Emma Bull - Bone Dance

…and blow.

I had lost sight and hearing. But white fire filled the bottom of my blindness, lapped around my ankles, surged up to my knees, my hips, my rib cage, sliced between Tom’s fingers and my neck, and closed over my head. I thought I heard a shriek, but sound wouldn’t have carried in that medium.

I didn’t know if it was a flat world; there was nothing in it. It was white. It wasn’t warm or cold, welcoming or repellent, sweet or cruel. It was not the place I had come to before. There was nothing in it. No helpful pictographs, no street signs. The natives knew their way around.

Bait, I thought furiously, in a state of nonawareness. You wanted me for bait.

It worked. There were no words formed. The answer was just a part of the void that meant something.

Your timing sucked!

My timing was perfect. The lightning froze him in the midst of possessing you, my whirlwind lit the building and destroyed the barriers that kept me out of Ego, my possession of you consumed him. There was no other possible order.

What did you do to Worecski?

Nothing. I rode you. He was no business of mine, except that you were concerned with him. It was his bad luck that I arrived when I did, and that it’s true what they say, that “Great gods cannot ride little horses.”

Tom… wasn’t your business?

You know my business. If you don’t remember, ask my little sister. Your friend the witch.

You never said you couldn’t get into Ego.

There is no technical manual for the spirit world. You will never know everything.

Why me? Why was it ever me?

Your left foot is in the past. Your right foot is in the present. You hold steel in your left hand, and flint in your right. You are the dancer between the old world and the new, because I made you to be so.

Fuck you! I deny you!

Do you deny your hands and feet?

Silence, in that volumeless space that had never admitted sound.

Let me go back, I said. Frances is dying.

I’m not keeping you here. Go.

I opened my eyes on a room bathed in watery golden light. The Gilded West was still gilded. The wind still roared outside. I was lying on my back. Tom lay three feet away in a half curl, one hand flung out loosely on the carpet, his eyes open and motionless.

“Anybody home?” I croaked. “Are you dead?” There was no response from whatever was left of Tom Worecski.

I crawled to the door, and Frances. Her breath still fluttered in and out of her parted lips, quick and shallow. Her eyes opened.

“Oh, why did I do that?” she whispered.

“Shut up, Frances.”

“Don’t be silly; you wouldn’t be able to tell who I was. He didn’t used to be a very good shot, you see. The nerve of the bastard, practicing up. It’s not fair.”

“Frances, please –”

There was a sound, from on the floor—from the inert body of Tom Worecski. I should have known; it was in all the horror movies. One last resuscitation. But in this movie, the heroes weren’t going to be able to kill the monster one more time.

The sandy head lifted from the floor and turned its frantic ice-pale eyes on me, and its mouth said, “Who are you? What’s… where am I?”

“Good grief,” Frances sighed. She sounded weakly amused. “He didn’t kill the host.”

“Are you sure? I mean, that he’s not—”

“We can… could always spot each other. He’s not there.”

I looked back into those nearly colorless eyes and tried to see them as the eyes of a stranger. For a moment I couldn’t think what to say to him. Then I called on my memories of the same experience. “You’re safe. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll help you in a minute, but please—just wait, okay?”

I knew it wasn’t going to work. He stared at me, and at Frances who had most of her blood, it seemed, on the outside of her.

“Don’t—” I began, but of course he turned his head and saw Mick, too. He would now have hysterics, and there wasn’t time for them.

Perhaps Tom had let him surface to scenes like this before. He didn’t have hysterics. He folded back up on the carpet with his hands over his face, in a pitiful attitude of submission and hopelessness. Eventually, I think, he passed out; I didn’t see him stir.

I turned back to Frances. “Now, shut up and mount up.”

“What?”

“Ride, damn you. I’m not half as near to dying as you are. Mount up and we’ll both get out.”

She smiled, almost. “And then what? Shall I steal another body once we’re out? Or just stay in yours forever?”

“What’s wrong with Mick’s solution: taking someone who’s getting out of the living racket anyway?”

“Why should it be better to steal people’s deaths than their lives? It’s a rite of passage. How do you know that Mick’s suicides weren’t harmed by what he did?” She winced, and shifted slightly against the molding.

I wanted to fetch a couch cushion to prop her up, but I was afraid she’d die while I was away doing it. I looked around for anything else I could use, and saw her near hand, palm down, on the carpet. Showing between her fingers was a bit of black leather thong strung with a black onyx bead.

“Not strictly sentimental, after all,” she said. “I had to be able to find you. You can have it back now, if you want. Oh, Christ, don’t cry.”

I swallowed, with difficulty, and it didn’t help. “Frances, please. Ride me out of here. If you don’t…”

“You’ll kill me?” she whispered, grinning.

“Probably,” said a harsh voice above me, “by talking you to death. Get out of the light, you idiot.”

I ducked and rolled sideways, expecting a blow that never came. Then I recognized the broad shape leaning over me, and the voice. It was Josh. His face was set like concrete. LeRoy was right behind him, hauling gear, his eyes huge.

“It’s too late, Josh,” Frances said.

“I love a challenge.” He stuck a needle in her arm.

“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she whispered, shaking her head. Her eyes closed.

I knelt frozen on the carpet and stared. “Is she…”

“She’s passed out. Now shut up.”

“Josh—what are you doing in here? It’s not safe—”

He jerked his head toward the window. “The building’s lit up.”

“Are you crazy ? The place is full of—”

“LeRoy, plug up the hole in this and give it a sedative.”

I would have felt it less if he’d slapped me. He knew it suddenly; he was very still. “I’m sorry. I—” He shook his head and turned back to Frances.

“Not a sedative,” I said. “LeRoy, get that guy out of here.” I nodded at the sandy-haired stranger who’d been Tom Worecski. “He’s alive. Give him the sedative. He’ll go nuts if he wakes up. Tom was riding him.”

“My,” said Josh, his back to me, his gloved hands full of tools, “there’s one alive. Was that an oversight?”

“I didn’t—” Then I realized that Josh hadn’t suggested it was my oversight. I wondered who he blamed.

During the exchange, LeRoy had torn the sleeve off my shirt and examined my bullet hole. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to take the shirt off.”

It was good of him to remember. “Go ahead.”

He did it with a minimum of fuss or contact, and dressed the wound the same way. His hands were shaking, and cold, but deft nonetheless. He produced a hypodermic from apparently thin air—I wondered if I’d blacked out for a few seconds—and I shook my head.

“No, LeRoy, I’m serious.” I hadn’t finished something…”

“I know,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “It’s not a sedative.” He wielded the needle like an expert, which I suppose he was. “It’ll take a minute. But don’t do anything stupid, okay?”