Songs_of_the_Satyrs (36 page)

“I don’t dance,” she said.

“Everyone dances.”

“I don’t. I do many things but I don’t dance.”

He humphed at her but said nothing.

“You do know you’re eating a napkin,” she said.

He spat gently and inspected the chewed thing he held. “I was wondering what it was. Well, you know, as a great man once said, try everything once except . . . um . . .”

“Folk dancing and incest,” she prompted.

He frowned deeply at her. “No. Tin cans and cardboard.” He shook his head. “Folk dancing and incest? Where did you hear such rot? I bet you’ve never tried it.”

“Which?” said Nell.

“Watch,” said Kantzaros. “And play.”

He turned on one hoof and sharply raised one knee, a sharp motion, like a whip-crack, cutting through conversations and demanding that every eye be on him. He turned and switched feet, cocked an elbow in one direction and thrust his face in another. It should have looked ridiculous, Kantzaros stepping out with jerky sudden movements like a spastic chicken, but it transcended absurdity and became something profound and compelling.

“Play!” he commanded, snapping into a fresh pose.

Nell put her pipes to her lips, picked up the tune and moulded it to Kantzaros’s movements, transforming the people’s dance into theirs—hers and Kantzaros’s. She stepped in behind him, and not to her own surprise—because surprise would indicate that she was something other than in perfect control of the situation—but to her glowing pleasure, she lifted her naked legs in time with his, shifted, pivoted, and kicked. The men and women of Blame ‘n’ Claim, ecstatically drunk, unkempt and at peace, fell in behind. In addition to the bells and drums, some took up improvised instruments and joined the music with stapler castanets, filing-tray tambours, and paperclip shakers.

Nell spun and flung her head back and, seeing Robert pulled toward the dance but clearly hovering at its edges, cast a trilling countermelody over him, dragging him to her side, his cheeks flushed and his eyes glistening.

“Eu-oi!” sang Kantzaros, and the crowd sang it back to him.

“Eu-oi! Eu-oi! Eu-oi!”

They progressed through the room until everyone had joined the procession, willing subjects of the Bacchanalia. With heads thrown back and eyes glazed, feeling the drumbeats guide their limbs and the melody tug at something more elusive, they abandoned themselves to dancing and capering and felt themselves filled with a spirit that was not their own.

They danced out into the reception area. Josephine came running up from the ranks and threw herself in front of the double doors, her arms spread wide to bar their exit. The dancing did not stop but Kantzaros drew to a halt in front of her.

“You’re not going anywhere!” said Josephine hotly, glaring at Nell.

There was laughter and booing.

“Come on!” yelled someone.

“Have a drink!” yelled another.

“This is wrong!” shouted Josephine.

For a moment, just for a moment, Nell was struck with an unpleasant thought, a peculiar connection made. She remembered the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, piping away the children of the town, luring them into a cave, never to be seen again. But the fear vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Kantzaros was not leading these people into the darkness. He was leading them out, into the air and freedom.

“The dance will go wherever it will,” he said to Josephine.

Julie from Accounts tried to press a cup of wine into Josephine’s hand.

“The ladies of the dance offer their gifts, their wine, to whomever they meet,” said Kantzaros.

“Just look at yourselves!” shrieked Josephine, gesticulating at their dishevelled, half-naked bodies.

This did not have the desired effect. The merry folk of Blame ‘n’ Claim looked at themselves and one another, decided they liked what they saw, and cheered.

Kantzaros dipped his head forward and danced onward, sweeping Josephine aside like a garden gate, and out into the winter’s afternoon. As their breath misted in the air and the cold pricked their eyes, they fought back with loud voices and enthusiastic leaps and turns on the icy path leading down to the road.

“You can’t do this!” yelled Josephine, chasing after them. “There are calls going unanswered in there, claims waiting to be made.”

“We lead the dance,” said Kantzaros, “and everyone must follow us or perish.”

Nell did not see, yet perfectly comprehended, what happened next: Josephine, running, stepping on a patch of ice, slipping. Nell heard the dull thump and the scream and incorporated that high pure note into the tune.

They led the tipsy, pissed, and near-catatonic across the ring road, past the retail park, and on toward the town center.

The wild procession collected all in its path, and the throng, both real and imaginary, grew and grew. And though Kantzaros and Nell led it, it eventually reached such enormous proportions that it became impossible to distinguish what was the Bacchanalia and what wasn’t, and as the alcohol flowed and the music spread and the short day ended, it wrapped itself around the world, and with the kind of logic that only the truly drunk are capable of, the dance of Dionysus simultaneously became the world and vanished from it.

***

Nell and Kantzaros, alone once more, danced up the stairs to her flat and spun in each other’s arms on the landing until nausea and laughter made them stop. As Nell fumbled for her keys, Kantzaros stumbled and slammed against the door.

“Ow,” he declared slowly. “S’very hard door.”

“I should put up a sign,” said Nell with difficultyand let them in.

Kantzaros rebounded off the sofa and then the wall before slipping, by chance more than design, straight through the kitchen door. There was the sound of many pieces of crockery almost breaking.

“Time for one last drink,” he said.

“No!” shouted Nell.

His head poked round the doorframe, the bottle of nectar in his hand.

“No?”

Nell placed her auloi on the table and patted them as one would a sleeping child. “Never say it’s the last drink,” she said.

Kantzaros jiggled the dark bottle in the general direction of the clock.

“Less than an hour to midnight,” he said with a rueful smile. “The world tree’s healed. I have work to do. Those tree roots won’t saw through themselves.”

Nell wilted. “You mean this is it?”

“Yup.”

He popped back into the kitchen and returned with two glasses. He pressed one into her hand.

“A toast!” he said.

She looked into her drink’s yellow-green depths. “Why?”

“What?”

“What have we achieved?”

“What were you expecting?”

She swept her arm down to indicate her hideous goat legs and then up and round to the unlovely flat she had somehow acquired and then, lacking the sufficient appendages, grimaced to indicate the formless unchosen life she had similarly acquired. He looked at her blankly.

“Oh, what’s the use?” she said and turned away and went into the bedroom.

She stood at the foot of the bed and knew that he stood behind her.

“I expected things to change,” she said. “But all we did was drink far more alcohol than was good for us. We’ve spent more time drunk than sober. We’ve pressured everyone else into joining in just because we wanted them to and only did what we’ve done because it seemed a good idea at the time.”

“Dear girl!” said Kantzaros softly. He took her by the elbow and turned her to face him. “You have it entirely wrong.”

“Really?”

“What we did was drink far more alcohol than is good for us. We spent more time drunk than sober. We pressured everyone else into joining in just because we wanted them to and only did what we did because it seemed a good idea at the time!”

He grinned widely and there was definitely a twinkle in his eye. “If that’s not an achievement, I don’t know what is.” He raised his glass. “A toast, my love. An end to care and worry.”

She raised her glass and clinked it against his. “An end to care and worry,” she said and drank and then leaned down to plant a kiss on the corner of the small satyr’s beard-wisped mouth.

“You are, without a doubt, my favorite uncle.”

“Or brother.”

“Or father or king. It doesn’t matter. It’s all good.”

She drained the glass and felt the intoxication flood her cheeks, her body, and head.

“Definitely my last drink,” she giggled and then, the back of her knee connecting with the bed, toppled backward. She grabbed at Kantzaros for support, dug her fingers into his shoulder, and pulled him down with her. Something bounced off the mattress and smashed against the wall but they were laughing and barely heard it.

***

Nell woke to the sound of her phone ringing. Something felt different, felt odd. She stretched. She was alone in her bed. Kantzaros had gone although his not unpleasantly earthy smell still clung to the bed sheets. That wasn’t the odd thing. It was something else.

The phone continued to ring.

She reached out for it blindly, not ready to open her eyes to a new day.

“Hello?” she croaked.

“Oh no, you don’t sound well.”

“Robert?”

Something in the freshness of his voice, or perhaps the faint noises in the background, made her suddenly wonder what time it was and she came awake more fully.

“I was just checking that you were all right,” he said.

“I’m fine.” She rubbed her sleepy eye with her knuckle.

“There’s obviously a virus going round,” he said. “Either that or a lot of people throwing sickies today.”

“Hangovers will make people do that,” she said.

“Hangovers?”

“Yeah. You know because of . . .”

She didn’t continue. She just knew the conversation that would ensue if she tried to talk to him about what had happened the day before. She didn’t know if it was Kantzaros’s magic or not.

“Virus,” she agreed. “Yeah, that’ll be it.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No,” she said, scrunching her toes. “No, wait.”

“What?”

“I want you to come out with me on Friday night.”

“Special occasion?”

“Our first date.”

“What about our first date?”

“We’ll have it on Friday night.”

“But . . .” He stopped. “Okay.”

She flung back the bed sheets and covered her grinning mouth to stop herself laughing into the phone.

“Some food and drink,” she said and looked at her ten pink toes, wiggling in the condensation-streaked light of Epiphany. “And maybe even some dancing.”

Gene O’Neill
is best known as a multi-award nominated writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction. O’Neill's professional writing career began after completing the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1979. Since that time, over 100 of his works have been published. His short story work has appeared in
Cemetery Dance Magazine, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
and many more.

John Langan
received his M.A. from SUNY New Paltz and his M.Phil. from the CUNY Graduate Center. His stories have appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and anthologies including
The Living Dead
(Night Shade 2008),
Poe
(Solaris 2009),
By Blood We Live
(Night Shade 2009),
Supernatural Noir
(Dark Horse 2011),
Blood and Other Cravings
(Tor 2011), and
Ghosts by Gaslight
(Harper Collins 2011). His first collection
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters
was published in 2008; his first novel
House of Windows
appeared the following year. With Paul Tremblay, he has co-edited
Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories
(Prime 2011). His essays on horror writers have appeared in
Fantasy Commentator
,
The Internet Review of Science Fiction
,
The Lovecraft Annual
,
Lovecraft Studies
,
The New York Review of Science Fiction
, and
The Weird Fiction Review
. He has served as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He is an adjunct instructor at SUNY New Paltz, where he teaches creative writing and gothic fiction.

Jodi Renée Lester
is a writer and editor. Her short story "The Guixi Sisters" appeared in
Midnight Walk: 14 Original Tales of Terror and Suspense
, which won the Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Anthology and a nomination for the Bram Stoker Award. She is currently working on a novel as well as several editing projects, while continuing to write short fiction. Jodi had the honor of studying with Dennis Etchison and is a member of the Horror Writers Association. She grew up in Southern California and now lives in South Carolina with her husband Mike and their three cats Bruno, Mathias, and Klaus. She can be followed on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/author/show/2970826.Jodi_Renee_Lester.

K. H. Vaughan
is a refugee from academia with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In his other life he taught, published, and practiced in various settings, with particular interest in decision theory, forensic psychology, psychopathology, and methodology. He lives with his wife and three children in New England. Information on upcoming releases can be found at www.khvaughan.com.

R. Christophe Ryber
lives in Hardwick, Vermont, where in addition to penning short fiction and poetry, he tutors English and studies writing and literature at a local college.

Robert Harkess
shares his writing time with his real-world job in a major ISP in the U.K. He lives just north of London with a wonderful wife and two attention-seeking furdragons and blogs at www.rbharkess.co.uk.

S. J. Hirons
has been previously been published in
Clockwork Phoenix 3
(Norilana Books),
Subtle Edens: An Anthology of Slipstream Fiction
(Elastic Press),
Daily Science Fiction
, SFX magazine’s
Pulp Idol 2006
anthology,
52 Stitches
(Strange Publications),
Title Goes Here
magazine (Issue #1, Fall 2009),
A Fly In Amber
,
Farrago’s Wainscot
,
Pantechnicon
Online
and
The Absent Willow Review
. He has upcoming stories in
The Red Penny Papers
and at
faepublishing.com
and some critical writing appearing in
Interfictions Zero
from the Interstitial Arts Foundation.