Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Cyn Horton gave me the matches. Elise Krueger held the candle while I lit it. The following umpty-ump thousand words are dedicated to both of them. Thanks, guys.

A book, like a building, needs a proper foundation; Tom Canty, Terri Windling, and Will Shetterly helped to lay the underpinnings for this one. But any doors out of true or stairs that lead nowhere are my fault.

I owe thanks to Jerry Blue, Denise Habel, Tom Grewe, Magenta Griffith, Mitch Thornhill, and Tony Taylor for their generous assistance with construction materials, to Howard Davidson for inspecting some of the wiring, to Tom Juntunen and Will Shetterly for help in hanging pictures, and to April Anderson for the secret blueprints of the Norwest Bank building. Still more thanks to Beth Fleisher, who understood when the tract house became the Winchester Mansion.

This edifice has been inspected by the Minneapolis Scribblies, for which inspection the author is darn grateful, you betcha. Additional building code compliance supplied by Cupertino Decon-struction: Jon Singer and Gordon Garb.

The section headings are paraphrased from Bill Butlers Dictionary of the Tarot (Schocken Books, 1978), a wonderful book for anyone interested in the comparative symbolism and interpretation of the tarot.

The room was dark. The room was always dark, because it had no windows; it ought not to have meant anything. But the way the shadows hung like drapery around the desk; the way the crook-necked lamp cast its measured oval of light on the polished rosewood; the way the silence lay on the room, unbroken by the hiss of a gas mantle; the way the faint, faint smell of petroleum and electricity, like the odor of wealth itself, rose up from everywhere these things gave the darkness meaning. Nothing in that room was incidental.

The customer sat behind his desk, in a chair so tall and wide it could have hidden two bodyguards. He leaned away from the light, and it from him. Maybe hed read somewhere that hiding ones face made for psychological advantage in business transactions. He was welcome to think so. He already had the only real advantage: money. All the rest was costume and props.

The merchandise was contained in a flat metal box half again as long as a hand, which had once been white. I put it on the edge of the desk, just outside the pool of light. Then I laid one finger on it and pushed, so that it skidded across the shining wood and stopped in front of him.

His hands came up from under the desk and settled on either side of the box. Then the left one rose again, touched the metal, spread flat on it.

The one I asked for? he said. They were the first words out of his mouth since his door had opened and let me in.

Look at it.

He scrabbled a little at the catch, his self-control momentarily breached. One hinge stuck, complaining; then the box opened with a tic, and a broken speck of metal skittered over the rosewood. Inside was another box, plastic. It was mostly deep blue, with a color photo reproduced on it, and the title. He was familiar with the design, I knew. Id brought him others like it, but with different photos, different titles. He opened the second box to reveal the videocassette. He touched the label as if it might be fragile. Singing in the Rain, he said, and I could hear his satisfaction self-satisfaction, really. He closed the inside box, and the outside. His hands returned to their guard positions, flat on the desk with the tape between them, like brackets in an equation.

Do the contents match the label? His voice was strong now, the voice that ordered that room and everything outside it.

Yes.

And is it really the original, or did you make a copy to sell me?

At that, I reached out, laid the same single finger on the metal box, and slid it back across the desk to me. His hands curved like little cats rising and stretching. But they didnt reach after the box. He knew the Deal.

You can look for it somewhere else, I said politely, if you arent comfortable buying from me.

His mouth, perhaps, had gone dry. I liked to think so.

We stayed like that for a moment. He might have been considering sending me away, but I doubted it. I had been searching for this one, at his request, for six months.

Finally he pulled a narrow leather bag into the light and spread it open. He shook the contents into his hand and lined them up, and made sure I saw that the bag was now empty. That was insulting, but not as insulting as his questions. Ten bright, round bits of gold he laid out between us, each with a nice portrait in the center, lovely examples of the coin-making art. Two hundred dollars hard, precisely what he had promised. Such a memory on that man.

I turned the line of coins into a stack with one hand and passed the box across the desk with the other. I looked at the top coin, then smiled across the barrier of light toward his face. Remarkable likeness, I said. I made the money disappear, and hoped hed noticed; it was a response to his showing me there was nothing left in the leather bag to steal.

Another commission, he said, as if I had asked for one and he was weighing the prospect. He needed this little dance to keep from himself the knowledge that he needed me. Thisll be a hard one.

The last one wasnt exactly lying around like gravel.

He picked up the box that held Singin in the Rain, and turned it over and over in his hands. At last, he said, I want the Horsemen movie.

I laughed, which I hadnt meant to do. No.

Why not?

Because Ive never seen it, thats why not. If anyone in the City would have seen it, I would, and I havent.

So you think it doesnt exist. There was chilly disbelief in his voice.

I know the folklore. That some poor bastard made a sci-fi-B-movie in which psychic Special Forces soldiers took over the minds of evil brown dictators and won the war in South America. And that some folks who wore dark glasses in the nighttime arrived at his house, asked him urgent questions, and took him into custody. Ive never heard if they let him out. Ive never heard that the thing got video release. Ive never even heard it proved that it was released, period. File the whole story next to Hitchhikers, Comma, Vanishing.

There was a silence, in which I decided he was trying to figure out what that meant. If he asked, I was going to tell him to look it up.

You sound as if you dont believe in the Horsemen.

Sometimes I feel a profound, crippling sense of loss for something I never had: the world, as it once was. I felt it then. Of course I believe in the Horsemen. I just dont believe that someone had the bad luck to make a movie about them.

Youre turning down the job?

I shook my head. Ill look. Ive been looking for years. But Im not going to find it. Not now. It if had ever existed, do you really think thered be a copy left unburnt?

Five hundred, he said.

I raised my eyebrows. A thousand, hard. Be glad I dont ask for the hand of your firstborn and half your kingdom.

No oned give you a thousand for a goddamn movie.

Then if I find it, no one will get it.

Long, expensive-sounding silence. If you find it, he said finally, rustily, bring it to me.

I smiled, and stifled the impulse to bow. We had not agreed on a price; but wed agreed that his figure and mine marked the borders of a country we were willing to skirmish in later, if the need arose.