

“That’s better. So what brings you out?” She laid the cigarette between her lips and took a long pull. She looked disturbingly undressed without lipstick.

The cigarette wasn’t hand-rolled, and I thought I could see a tobacconist’s mark printed on the paper. Luxuries, rarities, and indulgences: Dana surrounded herself with them.

She had offered me her help. Here was a problem that might yield to wealth and contacts. If she really had them. And where else was I likely to find a solution?

“… I need a favor.”

Dana let the smoke out of her lungs and watched me through it. “Anything I can do?”

I suffered a rush of doubt — had I ever been out of balance with Dana, on the owing side of the Deal with her? Always too many debts. I pushed the corners of my mouth away from each other and hoped it looked like a smile. “I have to dispose of a corpse.”

From her face, I might have just shed my skin. She whispered something and spit left. Her eyes slid away from me, then back. “I guess you better come in.”

I followed the swirl of her hem off the porch and, sunblind, into the building’s front hall. The smell of last night’s lamp oil hung around my head as I climbed the stairs. Very old marble ones; each tread was scooped out and shallow in the middle, as if the stairs had been a watercourse. The second-floor windows were shuttered, but on the third-floor landing, light fell on us like a malediction in shafts of dust. It was very hot in the hall.

Dana pushed open a door and sauntered in. I had never been in a place Dana called home. This one was so much hers that I found myself shying on the sill like an animal at an outstretched hand.

We were in a lavishly cluttered, languorous room, where the light filtered through slatted blinds and folds of lace. The unmade bed beneath one window looked right and proper, as if the linens weren’t woven to lie flat, but would always form those shadowed valleys, that textile refuge. There were rugs on rugs, so that even Dana’s heeled slippers were soundless. The chairs were strewn with things: clothes, magazines, single shoes, embroidered towels, gloves, strands of beads, and a box spilling tissue and printed with a shop logo rarely seen in the Night Fair. On the kitchen table was a bowl of full-blown roses, and I smelled rose incense, very fresh. The room was sleepily warm, and all its colors were indistinct.

Dana swept a robe and a cedar box off a kitchen chair and onto a footstool. “Have a seat,” she said. “D’you want some tea?”

I wanted, in fact, to leave. “No,” I said, and sat down in a cloud of disorientation. “I want to move a corpse.”

“Well, if it’s already a corpse, then there’s no hurry.”

“In this heat?” I wanted to break this slow, hypnotic atmosphere with something crude. But the imagined stink of decay couldn’t hold out against the incense. I looked around and found it still burning on a wicker table half curtained with lace. There was a figurine there, too, draped with veiling, surrounded by an oval mirror, a shell comb, and nine pink candles. Maitresse Erzulie, the queen of love. At the foot of the statue was an apple, cut apart and fastened back together with straight pins. The skin at the cut marks was just starting to pucker. I thought of Cassidy the night before, suffering in silence. What was Dana asking for, so early in the day? What lay under Erzulle’s dominion that Dana didn’t have?

She stood at the counter, filling the kettle from a stoneware jug. Her hair fell straight down, between her face and my eyes. From behind it, she said, “This body, is it… Did you kill somebody?”

Her voice was smaller than it usually was. When I didn’t answer immediately, she pushed back the hair curtain and darted me a glance. I read her expression: If I had killed someone, well, the world was tough, and she was tough enough to live in it, wasn’t she? I realized suddenly that I didn’t know how old she was. A confusion of feeling smacked me from the inside, understanding, pity, tenderness. My thoughts leaped away from all of them.

“No,” I snapped.

“Oh.” She was trying not to be relieved. She moved out of sight behind me. I heard a cupboard open; then her fingers stroked my shoulder. “What kind of tea do you want?”

I shook my head, as if to dislodge something (which didn’t work). “There’s a dead person in my apartment. I don’t know anything about him, except that there were people after him that I don’t want after me. For all I know, they’re not the only ones after him. I don’t want his debts, I don’t want the blame, and I don’t want any tea. What I want is someone who can make him disappear.”

Dana shrugged. “Dump him on the sidewalk.”

“No. I mean disappear. I’m connected to him already. I don’t want City security stopping by. And the people who were after him saw me with him. If he turns up dead, they’ll come straight to me. You know the ritual for splitting with someone, when you draw a line across the threshold with a knife after they’ve passed? I need the real-life version. Just tell me if you know someone who can help.”

“Easy, sugar. While the tea’s making, I’ll go call somebody.” She gave me a sweet, indulgent look. “You see? It’s not so bad, having friends. Nobody can be by herself all the time. So who is — was — this character?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to decide if that was a lie or not. “It was just — sometimes you bump into people.”

“And take them home,” she added sourly. I wondered if she disapproved of my recklessness, or was only jealous of some imagined intimacy.

“Well, in this case, he got the worst of it.”

“What kind of tea?”

“Will you — Earl Grey,” I said, because I hadn’t seen Earl Grey tea anywhere since… Someone, once, had given me some, but I couldn’t remember who, or when. A long time ago.

She laughed and pulled a stopper out of one of a cluster of tins on the counter. The smell, very strong and fresh, added itself to the incense and unlocked a memory. At the edge of a town in what had been Ohio, in a farmhouse kitchen full of dirty dishes, a fast-talking man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, who told stories as if they’d been corked up in him and my arrival had broken the seal — he had poured tea into a cup for me. The dark liquid had spun and swirled, and wide-eyed, I’d asked, “Why does it smell like that?”

Dana dropped some of the tea in a china pot and lit the gas under the kettle. “Be right back,” she said, and whisked out the door.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait… You don’t have a private line, do you?”

She stuck her head back into the room and smiled. “I’m discreet, sugar.”

Without Dana, the room was much larger. Still, nothing in it seemed quite in focus. I stared at the wide-open roses in front of me. Down the hall I could hear, barely, the rise and fall of Dana’s voice as she talked on the phone. Finding me a corpse-removal service. I could probably have done it myself, if I wasn’t so rattled. But no — the telephone; this apartment, uncontestedly hers, filled with luxuries; the shop logo on the box; the tea — Dana had connections, of a sort I would never have expected. I knew people, from deals, from the Underbridge, but I couldn’t call them connections.

She came back in. “Where’s your place, sugar?”

“Why?”

“They’ll meet us there.”

I told her, because I couldn’t see any way not to. She went back down the hall.

When she returned, the teakettle had begun to hoot. She did appropriate things with kettle and teapot, and brought all the paraphernalia to the table.

“Shouldn’t we go?” I asked. If my privacy had to be invaded, it seemed better to get there first and prepare the ground.

“Drink your tea.” She poured, through a strainer, into two thin china cups that matched. For some reason, I thought of Sherrea, with no food in the house. I drank my tea, with milk in it.

It was beginning to catch up to me that I hadn’t had enough sleep. That would explain my inability to concentrate, the distance everything seemed to recede to. Dana watched me over the rim of her cup, wearing her purring look. The angle was flattering.

“Why do you treat Cassidy so badly?” I asked suddenly.

“Do I treat him badly?” She sipped tea. “I don’t think I do. He’s one of my best friends, honey.”

“That’s not how he thinks of you.”

Left shoulder up, eyebrows raised, mouth pursed — it was such a graceful expression of regret that I couldn’t tell if it was genuine. “I can’t do anything about that.”

“You could stop giving him encouragement.”

“I treat him just the same as I treat you.”

“Ah, but I’m not your type.”

“Neither is Cassidy.”

“You should tell him so.”

She laughed. “Oh, Sparrow, honey, when did you start up in the lonely-hearts business? I thought you didn’t mess with romance.” She put the emphasis heavily on the first syllable, and grinned.

It was true; it wasn’t my place, my right, or my business. I turned my teacup around between my hands. I hadn’t had caffeine for months. I could almost feel my blood vessels narrowing.

“Cassidy,” she continued, “is having himself a fine time. He’ll collect just enough heartbreak, and then he’ll get tired of it and give up. In the meantime, he’s getting a little excitement, and not taking any harm. D’you want anything to eat with that?”

I shook my head. Dana pushed my cup gently down on the saucer and filled it again. It was time we left. I pointed to the wicker table and the draped figurine. “I didn’t know you were hoodoo.”

She raised her eyebrows again. “Sugar, we’re all hoodoo, aren’t we? Or whatever works.”

“What makes you think it works?”

“That it does, I suppose. I mean, you turn the fire on under the pot and it boils, doesn’t it?”

“Does it? What are you asking for?”

She smiled. “None of your damn business.”

This time she didn’t refill my teacup.

There was a car in front of the building when we got there: long as the course of history, black as a killer’s thoughts, and damnably familiar. “Wait,” I said, reaching for Dana’s arm. I missed it.

“They’re here. That’s the car.”

I watched her cross the street to the front door, and followed slowly after. Someone who’d been looking for Mick Skinner was about to find him. Or maybe Mick Skinner had successfully avoided someone he didn’t want to see. It all depended on your point of reference. Mine, I decided with a sinking feeling, was too close to the action. But there wasn’t much I could do now.

Two figures commanded the ruined grandeur of the lobby. One was a teak-brown man, nearly seven feet tall, carved with muscle and shining bald. He wore narrow trousers and a sleeveless double-breasted tunic with silver buttons; tunic and pants were black, and suggested a uniform without insisting on it. He had a baroque pearl hanging from his right earlobe. His arms hung loose at his sides, his hands open; he looked as if he was thinking about matters several miles away. On the floor at his feet was a leather case with a handle, like an old salesman’s catalog case.

The woman next to him seemed small only in contrast. She had to be the owner of the car — she belonged in something that long, that black, that silent. She was black herself; I’d never seen skin so dark. She wore a long dress, almost to her ankles, of dull dark blue chiffon over a dark blue slip. Her hair was hidden under a sheenless black scarf wrapped close around her head. Her long, angular face was interrupted by sunglasses with dark lenses and matte-black frames. Even her lipstick was black, and didn’t shine. I was afraid to look at her fingernails.

“Cherie,” she said to Dana with regal near-warmth. Her voice was low and hoarse. Against all that darkness, Dana, in a hyacinth-blue dress, looked like a faded print.

“Bonjour, Mattresse,” said Dana, in a startling schoolgirl voice. I glanced at her face and found an expression there to match. “This is Sparrow, who… has the problem.”

I was about to say something snappy — mostly to banish the urge to bob or tug my forelock — when I realized that the black woman had gone very still. I couldn’t tell what held her attention because of the sunglasses. I shot a look over my shoulder.

“Sparrow. Bonjour. What is your age?”

My heart gave one powerful beat and seemed to quit. “Old enough for most things.”

“Where have you come from?”

“I don’t think that’s relevant.”

“Sparrow!” Dana said.

But the black woman shrugged. “Keep your secrets, then, if you feel better. It doesn’t matter. Take me to this dead man.”

“Shall I call you Mistress, too?”

“When you need to call me anything, I will tell you what it will be,” she said pleasantly.

Gosh. Since there were no more channels for the small talk to run in, I led them all to the basement.

Again, I stood in the elevator in such a way that no one else could see what I did with the loose wires in the control box. I knew it was a delaying tactic; one of them could, with enough incentive and time, duplicate the process. I hated knowing that. Three more people who were aware that the elevator was not broken down. Mick Skinner seemed to be doing me all his disservices posthumously.

The apartment door was still locked. The apartment, when I opened the door, was quiet as — well, perfectly quiet. Dana came in after me, followed by La Maitresse and the large man. He closed the door after himself, which made me uncomfortable.

When I opened the bedroom door, I knew immediately that something had changed state. Mick Skinner’s mortal remains were where I’d left them. But the body seemed altered; maybe in its color, or the texture of the skin. I stepped in and plucked gingerly at the wrist I’d lifted before, and found that this time rigor mortis worked. “He’s different.”

Dana was standing in the doorway, staring. The woman pushed her gently out of the way and came to the bedside. “How?”

“Well… deader,” I said.

I found myself staring at my reflection in the sunglasses, long enough to realize that my way with words had not impressed her. “I need more room,” she said at last. “Can you give it to me?”

“Oh. Yes, down the hall.”

“Mr. Lyle. Bring him, please.”

At that the big man came forward and took the body off my mattress with no apparent effort. I led the parade to the next room, wondering what she needed space for. Dissection, maybe. I ought to tell her I didn’t have a garbage disposal. Mr. Lyle laid his burden tidily on the floor, and went back to the hall. When he returned, he had the leather case. He gave the woman an inquiring look.

“Yes,” she said.

He took candles out of the case. Lots of candles, in black. They all had something sticky at the base, and stayed upright when he placed them on the floor — one at the top of Mick Skinner’s head, one at each shoulder, at each wrist, at the outside of each knee, at the sole of each bare foot. He reached into the case again and came up with a tin box. I craned my neck when he took off the lid; the contents looked like flour. When he began to dribble it on the floor in fine lines, I realized that of course it was flour, and he was making the veves with it.

I turned to Dana, who sat cross-legged on the floor out of the way, her skirt spread out around her. “Maybe I gave you the wrong impression,” I told her. “I said I wanted the real-world version.”

“Don’t bother them when they’re working, sugar.”

“Does it bother them if I talk to you? I want him disposed of, not raised from the dead.”

“We will dispose of him,” the black woman said behind me. “When we are done with him.”

“I’d think the whole world was as done with him as could be. He’s dead.” The veves were going remarkably fast, for drawings done in flour; there was one elaborate triangle at the corpse’s head already, and another taking shape at its feet.

“In an ideal world,” the woman said fiercely, “the dead are left in peace. Do you live in an ideal world, do you think?”

I wasn’t even tempted to answer that.

When the veves were done, Mr. Lyle stepped back, and the woman began to take things out of the leather case. An unmarked bottle of clear liquid. A shot glass. A little dark glass vial. A square of red silk, embroidered around the edges. She spread the silk over Mick Skinner’s chest, with points toward his head and feet. Then she poured some of the liquid into the shot glass — the smell of high-proof drinking alcohol reached me — and set the glass in the middle of the square of silk. After that, she began to light candles.

She was speaking, and so was Mr. Lyle — in unison, I realized only after a moment, because their voices were so different I had trouble listening to both at once. Hers was low and smooth; he might have had some damage in his throat, to judge by the whistling, broken, breathy sound of it. I didn’t recognize the words, or even the language, but the speech had a dance rhythm. I had to work to keep from swaying. Dana wasn’t bothering. Her eyes followed the woman in black, and her shoulders moved freely with the words.

It was taking a long time to light nine candles. The room was already warmer, and the points of light swam in halos before my aching eyes. By the time there were nine of them, bouncing in their golden auras, the speaking seemed to have a tune, and someone was patting a drumbeat on the floor. The woman produced the dark vial, unscrewed the cap, and held it over the corpse’s closed mouth.

“Eleggua,” she said, as if to someone in the room. “Find this man for me, and see if he has something to say. Exu Lanca, somebody fooled you when you closed the way behind this one. Let him through to speak to me, and I will see that the joker is punished in your name. Papa Ghede, this is your daughter asks you this, and it is right that you give it to me.”

I wanted to rub my eyes; they burned with tiredness, with the candlelight, with not blinking enough. But I didn’t want to move. It was important not to move. Someone might notice me. I wanted to see what Dana was doing, but that would have meant turning my head. The candles, the singing, the beat, were narrowing the world alarmingly. The woman let a drop fall from the vial onto the corpse’s lips.

Silence. Silence as if the air had turned to mercury, heavy, thick, and poisonous. The candles burned straight up, not moving. I was watching Mick Skinner’s lips so hard, I thought I might be sucked into his mouth if they opened. The whole room might; the space behind his teeth was such a vacuum, it would take the whole room to equalize the pressure. I thought I felt a drop of sweat crawl from my forehead, past my ear, to my jaw.

The liquid in the shot glass burst into flames, and the glass shattered.

I was halfway to the sink for water before I realized I wasn’t holding still anymore. The teakettle was full, and I grabbed it. Nothing we did in this room could harm the contents of the other, of the third room, except fire. Except fire. I bolted back toward the mess on the floor.

But when I tried to fling the contents of the teakettle on it, I couldn’t. I looked down and found two huge brown hands closed around my wrists. “That will only spread it,” Mr. Lyle’s whistling voice said above me. “Look.”

The corpse was burning. The black, oily smoke of it rose straight up and stained the ceiling. But where the flames should have splashed around it with the burning alcohol, there was nothing. The nine black candles stood untouched, like everything outside them. I couldn’t even smell the smoke.

The woman was on her knees, bent double, and Dana hovered over her, her hands stretched out and falling a little short of La Maitresse’s shoulders. Then the black-wrapped head lifted. The woman looked straight into my eyes and said, “He wasn’t there.”

The sunglasses had come off. Below the line of the scarf, at the bottom of the sweat-marred forehead, were her eyebrows, two arcs of silver metal inlay in her skin. I hugged my teakettle and stared.

“He wasn’t there. Where has he gone?” She rose and advanced on me, her eyes very wide under those bright, motionless brows.

I edged around the smoking corpse. “Who?” I croaked.

“The one who was in there. Le chevalier,” she spat. Her hand snapped sideways and down, toward the body.

“He’s dead.” Even in my own ears, I sounded hysterical. “What do you expect?”

On the left, around the pillar of smoke, I saw Mr. Lyle moving carefully toward me. Dana was on my right, looking back and forth between me and the woman in dark blue on the other side of her.

“You are an ass, an ass,” the woman said to me. “Where is he now? Tell me, or I’ll wring it out of you like water from a rag.”

I didn’t kick Dana, exactly; I pushed her hard with my foot. She stumbled into the black woman. And I threw the teakettle at Mr. Lyle, and plunged for the front door.

It seemed to take five minutes to turn the knob and pull the door open, half an hour to run down the hall, with the sound of footsteps coming fast behind. The elevator control box took a week, and I looked up from the crossed wires to the sight of the doors closing on a huge brown hand, with an angry face behind. Two fingers stuck through the rubber door seal, so I bit them. They disappeared and the car lurched downward.

The opposite wall of the elevator was farther away than usual. So was the ceiling, and the floor. I rubbed my eyes. The light in the car was fading. I knew, suddenly, what was happening. This time, for the first time, I had some scrap of warning. And it didn’t help a bit.

I went down.