Hornets and Others

a creaking sound from below and the three of them stopped dead, leaning back against the wall and peering down into the shadows.

'You think someone saw us?' Paul whispered.

'Nah,' Bill said, 'not those old men. They're lost in their beer.' Jimmy nodded, and they waited, still as mice, for another sound from below that didn't come.

'You really believe that crud about 'the man in the chair'?' Paul snorted in a low voice.

'You were there, you heard,' Bill shot back, glancing up at what lay before them. 'And pipe down.'

'I think you put your big foot in your mouth,' Paul persisted. He too was looking at the top of the stairway, but his tone remained derisive. 'A bunch of bull— 'one man, and one only, from all the men in Greystone Bay, must always sit alone.'' He waggled his hands before him, his voice mocking in a whisper the spooky sing-song of a taleteller around a campfire. 'So was the pact made, and so it continues—the safety of Greystone Bay for the life of one only.' He opened his mouth and eyes wide, feigning fright, then broke into stifled giggles.

Beside him, Jimmy smiled grimly. 'Didn't have to say you could find him, Bill. Everybody knows that story. I say there's nothing to it.'

'I said I'd find him and I meant it. Let's go,' Bill said, and they turned once more upward.

'Looks like the door from Twilight Zone,' Paul said, but Jimmy hushed him as another creaking sound came. 'That was you, idiot,' Bill said, and he put his foot where Jimmy's had just been, producing another low crack of old worn wood.

The door was huge to them—four panels, the two on the top smaller, like squinting eyes. The knob was cut crystal, tarnished, like the ones in Bill's grandmother's summer house; he wondered if he would be able to turn it since he had so much trouble with those others—but then that had been because he was only three and he couldn't open any doors without difficulty.

'I hear somebody inside,' Paul hissed, and they halted until Paul poked the two of them in the ribs, making them smother shouts. 'Thought I did,' Paul laughed.

'Come on,' Bill said.

His hand was on the knob. It was just like those others, a thousand cut facets like imperfect prisms. It was slightly oval, fitting into the palm of his hand like a smooth Bay rock, a good one for skimming. He turned to smile at Paul and Jimmy, one step below him.

'Go ahead,' Paul said, grinning stupidly, and Jimmy stared at him unblinking.

He turned the glass knob.

The door swung inward, as if pulled back by weights and pulleys. For a moment he saw nothing in the room but grey-yellow light and dust: a small hexagonal skylight choked with dirt, plastered walls with great rivers and tributaries of cracks, flaking holes, dark wood molding at the ceiling sagging out of its nail holes, pieces of it gone here and there, the floor covered with a sheen of undisturbed dust—and then he saw a chair with an old man in it.

'Holy shit,' Bill said, and he reached for Jimmy and Paul but they weren't there. He heard their yells, their feet clattering down the stairway to the bar below.

The man in the chair opened his eyes once, a flutter of ancient eyelids like a lizard's, and it was over. After me, only you, Bill heard, though he didn't see the old man's lips move.

Bill blinked; time moved.

'Jimmy? Paul?' he called out. He stood over the threshold, the smell of mustiness in his nostrils, the glaring dead light from the six-sided skylight throwing the color of mustard at him. The room was empty. The arms were gone from under his; again, as before, he heard the sound of steps moving down the stairway behind him. He looked down, saw his army boots, and he felt his fatigue coat buttoned high around his neck. The room spun, came still; he saw off in one solitary corner the empty chair, high-backed, seat worn smooth—

'Jimmy! Paul!' he cried, knowing that his voice carried empty down the turning stairs, buried deep before it reached the floor below. 'Jimmy...'

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