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I hoped to surprise him. I moved right up to the desk, the gun aimed at the center of his forehead. I couldn’t miss at this range. But I also couldn’t shoot him when he was just sitting there, smiling. And not before he answered at least one question.
“Where is she,” I said, in a voice that sounded crude and raw next to his sleek French accent.
He raised an eyebrow and tapped his fingertips together. “She has not been harmed,” he said. “I am saving her for something very special.”
“So am I,” I said.
He laughed, three light, musical syllables. “You will be—disappointed.”
“You will be dead,” I said, taking the last step to the front of the desk. The barrel of the gun was only about eighteen inches from his forehead now but he still gave no sign that he had even noticed it.
Instead, he reached for a can of soda at his elbow on the desk. I could see the snake tattoo on his forearm. He picked up the can. A brightly colored drinking straw poked out the top. I didn’t recognize the label on the can, but as he brought the straw to his lips something else filtered in through my rage and tension.
There was no sweat on the outside of the can, no circle of water on the desk where it had been sitting. We were in the tropics and this man was drinking room-temperature soda.
Or—
I was already moving sideways as he whipped the straw out of the can and blew. He was fast, so very fast, and I felt myself doddering clumsily to the side as he pointed the straw at me.
A cloud of powder came out of the straw. Most of it missed me as I lunged to the side, but I felt a light stinging on the side of my face, an unpleasant odor in my nostrils, and an instant numbness spreading from my cheek into the rest of my face.
“Good night, Billy,” he said in his delicate laughing voice.
I straightened and looked at him as I felt all the power drain out of my body and then I—
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The fireworks were endless this year even though it was too dark to see them. They exploded without light over and over in reds and greens and yellows. The wooly blackness was hung with the swirls and patterns of the millions of dark bursting rockets and below them I sank toward the ground that was falling away from me just a little bit faster.
And now the rockets burst into bones, whole skeletons forming in the sky, red viscera dangling from the ribs. And still slowly falling, I became one of the skeletons as I fell out of my flesh in a dark red burst.
My bones rattled and burned with a cool green glow, the luminescent green of rot. I felt my skeleton begin to dance without me and I was afraid.
One coil of the darkness wrapped itself around a passing skeleton and became The Snake. At first I thought it was dancing, too. But then I saw that it was making the bones move to its own pattern and the mouth on the skull was opening and closing slowly, saying, “Help me.” And I felt The Snake coil on my bones, moving me to its bone dance.
My mouth was opening and closing to the same rhythm, but I couldn’t hear the words. I could hear nothing but the pounding clash of the falling bones and the laughter of
the snake.
And I fell and danced and cried for a time longer than there are words to tell.
And after this unbearable long time I finally smashed into the earth and shattered into cool darkness.
• • •
There was rhythm. I could not move but at last I could hear and there were drums and I could feel and there was pain.
All of me burned with a terrible fire and the pain in my head was like a living thing trying to eat its way out but I could not move even a little to try to ease the pain.
I was as dull and stupid as it was possible to be and I could not understand where I was or what was happening or why my whole body felt like it was rotting off my bones, melting away in terrible heat.
But slowly—oh, so slowly—I came back. Just a little bit at a time, but I came back. First there was awareness. I was. That was enough for a while.
And then from nowhere two words popped in: Billy Knight. Those words meant something. I let them echo in my head. Billy Knight. Billy Knight. Billy Knight. I said them too often and they lost all meaning again. It scared me.
I was just scared for a long time. Nothing more. There was no room in me for anything more complicated.
After a while the fear pushed that thought back into my head. Billy Knight. I knew what that meant. Billy Knight.
