Cat In A Topaz Tango

He stood on the dark threshold to this room so familiar to him, now just a black hole, and started tapping his foot on the durable vinyl tile meant to survive the constant scrape of folding chairs and spilled water, coffee, tea, and stronger stuff.

The sound echoed like bullets in the empty darkness. One hand clapping. One foot tapping.

Clap!

The real sound of cupped palms meeting. A call to the dance. Sharp. Summoning. Arrogant. Spanish. Then the drum of distant boot heels pounded an echoing wooden floor like an indoor hailstorm. Not this floor.

He knew where the sound came from. Tatyana must be playing one of her dramatic games. She liked to put her students on new ground, in “unsafe” dance situations. He left the rehearsal room and followed the maze around in the dark until he felt the brush of velvet curtains backing the show’s set.

The Spanish boot heels throbbed on wood flooring like a joke set of chattering false teeth. Machine-gun fast. Automated, almost. Endless.

Matt brushed through the curtains into more darkness, feeling around the bulk of the big light and sound console onto the actual stage. Everything was black except the well-lit image of the now-familiar space in his mind.

The flamenco beat of steel nail heads covering leather soles kept up the frenzied chatter. Matt stepped farther into the darkness, toward the sound as it clattered toward him, then stopped.

All he could hear now was his heart pattering like a hard rain in reaction to that visceral vibration in the floor beneath him.

A ripping sound jagged by his left ear.

He couldn’t help putting out a hand to sense something in this dark carnival of sound.

His left palm touched passing fire and separating velvet.

The solid curtain behind him was now torn in two and his palm was creased with a line of fire that had thickened like lava and turned sticky.

He recognized that moment of stunned sensation taking fresh shape as pain.

He’d been cut across the hand, across the palm’s head and heart lines. Blood was flowing and running down his bare forearm.

He made a fist to stop the flow and pain. Useless.

Boot heels retreated in the dark, sharp and fast as the angry, mocking laughter that accompanied it.

“Die, bastard, die!”

Matt wheeled and turned back.

Not to run.

He bumped into the big sound console and, dripping blood from his closed fist, ran his uninjured right hand over all the many levers, releasing demon voices of sound bytes, prerecorded snatches of mambo and waltz and samba music, sprightly and stately and frantic in turn.

His hand reversed the buttons as fast as his fingers found them until a light blossomed on the opposite side of the backstage area. There was the single backstage “ghost light” that should be on at all times. He flipped more metal switches along that row, illuminating a random patchwork of high and low spotlights until a dark, grotesque figure became visible in the shadows thirty feet away.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, his mind breathed in long-accustomed prayer.

He faced Lucifer out of an operetta, poised for battle in shiny black satin cape and mask.

Matt itched to swipe his burning and throbbing wounded left hand down his outside pants leg, clear off the blood, but he knew he needed to keep the arm upraised to slow the flow. Up high. Like a dancer. Like a fencer.

He turned sideways to face the figure posed the same narrow way as a duelist to avoid exposing his vulnerable trunk full on. The scanty lights showed the straight, thin line of a rapier raised from its hidden position along the man’s leg high into the air above his right shoulder.

Matt recognized the clothing now. José Juarez’s Zorro getup, complete with mask and flat-brimmed hat, with gloves and sword, boots and spurs.

His thoughts were still shocked, sluggish. Zorro ready to cut him into mincemeat, and he in his knit shirt, khakis, and lace-up suede shoes.

Not a lot of stomping going on his way.

Going My Way. Major forties movie with Bing Crosby playing a priest. Crosby and Hope on the Road to Sliced Liver, or Bali or Mandalay, bungling and making comedy villains trip over their own feet.

Okay. Not a lot of role models out there in the collective unconscious for dueling demonic Zorros. He felt a cool, clammy sweat break out on his face. The blood was coming mostly from his wrist, below the hand slash. From the cut vein. It was already getting hard to organize his thoughts and he couldn’t tell whether the symptoms were of fear or blood loss.

Matt ran through his memorized impression of the set. Easy. Cut-rate Dancing With the Stars rip-off. Four steps up center stage with winding staircases at each side. Dance floor. Judges’ table and chairs at his right, backup singers and live octet setups at the left. Audience chairs on three sides of the dance floor.

And now this out-of-time addition, the heart of darkness poised on the dance floor with a blade that had already tasted innocent blood.