by Emma Bull
She stared at me, then took in the room with a quick shift of her gaze. I think, until then, she hadn’t really seen it. “Bless my soul,” she said at last. “It’s the lost graveyard of the Sonys.”
“If it was only a graveyard, I wouldn’t care,” I replied, though I hated to do it. “They all work.”
She looked the room over again, this time with more attention. Then she looked at me. I could almost hear her thinking, though not well enough to know in what direction. “Lead the way,” she ordered. So I did. She gestured Mick Skinner out behind me.
I walked into the middle room. The teakettle was lying on the floor in a small puddle; most of the water seemed to have disappeared between the floorboards. That, and a black smudge on the ceiling, were all that were left to remind me of La Maitresse and Mr. Lyle. I took the kettle to the sink and started pumping water into it. There was a calm and reasoned dialogue going on in my head, something like:
This is a ridiculous thing to be doing.
The whole business is ridiculous. What should I be doing that would make more sense?
She might shoot me.
For making tea? I suppose she might. She might shoot me for not making tea.
In other words, I can’t fix things no matter what I do, so I might as well do anything at all.
I think I’m so scared I can’t feel it.
When I turned back to face my houseguests, Mick Skinner was standing by one felt-covered window, watching me, bemused and a little alarmed. And he was Mick Skinner; I was surprised at how easy it was to think of him that way, independent of his looks.
The woman, Frances, was perched lightly on the arm of the leather slingshot chair, the rifle comfortable in the crook of her right arm, its barrel tracking Mick Skinner. A casual sweep of that arm, and both he and I would be perforated at the waist.
She said, “I haven’t forgotten the subject before the committee, even if you have. What brought you here, Mick?”
“I came back for my jacket.”
“No, no, answer the exam questions fully; you’ve no idea what we’re testing for. This city, Skinner, you idiot, just now, for what God-damned purpose.”
He looked steadily at her, his face baffled and hurt, and resigned. “Do you still have purposes?” he asked. “I used mine up. I just move around, Fran.”
“Why move here?”
“I’d never been here, so I came. I had a notion to go on north and try to get into Canada.”
“A pitiful and profoundly moving story,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been hoping she’d believe him until I felt my spirits fall. “Let’s explore a promising side passage, shall we? What’s your connection to our chum here?” She tipped her head toward me.
Mick Skinner, inexplicably, was silent. “He rode me,” I told her, and stopped. The bald statement of it, out loud, sickened me; and it didn’t answer her questions, or mine.
“Oh, my downy chick, my sweet hatchling, I know that. I knew there was one of us here by the stink of it. When I laid hands on you, there on the bridge, I got the smell of Horseman in my nose so strong I thought I’d gag with it.
“Did you know that, Mick? That we leave a trail behind us, a spoor of possession? It’s related, I think, to the way we recognize each other in some other poor bastard’s body. And I thought, when I got a whiff of this one, that it was damned familiar.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Mick said. He sounded as if the words were being squeezed out of him. “I had… some bad rides. I didn’t know what happened the first time. I didn’t make the switch, it just—”
“Don’t, please, spare us the gory details,” Frances said pleasantly.
“The body I was on got hit by a car,” he said. I could tell — I thought I could tell — he hated doing it. “And suddenly I was three streets over, on Sparrow, being pushed out a door.” I had been in danger of being thrown through the door; if he had, by skill or fortune, spared me that, I owed him something. “I only stayed long enough to find another ho — another body.”
“What was wrong with that one?” Frances asked, pointing at me.
A muscle worked in Mick’s jaw. “He wasn’t done with it.”
Frances raised her eyebrows.
Mick Skinner’s eyes closed, and his long brown hands clenched. He was… ashamed? Of not taking me over? “I can’t not do it. Every time the choice comes, between dying and taking another horse, I jump for the horse every goddamn time. I can’t let go of living. But I try to find people who have let go. You find somebody who’s about to eat a bullet, you hop on, take the gun out of his mouth — it’s almost with his consent, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel so fucking evil.”
“But it happened more than once,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say it again: You rode me.
“I couldn’t get a solid ride. Sick people are hard. Crazy ones are harder. Jesus, the last one I got on a second too late, and he was dead. I didn’t think that was possible.” He looked up at me, apologetic. “And you were such a good fit. I kept being pulled back. I didn’t mean to be.”
At that, Frances began to laugh. She rose from the arm of the chair and came over to me. She still held the rifle as if she meant to use it. “Heavens, yes. Fits as if it were made for you. And with every convenience built in. Of middling height, to avoid drawing attention. Strong, young, resistant to disease, toxins, and bad food. And eminently biddable.”
“Fran,” said Mick with great care, “you don’t have to mess with Sparrow.”
“No, I don’t. But I want to. Do you know, Mick, that by my reckoning there are only three Horsemen left? I’d thought it was two, until you surfaced, which only shows you that I may be a hair off in my figures.” She was close enough for me to see the gloss of sweat on her skin. “Only the real sharks survived the witch-hunts after the Big Bang. And I found that each passing year pruned them further, leaving only the creme de la creme of sharkdom.
“Now, Mick, my old friend and partner, if there are only three of us left, and my theory of natural selection is correct, mustn’t we be the three meanest sons of bitches in the valley?”
Mick shrugged, not too unconvincingly.
“And yet — I remember you, Mick. You weren’t a nice person—”
“We were all shits,” Mick interrupted.
“ — but you didn’t have the real, cold-hearted taste for blood. Now, how could someone like that have survived for years in a world that will not suffer a Horseman to live? By apprenticing himself to the biggest shark of all, the Daddy Killer of the whole toothy race, that’s how. The slayer of cities, the drowner of worlds, the pusher of Buttons. Let me tell you why I’m in this city. I’ve come to pay a long-delayed call on the Prince of Sharkness.”
The stove burner hissed in the silence while Mick and I worked out what that meant. “Who?” Mick said finally. His voice was a colorless whisper, and all the blood had deserted his face for parts unknown. “Who was it? My family lived in Galveston.”
“Excessive, Mick. Too much pathos. Add the dog that was your boyhood companion, and I’ll throw you off the stage.”
“Who did it, Fran?”
She was grave when she said, “For to see Mad Tom O’Bedlam, ten thousand miles I’ve traveled.”
Mick Skinner stared, his round black eyes open as wounds. His lips formed the first letter twice before any sound came out. “Worecski? Tom Worecski pushed the Button?”
“He was the mastermind. He assembled the clique, and convinced them they would be humanity’s saviors. The clique, hubris-ridden idiots, have made permanent amends. Now there’s only Mad Tom.”
Mick put one unsteady hand behind him, found the wing chair, and sat in it. “It would have been Worecski. My God.”
The teakettle was rumbling, I realized, and I stepped toward the camp stove to turn it off.
“No,” said Frances. She took hold of a lock of my hair and pulled me to a halt. “We just got to the good part.”
I stood very still as she fingered my
hair, tugged it lightly, tucked it behind my ear. I would not tremble like a nervous dog.
“As I was saying about our specimen here, all the conveniences. The apparent genetic inheritance, for instance. The ruddy tan, the black hair and dark eyes, the bone structure” — she tapped my cheek under my right eye — “nothing there to raise an eyebrow anywhere from Oklahoma to Tierra del Fuego. Indigenous Western Hemisphere genes. Just what you’d want for sneaking around down below Texas.”
Mick Skinner’s eyes were on us, but I wasn’t sure they were seeing anything. I wondered if his mind was somewhere in drowned Galveston.
“Another handy thing about those genes is that they’re commonly associated with a lack of facial hair in males.”
My resolve was all for nothing; I was shivering in little, uncontrollable bursts. Frances was studying my face as if I were a painting, or something else that couldn’t stare back. She prodded my jaw lightly. I was more aware of her hand than the rifle.
“And there, Mick,” she said, “we come to the real artistry. This face, this pleasing architecture that would be handsome on either sex. The gothic arches of the eyebrows and the nostrils and the lips, echoing each other. That’s a work of art, that is, a work of trompe l’oeil.”
“He hates to be touched, Fran,” said Mick.
“A nice balance of bone to flesh, too. Seems a bit sturdy one minute, a bit frail the next. The Adam’s apple, that was tricky. See?” She pushed lightly with her thumb to raise my chin. “There isn’t one, but there’s sort of a suggestion in the angle of the neck. Marvelous. There’s a lot here that’s done with suggestion, in fact.”
Mick said, “Stop it.”
“The silhouette of the torso, for instance.” She drew a line with her index finger, slowly, from my collarbone to my stomach. I closed my eyes. “Tapered, but not excessively; narrow at the waist, but not too much. The tits weren’t a problem; within tolerance for a flat-chested woman, as long as the shirt never comes off.”
“Frances,” Mick said in a voice that would have stopped a train. It stopped her hand on the first button of my shirt. “Yes?”
“I got real tired of watching people be tortured. Give me another thirty years to work up a taste for it. He hasn’t done anything to you.”
She was suddenly full of focused intensity, like a magnifying glass held up to the sun. “His mind?” she asked Mick gently. “Or the body? You and I, we’ve learned to consider them separately.”
“Do you think he’s Tom? God damn it, Fran, I’ve been in there. I would have known—”
“Two things: I have only your word for that; and if it’s not Tom,” she said in a voice like a breeze off an icefield, “why do you call it ‘he’?”
Mick opened his mouth, and closed it.
“Because if you’ve ridden this body,” said Fran, with horrible satisfaction, “you must know it’s not male.”
“Or female,” Mick said faintly. “It’s — oh. Oh, my God.”
“Christ, Mick, if you really were surprised, I’d think you were a drooling idiot. Non-sex-specific bodies aren’t exactly thick on the ground.”
“It’s a cheval,” said Mick, huge-eyed.
“Very good, class.” She brushed loose hair back from my forehead and studied my face. “A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll,” she said to me — at me — whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t me. She didn’t believe I existed. Oh, tricky Legba, she was going to kill me, and she didn’t even know I was there. I stepped back, and she matched me as if she’d read my mind. She probably had. “A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle made to be filled by one of us, empty brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to the desperate Horseman, in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us to ride. And that means one of us is riding it. If his intentions were good, why the charming masquerade?” Her eyes were strange and wild, and I couldn’t look away from them.
“What if he — she — doesn’t know?” Mick said desperately. “What if it’s one of us, but messed up, so he doesn’t remember?” Her fingers twisted in my shirtfront, and she thumped me back against the kitchen wall.
“Run for it, Tom,” she said softly. “Or plead a bit, or try to kill me. Do anything you like, except move to skip off this body. That, I won’t allow.”
My vision wavered with tears, and my knees were buckling. I wanted to reach out and grab her shoulders, to hold myself up, to beg, but I was afraid to raise my hands for fear she’d pull the trigger. She was going to pull it anyway. My knees hit the floor, and the tears spilled over. What a horrible, shameful, pointless way to die. “Please,” I babbled wetly, “I’m not who you think I am. I’m not anybody.”
Mick Skinner said fiercely, “Fran, if you don’t stop, I’m gonna hit you. And you’re gonna have to weigh whatever’s kept you from shooting me against that.”
“Maybe I just wanted an audience,” she replied. There was a distance in her voice at odds with the violence in her eyes. “Shall I tell you how many people’s bodies I’ve ridden and lost, or used up? I can’t remember. But I took them all to get Mad Tom Worecski. I’ll kill that many again before I let him get away from me.”
“It’s not Worecski,” Skinner shouted. “You want to know for sure? Ride him — it — oh, God damn! Ride it and see!”
She stood over me, her face wild. The muzzle of the rifle was almost against my lips. Then hot white pain blossomed in my chest, my head, pierced my eyes and ears and made me deaf and blind. Consciousness didn’t slide away; it just stopped.
And was back. I had barely enough warning to turn my head before I threw up. My head was too heavy for my neck, and both of them were too much for my shoulders. I slumped against the wall. That hadn’t been anything like before, when I’d been… when Mick… I couldn’t think it, I’d be sick again.
Frances was still in front of me, her feet planted wide, the rifle in her hands. She was the color of raw bread dough, and her face and arms shone with sweat. She shook her head and turned away, walked across the room to the desk, and laid the rifle on it. Then she braced both hands on the desktop.
“He’s not there,” she said, her voice muffled. I wondered if it was her voice or my ears. Mick stood watching her, and I thought he might be preparing to do something, though I didn’t know what. “But one of us has to be riding. The chevaux were empty, no personality, no mind. Just a carcass. It’s a cheval, but there’s a mind on it, so it must be one of us. But it’s not Tom Worecski. And if it’s not… ” She straightened up, and her right hand reached, shaking, for empty air. ”… then I don’t know where he is.”
Slowly, tidily, she folded up; Mick caught her before her head hit the floor.
“Oh, Frances, you never did know much about people. Including you.” Mick turned to me, and there was nothing on his face to say that he didn’t spend every day in scenes like the one we’d just played. “It’s only exhaustion,” he added.
It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the woman in his arms. I wanted to say something rude, but couldn’t mobilize more than a stare.
“She was always like this. Like a damn guided missile — once she launched herself at something, she couldn’t stop or slow down or change direction. We used to call her Redline. I’ll bet she hasn’t let this body sleep for a couple-three days.”
He got her over his shoulder and stood up with a grunt. “I’ll put her on the bed.”
“No.”
He stopped and blinked at me.
“She was about to shoot me in the face. Leave her where she fell. If she gets a crick in her neck, I’ll cry buckets.” Then I remembered that the crick would be in someone else’s neck. But Frances would feel it… Papa Legba, no wonder they’d gone nuts.
Mick frowned, but lowered Frances gently back to the floor. Her black hair had swung forward when he’d picked her up; strands were caught in her eyelashes a
nd over her lips. Mick smoothed them back, his long brown hands light and careful, as if he were afraid of marking her skin. “She’s not… It sounds stupid, but she’s not so bad. For one of us. She was crazy, but she wasn’t vicious.”
The taste of bile was still in my mouth, and I was shivering steadily. “Which were you?” I asked. “Crazy, or vicious?”
He settled back on his heels and shook his head. “We were all crazy. God, how long d’you think you could stay well adjusted after you found out you could possess people?”
“I’m the possessee. You tell me.” I got up slowly — I felt as if I’d lost blood, I was so weak — and turned off the fire under the kettle. It hadn’t boiled dry, which was my only proof that it had not been hours since I filled it. I rummaged for tea on the shelves and found chamomile in a jam jar. Fine with me; my nerves could use soothing. I caught myself reaching for the teapot, and took down a mug instead. While the flowers steeped, I cleaned up after myself.
“If I leave for half an hour, will you be here when I get back?” Mick Skinner asked, which forced me to admit to myself that he was still in the room.
“Where are you going?”
“Thought I ought to fetch some food, before things shut down at dawn.”
He was relatively new to the City, but he knew the Night Fair’s schedule. “Did you steal that out of my head?”
“What — oh. Yeah. I needed it this morning, when I… ” When he’d ridden me last. “Do you have all my memories now?”
“No. Don’t get so damned excited. I get at a hor — a person’s memories just like they do. I have to fish for ’em. Sometimes what I’m concerned with brings one up, but it’s usually not that easy.”
I settled carefully into the wing chair, cradling my mug in both hands. I felt as brittle as one of my fragile old tapes, yanked into motion between pinch rollers, around capstans. If one reel balked: snap. I angled my head at Frances, limp on the floor. “Is that why it felt like she was killing me, when she made her little trip in?”