Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I thought, No.

Then Tom sagged to the floor and Mick smiled. “Jesus, what a sucker,” he drawled, and put the barrel in his mouth.

“No!” Frances screamed, but it was drowned by the double crack of thunder, inside and out.

Tom stood up and shook himself. “Shit,” he said. “Shouldn’t’ve done that. There was still plenty of fun in him.”

He’d been weak, that was all. Mick had cared for Frances; he’d even cared, I realized, for me. But he’d been too weak to stand against a thing like Worecski. And I’d been too weak to save him.

Frances’s head dropped back against the door frame, and I heard a little despairing noise from her. Her eyes were tight shut. Mick had slid in a heap to the carpet, smearing the white couch on the way. The pistol lay on the floor between his body and his arm.

“One down,” said Tom. “Come on, girl. Jump for it.”

Slowly, Frances shook her head.

The bead of glass at my throat was cool and hard. My head was swimming with heat and loss of blood, and my legs were shaking under me. But neither gun was in Tom’s reach. So I took a last shuddering breath and flung myself untidily at him.

His arm came up across the side of my face like a log. There was no reason why someone who could do what he did should be so strong. He hoisted me up in two handfuls of shirtfront and shook me. I hit him as hard as I could in the stomach with my right fist, but the angle was bad, I was weak, and it wasn’t hard enough. He grunted and bared his clenched teeth, and pushed me backward into the wall. I sobbed when my left shoulder hit.

He wasn’t going to fight with his head. If he didn’t, I hadn’t a chance against him. But the alternative to this pointless battering was to sit quietly and wait for him to kill me. That seemed wasteful.

I staggered upright and went for his throat with both hands. Tom grabbed my wrists and forced me back to the wall again, pinned me there. His eyes, so close to mine, suddenly widened and cut sideways, toward the door.

“Jesus Christ, Frances, what’s holding you back? I thought for sure—But if you were ridin’ this, it would fight better. What does it take, Franny?”

I wondered if she’d heard that. If he was right, she and I would both be better off if she’d ditch her principles and ride.

I could see the pores in his face in the lightning flashes; I could smell the sharp reek of his sweat and feel the moist heat of him. I twisted, felt torn things in my shoulder pull farther apart, and bit off a cry.

“Now I remember,” he said, his voice mild and cheerful. “You don’t like to be touched.” And he leaned forward and forced his mouth down hard on mine.

My teeth were already clenched; it was too late to clamp my lips between them. The hierarchy, from weakest muscles to strongest, is: lips, tongue, jaws. At least he couldn’t get past my teeth. He pulled his head back and laughed softly; his breath fanned my cheek, as warm and damp as the air. “Your head is sayin’ no, but—hell, your body’s sayin’ no, too. Guess I’ll have to change your mind.”

Somewhere in my brain, I probably had the equivalent of jaw muscles, that I could have closed and kept closed. I didn’t know where they were. Tom Worecski had ridden me once before; but the circumstances had been such that I didn’t remember what it had been like. I expected something like the blinding shock of Frances’s assault, a forced mental entry like a mortar shell. I didn’t expect Mick’s easy falling in and out, like blinking, like a switch toggled. All my expectations were worthless.

Tom was a gelid, poisonous presence inserting itself through the soft places in my personality, trickling in like dirty water through a crack. He was a flavor of decay in the back of my throat, a rotting-vegetable slickness under my fingers, the rustling sound of beetles scurrying. And it was all done slowly, slowly, so that I had time to understand what was happening to me. So I knew exactly what sort of tenant would occupy the rooms of my body once I was forced out.

I struggled. I did it physically, flat against the wall, unable to so much as get a knee up between us; and mentally with even less effect.

Suddenly I was alone again. Tom still pinned me in place, but he’d jerked back a little. He was glaring. “What the fuck you got on you?” he said. “What is it?”

He let go of my left wrist. I went for his face with my freed hand, but before I reached him he slammed his right shoulder into my damaged one. The sensation was, for several seconds, literally blinding. My knees buckled, but Tom’s grip kept me from falling.

The chain must have showed a little inside my shirt collar. He hooked a finger in it and flipped it to the outside. The glass bead glittered between us in the crazy light, and he caught it. As soon as he did he knew it was important, by the way I behaved.

It was like Beano all over again: slapping me against the wall, twining fingers through the cord—no, chain—around my neck. But this couldn’t be Beano’s. No miasma of incense. Gunpowder stink, and the smell of blood, which at Beano’s had come later. Oh, santos, Sparrow, keep your mind on it, don’t pass out now. I blinked, trying to clear the smudginess from everything.

“Voodoo shit,” Tom spat out. He fingered the glass bead. “Was this supposed to fool me? Figured you were gonna stick a few pins in me? Shit.” He yanked, and the chain cut into the back of my neck and broke. The bead slid off and dropped to the floor. He moved his foot, moved it back, and I saw the scattering of bright dust in the mottled light through the windows. Something ran from the corner of my eye to my jaw. It might have been sweat.

“All right, now,” he breathed. “Let’s party.” And he began again.

Water action. Filthy liquid filling me up slowly, dissolving me, toxins rushing into my mouth, my nostrils, my ears, filming my eyes, devouring the connections between me and my senses. He’d taken control of my gag reflex already, or I would have obeyed it.

Only twenty-four hours before, my friends had acted out the gathering-together of a tangle of energy, the naming of it: Sparrow. Now Tom O’Bedlam consumed it, strained its juices between his teeth, picked the meat out of it with delicate, epicurean delight. Mick and Frances had told me that the host personality could be starved or smothered gradually, or killed outright. They didn’t tell me it could be eaten.

I couldn’t feel anything. I could still hear: thunder, rain driving against the window, the two of us panting in unison. I could see; he hadn’t taken the optic nerves yet, or the muscles that moved my eyes. Over Tom’s shoulder I had a view of Frances, her head turned against the door frame, her face drawn in loosely with pain. But only loosely, as if it was a leftover expression, as if what had caused it was gone or nearly so.

Maybe she would find that white, flat place. Once Tom was done with my battered body, maybe I would, too.

There was a roaring in my ears, growing steadily. It was in the room, too; the window glass was rattling.

Then the building cracked in half. I heard it.

There was light like white air burning, like a welder’s arc against the eye, like the light in the old military films of nuclear tests. Tom/I screamed; and did it again when the light didn’t wink out. It was his scream in my throat, but I felt it. Somewhere along the tunnel I was disappearing down, there was a remote control for that much of me, if I could just find a button and push… No, it was lips. Just put your lips together…

Silly. Say goodbye. The sound was one I’d heard in movies, when a train thundered down upon the camera like doom.

“Pw? your lips… Nothing to lose.