Inktober #9: Swing (Patreon)

This is another one of those ideas that's really hard to explain. The mysterious hero in this story is heavily based on a character created by my son Alex. I do not yet know the relevance of the boy in the story, but he will probably end up being the main character when this gets expanded.

***

The child struggled against the hands of the cultists holding him down, yelling curses that some might falsely believe a child his age wouldn’t know. He kicked his arms and legs wildly and tried to bite the arms of his captors. It didn’t help.

The cultist standing behind the child’s head, the one holding the knife, spoke. “O Great One, accept the sacrifice of this innocent! Feed on its soul—”

“I’m not an it, you motherfuckers—”

“—restore your strength, and rise from your—”

A sound that had been gradually getting louder became recognizable finally as the sound of… a swing band, playing In the Mood. It was distracting enough that the cultist holding the knife lowered his hand slightly. “What the hell is that?”

It was a good question. The cultists had gathered in a temporarily closed, underground Metro station in DC, dozens of feet below the ground. It was late at night, when the Metro wouldn’t be running anyway. The construction workers on the expansion project that had required the closure were union, and definitely not on site this late. There was no earthly reason for the cultists to be interrupted by anyone, much less music from the 1930’s being played very, very loudly…

…Or maybe not at all. A mass of people emerged from the tunnel into the dim light from the cultists’ electric lanterns. Many of them were wearing pajamas; others were wearing evening wear, the kind you’d wear to go clubbing. A few women of a certain age and their grey-haired male partners were wearing ballroom fashion. A lot of them were teenagers and young adults in hoodies or t-shirts.

All of them were dancing, most in pairs, swinging their partners around to the beat as their arms and legs moved to more complex rhythms. There was a man in the front, however, who danced alone, his legs tapping out a pattern similar to the Charleston, but with more complicated flourishes and a lot of finger-snapping. He was dressed snappily but anachronistically, in a light green suit styled after the 1920’s, with a black homburg on his head, sporting a green ribbon the same color as the suit.

There was no evidence anywhere of where the music was coming from. 

“Who the hell are you?” asked one of the cultists, reaching for his own weapon. The ceremonial knives were for the sacrifice; for defense, the cultists carried guns.

“Now, this is a swell setup you’ve got here,” the man in the green suit said. “Nice and private. I can see why you’d pick out a joint like this for your party. But you need to light this place up! Can’t have a really ritzy shindig when it’s this dim!”

“They’re not having a party,” the boy being held on the ceremonial table yelled, “they’re trying to k—” A cultist managed to cover his mouth without getting bitten.

The lights in the subway station blazed to life, twice as bright as they’d normally be in a station that was actually operating, and the dancers, who were on the tracks on both sides of the platform, could now be seen climbing up off the track and onto the platform, everywhere.

The lead cultist looked around at the mass of dancing people, and made a bad decision. “Shoot them! Shoot them all!”

This proved to be much more difficult than one would think. The dancers effortlessly swung each other out of the line of incoming fire, while other dancers swung in to grab cultists from behind or the side, pull the guns out of their hands, and dance away. Three of the cultists didn’t escape; when a dancer grabbed them and swung them around, they started dancing too. 

Meanwhile the man in the green suit was dancing closer and closer to the boy and the lead cultist. Most of the cultists were at this point engaged in combat with dancers, who were humiliating them completely by dancing with them rather than fighting, and still managing to win. It was as if all the dancers were animated by a single hive mind, moving in perfect cooperation, able to see every angle that attackers might be striking from and responding with perfect rhythm.

“Stay back!” the lead cultist yelled, holding the boy down with one hand on his chest, the knife to his neck. “I’ll kill him!”

“You’re going to bump off a poor little bunny like that?” the man said. “That’s disappointing, fella. After I came all this way to meet the poor kid?”

Suddenly, the boy grabbed the cultist’s wrist with both his hands – which were no longer being held by other cultists, since the other dancers had pulled them away – and shoved it away from his neck, far enough that he could twist out from under the cultist and roll off the table. “You came to rescue me?”

“Posi-lutely,” the man assured him.

The cultist dropped his knife. “The Great One will not be denied!” he snarled, and pulled a gun. 

Before he had a chance to fire it, the man had skidded across the floor in a move Fred Astaire might have envied, sliding right under the cultist’s gun arm. With a single smooth move, he pulled the gun arm, flipping the cultist to the ground and sending the gun flying, using the momentum to push himself to a standing position. “Hey, fella, if you’re gonna be packing heat, you should learn to stay in the kitchen,” he said, and proceeded to dance on the fallen man, kicking him in the head a few times as part of his dance routine.

The music had never stopped, and it had never become apparent where it was coming from.

The rumble of a Metro train sounded in the distance – impossible, since the station was closed and the Metro wasn’t running at this time, and yet there it was. With a big grin on his face, the man in the green suit heaved the lead cultist up. “Come on, you big palooka, the dance ain’t over yet! Show me your steps!”

The cultist’s hood had fallen off, revealing a gray-haired man with ruddy skin and a very sweaty face. His eyes went wide. “No! No! You won’t take me – I belong to the Great One! I—”

“Suit yourself,” the man in the green suit said, spun in place, and kicked the cultist, hard, sending him flying onto the track – just as the train came in.

The boy looked around. All of the other cultists were dancing now, most having shucked off their robes for freedom of motion. The train was very, very short – just one car, almost unheard-of for a Metro train – and in the driver’s seat at the front of the car, there was a nattily dressed mannequin, wearing very similar clothes to the man in the green suit. The mannequin wore glasses, and seemed to have glass eyes rather than the smooth indents that suggested eyes that most mannequins the boy had seen sported.

“Well! Here I am!” the man in the green suit said. “Let’s get you aboard, young fella.”

“What the hell just happened?” the boy asked. “Why is there a train in a closed station? Who are you? Who were those assholes who tried to kill me? Why is a mannequin driving the train? Where’s the music coming from? Why is everyone dancing?”

The man laughed. He didn’t stop dancing. “I’m the mannequin, kiddo,” he said. “Name’s Aloysius, but you can call me Al.”

“Wait a minute, how can you be the mannequin?”

“Well, this fella dancing in front of you’s named Henry, and he’s got no life, so I lent him mine. The rest? They’re my backup dancers.” He snapped his fingers in time to the beat, which had changed from In the Mood to something else the boy didn’t recognize, but it sounded like the same time period.

“But… some of them were the guys in the cult robes, and now…”

“Ah, don’t go getting the heebie-jeebies on me, kid. There ain’t too many fellas – or dolls, neither – who can resist dancing when I’m around. That’s all.” He gestured to the train car, which was filling up with dancers. “But they can’t dance all night, and you and me’ve got places to go, so how about let’s blouse!”

“Let’s what?”

“Amscray. Get on the train and vamoose. Come on, kiddo, we haven’t got all night.”

It occurred to the boy that being in an abandoned Metro station, far from his home, which would probably lose all its lights as soon as the mysterious being and his impossible train car left the station, was probably a worse fate than riding on said impossible train car. The man – Al – or Henry? What did you call a guy who was a mannequin whose mind was puppeting another guy’s body? – he’d said he’d come here to see the boy, and he’d saved the boy from the cultists. And since the boy had no idea why the cultists had picked him to kidnap and sacrifice to their Great One, and Al seemed to…

“Yeah, okay, why the hell not.”

“Your ma’s gonna wash your mouth out with soap, you keep talking like that,” Al said, more as if he was imparting information than making a judgement.

The boy scowled. “Some of us live in the 21st century,” he said as he boarded the train.