Bone Dance

6.0: The house of the spirit

“The nights are getting shorter,” I shouted over Frances’s shoulder as we rode. “Mind the east.” The sky there was a dense and velvet cobalt, over solid rooftops and shattered ones, over the feeble lamps and torches of the Fair.

“Very nice,” said Frances.

“That means the gates close in an hour or so.”

“It does?”

Well, there; that was one thing I knew that she didn’t. “That’s why they call it the Night Fair.”

“What happens after that?”

“Nothing. Lively as a mausoleum. The hours are shorter in the summer, but it beats staying out in the sun.”

We were threading a narrow, noisy, busy strip of pavement bordered with vendors’ stalls. She braked as a huge, hairy gray dog shot out from between two of them and hurtled across the path, its bony joints rolling. A smooth, loam-black face topped with a brilliantly colored cylinder of a hat thrust itself in front of the windshield. “Las bujias, senora,” it said, showing small white teeth and a raised hand full of spark plugs. “Para todas las máquinas, senora, y muy baratas—” Frances growled with the throttle, and the face disappeared as we lunged forward. I peered back through the weather shell, and couldn’t find a sign of the bright hat.

“Not to be critical,” I told her, “but if we’d gone to the gate we came in by, we’d have missed the crowds.”

There was a pause before she said, “I was hoping we might find Mick.”

“The place is a warren. We could pass him a dozen times in the next ten minutes and never know it.”

“Ah, but he would,” said Frances harshly. There was a fierce, fruitless rev from the throttle. “Have you noticed many of these here tonight?”

“What if he’s gotten into trouble?”

“In other words, what if he hasn’t come to us because he can’t?” She turned the trike into the mouth of an alley and, to my surprise, killed the engine. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. Finally she said, “We do all want to survive. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in difficult circumstances, and I’ve done it by suspecting everyone unfailingly. I’m afraid it’s a habit now.”

Her habits didn’t account for why we’d stopped here. “Does that mean that you don’t think Mick Skinner is in league with the devil?”

She twisted to look at me. Her eyes didn’t look focused. “Of course I do. I told you, it’s a habit.” She turned away again.

After a moment I said, “If you’ll open the shell, I’ll get some food. The stall’s right there; I’ll be in sight the whole time.”

She didn’t answer, but she groped for and pulled the lever that popped the shell. I scrambled out past her as best I could.

The smell and sound and sight of chicken frying was a swooning sensual overload; I wondered, for an instant, if that was how a caress seemed to most people. I was suddenly vague and giddy with hunger. I had always worked that way: not needing to eat all day, until I needed it desperately, like an engine that runs smoothly through a tank of alcohol and stops without warning when it’s gone. What string of adjectives had Frances hung on me, earlier? Strong, resistant to disease and poisons… She could have added cheap to operate, and rarely needs refueling. I bought chicken (“Picante,” the old woman warned, her hands fluttering, her accent terrible, “picante”) and fried potatoes and okra and buttermilk biscuits and two long bottles of homemade pear nectar. I tucked the bottles under my arm and juggled the hot paper-wrapped parcels back to the trike.

Frances sat where I’d left her, but her wrists were crossed over the instrument panel, and her forehead was pillowed on them. Her hair had fallen forward to sweep and scatter across her near forearm. Relaxed, that arm looked surprisingly thin, and the pointed bones in her elbow seemed frail and vulnerable. Out of character.

Sometimes wisdom arrives first in the pit of your stomach. That was where I felt it then, a little slippery twist. Of course it was out of character. That wasn’t Frances’s arm.

I already knew that this body didn’t belong to Frances; but now I really knew it, all the many-sided shape of it. There was no relation here between the shell and the spirit, no way to judge from outside, except by the crude language of action and expression, what the person inside was. The body I was looking at was the life story, in fading ink, of a person I’d never met.

Who was she? Would she approve of this vendetta she was being ridden on? I’d awakened, over and over, in strange places with bits of my past gone, and it had nearly driven me crazy. How long had Frances ridden this woman? Would she wake up in a new city, maybe years since her last memory, and do any better than I had? Would she get the chance to wake up at all?

The exhaustion belonged to the stranger’s body. The driving passion, the mind under the lash, belonged to Frances. Both needed to eat and rest. Both would suffer if they didn’t. Whoever was entitled to judge between them, it wasn’t me.

I said, a little loudly, “Well, if you didn’t like spicy chicken, you should have said so.”

“I love spicy chicken,” she said, and sat up. Her face was composed, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to notice, or at least to comment on, the weariness in it.

So I said, “At the Underbridge, there’s a place where you can catch a few hours’ sleep.”

“I’ll be fine once I eat. Now, can we eat?”

“You’re welcome,” I replied, and began to set bundles on all the flat surfaces. There weren’t a lot of these, on or in the trike, but I ate leaning against the outside, which left her the passenger’s seat as a table. “Eat the okra first,” I warned. “It’s terrible cold.”

And that was the last conversation for a few minutes. Except for the rattle of the paper, we were a speck of silence in the Night Fair’s tapestry of noise. I stopped chewing to listen to it. I felt like an alien object in the world-body, something it had encysted because it couldn’t cast it out. Or was it Frances who had been isolated, and I was simply standing within the radius of the effect?

“Wish I had some coffee,” Frances said at last, around a bite of biscuit.

I stared at her. “Nothing easier. Give me ten bucks, and I’ll be back sometime tomorrow with about twelve green coffee beans. If someone, somewhere in town, has managed to lay hands on a sackful.”

She smiled, wry and surprisingly genuine. “I know. I think that’s the rest of my penance. To get to where coffee grows, it’s a thousand miles over bad roads full of unpleasant people. I hear there’s a slope near Taos where they’ve discovered it does pretty well, but strangers within half a mile can expect to be shot at.”

“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 embarrassment. “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.

“No.”

“Care to join me anyway?”

I looked sharply up at her.

“I find I’m reluctant to leave you behind,” she said. “I think you’d best come along.”

The bathroom was at the end of the hall, perfectly agreeable, with a tub big enough to drown in. We continued to retrace our route, left and another left. But we didn’t come out at the top of the stairs.

“Over there,” Frances said softly. She pointed down the corridor. I saw the turned walnut newel post and frowned.

At the landing, instead of turning left to the next flight, the stairs turned right. “The back stairs?” I muttered.

Now Frances was frowning.

We might eventually have reached the first floor, but we couldn’t tell. We might have passed through the basement on the way to it. The halls were graciously appointed, the stairs were ornate, the rooms we peered into and passed through sunny and innocuous and even a little bland. And at last, without ever going up a flight of stairs that I remembered, we turned a corner into a hallway with yellow walls and white woodwork and a window at the far end.

“Oh, Lord,” Frances sighed. She was pale and inclined to lean. “Shall we make book on the next scene? We open the doors to our rooms and find ourselves sleeping on the beds. We open the doors and find the pits of hell. Or someone with a sword, who kills us. Or a bag of gold.”

I stalked to the door of mine and wrenched it open. “Or the room, just as we left it.”

“Could we have been drugged, do you think?”

“I’m too tired to think. I’m going to take my damn boots off and lie down. If you want to explore, have fun. Don’t wake me ” I didn’t actually slam the door. It had a bolt, so I turned it.

The sheets, of course, smelled like lavender.

6.1: A shedding of skins

The curtains were blowing lazily at the window; the breeze was lukewarm and smelled of the garden. A shaft of light gently cooked the floorboards. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but it must have happened. There was a distinct feeling of afternoon in the air.

I sat up and swung my bare feet to the floor, and thought, There’s more changed than the hour. It might have been the light. It might have been that the filter of weariness and alarm was thinner. Or maybe Frances was right: Maybe somehow we’d been drugged, and it had worn off. But the room seemed different.

Had the wallpaper been like that, before? Hadn’t the bedspread been a little threadbare? For that matter, had there been curtains? I couldn’t remember. The room seemed less determinedly reassuring and more… exotic? Not quite. Well, I’d been awfully tired.

I put my boots back on and cleaned up a little at the dresser. When I tried the door, I felt an instant of fright. Then I remembered I’d locked it. At least nobody had been hanging curtains while I slept.

In the hall, on the floor by the door, I found my canvas pack. So the porter had come up. I dropped it in a ladderback chair that I didn’t remember, either. The corridor was quiet. I thought about trying Frances’s or Mick’s doors; then realized I didn’t know why I’d want to.

When I came out of the bathroom, the enormous gray dog was waiting in the hall. It rose to its feet and gave that articulate single wag of its tail. Then it turned and went to the junction of the next corridor, and looked back.

“Don’t tell me,” I said aloud. “The old mine caved in, and I have to come rescue little Timmy.” The dog, mercifully, did not respond. I could test matters by trying to walk back to my room, but why bother? I followed the dog.

A left turn, and a left, and I was at the top of the stairs. It was as annoying as not arriving at the top of the stairs the last time I tried it. At the bottom of the stairs I was in the beautiful front hall. The dog trotted into the ivy parlor. I thought it seemed a little smug; given the success Frances and I had had at reaching the same place by the same route, I supposed it had a right. I heard voices and clinking in the parlor: low, even voices and the noise of crockery used as its manufacturer had intended. It seemed, if not safe to go in, at least the next logical step.

Everyone looked up when I entered, including the dog. Everyone was China Black and Mr. Lyle, Frances and Mick. They were sitting on a pair of cushioned wicker couches that faced each other, one team to a couch. I had just begun to wonder which team I was on when I looked past them.

The far wall of the parlor held a log-swallowing fireplace, surrounded by painted tiles and complicated woodwork, surmounted by a mantelpiece with what seemed a hundred unmatched candlesticks on it, and a huge, gold-framed mirror over that. On either side, taking up the rest of the wall from side to side and floor to ceiling, fronted in leaded glass, were bookshelves. Full bookshelves.

I made the circuit around the couches without exactly seeing them and stood in front of the right-hand case. What was probably the complete works of Mark Twain, in leather. The Jungle Book. The Encyclopedia of Folklore. Treasure Island. Shakespeare, Yeats, Piercy, Eliot, Woolf. Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. Grieve’s herbal. Stephen Jay Gould and Martin Gardner. And those were the ones I recognized. Who were Gene Wolfe and Alice Walker and Kenneth Roberts and Jane Austen? Maya Angelou and John Crowley and Zora Neale Hurston? And there was another bookcase on the other side.

“I knew you’d do that,” said Mick’s voice, and I jumped. I really had forgotten there were other people in the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and yanked my eyes from the books and back to the pair of couches. “Excuse me.”

China Black’s face was uninformative, but Mr. Lyle was smiling broadly. “That’s only part of the collection,” he said. “The rest is in the library. I’ll take you there when we’ve finished tea.”

Chango — the rest. “Do you have any” — I fished in my memory for the name — “Marquez?”

“All of his, I think,” said Mr. Lyle gravely. “One of my favorites. Now, sit down and have some tea.”

I saw a wicker chair with a cushion that matched the couches on one side of the fireplace. I carried it over and set it firmly down with its back to the bookcases. Which meant the seating was now U-shaped, with me halfway between the two couches.

Mr. Lyle hadn’t meant tea; he’d meant Tea. On the low table that separated the couches was a brass samovar, a plate of sandwiches, a bowl of dark muffins the size of dandelion puff-balls, a tray of cookies with specks of something in them, and a bowl of strawberries. There were also two cups. I looked to see who else hadn’t gotten tea yet, but Mick, Frances, China Black, and Mr. Lyle were all holding theirs. Maybe the dog had decided to wait.

The tea was mint, the sandwiches were cucumber and basil, the muffins were carrot, and the specks in the cookies were caraway. Then, I didn’t think that was significant. Tasty, but not significant. Now I wonder: How much of what I ate at that meal came from the garden that held that house like a cupped hand?

“You are safe here,” China Black said, “as long as you are our guests.” She was stern and distant, the patron of some church that put mercy after judgment. Her voice was roughened a little, as if from hard use. “It seemed to me we must have safety before we could speak freely. But now I would like to know why you are here.” And she looked at Frances and Mick.

Since her attention was elsewhere, I studied her over the edge of my cup. She wore a long, sleeveless olive-green dress, and a headwrap of green and yellow. Her nose, in profile, was high-bridged, and the nearest eyebrow shone like a streak of sweat. Her eyes were almond-shaped and sleepy-looking. I didn’t think she was sleepy.

“I’d like to know why you ask,” said Frances, smiling blandly.

Trust Frances to put all this amicability to flight. She watched us over her teacup like a panther eyeing a herd of antelope.

China Black was unruffled. “Would you like my credentials?”

“It’s a start,” Frances said.

Our hostess — was she our hostess? — seemed almost pleased. “This is a city divided in power. There is A. A. Albrecht, who sits at what he thinks is the heart, and tries to keep the flow of power all one way, all toward himself. He does not know, or care, perhaps, that the City is an organism, and that without its circulation, it will die. I am a houngan; I was chosen by the snake thirty years ago to serve the spirits, and the living. I and those like me try to keep the City’s lifeblood flowing in spite of Albrecht.”

“I thought if you were a woman, you were a mambo, not a houngan.”

“Once, if you were a woman, you could not be a houngan. And once, if you were a woman, you couldn’t be a soldier.” The look she gave Frances was probably meant to be quelling.

“Power is most things to most people,” said Frances. “When you talk about power in the City, do you mean money? Politics?”

“I mean energy,” China Black replied.

Frances’s expression made me think again of predators. “The ju-ju kind?” she asked with a hint of distaste.

“Not usually. Like you, he has little interest in the spirit.” China Black’s teeth flashed, just for a moment. “He wants to control electricity and fuel. If your vehicle was powered by methane, he would have it confiscated, because in the City no one may use fuel he does not profit from, and he neither makes nor taxes methane.”

While China Black and Frances eyed each other, I stole a glance at Mick. He was leaning back, legs crossed at the knee, cradling his teacup. He didn’t look relaxed. He was waiting for something, and until it came, there was no way to tell what.

China Black put her teacup down and said to Frances, “What is your name?”

“Frances Redding.”

“And you are… ?”

Frances raised her eyebrows. “Female? A Scorpio?”

“You know what I’m asking.”

“Then I’ll bet you know the answer.”

“Then it can do no harm to tell it to me.”

Frances’s jaw worked a little, as if she might be biting the inside of her lip. “I’m a Horseman,” she said.

It might not have surprised anyone in the room; still, there was a moment of silence for the enormity of the fact.

“And so are you,” China Black said, turning suddenly on Mick.

He started, looked up with a jerk. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What brought you here?”

“Impulse,” said Mick, with a shrug. “Nothing particular.”

After a moment China Black turned to Frances. “And you?”

Frances leaned forward and laced her tanned fingers together. Meeting China Black’s eyes, she said, “I came here to kill someone.”

“Ah. In the interest of the general welfare, I think I am entitled to ask who.”

“His name is Tom Worecski. He’s also a Horseman. He was the leader of the group that betrayed… that started the exchange of things that go bang.”

“That betrayed humanity?”

Frances shrugged. “It seemed, on reflection, a little melodramatic. And not quite true. I think the grudge belongs to the Western Hemisphere.”

“The world is not so large that half of it can afford to ignore what happens to the other half. I would let it stand at ‘humanity’ — but maybe I am an unforgiving old woman. And maybe you are, too.”

“Maybe. If, when I find Worecski, I decide he’s become a saint, I’ll see if I can forgive him.”

“You haven’t found him? Then why do you think he’s here?”

Frances rubbed the space between her eyebrows absently. “I’ve trailed him here. I followed the wreckage he left behind him over the years — he’s a great one for wreckage — and the little personal motifs. That’s all we had as identities, once we found that the relationship between body and soul was tenuous.

“And Tom would want a city. He’d want plenty to work with, to run roughshod over. He wouldn’t be out in the bush, or settled in some farm village.”

“What if you’re wrong, and he’s changed?”

“Then I won’t be able to find him, will I? He’ll be safe. But I don’t think he’s changed.”

China Black set her cup in front of the samovar and turned the spigot. A fresh wave of mint smell curled around the room. “And why do you trust me with all this?”

“Because I suspect it doesn’t matter. I think he knows I’m coming, and if he does, none of this is news. If he doesn’t, it still won’t matter. He won’t run; Tom always loved a fight.”

“You know him very well, then?”

Frances’s face was still. “We went to Killing People School together. It produces a wonderful camaraderie.”

“Why were you after me?” Mick asked suddenly of the opposite couch. “You followed me around that night, didn’t you?”

“Maybe we didn’t know we were following you,” China Black replied with a large and uncharacteristic grin. “Maybe we thought we were following your body.”

Mick opened his mouth; then the expression seemed to fall off his face. “Oh,” he said.

He settled back into the cushions again, as if he were satisfied. But I’d seen the line that had appeared between his brows for a moment, and the unhappy little twist of his lip. I wondered if anyone else had.

“You said we might be able to help each other,” Frances said. “Now you know what I want. What about you?”

China Black’s attention moved slowly from Mick to Frances. “I am not so sure, now. What do you know about the spirits, the loa?”

Frances visibly squashed her frustration. “I’ve heard of them.”

“They are not gods, though they’re like them; and they are not ghosts, though they’re like that, too. The European churches prayed to gods that rarely spoke, and then only to a few. The spirits speak all the time, and we don’t pray to them any more than you would pray to your grandmother. We live with them. They are part of our family.”

“’Our’?” Frances said.

“If you asked, you would find most people of the City — of the streets — know them. The loa, the saints, the spirits, the ancestors. There are many names, but you would find the principles similar, and the way they shape the world. The people in the towers don’t think about the spirits. They don’t know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two. Ah!” China Black snorted and shook her head. “I have been a teacher so long that I fall into it, so!”

She drained her teacup and stood, and began to walk slowly up and down the room. “You don’t believe. You are like the people in the towers; it is your past they live in, not seeing that it hurts us all. But these things don’t wait for you to believe in them. Chango, the young warrior with the sword, came among us while we danced. He said that from his quarter, the south, one of his own would come, limping. Oya Iansa, Lightning Woman, came and said that change would arrive from the west, but would not know its own nature. And Eshu drank white rum and smoked a black cigar, and laughed until the tears poured down, as he told us to duck when the marassa met, and joined the dossou-dossa, and the three of them, like a three-pointed throwing star, broke all the windows in the tall buildings in town. Tell me,” China Black said, turning back to the couches, “do you see anything of yourselves in that?”

Mick leaned forward to set his cup down; the angle and a sudden sweep of little braids hid his face from me. He didn’t answer. Frances said, “Since I didn’t understand much of it, no, not really.”

“The marassa are twins,” I said. “Real-world ones, and spirit-world ones; you have to figure out which by context, I guess. Their hoodoo is unity and polarization, innocence and malice both at once. They share one soul. The dossou-dossa is the child born after twins. Actually, it’s dossou or dossa, depending on what sex the kid is. And in the spirit world, it’s the neuter principle, the third point on the hoodoo triangle that connects the male and female points.” I looked at Frances and thought, Don’t say a thing.

She might have understood, or not; her face didn’t change. “My, that was encyclopedic. Do you believe? I’m forgiven because of my great age, it seems, but what about you?”

After a moment I shook my head. It seemed rude to deny the operating system of our — hostess? Who owned this house, anyway? — in her own parlor. I was annoyed at Frances for making me do it. “Knowing it is a survival skill. She’s right. If you mention any of those names on the street, the people you’re talking to might tell you they use a different name, but that’s the most denial you’ll get.”

Frances pressed her lips together — to keep from smiling? “This must be a hard town for atheists.”

China Black said, “But I told you, they aren’t gods. You don’t believe,” she added, and looking up, I found she was now talking to me. “But you have sworn by Chango, haven’t you?”

“Me?” I shrugged. “It’s swearing, not invocation. You pick up habits from your neighbors.”

“If you were hoodoo, maybe you would swear by somebody else. Chango is not the master of your head. That’s Legba’s symbol around your neck, you know.”

My hand went to my throat before I thought about it. Sherrea’s pendant was lying outside my shirt. “No, I didn’t know.”

China Black nodded. “It is always in Legba’s veves: the figure for androgyny and metamorphosis. It is why Legba and all his cousin spirits keep the gates and the crossroads. Do you like practical jokes? Legba is a trickster.”

She seemed to want a response, but I couldn’t think of one. The gates I worked had to do with semiconductor technology, and in the last few days I’d discovered I had a positive distaste for change. As for practical jokes, it could be suggested that I was one. I certainly wasn’t going to take up the matter of androgyny with her.

“So your information was that three people — or maybe four — would appear, join forces, and raise whatever passes for hell in this pantheon,” said Frances thoughtfully. “You think we might be them. Pigs might get pilot’s licenses, too, but I don’t think so.”

China Black didn’t seem insulted. “How so?”

“I’ve come to raise a very limited and specific sort of hell, in a localized area. You found the three of us in close proximity because what I’m about to do would be likely to splatter on Mick and Sparrow if they’re nearby. Far from joining forces with them, I was hoping to get them out of range before I started.”

“That’s very noble of you,” said Mr. Lyle, his dark face exquisitely grave. It had been so long since he’d last spoken that I jumped a little.

Frances, equally grave, ignored him. I saw Mr. Lyle smile out of the corner of my eye. “If you think the text of all these messages from beyond is that you should help me,” Frances said to China Black, “then you could hide Mick and Sparrow, and tell me about anyone highly placed and crazy enough to be Tom Worecski on his horse.”

Beside me, Mr. Lyle made a dreadful sound. It was laughter, I realized, genuine merriment distorted by that broken voice. “You’re trying to force the world into a shape. You were a soldier. Do you know the saying ‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’?”

Frances turned to him, her face very still. “More so with some enemies than with others,” she said at last. “Yes. Point taken. In the meantime, shall I plan on help from you, or hindrance?”

“We cannot help you,” said China Black. She stood very straight by the fireplace, once again the stern, judging image. “We were warned, I think, of your coming. The loa never said we were to serve your cause.”

It was the word “serve” that did it. China Black had received no instructions. But Sherrea — or a voice in her mouth — had given some to me. They couldn’t be connected to this. If they meant anything at all.

The front doors rattled under three solid blows. Frances was on her feet, the butter knife held low in one hand. I’d risen, too, I realized, but my hands were empty, and I was wondering about other exits.

The door banged open, and a voice yelled, “China? Where are you?”

“Ti-so!” China said, her grim look melting. “Come quick!” The intruder appeared in the door, disheveled and wide-eyed. It was Sherrea. She wore a black tank top and purple harem pants that looked like a pair of collapsed dirigibles, and a gold-shot sash around her hips that flailed the air behind her. Her neck and arms were hung with amber.

“You see, I have found them for you!” cried China Black, looking nearly as smug as her dog had.

“Sparrow!” Sher crossed the room in a leap, stopped before me, and put a light hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

I nodded, because something stiff in my throat kept me from speaking. Her hand slid off my arm.

“Gracias, mi hermana,” Sher said to China Black, beaming. “Was it a bitch to do?”

“Oh, no, they were wandering around the Night Fair like old women on market day.”

“Were you?” Sherrea asked me intently.

“No.”

“That’s what I thought. The old crow just wants to save it up ’til she can make me feel guilty about all the work she did.”

“Pah! I would never be so stupid. I know you have no conscience at all, so!”

They were friends. They were good friends. I felt as I had at the Underbridge, when I heard her call Robby by his nickname, when I discovered she knew Theo.

“… Theo!” I gasped. “Sher, where’s Theo? Is he okay?”

She blinked and turned to China Black. “You didn’t explain?”

“There were more important things to discuss.”

“Sure. I bet you forgot,” Sher grumbled, scowling. She sent that glare at Mr. Lyle next. “You could have said something.”

Mr. Lyle grinned. “I had no chance, little sister. When she gets like Iansa with her horsetail, what can poor mortals do?”

“I apologize,” Sherrea sighed. “These two would tell a gopher how to dig, but a little thing like saying whether your friend’s alive or dead—”

“Is he?” I blurted.

“Dead? Nah. Theo’s upstairs — or he’s supposed to be. Resting up. If he comes downstairs before tomorrow, I’m gonna kick his butt.”

“Get your pointy shoes, then,” said Theo from the doorway. He was smiling and rumpled and pale, and his right arm hung in a black cloth sling. “I was cool with it, ’til somebody broke down the door. Then I got curious. Hey,” he said to me, and the smile was wider.

“Hey,” I answered. He looked embarrassed. I felt embarrassed.

I wondered if he had any idea why; I sure didn’t. “Oh, Cha — here, have a seat.” I moved quickly away from my chair.

China Black frowned. “We need another cup. I’ll get one.”

As she disappeared into the hall, Frances studied Sherrea. “I think I misjudged something a few hours ago,” Frances said. “I’m sorry if I seemed patronizing, back on the riverbank.”

Sher shrugged. I watched them size each other up, and realized, with a jolt, what Frances was reacting to. Sher and China Black weren’t just friends. They were peers. China Black, with her limo, elegant clothes, haughty manner, and easy power, behaved as Sherrea’s equal. The Sherrea I thought I knew, the adivina with the cheap cards and the melodramatic apartment, barely older than I actually was. What had I missed?

I was irritated. It was another change, another upset to my delicately balanced routine. I found myself suddenly too grouchy to converse. I would have dropped into my chair, but Theo was in it.

“Here,” Sher said. She’d dragged two low-backed chairs to the other end of the tea table. That was irritating, too: the second-guessing, the attention, the proximity.

“Thank you,” I said, and sat down. She gave me a sideways glance, filled the last clean cup for Theo, and sat, too. Then China Black returned with a cup for her.

“I bet everybody’s told everybody everything,” Sherrea said. “But would you mind telling it all to me, anyway?”

“Starting from the Underbridge,” Theo added across his tea. I didn’t feel like talking, but they were looking at me. Well, I was the one they knew, not Frances or Mick. Chango — or whoever — it seemed strange that they didn’t all know each other. I knew them, and until a few days ago, I would have described myself as knowing no one and happy about it.

I started from the Underbridge and didn’t get far. As I came up on the image of Mick in the archives, I realized I was in trouble; I should have started earlier and explained Mick. But I couldn’t explain Mick, because that would mean telling about his dead body, and revealing that he was a Horseman, which wasn’t mine to tell. And then there were the archives. I dragged to a hand-waving stop.

“They’re Horsemen,” Sherrea said briskly, nodding. “I knew that. Which one was riding the redheaded woman?”

I stared at her.

“It was the only thing that explained what happened. What did you think, that she was having a religious conversion?”

I gave up on chronology and explained Frances’s vendetta against Tom Worecski and our interception by China Black and Mr. Lyle.

“How did you sandbag Mick?” Frances asked. “It’s a bit of a trick to get one of us unconscious before we think to jump horses.”

Mr. Lyle nodded. “You have to be very slow, or very fast. In this case, it was speed. And one can’t suspect every large, friendly dog one sees.”

Mick half grinned, sheepish, at Frances. “He distracted me.”

“I’ll remember that. Too bad it wouldn’t work on Tom; he hates dogs.”

Sherrea folded her knees up under her chin and wedged her feet on the chair. “So you want to find a guy who could be anywhere and look like anybody, who might not even be in the City. Why not give us a hard one?”

Frances turned her hands palm up. “It was the best I could do at short notice.”

“Ti-so, this has nothing to do with us,” China Black said urgently.

Sher looked up at her. “How can you be sure? It has something to do with Sparrow.”

China Black’s gaze went from Sherrea to me, and narrowed. She tapped a finger against her lower lip. She looked as if she were planning to move furniture, and I was a sofa.

Sherrea began to push empty dishes and the samovar to the far half of the tea table. Mr. Lyle caught the muffin bowl as it was about to heel off the edge, and stacked it and anything else in danger on the tea tray. Then Sher pulled a wad of electric-blue silk out of her sash. It fell open when she put it on the table, in a way I recognized. I wondered if anyone else there knew it was a new cloth, and knew why.

Given my last reading from Sher, I wanted to volunteer to take the dishes to the kitchen. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where it was. I lifted my eyes from the cards to the rest of the audience. China Black was haughty and nervous; Mr. Lyle was calm, as if this was the logical progression of the conversation. Theo was leaning forward and peering. “Groovy cards,” he said. “Where they from?” Mick was looking, and looking blank. But Frances was sitting straight-backed on the edge of the couch, her face frozen.

“Could we forgo this, do you think?” she asked. “It’s silly.”

Sherrea raised her eyes to Frances as she shuffled. I watched her small-boned, purple-nailed hands working over the cards, fllllllllt, fllllllllt, as she said, “This won’t take long. And we promise not to tell anybody you did something silly.” Thump — she set the deck on the silk and cut it into three piles. Then she snapped the top card off each pile and onto the table, face up.

“Oh,” she said, and stopped. Her head lifted again, and this time her eyes went to Theo. “Well, that was easy.”

Theo leaned even more. “What did — oh,” he breathed.

The Tower, the Ace of Pentacles, and the Emperor. I looked at Sherrea.

“For the question-and-three-cards, you want to be pretty literal-minded,” she explained. “Which means he’s in a tall building, the one associated with the most money and power; and either the building is owned by, or he’s in the company of, or he is, the bossman of the temporal reality.”

“Or all of those,” I said, staring at the three cards. “You mean, he’s in Ego? With Albrecht?”

She turned again to Theo, so I did, too. He looked like old ivory. “He is,” said Theo, barely audible. His glasses reflected afternoon sun; I couldn’t see his eyes. “Oh, shit. He sure is.”

Frances’s icy posture was melted. It had been replaced with the hunting-animal intensity I’d seen before, and that was turned on Theo. She hadn’t spoken, but she was waiting.

“What?” I said. “How do you know?”

“My dad’s goddamn advisory officer. I know those two freaks who were after you at the Underbridge — they’re goons of his. Oh, shit, shit, it makes too much sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. What does this have to do with Albrecht?” But as I said it, I knew.

“That’s my dad,” Theo replied.

China Black sat down suddenly. “Ah,” she said with a look at Sher. “This would seem to be our business, after all.”

The assembled multitudes were in the parlor, listening to Frances plan her murder, no doubt. I wasn’t with them. I’d found, after a few more minutes, that I needed a walk in the garden.

The front door didn’t object to the idea, and the path didn’t lead me back to the porch as I’d half expected. It was a brick path at first; then it became a trail of slate flags in a stream of silvery creeping plants. In the shade of a cluster of trees, I found an ornamental pond with a boulder beside it for sitting. So I sat.

I hadn’t been there long before Sherrea said behind me, “I know just how you feel. Hey, you’ve been doing this to us for years.”

I decided I wasn’t up to a heated response. I’d try Frances as a role model. Chilly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, fuck that,” she said, and sat down with a bump on the grassy bank. “You’re pissed as hell that you’ve known Theo for years and he never told you who he was. And that you’ve known me for about as long, and I didn’t tell you I was an accredited kick-ass bruja. In fact, you’ve had your nose rubbed in it that life has been going on outside your skin and nobody was filling you in on the details, and it bothers you a lot.”

At the side of my boulder, almost hidden in a tuft of tall grass, was a thin-stemmed little plant with a cluster of deep pink flowers. The color was so vivid it seemed to vibrate. I pulled it. It had no fragrance. There were short oval leaves climbing in pairs up the stalk. I began to strip them off, starting at the bottom.

“So now you know how all your friends feel,” Sher continued.

“Not quite,” I said. “You haven’t had any sudden revelations about me.”

She glared at me. “I’ve had plenty about you. Half of ’em I found out by accident and the other half by putting things together, and every time I found the kind of thing friends tell each other, it made me feel like shit. Because you hadn’t.” Sher dug a stone out of the grass and lobbed it into the pond; I watched the rings of water pulse out toward us as she talked. “If you’d wanted to know anything about me, or Theo, you could have just asked. But then we might have asked you something, and whenever we did, you’d slither out of it until it was pretty clear that you wanted us to keep our distance. Now you’re mad because we did. Were we supposed to keep giving our little secrets to you and never get anything back?”

“That’s not true!” Careful, careful. Chilly. “I’ve always kept even-up with you. I know the Deal.”

Sherrea looked at me as if I’d sprouted antennae. “Damballah, you can bite me now,” she muttered. “For instance,” she went on, stronger, “there was when I found out you weren’t a woman.”

The stem bent in my fingers.

“There’s one you can pay Theo back with; I don’t think he’s been disillusioned yet. He still talks as if you’re a guy, anyway.”

“Make up your mind,” I said. It came out thin. “Which am I?”

“My mind has nothing to do with it. When I figured out that either you were both or neither, I started watching for it. You do a chameleon thing — maybe it’s not even conscious — that makes you seem female when you’re with a woman, and male when you’re with a man. Like you take on the local coloring. In a mixed group you kind of shift around. I was still trying to figure out if you were natural or technological when the Horseman showed up. Then I knew — I just did — that they were in it somewhere. And I was afraid she could control you with it, so I said what I did to you.”

“You said… I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

“That you don’t belong to them. Never did, and don’t now.”

I blew air out through my nose, like laughing. “Maybe I don’t now. But as far as ‘did,’ you’re wrong. I was a custom order.”

“No.” She rose and brushed nonexistent grass off her trousers. “I’m the kick-ass bruja, and I say so. You never did.”

I’d peeled all the leaves; now I had a bare, battered stalk with a little cluster of magenta blossoms. “What kind of flower is this?” I asked suddenly. She stood with her hands in her pockets, her feet planted. She didn’t answer immediately; then she said, “Why do you want to know?”

“I don’t know.” Inside each star-shaped circle of petals was another ring, little bristly projections, like eyelashes around a circular eye. It still didn’t smell like anything. I tossed it on the water, where it wandered until it disappeared along the bank.

“I’m going back to the house,” I said, and slid off the boulder.

“Can I go with you?”

“It’s a big house.”

She didn’t flinch; she just closed her eyes for a moment.

6.2: Time stands still on the road

Altogether, my stay in that house was four days long. It seems longer; not because time dragged, but because of things I did, of things I looked at, of conversations I had. It seems strange that they all happened butted up against each other in four days. Maybe time, during those days, ran the way the hallways did when Frances and I’d tried to find our way out. The hallways themselves, after that first surreal morning, remained where they were put.

Mr. Lyle had promised me the library, and delivered when I came back, still snappish, from the garden. It was another long-windowed room on the first floor. The heavy moldings around the door and windows, the shelves, the pedestal table, were oak; the chairs were high-backed and upholstered in a dark fabric full of birds and flowers. The shelves were anywhere the windows weren’t, except for the floor and the ceiling. The rug under the table and the smaller ones by the windows were deep red, figured with detailed geometric medallions in many other colors. There were lamps on brackets and on stands by the chairs, and a huge oil and candle chandelier over the pedestal table. Reading after dark, it seemed, was expected.

I was impressed, but I was also in a lousy temper, and not inclined to show I was impressed. I began to read spines. I’d been caught off-guard in the ivy parlor; it would be a good deal harder to make me gape now.

Part of the collection might have been acquired in reaction to the events of the last hundred or so years: all the books in the Foxfire series, for which I had a sort of uninvolved respect; several works, theoretical and not-so, on global warming; a delectable variety of how-to books on solar and water and wind power, and the attendant wiring, storage, water heating, and whatnot. (The latter were shelved in plain sight, which nearly ruined my resolution. How secure was this house, its land, this island? Any City deputy who got a glimpse of those books would burst a blood vessel.)

The rest of the shelves, the majority, had been filled by the process of finding a book that looked interesting and bringing it home. The finders, I hoped, had been plural; there was a point at which diversity of interest became multiple personality, after all. Eventually, under Mr. Lyle’s benign eye, I found the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I took a volume down at random and pecked at the beginning. And began, after a little, to grin.

“Which?” said Mr. Lyle.

“You’ve read this one?”

He nodded. “The bit about the maid shaking the pillowcase, and the pistol falling out and going off.”

“You read Spanish?” he asked after a moment.

I looked up and closed the book. The title was Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada. “Is that so odd?”

“Some. It’s the lingua franca, or one of them, but most of the people who use it can’t read it. Many of them can’t read at all.” I remembered my mood suddenly. “I don’t imagine it bothers them. As long as they can count.”

“No, they’re perfectly happy. They have no idea there are things like this out there.”

He might have been talking about the Marquez book, or the library, but I saw something in his hand, and turned to look. It was one of the books on wind-powered generators.

I put the novel back and stood where I was, my arms slack at my sides. “I saw them the first time.”

“I was watching you when you did, too. Once you remembered that you shouldn’t react, you had a very good stone face. What does this mean to you?” He gestured again with the book.

“It’s illegal as hell to have it,” I said, my eyes wide. “Isn’t it? Any of those books.”

“And that’s what impressed you? The wickedness? Maybe it was. But tell me, why is it illegal?”

Well, there was a limit to how brainless I could be expected to be on the subject. I said, “In a town where the City controllers have an energy monopoly? Information about free, unregulated, untaxable energy? Heck, I can’t imagine.”

He smiled. “And don’t you know anyone who buys untaxed methanol? Or has a portable generator with no registration tag in the cellar?”

I raised my hands and opened them; the international symbol of helplessness. “Afraid not. If you’re looking for households to raid. I guess you’ll have to find your own.”

“My own would be a good place to start. But you’ve forgotten, I think. I rode in your elevator.”

I had forgotten. “My elevator?” I asked, blinking.

“Up and down. I was glad you’d left the call button working on your floor, after I had a look at the stairwell. But it took us half an hour to make it run from inside.”

If it had ever occurred to me that I’d be escaping from my own floor, I’d have torn out the damned call button. If I’d realized I’d be facing this exceedingly large person who held a copy of Running on the Wind like a smoking gun with my fingerprints on it, I’d have jumped off the roof before I let him ride in my elevator.

I walked past him to the window seat and occupied it. There wasn’t a chair nearby, and I thought he’d have to stand. “All right,” I said. “What, do you need your VCR repaired?”

Mr. Lyle sat on the rug at my feet. It was like being attended by a folded cast-iron pillar. “A twelve volt to AC inverter, actually. Can you do it, do you think?”

This time my blink wasn’t for show. “Good grief. You’re not kidding. You use wind?”

“Solar panels.”

“Wind’s better,” I said absently. “Or water. You can’t replace photovoltaics anymore, unless you know about a warehouse I haven’t found.” Then I woke up “Chango, anyone can spot a solar panel! If you want to get busted, why not just carry the damn thing downtown?”

Mr. Lyle’s smile was benevolence itself. “You don’t understand the island. Besides, the City can’t afford a helicopter.”

Of course. The building that held my treasure house stood in plain sight of Ego and her tall sisters. The spinning vent on my roof had to pass daily inspection. Who would see anything here? This was one of the tallest buildings I’d seen since we left the Deeps. “I don’t have any tools with me.”

Mr. Lyle shrugged and stood up in the same motion, as if his shoulders pulled the rest of him along. “Come see what we have.”

So I was shown through the dining room, the kitchen, the pantry, and, finally, into the power shed, opening off the pantry. I was a little disappointed. There were enough tools, but no more, and they were only of reasonable quality. The inverter was all right, but I had one rated for twice the load, and another hidden away, still crated, for when the first began to show its age.

This wasn’t the opulent marvel that the rest of the house was; this wasn’t the magnetic center of anything, for anyone. While I took the inverter apart and assaulted it with multimeter probes, I asked Mr. Lyle, casually, what they ran off it. Answer: a pump, some lights, some fans, a couple of recharging units. No audio, no video? A shortwave radio. So this wasn’t Paradise, after all.

Mr. Lyle must have seen something in my face. He said gravely, “There are so few disks and tapes left, and they cost so much, that it’s easier to fall back on other things. Books, and live music, and theater. There’s a lot of that on the island.”

“Anyone recording the music?”

He looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken a language he knew.

“The trouble is finding blank tape stock. It would be great to videotape the plays, but there was never as much tape or hardware for that, so it’s hard to get. I think we’ve lost the movie biz for good.”

Then, appalled, I shut up. Enthusiasm had possessed me for a moment, tricked me into an openness as foreign to me as… well, as any number of things. I’d be giving guided tours of the archives, if I went on like this.

The output off the inverter seemed steady. I put the cover plate back on. “Hand me the lamp and we’ll test it.”

The fluorescent tube clinked like microscopic bells and lit. Mr. Lyle stared at it, pleased, and the light sketched chilly blue-white highlights over his bare scalp, down his nose, along his upper lip, and across his chin like a scratchboard drawing on the brown of his skin. “My first name is Claudius,” he said. “Feel free to use it.”

As if I’d earned it by fixing the inverter — but that didn’t ring true. Before I had time to reconsider, I asked, “What happened to your voice?”

“I used to sing. I was proud of it. But when I was fifteen, I was involved in a cocaine deal that went a little astray. I was shot in the neck.”

“Chango.” My eyes, before I could stop them, went to a spot just below his face, but the band collar of his shirt hid most of his throat.

“It was hard to forgive that fifteen-year-old boy for ruining my voice. But you must forgive yourself. I never forgot; that would have meant unlearning the lessons that made me wiser than him. But I forgave.”

“Well, there,” I said brightly, and put the screwdriver away. “All done. But I still think you should switch to wind.”

As we retraced our steps to the front of the house, I waited for him to return to the subject. I was relieved when he didn’t.

The person I least wanted to talk to was Theo, so I was unreasonably annoyed when he was consistently somewhere else all afternoon. When I found China Black in the kitchen and mentioned him, she raised her hands from a pile of lettuce and looked at the ceiling. “Your Frances has him, cher,” she said. “She is making him draw maps and remember the number of steps in all of Ego’s staircases.”

“She’s not my Frances,” I said, without heat. “But I wish her luck. Theo’s doing all right if he remembers to go home when we turn the lights off.” That was spite; Theo was perfectly acute by any normal standard. Now I could tell her how many -

I could, too. I could tell Frances all manner of useful things about Ego, that Theo was unlikely to have noticed. Number of security people on the front and back entrances, day and night; old fire exits; corners that stayed dark, even when guards passed with their lamps… Theo would never have gone into those windowless rooms wary of the absence of light, as I had, frightened of the power that could swallow me with impunity, that dimmed my life to nonexistence just by being there.

Frances was planning her damned murder. Santos, I could take the point for her, with a videocassette in my hand. All I needed was a faked label for — what was the supposed name of the stupid thing? — Hellriders. The Horseman movie. I sold video to his old man, for gods’ sake. Did he know that? He had to.

“Are you well?” said China Black.

I’d forgotten I was in the middle of a conversation. “Yes,” I said. There was a leaf cast aside on the counter, brown around its red-and-green edges. I picked it up and turned it between my fingers and thumb. “Dana called you ‘Maitresse,’ ” I said suddenly.

China Black went on tearing lettuce. “Shall I answer the question you want to ask? I am teaching her, for her safety.”

“Safety?”

“I may be too late. Pombagira may already have her.”

“Who,” I asked with a stirring of unwelcome alarm, “is Pombagira?”

“She is the wife of Eshu. Some call her Red-eyed Erzulie. You will see her in the bar, in the whorehouse, wearing her tight red dress, smoking her cigarette. She likes liquor and blood, and in her service there is power and money, but no lasting joy.”

I pleated the lettuce leaf, and heard the center rib pop with each fold. “You can’t Deal with joy,” I muttered, but she heard me. She turned her back on the counter and stared at me.

“No. You can Deal with power and money, and shame and pain. Do you want your friend to have those?”

“I have no friends,” I said, and walked blindly away.

Pantry, power shed, garage. I stood staring at the limo, barely visible in the near darkness; the sun was dipping its toes in the river, to the west, and the garage windows faced east. Did Albrecht have a limo? Had Theo ridden in it, to the Underbridge, even, and dusted the smell of wealth off at the door to keep the secret? But it had been no secret for Sherrea. Just for me.

I didn’t want to think about either of them. I hoped Frances the Serial Killer was scaring the wits out of Theo, along with the information she wanted. Was this why Albrecht wanted the Horseman movie? Not because it was rare, but because he had a damned good reason for wanting to know about the Horsemen, no matter how unreliable the source? Because he was suffering an infestation of Tom Worecski?

Or maybe he was a willing accomplice. I thought of that money-pale face in the light of his desk lamp, the profile repeated on the coins he gave me. He’d sent me to find a copy of Singin’ in the Rain. Maybe Gilles de Rais would have loved Singin’ in the Rain. But if A. A. Albrecht was delighted with Tom Worecski, why had he wanted the Horseman movie?

My thoughts were as productive as peas in a rattle: they made a lot of noise, and went nowhere. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the garage door, so I left by it.

Evening, in that garden, seemed to bloom like one of its plants. Clinging to the garage wall was a vine with flowers like the bells of trumpets, milk-white and luminous in the dusk, lavishly scented. Bats rose in a translucent cloud from the eaves of an outbuilding and set to hunting with brisk, irregular darts. A slow spark fired and disappeared in the shrubbery across the grass, and another: fireflies. I crunched along the gravel path to round the garage and see the last of the sunset.

It was down to turquoise, watery gold, and indigo. “Going someplace?” said someone behind me.

“Nope.” I glanced over my shoulder. It was Mick Skinner. I wasn’t familiar with the timbre of his new voice, though I noticed that he’d brought the hint of Texas with him when he’d switched bodies. The light warmed his features, delicate and angular under the well-kept copper-brown skin. The whole body was well kept, I realized, and young. “Was that one trying to kill himself?” I asked.

“What?”

“Your new ride. This is going to be a real growth experience for him, right?”

“Jesus,” said Mick, “who put a burr under your sa—”

It took me an instant to remember the end of the expression, as it had him. The sound I made was a substitute for laughter. “Let’s do ’em all and get it over with. Shall I take the bit between my teeth? Or you could look a gift horse in the mouth.”

He looked away.

“I haven’t any horse sense. I kick over the traces. I’m mulish. I’m given to horseplay, nagging, and feeling my oats. Have we locked the barn after the horse got out, or is this a horse of a different color?”

“Stop.”

“Whoa?”

“I’m sorry,” Mick said. “Whatever it was I did. Only I’m betting it wasn’t me.”

I sighed. “Well, the thought of you doesn’t lead me to remember several years of my life with vague embarrassment.”

“What?” he said again. “You’re starting to sound like Frances.”

“That’s almost an insult.” I turned and walked back to where he stood. “Are you part of her invasion plan?”

He lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Why are you still here, then?”

“Why are you?”

“I don’t know. Sorry, that wasn’t meant as mockery. Last I heard, you and I were to be protected.”

He looked out toward the sunset, which was gone. “Would you join the invasion?”

Here was the opening to say that I knew Ego, that I knew Albrecht, that I’d be useful. “I can’t imagine why.”

After a moment he said, “Because nobody’s as good at looking out for themselves as Frances thinks she is.”

That was nearly as hard to figure out as the sentence of mine that he’d complained about. “Then maybe she’ll get killed. Ask anybody in this household if they’d weep at the thought.”

“I would.”

“Then go pick up your flamethrower and enlist.”

He smiled, reluctantly. “I don’t think a flamethrower would help.”

“Whatever. What does she have to do to get Worecski?”

Mick scuffed the gravel, drawing patterns in the pale stone with his toe. “It’s all brute strength and speed. At least, it always was. Christ, two Horsemen in a head fight is an ugly thing. You can keep somebody from switching rides, from shifting to a new body, if you move on him fast and hard, as if you’re gonna ride him.”

“What do the real owners of the bodies do while all this is going on? Referee?”

“They’re not necessarily there,” he said with an odd expression.

“Where are they?”

“A Horseman seals up the host personality and uses the rest of it: memory, conscious and unconscious motor control, learned skills. But… if you’ve got a horse you want to keep, and you want it to stay where you left it when you ride somebody else… it’s easier if the host isn’t there anymore.”

I felt a chill. “You kill it.” He could have killed me.

“It can happen by accident, if you ride too long. The personality dwindles away, like a candle going out. But you can snuff it right away, too, if you need to. If you want to.” He dropped his gaze to the path.

I wanted to ask him if he’d killed the young man who’d taken such care of that pretty body. I was afraid to know. “So Frances will try to take Worecski over. What happens if she does?”

“Oh, she won’t,” he said. “She just needs to hold him there while she blows his brains out.”

“Chango.” When my voice was entirely mine again, I said, “But if she’s — won’t she blow her own brains out, too? Effectively?”

“Timing’s everything,” he agreed. “If she pulls back too early, he can skip before she kills the body. If she doesn’t pull back in time, it’s blammo, brain for rent.”

Unless that gave the brain back to its original owner. Did Mick believe that Frances had killed her host? “You don’t talk as if this is hypothesis. You… People have done this before.”

“Yes,” he said, mildly surprised. “I told you, it’s called a head fight. Not too many people actually got killed, but that was usually the intention.”

“Frances has done this.”

“Oh, yeah. It must be the way she got the Horsemen she was hunting, too. She was always good. Strong and fast. But Tom was strong and fast and bugfuck crazy. I don’t think Frances can take him. Without help.”

“This doesn’t sound like something you can do by committee.”

“We could distract him,” said Mick. He was hard to see in the dark. “We could do that much.” He sounded as if he were arguing with something I couldn’t remember saying.

It was cool, out near the river after sunset. Mick was wearing his jacket, the one he wouldn’t leave behind in my apartment. I shivered and rubbed my arms.

“Then you can,” I said. “Have fun. If this is a remake of High Noon, she’s not Gary Cooper. She’s not the good guy.”

“Who is?” he asked, as if the question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Forget it. I’m square with Frances, and I’m sure as water runs downhill not going to try to get killed just because I can.”

“You still hold it against her, that bit back at your place.”

“No, I told you. We’re square. If I owed her, it would be different, but I don’t owe her anything. Do you?”

With a crunching of gravel, he turned back toward the shrubbery. He came out of the shadow of the garage and moonlight fell on him. I caught up to him where the path bent.

“We all slept with each other,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, at first. “We had a lot of contempt for normal people — or we said we did — and besides, some experiences are so strange and strong that they force you away from anybody who doesn’t share ’em. When we wanted to get laid, as opposed to when we wanted to prove something, we turned to our own kind. So Frances and I have gone to bed with each other a few times.” He pinched a branch end off the nearest shrub and toyed with the leaves, creasing them along the veins. “I think, for Frances, that’s all it was.”

I knew it wasn’t the sort of statement one was expected to answer. I said, “If that was supposed to make me understand, let me remind you that’s not a motivation I have much experience with.”

He looked up sharply. “Haven’t you ever liked someone? Respected them? Been their friend?”

Had I ever… “No,” I said. “So if you tell me it makes you want to get killed for no good reason, I’ll have to take your word for it.”

He dropped the twig. “I was going to tell you dinner was ready. I bet we’ve both missed it now.”

We had, but there were leftovers. I felt a little like a character mistakenly let loose in Beauty and the Beast, in that house. All one’s needs provided for, and no staff in sight. And a strong suspicion that one ought not to try to leave. Mick took his dinner away with him; I sat in the kitchen with mine, at a wooden table with a scarred top, under a hanging kerosene lamp. It was another of the house’s comforting rooms, full of simple objects and the smell of garlic. Or maybe the damned house just thought I needed comforting. I cleaned up after myself and found my way up the back stairs without incident to my allotted room.

Of all the things that might legitimately trouble me, one seemed to take precedence, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of it. I yanked off my boots and lay down on the bed, staring at the wall that sloped over it, the part under the roofline that was almost but not quite the ceiling. The wallpaper was full of flowers and leaves, like everything else in the house. Who was the gardener? China Black? It seemed out of character from my first sight of her, vampiric in dark blue chiffon and sunglasses, on the first floor of my building.

Bingo. The tea party, when China Black had told Mick Skinner that they weren’t looking for him, they were looking for his body. But in my apartment, China Black had asked… no, it wasn’t conclusive. She’d asked, more or less, to be allowed to speak to the previous occupant, and there was nothing to tell me for sure who she thought that might be. Then when she failed, and was so furious, she’d said, He wasn’t there.

If there was something about Mick that ought to be passed on, she or Mr. Lyle would do it. If it didn’t need to be passed on, I didn’t want to know it. After all, plenty of people around that tea table knew things about me I was glad they hadn’t said.

I lived on City time, staying up until dawn and sleeping through half the day to avoid fighting with the sun. So I was surprised when I woke to a mild blue morning sky in the window. I hadn’t remembered falling asleep, which I’d done in my clothes on top of the comforter. I really had to stop sleeping in my clothes. The hall was quiet. I thought of that bathtub suddenly, the one big enough to drown in. I dug my clean shirt out of my pack and headed for the bathroom.

If I’d been in Beauty and the Beast, the hot water would have been waiting for me. I found the sight of the empty tub reassuring. But there were towels in the cupboard, soap in the dish, and I didn’t even have to pump the water up by hand. Of course not — the inverter was fixed, the pump was running. There’d been a hand pump in the kitchen, so that even when the electric one was down, no one would have to haul water from outside. One cassette deck and the place would be a pretty supportable prison. I braided my wet hair and went downstairs.

The kitchen was deserted, but there were signs that someone, singular or plural, had already had breakfast. I found some leftover muffins and carried them with me as I wandered.

I wouldn’t explore the house; it would look as if I were hunting for company. I went outside again instead. Hidden in the gardens beyond the garage, I found the chicken yard, the rabbit cages, and the beehives. There was a wooden shed that I knew from the sweet hickory smell was the smokehouse. Past that, down a wooded trail, in the center of a broad ring of old trees, I found a circular one-story building that I couldn’t identify at all.

Half the building didn’t have walls; there were only the roof pillars, peeled trunks maybe six inches thick, to mark where the walls would be. The floor was dirt, packed smooth, and featureless as if swept. On one side, where the wall started, there was an empty raised platform. There was a center post for the roof, rising out of a cement footing. Beyond the center post, at the back of the circular room, it was dark; but I made out another platform, with a squarish bulk on it like a table or a chest, and irregular points of light. There was nothing to indicate that I ought not to go in.

The center post was painted. It reminded me of the stair railings in Sherrea’s apartment building, the colors twining one after another, yellow, red, black, green, and white. The walls were painted, too, with murals. They were simple and stylized, angular and almost abstract — the antithesis of Sherrea’s cards. A muscular young black man, smiling, wore a red cape and carried a curved sword, and seemed to be walking through fire. A naked woman, wide-hipped and heavy-breasted, her curly blue-black hair falling to her ankles, poured water from a jar under her arm. An old, fat black man sat cross-legged and grinning, as if his erect penis were the best joke in the world. Two snakes twined upward, facing each other, as if dancing on their tails. Between the figures, tying them together, explaining and keeping secrets, were the veves.

The square bulk was an altar, draped in scarlet and purple, and the changeable lights were candles. They reflected off the rest of the altar fittings: glass bottles, a mirror, strings of beads, a silver bowl, two tall vases with flowers in them.

I backed away and bumped into the center pole. The whole wide, unwalled space was closing in on me, pressing my skin against my muscles, muscles against protesting bones. I heard my breath entering and leaving in bursts. The back wall wavered under my eyes.

I heard a voice, not loud, but I didn’t see the speaker; I smelled ozone and a thick, watery odor, like the banks of a pond. My tongue was thick in my mouth. A ball of panic swelled in my chest.

A voice — the same one? Come with me. I felt an arm around me, guiding me. Then I was sitting on the grass under the trees, and a glass was pressed against my lips, holding something that gave off fierce fumes. I swallowed, almost prepared for it: rum.

The face above me belonged to China Black, as did the voice that said, “Well, cher, are you sickening for something?”

I took the glass of rum from her and had another sip. “What is that?” I said, nodding at the building.

“It’s the hounfor.” I must have looked blank, because she added, “Where we dance, and call the spirits.”

“I’m sorry. I suppose I shouldn’t have gone in.”

I thought, if she could have raised the silver eyebrows, she would have. “Why not? There’s nothing there to harm anyone, or do harm to. Were you afraid?”

“Not until… No.”

She studied me; then she took the glass out of my hand. “Hmh. Come along. Yes, back inside, nothing will happen to you.”

We came to the center pole, and she laid a hand on it. “This is the poteau-mitan. The spirits rise through it to us. The altar looks pretty, and we do our work there, but this is the source.” She stopped at the altar. “Kneel here. On the platform, yes.”

“Why?” I said.

Her dark face radiated tried patience. “Because it will make me happy. You do not believe in this. So what can it do to you?”

I knelt, which put everything on the altar at eye level.

China Black lit a new candle. “Legba,” she said, her voice peremptory, “are you listening to me? Here is one of your children, Papa Legba, a child of the crossroads. Are you watching out for this one, Papa?” She took a rough gray stone off the altar and handed it to me, along with the glass of rum. “Take a little and rinse your mouth with it,” she said. “Then spit it on the stone.” I did. She set the stone back on the altar. Then she handed me the mirror I’d noticed. “Do the same to this.” After I did, she took the mirror from me and set it on the altar to reflect my face. Distorted by the rum, the image reminded me of Frances’s catalog of my features, back in my apartment. I shivered and closed my eyes.

“Legba, you were thirsty, and we gave you rum. Now you see your child, Papa,” China Black said. “You will watch over this one, and play your tricks on the enemies of your servants. And we will make a meal for you, to show you we are glad that you have listened.” She tugged me to my feet, and led me out of the hounfor.

“Nothing’s free,” I said as we walked up the path. But I felt a nagging disappointment.

China Black stopped and stared at me. “Most things are free,” she said. “You have much to make up for, that is all.”

“What is Legba to me, or I to him?” I smiled when I said it, though.

“That is exactly what I mean.”

I made a gesture meant to include the hounfor, the gardens, the house. “Was most of this free?”

The look she gave me had irritation in it, and surprise, and a little of something else that I liked less. She shook her head and continued up the path. I followed her back to the house.

She put me to work. As long as I was there, she said, and knew about these things, I could look over their electrical system. I reminded myself that I was getting free room and board, whether I wanted it or not, and climbed up to the roof to look at the solar panels. If I hadn’t known better than to stay out in the sun that long, I would have found an excuse to be there all day. I could see the whole island, green and dotted with rooftops, and the silver-gray brilliance of the river around it. The suspension bridge looked like a fistful of streamers, tying the island to the City, and the City dozed upright, glossy and geometrical. I had locked the doors and covered my tracks; the archives were safe and would wait for me, as they always did.

There was a printing press in the basement. I should have known there would be. It was a hand-operated one; more than that I couldn’t tell, since that wasn’t the medium I specialized in. I recognized type cases, though, and the apparatus for laying out a page. I had to squeeze around it all to get to the circuit box.

I was in the cellar when Sherrea stuck her head around the door (I jumped) and said, “It’s lunch. Are you done?”

“Mmm.”

“Well, you may as well stop to eat it, since it’s there. Theo’s been asking where you are.”

It occurred to me that Theo could have done a lot of what I’d found to do today. He was a friend of Sher’s, and Sher seemed to run tame here. Had Theo been here before? Or had he been, was he still, an unknown quantity, as I’d been before Mr. Lyle — Claudius — surprised things out of me in the library?

The dining room, paneled and bay windowed, was awfully full of people. China Black and Claudius Lyle, Frances, Mick, Etienne, the old woman who’d opened the gates — yesterday? Was that all? — Theo, and now Sher and me. Sher’s hand lifted, as if it wanted to settle on my shoulder, and dropped again. “Don’t worry,” she muttered, “I’ll protect you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re half out of your mind, and hiding it damn well. I’ve never seen you in a group larger than three people.”

She was right, of course. Maybe it had to do with the chameleon nature she’d commented on, or maybe I was afraid that if I talked to more than two people at a sitting, they’d compare notes and find out all my secrets. The tea party in the parlor had been, before this, the largest intimate gathering I’d ever been in.

“What’s the old woman’s name?” I asked.

“Loretta.”

“And the dog’s?”

“What?”

“The dog’s name. If I’m doing this, I may as well do it all the way.”

Sher grinned. “Eustace.”

“You’re not serious.”

“The hell I’m not. It was six months before I could call him with a straight face.”

The food was laid out on the buffet, which meant I’d be spared having to ask anyone to pass the whatever. The whatever consisted of the crown jewels of southern cooking: ham and red-eye gravy, corn bread, hoppin’ john, string beans, and sweet potato pie. If Frances didn’t get on with her murder soon, she wouldn’t fit into Ego’s elevator.

Following Sherrea got me either exactly what I didn’t want, or what I did, depending on which interpretation of my wants I used. I found myself at a corner of the long table, with Sher on my right and Theo, at the end, on my left. He smiled when I sat down and pointed to the sling on his arm. “Temporary lefties get to sit in state, man,” he said. “Makes me want to ask the meeting to come to order.”

I stared at the sling, stupefied. He hadn’t told me anything about himself. I hadn’t told him anything about me. But he’d stood on that landing in the rain and taken a bullet from one of my would-be kidnappers. He — and I — made less sense than ever, but something heavy lay on the scales between us. I had ignored that, yesterday. How could I?

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. I keep forgetting and reaching for things.” He pulled a hand-rolled smoke out of his shirt pocket. “But hey, we have the technology.” It was a red-and-orange paisley shirt. I wondered it it was his. Probably.

I would have offered to cut something up for him, but the ham was fork-tender.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the quietest person at the table. Mr. Lyle mentioned that I’d recommended wind power, and engaged me in a pleasant argument about the efficiency of aging PV cells and the availability of good bearings. The woman from the gate, Loretta, was sitting across from me; she scowled and shook her head.

“Everybody ’long the river ought to be runnin’ off communal-owned hydro,” she said sharply. “Doesn’t make efficient sense or economic sense, all this sneakin’ around for power that rightly belongs to everybody or nobody. No point arguin’ over it, either, with that horse’s ass Albrecht sayin’ it’s all his.”

I glanced at Theo, but he seemed to be concentrating on his plate. For all I knew, he thought his father was a horse’s ass. How should I know? I had no idea what family feeling was like.

“Why hydro?” I asked.

“Frees up the rest of the stuff for folks without running water nearby. Though the way you talk, I could run a goddamn dance hall on old bicycle parts and a car battery.” I was about to protest when she smiled at me, and I decided I didn’t need to.

I talked; it was Frances who was quiet. Her face was pale and pinched, and sometimes her fork would pause in midmotion, and her eyes would lock on nothing at all. I was halfway through dessert before I understood. She was afraid.

Did she share Mick’s doubts? Was she wondering if she was fast enough, strong enough? Or was she only worried about getting in and getting out?

I could tell her the number of steps in all the staircases. But she never looked at me. Had Theo told her that I had knowledge she could use? Had he realized, yet, that I did?

Theo was pushing his chair back. “Can I talk to you?” I asked.

Sunlight flashed on the lenses of his glasses. “Sure. C’mon upstairs.”

I caught sight of Sherrea as I rose from the table. She looked pleased.

Theo had a room on the second floor. It was larger than mine, but it had the same character; it was a guest room, not a regular habitation. “Heck of a house,” I said, to see how he’d respond.

“Scared the shit out of me,” he said, dropping lightly on the bed and prying his sneakers off one-handed. “When Sher brought me here, right after that Frances hauled you away, and I saw this big old house with the lightning going off behind it… I thought she was checking me into the Bates Motel, man.”

He knew I’d understand the reference. I would have used it with him, secure in the same knowledge. I looked into his face, the pale face of a confirmed nighthawk or a rich kid, and said, “I’m not a man.”

The light on his glasses interfered with his expression, but there was no great surprise in the lines of his mouth. He was nice-looking, I realized suddenly, by any standards. “It’s just a figure of speech,” he said.

“I’m not a woman, either.”

He sat quiet for a few moments. Then he said, “Oh. That explains some stuff.”

I don’t know what I’d expected. Or wanted. “What stuff?”

“Well, Sher and I once, when we’d had a lot to drink, had this discussion. I said… that I felt, sometimes, like I had a crush on you, and it made me uncomfortable. And she looked at me like I was nuts, and said she didn’t know why it would, because you seemed like someone it would be pretty easy to have a crush on. I was really embarrassed, and I laughed and said maybe for her, but you weren’t, like, my type. Then we both looked at each other funny and changed the subject. But that was when I realized that maybe I didn’t know what sex you were, and maybe Sher didn’t either.”

“She figured it out,” I said thickly.

“She didn’t tell me.” He gazed steadily at me through the tops of his glasses as he said it. He was telling me that Sher had respected my privacy; and that he had, too, by not asking.

I sat down on the edge of an armchair across from the bed. We had the window between us, lighting both our faces. The conditions for perfect vulnerability had been established. So I told him everything I knew about what I was.

“Far out,” he said when I was done. “In fact, about the farthest out I’ve ever heard of. But none of you can figure out if you’ve got a Horseman in your head?”

I shook the body part in question. “I want to say I don’t. I’m sure I don’t. But how would I know? For a while Frances thought I was Tom Worecski, and I can’t even say for certain that I’m not.”

“No,” Theo said softly. “I’m pretty sure where he is. He’s calling himself Frederick Krueger. Some joke, huh? I never got it ’til yesterday.”

Freddy Krueger, with a handful of knives and the ability to turn dreams to his advantage. Who died at the end of every movie and came back again and again. Some joke. “Is he that bad?”

“I’m scared of him. I think my father’s scared of him.”

“And your father’s never even seen Nightmare on Elm Street, unless he bought it from somebody else. You knew I sold videos to your father?”

“Hell, yeah. That’s how you wound up at the Underbridge.”

After a moment I said, “Pardon?” Well, this wasn’t supposed to be painless.

Theo must have understood. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t — look, my dad and I don’t get along. I mean, if he was just a guy I knew, I wouldn’t like him. And contrary to popular belief, being A. A. Albrecht’s kid is not the coolest thing in the world. I make a point of not telling people. So I couldn’t just march up to you outside my dad’s office and tell you about the Underbridge. And I couldn’t ask you to sign on, anyway. It’s Robby’s club.”

“So you asked Robby to ask me?”

“So I told Robby that you might know the stuff we needed, and that he should check you out. I told him where he could leave a message for you.”

“You knew all this about me?”

He flung his free hand out to one side. He would have flung the other one, too; I saw him wince. “You were interesting! All right? D’you know how many other people care about this stuff? Electronics and old video and recorded music?”

“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.