Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“Oh. Yes, down the hall.”

“Mr. Lyle. Bring him, please.”

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

“Yes,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wasn’t even tempted to answer that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went down.