Night and Day

by Rowan Speedwell

  “Even Mario?”

  “Even Mario. Harry, too, sometimes. But we don’t know what. Corinna says it doesn’t involve us. It’s something to do with the old country.”

  “Oh. Like Auntie?”

  “You’ve met Auntie?”

  “Yes. Rick took me to Delphie’s for breakfast. We’ve been there a couple of times, but I only met Auntie the first time.”

  “She scares the bejeebers out of me,” Billie said frankly.

  “Me too,” you admit.

  The two of you drink your tea in silence, and clean up afterward in the same silence. Finally Billie says, “I’m going to wait for Corinna, but you just go on upstairs. Nothing for us to do here. It’ll be okay. They won’t let anything happen to us.”

  “I know.” You do know. You know that Dion is no match for Rick, and certainly no match for Corinna. But he bothers them, and that bothers you.

  You decide to sit up and wait for Rick to come upstairs to bed, but the night catches up to you, and you fall asleep. When you wake in the morning, you’re alone, but he appears at the door a moment later, as if he was waiting for you. “Breakfast?” he says with a grin. “Mario’s still here, and he’s offering.”

  “You didn’t come to bed,” you say, yawning.

  “You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to disturb you. So I slept in my own room.”

  Where you’ve never been; he’s spent the nights since your arrival with you. It’s one of those things you just never think about. But breakfast sounds good, and Rick doesn’t seem at all disturbed about the events of the night before, and he’s giving you looks that make you think breakfast isn’t the only thing on his mind.

  And after breakfast you go up to change out of your pajamas, and Rick follows and keeps you from getting dressed for an hour at least. And somehow you just forget about the night before, the worry and the curiosity vanishing beneath his warm hands and hot mouth. He keeps you on the edge for what seems like forever, until you are trembling with the strain and the sheer need, and then he lets you go, like a magician releasing one of his doves, and you soar and plummet in the white light of his love. You barely hear his soft “Sleep,” but your body obeys, and you drift again into slumber, worry and fear forgotten.

  AND THEN one morning the police come to the club, and Rick has to go downtown and bail one of the waitresses out of jail for solicitation. It’s strange, because the waitress is Billie, and she’s the least likely person you know to wander from the straight and narrow like that. Well, excluding Corinna, of course. You offer to come with him, but he just tells you to go on to the grocer’s and replace the dozen eggs you’d used up in the monstrous—but delicious—omelet you’d made for him earlier.

  So you do, and it only occurs to you halfway there that it’s the first time you’ve left the club without Rick in—is it six weeks already? The few blocks to the market retrace the same route you’d walked all those weeks ago on your way from Harry’s, but you’re not the same sad sack that came down that pike; you’ve money in your pocket, new clothes on your back, and a song in your heart.

  So that when you see the shabbily dressed woman with the toddler in her arms, holding out a battered man’s hat for people to drop coins in and no one dropping coins, you have to stop. The woman isn’t pretty; she has the sad, drawn face of the hopeless, and the child has her own face buried in the woman’s shoulder. She’s thin and wasted under the worn pinafore.

  You stop and pull your wallet from your pocket and take a five-dollar bill out and put it in the hat. “Buy the baby something to eat,” you say gently.

  The “baby” turns to look at you, and you step back involuntarily. Those round black eyes have no whites, and instead of a nose, there’s a red vertical slash. When the creature grins, it flashes teeth that are sharp with ragged points. “Gotcha,” it says in a growly voice, and puffs a breath in your face. This time the step back is more of a stagger as the world goes fuzzy.

  The woman isn’t shabbily dressed anymore; she’s not dressed much at all, just a bloody animal skin draped over her like an apron. She laughs—cackles, really—and drops the “baby,” who scampers off into the woods that have suddenly appeared around you. The woman, her knotted hair exploding from the neat bun she’d worn before, follows, laughing wildly.

  The city is gone. You’re standing in a clearing, in the middle of a circle of stones surrounded by wild woods. Above the trees you see mountains. Your heart pounds in your chest and you spin around, blinking. “This can’t be right,” you say aloud, and the fright in your voice makes you all the more scared.

  “It isn’t right,” another voice answers. You’ve heard that voice before, but you have to turn around to be sure.

  Dion Winyard is sitting in a stone chair, almost a throne, just outside the circle of stones. He’s wearing the same kind of outfit the crazy woman had on: an animal skin draped over one shoulder and wrapped around his waist. A crown of vines circles his head, and a leather wineskin is in his lap. As you stare at him blankly, he takes a swig from it. “It’s not right,” he repeats, “but it is the way it is. Only here is the way it should be. Out there—it’s all wrong.”

  “I don’t understand,” you say blankly. “Where am I? What is this place, and how did I get here?”

  “See, that’s the problem,” he says, pointing the mouth of the wineskin at you. “You live with them, and you haven’t a clue who they are. They’re part of the problem! They just go along with the way things are. They don’t get it—if we don’t fight, we’re gonna end up just like the others. They think if they change, if they go along with how the world wants them to be, then that’ll be fine. They think just because they’ve lasted two thousand years this way that they’re the survivors. Them and their ‘music.’” His sarcasm puts the quote marks around the word. “Do you even have a clue who they are?”

  You glare at him, but he just waits. “Yes, of course I do,” you say. “I’m not stupid. I went to school. I know about… them. I don’t know why, of course. Or how they survived… whatever it was they survived.”

  “The death of the Great Pan,” Dion says. “The death of everything. I know what they teach you in schools, mortal. They cleaned it all up, organized it like they were damned Hesiod, for Zeus’s sake. Crammed us all into nice clean little niches. God of this, goddess of that. But that ain’t the way it was. Ain’t the way it is, or should be, for that matter. I’m the god of the vine, whoop-de-do. I ain’t the fucking god of the vine. I’m the god of madness, of drunkenness, of lewd behavior, of fucking, for Zeus’s sake, and they’ve got me emasculated as god of some gods-damned plant? And Ricky? They turned him into a faggoty sun god or crap like that. Twenty thousand years the god of the hunt and the chase and the scalding desert, and now he rides his little chariot across the sky and mentors mortal musicians. Jazz!” He says the word like a curse.

  “What do you want from me?” You try to be brave, but it was easier facing the guns in a charge across the bloody plains of France than this man. Or god. Or whatever he is.

  “They’re the only ones left, except the little godlings, the ones who are actually gods of plants and shit like that. And the leftover monsters. Those don’t matter. But they do. They’ve turned their back on who they are—who they were. They were once among the oldest and strongest of all of us, but they’ve forgotten. They’ve gone weak. I haven’t, but I can’t go on alone. The three of us can rule the world again, once I do this.”

  “Do what?” You’ve backed as far away across the clearing as you can, but there’s an invisible wall or something you’re plastered up against. Behind you the trees rustle, as if inhabited by more of the crazy pelt-wearing females, but your hands touch only solidity.

  “Bring them back into their godhead,” Dion says, his voice low and wicked. “Force them to take it up again. Then—when it’s three, and the best of us—then we change the world. Cast down their plaster gods, their pallid, bloodless saints of sacrifice, make them worship us again
as they did before. And you, little man, are just the one to do it.”

  “Me?” you squeak.

  “You. You’re the closest thing to a worshiper Ricky has.”

  The invisible wall dissipates behind you, and you stumble back, right into the arms of the wild women. Filthy hands with nails like thorns grab you, scratch you, clutching arms, legs, dragging you across the clearing to where Dion stands. He raises his arms, and there’s a rumble, and a stone slab appears in front of him, waist high. The wild women throw you up onto the slab; you try to scramble away, but they’ve got your arms again and haul you down onto your back, hanging on to you. Dion draws a long knife, curved like a scimitar, and slices open your new shirt, the tip sliding along your breast and belly and leaving a thin line of red.

  At the sight of the blood, the wild women howl. Dion grins. “First blood,” he cackles. “This is how it will go, Nate.” The sound of your name on his lips is terrifying. “You are the worshiper, the devoted, the sacrifice. I dedicate you to the sun god Utu, the god Shamash, the god Nergal. To the god Inti, the god Istanu, to Agni and Ravi, to Helios, to Aten and Khepri and Ra, to Huitzilopochtli, to Malakbel, to Igbo, to Magec, to Ngai. To the gods of light and justice and punishment, of fire and war and the daylight hunt. To the eagle, to the lion, to the wolf. And through this sacrifice to the sister of the Sun, the Moon, Mayari, Astarte, Isis, Bendis, Selene, and all the other crap names of that crazy woman. By this sacrifice do I bring them to their godhead….”

  Vines have sprung up all around you, binding you to the stone. The knife is poised above your breast, glittering in the dappled light of the clearing, a drop of blood quivering on the tip. The women are crouched around the makeshift altar. Your mouth moves as you whisper silent prayers—to whom you’re not sure, maybe the God of your childhood, the God of your parents who drove you out, begging for forgiveness, not rescue, because you know there’s no hope, not anymore. Your hope is down at the police station, bailing Billie out of a trumped-up charge—and you know now who it was that accused her, to get Rick out of the way while he pulls this crazy stunt. You take a breath and close your eyes, bracing yourself.

  Someone screams, and it’s not you.

  Your eyes shoot open, and you stare up at Dion, who’s got a feathered stick growing out of the center of his chest. He drops the knife, and it lands on the stone beside you with a clatter. “Zeus fuck,” a complaining, beautiful voice says, but the vines have twisted around your head and hold it immobile, so you can’t see.

  “You shot me, you bitch!” Dion accuses angrily.

  The wild women are screaming and, from the sound of it, running away. Rick comes closer and touches the vines; they shrivel up and fall away. He’s got a bow in his left hand, the arrow still nocked, but his right hand draws you up and against him. “Are you all right, baby?”

  “I’m okay,” you say into his shoulder.

  “Of course I shot you.” Corinna sounds mildly aggrieved, which, after a few weeks of acquaintance, you know means she is furious. “What the hell were you thinking, Dion? Nate is a mortal. You bring him here as a sacrifice? You’re breaking all the oaths we took when we were permitted to remain.”

  “Of course he is,” Rick says. His voice is a comforting rumble in your ear. “He’s nutty.”

  “He said he would bring you into your godhead,” you mumble.

  “Like I said, nutty. We gave all that up, you moron.” You know he’s not talking to you. “We agreed. You agreed.”

  “It isn’t enough!” Dion roars. “To have to live among those petty little minds, those little lives? To see them bow down to these new gods?”

  “They are the gods they have chosen, Dion,” Corinna says. “They are the gods who fit what they are now, the gods of this age. Our time has come and gone. To them we are nothing more than the shadows of their ancient past, the gods of the field and the hunt and the physical world. We are not the Written Gods. We are the Dreamt Gods. Our time is done.”

  “So I’m supposed to just give in, let myself die like Zeus and Hera and Osiris and Woden and all the others?”

  “No,” you say, turning back to him. With Rick at your back you feel braver, strong enough to face this man, this god. “Go on the way Rick and Corinna have. Find your niche and your worshippers among the ones who are left.” You snort. “You know Rick says they’re about to repeal Prohibition….”

  “Huh,” Dion says. “Prohibition has been a gold mine for me.”

  “You’re a gangster, and a successful one, so you know how it is. People will always drink. They’ll always go crazy. They’ll always—” You glance at Corinna and modify what you’re going to say. “—have carnal relations. Find your worshippers there. Corinna’s right—this isn’t your time anymore. And your idea wouldn’t have worked, anyway. Rick’s not a god to me. He’s just a man. A man who sets things on fire occasionally, yeah, but still just a man.”

  You feel Rick’s hand fall away, feel the coolness at your back where he had been standing. You glance back to see his face blank. And then you think… oh….

  And you add, “The man I love.” But you say this to Rick, not to Dion. Dion doesn’t matter anymore. “I don’t care if you’re Apollo or Vishnu or Buddha….”

  He’s laughing now. “I’m not Vishnu or Buddha!”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re Rick Bellevue, and I love you.”

  “Finally,” Corinna says.

  THEY LEAVE Dion there, trying to get up the nerve to yank the arrow out of his chest. “It won’t kill him,” Corinna says as she and Rick escort you to the gold chariot that waits in the trees. “It’ll just hurt like the very devil. We can’t be killed by ordinary means. We can die, we can kill ourselves, but a mere arrow is nothing.”

  “She left the killing arrows at home,” Rick says to you in an aside.

  “Of course I did. He’s an idiot, but he’s still family.”

  Rick sets his bow down on the floor of the chariot at his feet and picks up the reins. Corinna somehow looks right with a bow in her hand, even in the filmy white dress she is wearing, but Rick looks plenty strange in his white seersucker suit, holding a bow. Of course, the suit looks plenty strange on a man standing in a gold chariot and driving a team of four white horses. Not even white, really; incandescent, like Rick the morning you’d seen him on the roof.

  A road opens up through the trees, and as Rick drives the chariot, the air gets fuzzy again; something whacks you in the back of the knees, and you sit down hard on the backseat of the Lincoln, and Corinna pulls out a filmy white scarf and wraps it around her hair. “You lost your hat,” she says over the back of the front seat, and hands it to you. You put it on, but you feel ridiculous with your sliced-open shirt, the edges stained with blood.

  “Are you all right?” Rick asks again.

  “I’m fine,” you respond. And you are. The cut stings a little but not much. “Where are we?”

  “I want to make a stop,” Rick says.

  The road starts to look familiar—or rather, the switchbacks do—and you see up ahead the little restaurant on the bluffs. This time when he pulls into the parking lot, there’s no Delphie to come running out to meet him. “Come on,” he says, and opens the door for Corinna. “You can leave the bow—I’m not going to kill either of them.”

  You follow them up the path to the little cottage. Delphie’s waiting outside on a bench, with Auntie in her rocker in the doorway. The restaurant owner’s face is set.

  “You listened in, didn’t you?” Rick asks her. “When Auntie spoke about Nate.”

  “Yeah,” she admits. “And told Dion. Sorry. It’s just hard to say no to him, y’know?”

  “Yeah,” he agrees, “but you’re my employee, not his. Next time he asks you to do something like that, you tell me, okay?”

  “You aren’t mad?”

  “Oh, I’m plenty mad,” he says, “but where am I going to get someone to watch over Auntie?”

  She lets out a breath of air in relief.
He adds softly, “But that doesn’t mean you aren’t getting punished.”

  “Oh, crap….” And suddenly it’s a baboon crouched on the bench. It howls pitifully.

  “You get your real form back when I think you’ve been punished enough,” he tells it. “Plus this way you can eavesdrop all you want and not have to worry about anyone pressuring you to blab.”

  “What did Auntie say?” you ask finally.

  “That you were the perfect sacrifice if I wanted to get back what was lost to me,” Rick says distantly, his eyes on the roof of the house. “That you were the key. You were wrong, you know, back there, when you stood up to Dion. It would have worked.” He drops his eyes to mine. They’re dark and sad and human. “But I would have lost you. And, my Orpheus, I love you.”

  “Finally,” Corinna says.

  Epilogue

  YOU’RE NOT unchanged by your experience. When the usual crowd files in the next night (you and Rick take that night off, you to recover from Dion’s tender mercies, Rick because he can’t bear to be away from you), you see scattered among them not ordinary humans of whatever shape or color or gender, but the small gods and monsters Dion referred to. Some have horns, and webbed hands, and cloven hooves for feet; they’re brown and green and gray, and some of them have leaves growing out of their head, and one woman has snakes for hair. (You’d wondered why she’d always worn sunglasses, even inside the dimly lit club.) And when you walk down the street, some of the people you see aren’t exactly people. But you’re still human. And so is Rick, more or less… just a little more than less.

  “You won’t live forever,” he told you that night as he ran a hot thumb over the tear from Dion’s knife, sealing the cut with just his heat, “but you’ll live a damn long time, and you’ll stay young and healthy that whole time. I can still do that much. Will you stay with me until then?”