He hadn’t. I’d had a hopeful moment when I found the bedroom door unlocked, but he was there. His cotton jacket and a broken-down pair of boots were on the floor by the mattress. He lay on his back under my blanket, his limbs neatly arranged, staring at the ceiling.

Without blinking.

Once I’d taken a step into the room, I was sure it was true, but death is a diagnosis that can never go untested. I jabbed his shoulder. Then I felt for a pulse in his throat. There was none, and his skin had the same chill on it as the top of the dresser. But his flesh was soft, and his arm, when I lifted it, limp. Didn’t rigor mortis set in as the body cooled? Maybe he had some disease that produced this convincing catalepsy. Who would know — and how could I find them, in the Night Fair in daylight?

I began to examine him for some kind of damage. Perhaps a blow to the head? Nothing. He’d clutched at his side the night before -

Under his shirt, just to the heart side of middle, between one ridge of muscle and the next, there was a hole. Not a large one, not a fresh one, and not healed. I stared at it for a while before I rolled him over. There was a corresponding hole in his back. They were the entrance and exit wounds made by a bullet, and since they hadn’t been dressed, treated, or healed, they must have killed him.

Sometime before we’d met.

It was only a few steps from the corpse to the door; easy to do walking backward. I closed the door. Then I stumbled down the corridor and out into the building hallway. I locked my front door, methodically, watching my hands work. I went down in the freight elevator, climbed the basement stairs, and slipped out, at last, into the silent street. Somewhere in the sleeping Fair I had to find someone who could help me get rid of Mick Skinner.

Card 3: Beneath

Two of Pentodes, Reversed

Crowley: The Lord of Harmonious Change overthrown.

Gray: Inability to handle many things at once; disruptive change; harmony at the expense of change.

Waite: Enforced gaiety. Simulated enjoyment. False news.

3.0: The goddess and the girl next door

It was already as hot as it had gotten the day before, and promised to be one of the arid ones. The street smelled like scorched tar, and the sidewalk glared where the sun hit it between the building shadows. Nothing moved, not in the hard light, not in the shadow. In a thousand years, when planet-hopping archaeologists discovered the ruins of our civilization, the photos in some alien National Geographic would look like this. They’d be silent like this, too. The Dead City: remarkable state of preservation.

I was reminded of my houseguest. So I moved on, briskly.

Once I began to penetrate the heart of the Fair, I had to stop again. Hadn’t I had a nightmare like this once, before I’d been lulled into thinking that there would always be enough people?