Falling Idols by Brian Hodge

somehow, more elemental, obligatory. People in chains would dance this way.
    From the comfort of shadows, Willy came forward to meet him. He looked much the same as the other night, gray sweats for black the only difference. The sad shake of his head was the same.
    “Warned you once, cuz,” he said. “I told you you’s messing with shit you don’t understand.”
    “I can’t understand what nobody’ll talk about!” Leo shouted. His only defense.
    “Sometimes you got to take things on faith. I know you mean well, but you past the point of no return now, you know what I’m saying?”
    Leo looked past him to the nightmare conga line out in the street. Dancers still caught in a frenzy of muscle and bones. The girl in the circle, still kneeling, swayed with lithe serpentine fluidity. Wild hair tossing to and fro about her shoulders, head thrown back in an act of perfect supplication. She reached into the bag beside her, drawing out its source of erratic movement: one of those plump rats so prevalent in the neighborhood. She lifted it to arm’s length above her head, and it squirmed like a worm on a fishhook, fat pink tail lashing at her wrist and forearm like a tiny whip.
    Leo thought of films that he’d seen — strange rites born of Africa, of the Caribbean. Priestesses doing much the same thing with live chickens. Only now, rats were so much more in keeping with the locale.
    “There’s a way things run around here,” Willy said. “We may not like it, but we understand it, and so we know how to live with it, you see what I’m saying? And we get by. Bricklord wants a building burned out? We give it to him. He wants to smell some food rot in the street? We give that to him too. He don’t never ask for life so long’s we keep him happy with all the other shit. Sacrifices, cuz. That’s what it’s all about. Keeping the place the way he likes it.”
    Leo, shaking his head in numb refusal, Just who the hell is this Bricklord guy that’s got these people so beaten down?
    “And then you come along with your spray cans,” Willy said.
    Out in the street, the girl pulled a dagger from the folds of her dress. Within a tightening circle of dancers, she slashed at the rat with a deceptively gentle arc of the blade, then bucked beneath its all-but-severed head, catching the sudden dark drizzle on breasts and throat, forehead and tongue.
    And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.
    “Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”
    Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.
    The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…
    And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.
    It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.
    Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.
    “Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”
    Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous