The little man coughed loudly.
Skelton nodded. “It’s late,” he said. “You can hear the whole story tomorrow.” He pointed a tattooed finger at the card. “Do an old man a favor and read the paper. Soon enough, I won’t be keeping any secrets.”
Cyrus and Antigone looked at each other. Antigone nodded. Cyrus cleared his throat, raised his eyebrows, and began to read:
Pausing, he glanced up. William Skelton was staring at the ceiling.
Horace, the little man, was pursing his lips expectantly. “Go on.”
At first, Cyrus read slowly, stumbling and tripping as his tongue attempted to string the odd syllables together. But after two lines, his voice found a rhythm, and he could almost believe that he understood his own strange chanting. He smeared words, blended, missed, and guessed at words, but he got through it, and when he did, he held the card out to the little suited man.
“Keep it with you,” the man said. “Miss Smith, do you offer assent?”
“Um, sure,” said Antigone. “I guess.”
Hunching over the bed, the man checked his watch and made a note of the time on a large piece of paper. Then he signed the bottom with a flourish. “Billy Bones, that’s all I need. Know that I am risking a great deal for you.” He scraped all the papers into a pile, and then he shoveled the pile into an enormous leather folder. When he had finished, he shook hands with Billy, shook hands with Cyrus, bowed to Antigone, then picked a bowler hat up off the wreckage of Cyrus’s shelves and popped it on his head. “Good luck and good night to you all,” he said. And leaning to one side, he lugged the enormous folder out into the night.
Billy Bones slumped onto the end of the bed and put his head in his hands.
“Go now,” he said quietly.
Cyrus and Antigone backed slowly through the doorway.
The old man looked up suddenly, and his face was gray and bloodless. “Wait. Music. Your record player. I couldn’t get it to work.”
“It’s broken,” Cyrus said. “Always has been.”
“No, it’s not,” Skelton said. “Not for you. Not anymore. Turn it on for me.”
Antigone’s hand closed around her brother’s wrist. Cyrus stared. The old man was getting stranger. Sleeping next door could be too close.
“Please,” Skelton said. “Just flip the switch.”
Cyrus walked to his dresser, glancing back at the man on the bed. He’d already put a record on. John Coltrane. Cyrus had never listened to it. He’d never had a record player that worked. Flexing his fingers, he reached down and slid the power switch with his thumb. A spark tickled its way up into his hand, and the vinyl disk began to spin slowly. The mechanical arm lifted off its rest and swung into place.
The voice of a smooth sax filled the room.
When the door to 111 had closed safely behind them, Cyrus turned to his sister. Antigone widened her eyes. “Can this get weirder?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Cyrus said. “I bet it can.”
four. THE BEREAVED
CYRUS OPENED HIS eyes — there was no point in having them shut — and rolled up onto his side, clawing at his forearm. But that meant he couldn’t scratch his calf. Splaying his toes, he put them to work, too.
The lights were off, and his sister’s breathing was even. The curtains were glowing, backlit by the Golden Lady — he wondered if Dan even knew how to turn her off. The air-conditioning was humming, and the bed squealed every time he moved. He had kicked all his blankets onto the floor at least two hours ago.
They had only watched Antigone’s movie four times, but he hadn’t been able to stop replaying it in his head. His sister’s movies were always odd. The clicking, flashing images made new things seem old and forgotten. They made his dark, smooth-skinned mother seem painted and imagined. Her sleeping face had somehow steadied the camera in Antigone’s hands, and the picture had stopped bouncing and shifting and had become still. His mother’s hair, almost invisibly white, had grown since their last visit, and Antigone had made an exception to her rule, as she always did on Mom days. She’d let Dan take the camera and had entered the frame herself, holding her mother’s hand, brushing her mother’s hair.
Cyrus should have been there, sitting on the other side of the bed.
And then the movie had cut to the car, to the flooding windshield, to Dan’s stress, to the yellow truck, to Cyrus in the parking lot, to the rocking bolts of lightning.
Cyrus clawed at his calf and then sat up in bed, switching on the lamp between the beds. An old boxy phone with a tangled cord sat beside the lamp. The lightning bug glass stood on its side in front of it, catching the light. For a moment, Cyrus stared at his sister, breathing beneath a mound of blankets.
His dirty clothes were in a pile by the door. He stood up as quietly as the bed would let him and went over to fish in the pockets of his shorts. Out came the key ring. Out came the small paper card.
Antigone hadn’t moved. “What are you doing?” she asked suddenly.
Cyrus sat back down on his bed. “You awake?”
“Take a guess.”
“We never read the English,” Cyrus said. “Do you want to hear it?”
Antigone didn’t answer.
Cyrus fingered the key ring in the lamplight. He flipped open the silver sheath and rubbed his tingling thumb across the sharp, chilly tip of the tooth. The key ring had been in Skelton’s pocket when the Lady had become golden. It had been in his own pocket when he’d touched the record player.
Antigone sighed loudly. “Tell me I’m not hearing keys. No. Don’t tell me. Just turn off the light.”
“Fine,” Cyrus said. He dropped the keys on the bed. “But I’m reading the card first. Listen.”
Antigone filled the room with a fake snore.
“ ‘Please declare aloud: I hereby undertake to tread the world, to garden the wild, and to saddle the seas, as did my brother Brendan. I will not turn away from shades in fear, nor avert my eyes from light. I shall do as my Keeper requires, and keep no secret from a Sage. May the stars guide me and my strength preserve me. And I will not smoke in the library.’ ” Cyrus looked up. “ ‘Translation approved, 1946.’ ”
Antigone flopped onto her face. “Now you’ve done it. No more smoking in the library.” She pulled her blankets over her head. “Turn off the light.”
Cyrus set down the card with the lightning bug, clicked the lamp off, and sat bouncing his knees in the dark.
“How can you sleep right now?” he asked.
“I can’t,” Antigone muttered.
Sighing, Cyrus rocked back onto his bed and stared at the dimly golden ceiling.
“Whatever it is you’re tapping,” Antigone said, “feel free to stop.”
“What?” Cyrus asked. “I’m not tapping anything.”
He held his breath and listened. Someone, something,
Antigone sat up. “That’s really not you?”
Cyrus shook his head. Both of them slipped out of their beds and crept toward the window. When they were on their knees, with noses above the sill, Cyrus hooked one finger in the curtain and peeled it back.
A large, dark shape was moving slowly through the parking lot, sweeping the white cane of a blind man in front of him. He reached the yellow truck, felt it with his hand, and then kept coming, finally stopping six feet from the pair of motel room doors. He was wearing an enormous coat and a heavy stocking cap pulled down snug around his scalp. Two large ears stuck out from the sides of his head like a pair of skin satellite dishes. His eyes weren’t covered, but they were closed. He tapped the ground and turned his head from side to side, listening. Then he sniffed at the air with a flattened and crooked nose. His jaw was broad but uneven, visibly scarred even in
