He walked, and the chair held up its arms to him, and he embraced it...
So that is what was. So long past, so many sour shines of moon and sun through my little window above. My eyes never open anymore...
But you are here now. I hear you. On the stoop, hesitation at the door, and then you push it open. The smell of beer and smoke. No one looks up as you sneak past—how many of you are there—two? Four? It doesn't matter. Only one will enter. To the back, past the jukebox, up the steps. A hesitation, another.
Come closer.
The Beat
"Dancing to a beat is as peculiarly human a habit as is the habit of artificially making a fire."
—Edwin Denby
FORMS IN MOTION AND THOUGHT
Minnow was pulled through the City. Feeling the beat—thump, thump—rising from the cracked asphalt, through the soles of her boots, stabbing up into her feet, through the leg and up her chest, until—wham--out through the top of her head and hands—feeling this, even as her fingers began to snap by themselves—she felt despair and lethargy overtake her. Leave me be, she whispered under her breath, but the beat wouldn't go away. Like a third rail jolt, she was locked onto it.
Snap, snap. It was as if her boots were metal and clamped to the magnet of the beat. It made her leap and dance. She flopped high into the air—came down, swuck, pulled like a piece of metal back to the magnet of the road again.
She whirled from block to block. The sun was rising now over the jagged edge of a skyscraper. It would be another hot day, and Minnow groaned at the heat to come. In yawning black doorways, others were starting to stir, rising on wobbly legs and being overtaken by the beat again. The worst were the cripples and arthritics—their dancing was a tortuously forced one: each step bringing cries of pain as a thousand knifepricks rolled up and down their limbs.
Minnow found herself now at the head of a grotesque conga line. It would be one of those days—the beat below was tapped into its sardonic circuit. When it felt playful, there was always trouble—burnings and perhaps other violence: perhaps even, Minnow thought with a shudder which quickly turned into a waving flourish by the beat, they would have another summer day like the one two years ago, with human head-topped flagpoles and the crack of overdanced bones filling the air long after the sun went down. Minnow doubted it—the beat had obviously been so drained by the whole onslaught that it had nearly shut down completely, its solar power reserves dried up—but maybe it had purged those circuits.
With an effort, Minnow stole a glance behind, and was greeted with the sight of a thirty block-long kicking line of bodies all following her demented lead. Dip, rise, hands in the air, hands down, shout, kick, hands in the air—the conga wove back and forth up the street with a pulsed regularity. The dance went on for a long time, with only a short heaving break which found twenty or thirty dead dancers flopping to the ground, their source of animation removed. During the pause, a few live ones tried to run for the buildings, but it was useless: in a few minutes the beat called them back again and the dance resumed.
This time they flapped and stepped their way in and out of buildings, a mile-long snake of human and halfhuman, climbing staircases and corking down fire escapes. One stairway broke under the heaving weight, but the dance went on, the bisected parts of the conga line rejoining outside the building. Minnow heard the screams of those who had been buried but were still dancing, under all that rubble...
But as Minnow had prayed, the dance ended at nightfall. There would be no undue carnage, no burnt-alive bodies, after all. The beat had decided, at least for tonight, to take it easy on its fuel reserves. Despite the heat of the day, and the clarity of the air which had led Minnow to fear that a bad one was happening since the beat sucked in more juice when the skies were cleared, the whole thing shut down with the sun.
Minnow, along with everyone else, dropped half dead to the pavement when the dance ended, and fell asleep on the spot. The human body was not made for punishment like this—sixteen hours of uninterrupted movement. Sometimes Minnow would try to fall asleep while dancing—the heat roasting into her and all—but sleep hardly ever came or, when it did, didn't stay long. And sometimes the beat knew this, and responded in kind...
Minnow awoke and pulled herself to her feet. The soles of her boots were still humming. Unsteadily, she hurried to where the others would gather—it would be best to get there first. But when she pulled herself up the five flights of steps and pushed the flap of the door aside, she realized that she had slept longer than she'd thought. They were all there already.
"We've got to do something tonight," said Cave, not waiting for Minnow to say anything. His mouth was as grim as the rest of him, and almost as hugely wide: Minnow remembered that there had been a time when Cave had laughed with that mouth but that was before the girl — Ginny? Rava? Whatever—had been pulled under by the beat. He wasn't a laugher anymore.
"We thought you were dead, Minnow," said another voice from the corner. Minnow peered that way; it was Goat—a half-treacherous bastard who, it was rumored, had done as much killing during the night as the beat did during the day. It had been obvious for a long time that Goat had set his eyes on Minnow's position, if not her body; and Minnow knew, along with everyone else, that there was only one outcome of that silent challenge: one less set of limbs for the beat to jerk around.
Minnow flexed her legs, pointing her toes out at Goat's dark corner. "Sorry to disappoint you."
There was uneasy laughter.
From the other side of the room another voice spoke up. A new one. Soft and careful, and the face that did the talking was, like Goat's, hidden in shadow.
"If you don't do something tonight there won't be another chance." All eyes swiveled toward the stranger.
"And who are you?" asked Minnow in a neutral voice.
The stranger leaned forward into a patch of weak light, and there was a gasp.
"Call me Skull."
His head was like his words. At first it looked to Minnow like it really was a skull, skin and organs stripped bare to bone: but, on a more careful look in the dimness she saw that he wore a mask, a tight-fitting death's head over his own.
"Why the theatrics?" Minnow asked, in a tone more defensive than neutral now.
"I have my reasons," the stranger said curtly. "I've been traveling a long time, started out from the other side of the continent, and I can tell you that things have already fallen apart over there. Have been, all across the country."
"This destruction been following you, by any chance?" This from Goat.
Skull worked his head slowly towards the other. There was a moment of silence.
"Can't say. But I know what I saw." He turned back to Minnow, his voice softened again. "And what I saw was this. That thing below, that you call the beat here—it's called a lot of different things—it seems to have completely lost control, and is slowly and methodically killing off everything. I think it's eating itself alive, looking for something it wants. Have things been getting progressively worse lately?"
There was a pause before Minnow answered, "Can't say they've gotten better."
"It's what I've seen everywhere."
Again a pause. "And you think it's going to happen here?"
The stranger spoke very softly.
"Tomorrow or the day after, at the latest."