Night and Day (6 page)

She takes your hand and leads you across the floor to the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. As you’re about to go through, Winyard calls, “Hey, Canary!”

You turn and look, and he squashes his lips up in a mockery of a kiss.

When you come through the doors, you’re shaking and nauseous. Billie leads you to a little bistro set in the corner of the kitchen; the place is oddly quiet without Mario’s presence: no banging pots or boiling pasta or hollered orders. The waitstaff and kitchen help are gathered at the back, waiting. Billie turns from you and says to them, “Y’all go home now. You’re not needed ’til tomorrow.”

They seem to have been waiting for her words, because they’re suddenly in motion, abandoning the club like lemmings. Billie ignores them, bustling about making a pot of tea, which she sets down on the table and drops into the chair opposite. You get up silently and fetch two cups and saucers.

“Thanks, toots,” she says. Her voice, her face, her body are all tired. She’s always so upbeat it’s disturbing to see her like this. Suddenly you realize she needs the tea as much as you do.

“What’s going on, Billie?”

She shakes her head. “About once a month, Dion comes in here to harass them. He never does anything; he can’t intimidate them like he does the other businesses in the area, but he tries. There’s something that goes way back between them—between all of them.”

“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….”